Conquest of Everest

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From Thyangboche camp, the climbers skirted Nuptse and pitched Camp I on the scree of Khumbu. All around were towers of ice that rumbled by day and creaked and moved by night. Above was the great ice fall, savage and unstill.

The ice fall is a labyrinth, gashed by echoing crevasses where a cathedral spire might be lost, crisscrossed by sharp seracs (ice towers) that no man can scale. In the deepest ice corridors, the air is foul and weakening; often as the climbers moved, ice blocks the size of houses vanished into chasms that yawned at their feet. Always, there was snow.

Where the crevasses Vere widest, the climbers built bridges with ropes and a portable ladder that stretched to 30 ft. Camp II was halfway, Camp III at the top. And after 45 days, they stood in the Western Cwm.

In the Western Cwn. A man has not long to live above 22,000 ft. His heart dilates and beats faster, he has no desire to eat. The thin air leaves him gasping, the cold that numbs his limbs fills his throat with lumps of mucus. Worst, it can sap his courage so that every step forward demands a conscious effort of will to jog the body on.

Camp V was at 22,600 ft. at the head of the Western Cwm. Here the South Col rose 3,000 ft. sheer. Ice boots were changed for high-altitude footwear soled with microcellular rubber (to keep out — 50° cold). Goggles protected the men from snow blindness; padded smocks enclosed their bodies. One by one, Hunt and Hillary, Bourdillon and Evans, Noyce, Wilson and Tenzing, put on their oxygen masks and learned to sleep in them.

Climb to the Col. Thus, fully accoutred, they struck at the face of Lhotse. Heavy icing is dangerous on a slope of 30°; Lhotse, in many places, is close to vertical. Wilfred Noyce, a Charterhouse schoolmaster, took two days to hack an ice staircase diagonally up to the -col. Camp VI and Camp VII were established on the face; finally, Noyce and a Sherpa gang reached the col and stood in a clear sky on the threshold of Everest. Here they made Camp VIII at 25,850 ft.

The last climb was 3,000 ft. No one man could have tried it if Hunt had not planned well. In the last exhausting stages, two assault teams (two men to each) had been "babied" for the final attack. Team No. 1 got the order to go.

Tom Bourdillon, a nuclear physicist, and Charles Evans, a Liverpool physician, went up from Camp VIII toward the halfway mark—a rounded shoulder of rock known as the south summit. Stumbling and panting, they made it and vanished in the cloud beyond. No man had been higher and lived, but the pair lacked strength to go on. Back they came.

Team No. 2 was Hillary, the beekeeper from Auckland, New Zealand, and Tenzing, the sinewy Asian whom Colonel Hunt named "the greatest Sherpa of them all." They dragged themselves up to 27,900 ft. and there, on a rocky ledge, they spent a gale-swept night in a ragged tent.

Dawn on May 29 made the Himalayas glow. Tenzing saw Thyangboche Monastery, 16,000 ft. below. At 6:30 they thawed out their boots and buckled on all that remained of the precious oxygen. The summit was hidden in cloud, but they knew it lay ahead and above.