Sara Wheeler
The Pursuit of Fear
Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination
By Robert Macfarlane
Bloomsbury 252pp £35 order from our bookshop
As A CHILD Robert Macfarlane chanced upon a copy of The Fight for Everest, an account of the epic 1924 expedition on which George Mallory and Sandy Irvine vanished into the mists on the summit ridge. He quickly became a mountain junkie, beguiled by ‘the beauty and danger of the landscape, the immensities of space, the utter uselessness of it all’. As soon as he could, he started climbing. It might be risky, but Macfarlane looked to the achievements of Maurice Herzog. that Homeric figure who made the first ascent of Annapurna at the expense of most of his digits. ‘For what were toes and fingers’, muses Macfarlane, ‘compared to having stood on those few square yards of snow?’
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