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A sweeping history of mountaineering before Everest, and the epic human quest to reach the highest places on Earth.Whether in the name of conquest, science, or the divine, humans across the centuries have had myriad reasons to climb mountains. From the smoking volcanoes of South America to the great snowy ranges of the Himalaya, The White Ladder follows a cast of extraordinary characters -- conquistadors and captains, scientists and surveyors, alpinists and adventurers -- up the slopes of the world's highest peaks.A masterpiece of edge-of-your-seat narrative history, The White Ladder describes the epic rise of mountaineering's world altitude record, a story of ever higher climbs by figures great and small of mountaineering during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.