“Yet as he sailed from England to India, then as he rode and hiked toward Everest, Britain’s finest climber was filled not with foreboding, but with optimism. “I can’t see myself coming down defeated,” he wrote Ruth from the remote Tibetan village of Shekar Dzong. To his former teammate Tom Longstaff, he predicted, “We’re going to sail to the top this time, and God with us—or stamp to the top with our teeth in the wind.” As he had in both 1921 and ’22, once more Mallory underestimated Everest. H...is bravura performance two years before, along with Finch’s, had made the summit seem well within his grasp. At times, his certainty about success could approach cocksure arrogance, as during his lecture tour of America, where, envisioning a third expedition, he boasted, “Mount Everest is asking for trouble.” Yet at other times, his confidence was laced with threads of doubt, as in a sentence he wrote his sister Mary from shipboard, “Anyway, we’ve got to get up this time; and if we wait for it and make full preparations, instead of dashing up at the first moment, some of us will reach the summit, I believe.”MoreLessRead More Read Less
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