One comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony.

Letter to his wife Ruth Mallory (1921), acquitted in Everest: The Mountaineering History (2000) by Walt Unsworth, p. 47; also The Wildest Dream: The Biography of George Mallory (2001) by Peter Gillman and Leni Gillman, p. 13