What happens
Hamilton, a climbing leader, organizes an expedition to scale Mount Everest with Langmuir, Chaloner and Revere, despite a porter's warnings and the high costs of the venture. As the team pushes upward through brutal wind, snow and thinning oxygen, the men grow tense and divided, and the climb takes a costly toll. Hamilton and Langmuir press on toward the summit while a sense of rivalry and obsession takes hold. The story is told as an episode of the radio series Escape, first broadcast on January 7, 1951, with Bill Conrad in the lead role of Hamilton.
Mount Everest and the Himalayas, including Darjeeling, the Tibetan plateau, base camp and the upper slopes of the mountain, in the 1920s
Characters: Hamilton, Langmuir, Chaloner, Revere, Ben, Tichba Marani, Odell, Mallory
Listen for: The tense exchanges at high camp and Hamilton's discovery of Mallory's cigarette case near the summit
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.