![]() What would have driven a man with no climbing experience and meagre flying skills to do what he did? By the time I reached Belgium, I had scoured archives on three continents, read Wilson’s diary, found shipping manifests bearing his name, and read dozens of books. ![]() In the years that followed, the question I sought to answer was not so much what happened to Wilson - which was a series of more or less knowable facts - but why his life had unfolded the way it did. My obsession with Maurice Wilson began in 2011, when I read a short passage about him in a mountaineering book. Eighty-five years after Wilson clambered into the cockpit of his Gipsy Moth at Stag Lane Aerodrome in north London, bound for the highest mountain on Earth, I drove from Paris to Flanders, parked near a town called Wijtschaete, then wandered through a field, watched by some stupid cows. I was writing a book about Maurice Wilson, who in 1933 had embarked on the maddest of quests: to fly a biplane 5,000 miles to Mount Everest, then to climb to its summit, on foot, alone. ![]() ![]() On 25 April, 2018, I walked across an unremarkable piece of Belgian countryside, attempting to commune with a dead man. ![]()
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