Mountain Climbing: Up to the Gods

Compared to Mount Everest, the Sahara is a sultan's garden and the Amazon jungle is a farmer's meadow. At its summit, the highest point on earth, 29,028 ft. above sea level, spores have trouble surviving. The hardiest of mountain creatures—the snow leopard, the lammergeier vulture—stay clear of its bitter cold (down to —50°F.) and raging gales (up to 150 m.p.h.), and even the Abominable Snowman—whatever he is—confines his ambulations to the Tibetan plateau, 12,000 ft. below. Transported suddenly to its upper ridges, without an oxygen mask, a healthy man would die within hours—of physical deterioration. Tibetans call the mountain Chomolungma, "Mother of the World," and insist that it is the home of the gods. Why the gods would choose to live there, with Elysium at their disposal, is beyond human ken.

Yet Mount Everest's horrors have a powerful fascination for a peculiar species of human: the mountaineer. Since 1920, when Tibet first agreed to let foolhardy foreigners gamble their lives against an instant of immortality at the rooftop of the world, 15 expeditions have started for the summit. Two, perhaps three, made it: New Zealand's Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa guide, Tenzing, first conquered Everest in 1953; a Swiss party followed in 1956; and Soviet-Chinese climbers say they planted a statue of Mao Tse-tung at the top in 1960—a claim that most experts do not believe. Other expeditions met only heartbreak or death. In 1924, just 800 ft. from the summit, George Leigh-Mallory and Andrew Irvine vanished forever into the swirling mists. And in 1952, without sleeping bags or even a stove to boil water on, a party of Swiss struggled to 28,200 ft., where sheer exhaustion forced them to turn back.

Specialists All. On that expedition was Norman Dyhrenfurth, a movie cameraman. In 1960, by then an American citizen and a producer of documentary films in Hollywood, Dyhrenfurth decided to have another go at Everest. He planned his assault with the precision of a man-in-space shot. First, he raised $326,000 (including $100,000 from the National Geographic Society), wheedled U.S. firms into supplying equipment at cut-rate prices: lightweight oxygen tanks, walkie-talkies, 13 tons of freeze-dried food, vitamins, Metrecal wafers. Then Dyhrenfurth picked his team: 20 men, each an experienced part-time mountain climber, each a specialist in his full-time field—a physicist, a psychologist, a philosopher, a geologist, a geographer, physicians, a sociologist. The expedition was more than a sporting assault: on Everest, Dr. William Siri planned to measure the effects of solar radiation, study the effects of high altitudes on the human mind and body. Even the team's diarist was something of a specialist: Novelist (The White Tower) James Ramsey Ullman.