Mount Everest, that great pyramid of human vanity, has once again proven itself a theatre for the absurd. This week, a British-made rescue drone filmed a climber’s six-day ordeal in what can only be described as a triumph of engineering over biology, of cold machinery over warmer, more fallible flesh. The drone, a piece of plucky British ingenuity, hovered where no helicopter dare, capturing every frozen gasp and desperate shuffle of a man who had, by all accounts, already been written off by the mountain. One is reminded of the Victorian polar explorers, who packed tinned ham and Fox’s biscuits into the jaws of Antarctica and expected to return. They did not always return. But they did have tinned ham. Now we have drones.
Let us dispense with the sentimentality. This is not a story about the ‘indomitable human spirit’. That phrase has been worn thin by a thousand Instagram captions and motivational posters. This is a story about the hubris of altitude, the death wish that lurks in the souls of those who pay fifty thousand pounds to be dragged up a pile of rock and ice, and the quiet, unwavering efficiency of British engineering. The drone was not there to save him; it was there to record his failure. The irony is exquisite. The very technology that films the climber’s slow, agonising retreat from death becomes his lifeline, his beacon of hope. The drone does not rescue him. It watches. And in that watching, it tells the world: here is a man who should be dead. But he is not dead because someone on the ground, perhaps in a warm room in Oxfordshire, decided that a piece of machinery should loiter at 8,000 metres and wait for a miracle.
We are, I fear, in an age of mediated survival. The climber did not survive because he was stronger or wiser or more virtuous. He survived because a drone with a camera and a satellite link kept a line of sight on his coordinates. This is the intellectual decadence I have warned about: we no longer believe in the heroic narrative. We believe in the efficient one. The drone is the hero, not the man. The man is merely the subject of the documentary. And we, the audience, are the voyeurs who will watch the film, perhaps on Netflix, and feel a flicker of something approximating admiration before we scroll to the next title.
Compare this to the Victorian era, when climbers like Edward Whymper scaled the Matterhorn not with drones but with ropes and courage, and when they fell, they fell in silence. Their deaths were elegies, not data points. Now, every stumble is captured, every heartbeat monitored, every survival turned into a spectacle. The mountain has become a studio. The climber has become a performer. And the drone is the director, hovering, waiting for the final cut.
But let me be clear: I am not against rescue. I am against the emotional pornography of survival that these stories generate. We are meant to feel uplifted, but what we feel is relief—relief that we are not the ones freezing on a rock, relief that technology has vanquished nature once again. And yet, the mountain remains. Everest has not been tamed. It has been wired. And that, I suppose, is the British way: not to conquer, but to observe, to catalogue, to stitch a bit of wire and hope it holds.
Will this change anything? Of course not. Next season, more climbers will queue at the Hillary Step, more drones will buzz overhead, and more copy will be written about the miracle of survival. I will still be here, cynical, erudite, probably annoying you. And you will still click. Because you want to see the man who almost died. You want to see the drone that watched. You want to feel, for a moment, that the human race is not entirely doomed. But it is. Or it would be, if it weren't for a few British engineers and their marvellous toys.
