On June 6, 1924, two men set out from a camp perched at 23,000 feet on an ice ledge just below the lip of Mount Everest’s north face. Col. George Mallory, 37, was Britain’s finest climber. Sandy Irvine was a young Oxford scholar of 22 with little previous mountaineering experience. Neither of them returned.

In this work of history and adventure, based on more than a decade of research in British, Canadian and European archives, and months in the field in Nepal and Tibet, Wade Davis vividly re-creates the British climbers’ attempts to scale Mount Everest in the early 1920s. With new access to letters and diaries, Davis recounts the heroic efforts of George Mallory and his fellow climbers to conquer the mountain in the face of treacherous terrain and furious weather. Into the Silence sets their remarkable achievements in historical context: Davis shows how the exploration, in the wake of the devastations of World War I, emerged as a symbol of national redemption and hope.

Co-sponsored by the Mechanics’ Institute Library