Life and death at the top - The Epic of Everest

Simon Fisher Turner has put music to the 1924 film of a doomed attempt to climb Everest , writes Richard Fitzpatrick.

FOR a moment in the 1924 documentary, The Epic of Everest, the camera rests on seven of the men who led the expedition, including George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, who would die a few hundred metres from the summit, having, as the film’s narration breathlessly notes, come “nearer to God than men had ever reached before”.The men look jolly. One of them jigs on the spot to keep warm. Some of them wear plus-fours, fashionable for the day, although their clothes and caps look ragged, almost threadbare. A few smoke pipes.

It is not the British adventurers, however, who captivate, but the “unutterably lonely” mountain they tried to conquer.