019 CHAPTER 4 – THE NEPALESE DIARIES HÉCTOR CASTELLS NOW HERE, EVEREST NORTH RIDGE, JUNE 1924. On the last day of Life with George Mallory and Sandy Irvine in it, the wrath of the Gods ruling the highest peak on Earth unravelled as predicted by the Dalai Lama: the delusional white men would be greeted mercilessly. It was the 6th of June of 1924, and Mallory was as possessed as he had been the year before, when his hasty, final attempt to climb Mt. Everest ended up claiming the lives of seven of his strongest Nepalese Sherpa. On both occasions, the expedition was coming to an end, and Mallory kept refusing to take losing, his pride higher than his immediate graveyard. In 1924 the climbing party had been severely decimated by the ungodly weather and a number of injuries. On his last day on Earth, Mallory knew his effort was reckless and against all odds. Somehow, the army leader of the venture, Edward Norton, could also smell the looming fatality: “There is no doubt, Mallory knows he is leading a forlorn hope,” he said to Noel Odell, the last man to see the vanishing heroes. By then, Mallory and Irvine had agreed to face the ultimate challenge any rock climber must deal with. 1924 marked Mallory’s third expedition as leader mountaineer, and his second as poster-boy. His star had been pumped up by a prearranged marketing campaign commanded by the English tabloid tycoons of the time, a bunch of illiterate bastards with a knack for making money, their favourite word asides from death. The goal of the crusade was clear as ever: to stab the Union Jack on the umpteenth foreign kingdom, hence to preserve the spirit of colonialism. Mallory had not chosen to be the leader, he just happened to be a natural. Inevitably, upon the cruellest hour, the obnoxious rock climber inside Mallory forbade him to taste humiliation for a third, consecutive time. He would not allow himself to be back empty handed once again. NOW HERE: GANDAKI, NEPAL, AUGUST 2025. The man who has lost his sleep, wife, country, farm, friends, appetite and lust trying to hunt you down for the last five years, has never looked quieter or more content since the start of the manhunt. He has been devouring Into the Silence, Wade’s Davis seminal account of the first expedition to Mt. Everest with such fruition that he has started to believe that he might be Mallory’s reincarnation. It is a too forgiving way to look at yourself when you are a murderer. Before attaining this unexpected, delusional Nirvana, he was seen outside a lovely hotel near Kathmandu’s airport crushing the head of a shaved, plump man with a baseball bat. NOWHERE YOU You had pictured yourself doing the exact same thing for so long that upon finding the news your sense of revengefulness feels cheated How unfair it is that someone else has finished Khaled? Yes, Khaled, the first singer that you had ever interviewed in the Little Barcelonan Hell, a former prodigy hip-hoper who dumped his Grammy’s dreams to become an AI tycoon and cyborg, and whom you provided with your unsolicited, forced labour: he kept you locked in an underground facility in Marrakech for almost a thousand nights, barely feeding you with dates and shisha’s, until you had completed his nauseating hagiography, a book that made him plumper and richer. AI MOUNTAIN HIGHER — NEVEREST
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy Mjk4NzM=