Everest is a deadly place. In the hundred odd years that humans have attempted to conquer Chomolungma, 288 climbers have perished on the mountain. Last week, the death of a revered and celebrated alpinist Ueli  Steck—dubbed the ‘Swiss Machine’—higlighted the ever present danger that looms around those who seek to conquer the formidable mountain. In fact, 1977 was the last year that a death was not recorded during climbing season and Everest continues to remain an open graveyard, with bodies of those that have perished in the ‘death zone’ nearly impossible to haul down to base camp. There are other climbers who have disappeared altogether, having slipped or plainly blown off the face of the world’s highest summit.

One such disappearance—one of the very first recorded deaths on Everest—continues to remain shrouded in mystery. In 1924, two British climbers, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, were last seen a few hundred metres from the summit and the question of whether if they conquered Everest, 29 years before Hillary and Tenzing, is a conjecture that simply refuses to go away. In subsequent years, several expeditions have been mounted to try and recover the camera that the men carried with them and may contain images of them on the summit, but to no avail. Mallory’s body was found in 1999, 75 years after his death. Twenty-two-year-old Irvine is still missing on the mountain, potentially with the camera still on him.

Speaking about the 1953 conquest of Everest by Hillary and Tenzing, Conrad Anker, the mountaineer who located George Mallory’s body, has been recorded as saying, “The first ascent of Everest came at a time when humanity needed relief from two world wars. It was a unifying and inspiring event, signifying the drive to reach our greatest potential.” Needless to say, any evidence that proves otherwise would literally rewrite history.

But what if the first conquerors of Everest were the Nazis? What if the swastika flew over the highest summit of the world, long before the Union Jack did? How scandalous and sought after would such a picture be?

This is the central question explored in Harry Farthing’s debut novel Summit. The book imagines that Josef Becker, a prodigal alpinist and reluctant tool for Heinrich Himmler and his SS, completed a secret mission to “steal” Everest from the British in 1939; but much like Mallory and Irvine, the camera proving his conquest was lost with him on the mountain. Seventy years later, Neil Quinn, a seasoned mountain guide, loses a high-profile young climber, the son of an American billionaire, in the death zone but he makes a remarkable discovery—an ice axe with the swastika carved onto it. And thus ensues a high-stake treasure hunt in one of the most inhospitable and dangerous places on earth.

With a narrative that criss-crosses the 70 years that separate the two climbers, Summit is a novel that is steeped in intrigue and ‘what-ifs’. A slew of characters, including Henrietta Richards—fashioned after the legendary chronicler Elizabeth Hawley; Jean Phillipe Sarron, the blood-crazed chief antagonist; Ang Noru, Becker’s amicable ‘tiger’ Sherpa and Zazar, a sinister Tibetan head-hunter, provide a perfect support crew that thicken the plotline, making Summit a veritable page turner packed with the thrills and cliff-hangers any good book of fiction should have. What is more, because the Nazi fascination with the Himalayas—a supposed omphalos for the Aryan race—has been well documented, the book is able to draw upon real-life missions that were taken up in the 1930s, giving it a further air of believability; playing on all of our penchant for fantastic, if highly improbably, conspiracy theories.

That being said, at 600 odd pages long, Summit can be a slog at times and the narrative does slow down significantly when minor characters are drawn in to develop the plot line—some sections are drab, or worse, outright cringe-worthy. As an Everest summiteer himself, Farthing’s writings shine through best when based on the mountain; the rest is all context. A necessary evil.

The mark of any good novel, however, is its ability to create characters that the reader can empathise with and relate to, and on that account Summit is successful. You do end up rooting for Quinn and Becker and the gem of a character that is Ang Noru—who drops occasional insights like “To you, I think, all mountains are friends. You must understand that Chomolungma is not your friend. She is a goddess with no need for human friends. You are as important and interesting to her as the fly is to you. She will kill you just as readily if you annoy her.”

All in all, although occasionally hard work, Summit is a pleasant enough read that is bound to keep you intrigued, if not by the prose then by the plotline. With hundreds of non-fiction books written about the mountain in the last century—making Everest a sub-genre in itself—the fictional Summit will undoubtedly be appealing to many. In the very least, it should intrigue the tin-foiled hatters in the deep, dark recesses of the internet. That rabbit hole is already rife with a grotesque fascination with Nazi mysticism and their obsession with the paranormal, and Summit, although fictional, will probably become a fodder for more speculations; even if unintended.