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On 4 June. 1924. two English mountaineers set out from their camp in the Himalayan Mountain range. Their goal was to be the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest — the tallest mountain on Earth! A wild wind was blowing all around them and their feet and hands were numb from the freezing cold, but they bravely moved upwards. Behind. a third climber spotted them just 240 metres from the summit. Then, a thick cloud surrounded the climbers, and nobody saw them alive again. The names of these brave men were George Mallory and Andrew Irvine. Mallory, who had fought in World War I, was a 37-year-old mountaineer who had climbed close to the summit of Everest twice before. Irvine. on the other hand, had never climbed Everest and was just 22 — but he was still a vital and popular member of the expedition. But were Mallory and Irvine the first people to conquer Everest — 29 years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay achieved the feat in 1953? Perhaps we'll never know — but we do have some clues. On 1 May, 1999. the American mountaineer Conrad Anker set out on an expedition in the hope of locating Mallory and Irvine's bodies. Amazingly, in just a few hours, he discovered Mallory's frozen body around 500 metres from the summit. It seemed that Mallory probably died from a fall, but Anker couldn't say whether he had reached the summit first. Interestingly, though, Mallory had planned to leave a photo of his wife on the summit — and Anker didn't find it on his body. In 2007 Anker returned to Everest as part of Anthony Geffen's documentary The Wildest Dream. This amazing film shows Anker climbing up Everest using equipment that mountaineers used at the time of Mallory's expedition. Anker failed to reach the summit using this outdated equipment. and suspects that Mallory and Irvine probably didn't either. But we still don't know for certain. Some people say that finding Irvine's body could solve the mystery since he had a camera and logbook on the day of the climb. But even if they didn't make it. coming so close was a huge accomplishment. Today. Mallory and Irvine are mountaineering heroes —ordinary men who tried to achieve the wildest dream.