“It will be a great adventure,” George Mallory wrote to his mother before leaving for the summit of Everest a century ago this week.
His disappearance, along with his climbing partner Andrew Irvine, has become one of the most alluring mysteries in the history of exploration. A final, tantalising glimpse of the pair through mist not far from the summit has inspired successive generations of historians, authors and film-makers with competing theories on a single question: did they reach the top?
