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Man and mountain
It
seems the lure of adventure is a hallmark of spirit, a hallmark
of the human. Both men and women have been lured, down the ages,
to accomplishing incredible feats of endurance on land, sea and
air - wherever they saw challenges, which would test the limits
of physical and mental endurance. And man was not always the victor
in that tussle. Nothing epitomises
the life-and-death dance of man and nature more than the saga of
Everest - the struggle of the human spirit to conquer the highest
peak on planet Earth. The drama of that struggle is particularly
striking because of its pictorial visibility. Photographs of the
mountain and of the range of 8000-metre Himalayan peaks -panoramic
and dramatic - are legion, and the history of Everest expeditions
has been well documented, in word and picture. A mountain
somehow touches that part of the human spirit which seeks the transcendant,
the urge to go beyond. Is it because of its heavenward pointing
shape, the earth rising up to an apex high above the mundane ground
below? Our own unique Sri Pada (Adam's Peak), which John Still thought,
"must be one of the vastest and most widely reverenced Cathedrals
of the human race", may give us a clue. Devotees, young and
old, of all the four major religions of the country climb the peak,
to be touched and blessed by the holiness of the Holy they believe
in. The climb is symbolic of the inner urge to rise to the heights
of enlightenment, into the plane of the Divine. No wonder Everest
has cast a spell over both professional and amateur mountaineers
ever since it was identified as the world's highest peak. However,
it took over 30 years and eleven expeditions before Everest bowed
before indomitable human effort, fighting capricious weather, bone-chilling
cold and "killing" fatigue, on May 29, 1953, when New
Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, of the 1953
British expedition led by John Hunt, set foot on its summit at 11.30
a.m. local time. As Newton said of his predecessors "I stand
on their shoulders", so did this pair stand not only on the
shoulders of the team, but also on all those who failed in earlier
attempts. Since then
well over a thousand climbers have set foot on the top, among them
about 65 women. But Everest has also extracted its pound of human
flesh - 169 deaths, 13 before its conquest, the rest subsequently. The conquest
of Everest was the culmination of an endeavour which had its beginnings
when the Royal Geographic Society and the Alpine Club of Britain
formed a Mount Everest Committee in January 1921 to launch an expedition
to find a route up Everest and if possible to climb the mountain
as well. The identification of the highest point of the majestic
range of Himalayan peaks, blanketed in snow and mist year round
was in itself a Herculean task. Survey work of the area by British
mapmakers commenced at the beginning of the 19th century. By 1856,
the Surveyor General of India, Andrew Waugh, was ready to state
with confidence that the peak designated XV was the highest of the
range at 29,002 ft . (The most recent calculations indicate a height
of 29,035 ft). The mountain had several local names among them,
Chomolungma and Sagarmatha; but finally British imperialism prevailed
and Waugh was able to persuade the British Govt. to name the mountain
after his predecessor, Surveyor General George Everest. The most charismatic
figure of the nine-member team of that first expedition was George
Mallory, who, almost fittingly, died on the mountain in his third
attempt to win the love of his life in 1924. It was Mallory who,
when asked why he was risking his life attempting Everest, famously
replied, "because it is there". The setbacks
and failures in the attempts to climb the mountain were often, not
of Everest-origin but of human-origin. The problems of that 1921
expedition were typical. The leader Howard Bury was disliked by
many of the teammembers, resulting in deep fractures of relationships.
One member thought that he was "too much the landlord with
not only Tory prejudices, but a very highly developed sense of hate
and contempt for other sorts of people than his own". The medical
doctor of the team, Alexander Kellas, died of a heart attack precipitated
by exhaustion and dysentry. Mallory himself suffered from bouts
of depression. The story of
George Mallory and Sandy Irvine's ill-fated attempt to summit Everest
in 1924 is, as one author put it, "the most mesmerizing of
Everest's mysteries". The two were last seen by support climber
Noel Odell within striking distance (about 900 ft) from the summit.
Banks of clouds shrouded the Everest range, but at 12.50 p.m. when
they cleared momentarily, Odell saw through his binoculars his two
colleagues heading for the summit "with considerable alacrity".
In a dispatch
to the London Times, which has become a celebrated piece of mountaineering
history, Odell wrote: "The entire Summit Ridge and final peak
of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on one tiny black
spot silhouetted on a small snow-crest beneath a rock step in the
ridge; the black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent
and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest. The first
then approached the great Rock Step; the second did likewise. Then
the whole fascinating scene vanished, enveloped in cloud once more".
The two were never seen, or heard of, since. There has been
intense speculation all along whether Mallory and Irvine reached
the summit or not. Did they perish on the way up or on their descent?
The discovery of Irvine's ice axe in 1933 and of Mallory's body
in 1999 has not helped in any way to solve the mystery. The Second
World War and its aftermath did not permit Everest expeditions -
a lull from the mid-1930s up to 1951, when a British expedition
headed by Eric Shipton, a veteran of four pre-war expeditions, set
out to reconnoitre a new route to Everest through Nepal. It included
two climbers from New Zealand, one of whom was Edmund Hillary. Two
Swiss expeditions attempted to summit Everest in 1952 through the
route discovered by the British, without success. At 6.30 a.m.
on May 29, Hillary and Tenzing ( a Sherpa with long Everest-experience),
crawled out of their tent, hoisted 30lb oxygen gear on to their
backs and set out from the final camp of the expedition at 27,900ft
(8500m), in fine weather, on the final leg of the assault. The unassuming
Hillary's prosaic account of his reaching the top of the world is
almost an anti-climax: "My initial feelings were of relief
- relief that there were no more steps to cut, no more ridges to
traverse and no more humps to tantalize us with hopes of success.
I looked at Tenzing and in spite of the balaclava, goggles and oxygen
mask all encrusted with long icicles that concealed his face, there
was no disguising his infectious grin of pure delight as he looked
all around him. We shook hands and then Tenzing threw his arms around
my shoulders and we thumped each other on the back until we were
almost breathless. It was 11.30 a.m". For the British it was a unique coronation gift to Queen Elizabeth II, crowned on June 2, 1953. The banner headline of the Daily Express read: "All this and Everest too".... |
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Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
