What about David?

Answer 1

Leonard Clark is one of the "lost stars" of twentieth-century exploration. Never a proponent of big expeditions and elaborate paraphernalia - he carried his own belongings and charged ahead be it on foot, on horseback, dug-out canoe or questionable aircraft.

This trait of self-reliance initially enabled him to perform extraordinary feats of military intelligence and reconnaissance in difficult and dangerous areas during the Second World War. Clark, who had attended the University of California, joined the army and first flew in China behind Japanese lines. With his intimate knowledge of local affairs, Clark was asked by the American OSS, forerunner of the CIA, to organize guerrilla activity and espionage in China and Mongolia.

After attaining the rank of colonel, Clark turned his prodigious energies towards exploration by leading expeditions in Borneo, Mexico, the Celebes, Sumatra, China, Tibet, India, Japan, Central America, South America, and Burma. The dashing adventurer died while on a diamond-mining expedition in Venezuela.

Leonard Clark was a lifelong enemy of fear, common sense, and all the other elements that usually define "normal" people. During The Second World War he headed the United States espionage system in China. When that global conflict came to a peaceful conclusion, Clark turned his relentless energy towards exploring the most dangerous and inaccessible places on the globe. Case in point was his decision to lead a mounted expedition of Torgut tribesmen into Tibet!

The official reason for Clark's decision to "invade" this mountainous kingdom on horseback in 1949 was his decision to prepare an impregnable base for General Ma Pa-fang, a violently anti-communist Moslem general. Yet romantic adventure ran deep in Clark, which helps to explain why he was journeying through one of the world's least known and most forbidding regions in the center of Asia. He was also eager to find and measure a mysterious mountain in the AmneMachin range rumored to be higher than Mount Everest. The only problem was that the sacred mountain was guarded by the fearsome Ngolok tribesmen.