An author whose book about Everest mountaineer George Mallory won the £20,000 Samuel Johnson Prize today said “real” explorers no longer exist.
Wade Davis, 58, explorer-in-residence for National Geographic, has travelled deep into Borneo and Mongolia. He described Mallory, pictured, and his team of 23 who made three unsuccessful attempts on Everest between 1921 and 1924, as men “of such virility” that they watched butterflies at dawn, painted watercolours at lunchtime, discussed Keats and Shelley in the afternoon then climbed Everest at dusk.
“I don’t think they exist any more,” said Davis. “I get described as an explorer but it’s silly to compare what I do to what those people did. I think of myself as a storyteller.” His book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest, recounts the experience of the First World War in forming the characters of the mountaineers.
