Mountain of a Different Summit

James Morris was young, strong, and pugnaciously competitive when he was picked by The Times of London to be its correspondent on the 1953 British attempt on Mount Everest. At age twenty-six, he weighed one hundred forty pounds, stood five feet nine inches, and strode into the Himalaya as if to battle. “I would have stooped to almost any skulduggery to achieve what was, self-consciously even then, quaintly called a scoop,” he wrote in his memoir. “The news from Everest was to be mine, and anyone who tried to steal it from me should look out for trouble.”

The British made several forays on Everest in the 1920s, the most famous of which was the tragic 1924 expedition that saw the loss of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine high on the north face. World War II left European countries battered, and many of them raced to be first up the highest mountains and restore national glory. The Germans “had” Nanga Parbat (1953), the French Annapurna (1950),