019 According to the account of an obscure Finnish scholar, it was then when decadence met death metal. As it turned out, while the quoted writer was contemplating the dismaying sight, the deafening buzz of a plague of cicadas left him spinning for an indefinite amount of time. Upon regaining his senses, he saw the youngest sister escaping from the chase of her brothers. She was crying out as loud as a cicada poisoned by a fungus —at least according to Arvo P, the obscure Finnish. THE FILTHY SOUND OF FURY The quoted writer saw the younger sister climbing a rusty fence. The manoeuvre barely bought her a minute. Next thing the fence collapsed, she fell and the writer saw her wet pants and underwear covered in mud and fear. Somehow, the picture summarised the unfathomable cruelty of existence, and with those filthy knickers in mind, the only thing that the writer needed to do was to zoom in and let his elaborated words flow. And so he did: fast-forward seven years, and his effort was published and praised as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century in his country: The Sound and the Fury. “To write a novel is to climb a mountain: if you want to succeed you’d better kill your darlings before the hill becomes the mountain”, the quoted writer would say years later. He had never climbed a mountain, but he had killed all his darlings and would end up being rewarded with a Nobel Prize. NOW HERE, LONDON AND TIBET, 1922. “The avalanche had filled the crevasse at its base with snow, even as it had cast the nine men into the void. Crawford and the four surviving Tibetans began to dig. Mallory and Somervell dropped over the edge of the crevasse. One man was quickly recovered, still breathing. The one beside him had been killed by the fall. Mallory traced a rope to a second corpse, but then found a man alive, barely breathing, trapped upside down with snow packed hard around his limbs. He had been carrying four oxygen cylinders on a steel frame, which had to be cut from his body before he could be dragged to the surface.” Wade Davis. “Into the Silence.” While William the writer was climbing his vertiginous prose, George Mallory became the wettest dream of the Commonwealth for all the wrong reasons. The news of the avalanche reached the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club in London in a matter of hours. Both fancy houses were the main investors of the Himalayan enterprise, and upon reading the tragic news, the old farts sitting at the executive board started rubbing their hands together and lighting up their cigars: they had just hit the jackpot. NOWHERE & MANYWHERE: FAKE NEWS CENTRAL. The first marketing offensive in the history of fake news began right there right then: the old farts would go on to persuade the stakeholders of a piece of sheet filled with lies and rumours called The Times to join forces with them. And so they did. Between the months of April and September of 1922, The Times would publish over fifty articles about the heroic ascent and its tragic ending. Millions of English squalid eyes were stuffing their faces with the printed leftovers of the tragedy like vultures on speed. To the readers, the Nepalese were presented as unaccountable savages and Mallory as the Riefenstahl-like icon that was about to stab the Union Jack on the peak of the world, a much-needed hero for an Empire that had started showing signs of weakness. His raise to celebrity status was unstoppable and would only get greater after his demise. Mallory would die two years later without having stabbed anything but his own life; another cruel and unexpected turn of events that would only bring happiness to the tabloid owners, who would go on to publish endless obituaries and stories about the fallen martyr.
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