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Books

K2’s fatal attraction

Mick Conefry describes the occultist Aleister Crowley as being among many sent mad by the treacherous mountain

28 November 2015

9:00 AM

28 November 2015

9:00 AM

The Ghosts of K2: The Epic Saga of the First Ascent Mick Conefrey

Oneworld, pp.336, £20, ISBN: 9781780745954

Take one drug-addled occultist, one forlorn aristocrat, an assortment of urgent colonials and you have, no, not the western canon but the earliest expeditions to K2, the second-highest mountain in the world after Everest. First measured in 1856 by Lieutenant Thomas George Montgomerie, it stands at 28,251 feet, on the present-day border of Pakistan and China, amid the Karakoram range — hence its name, Karakoram 2, now abbreviated.

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