A man taller than Everest

When asked whether he was an extra-ordinary man, Sir Edmund Hillary said he’d rather be remembered as an ordinary man who did something extra-ordinary. The first man to climb the world’s highest mountain never claimed to be the first. Irritated at being repeatedly asked who had reached the summit of Everest first, he once snapped, “It was an expedition, not a bloody race.” It was left to Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, who climbed the mountain with him, to record in his book “Tiger of the Snows” that Hillary was the first to put foot on the summit of Everest.

However, it is the photograph of Tenzing on the summit which illustrates every account of that expedition. Hillary was never photographed standing on the summit since Tenzing did not know how to use the camera which they carried with them on that May morning some 54 years, seven months and 15 days ago.

Some five decades after Hillary and Tenzing created history, Everest expeditions have literally become a bloody race. Take the 2006 season where, one May morning, 40 people in various groups left British climber David Sharp behind to die. Hillary publicly criticised New Zealander Mark Inglis and the others: “I think the whole attitude to climbing has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top. It was wrong if there was a man suffering altitude problems and huddled under a rock, to just lift up your hat, say “Good morning” and pass on by.”

Hillary was quoted by the New Zealand Herald as saying of today’s generation of climbers that “They don’t give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn’t impress me at all that they leave someone behind a rock to die.”

What set Hillary apart was that he never forgot the Sherpas who lived in the shadow of Everest and who were just used to fetch and carry by one expedition after the other. Instead of resting on his laurels, he dedicated the latter part of his life to improving the lot of the Sherpas. He used the good will generated by his achievement to set up the Himalayan Trust and raised money to build hospitals, clinics, bridges, air-strips and schools for the people in the remote Khumbu region of the Himalayas.

The first man to climb Everest was not the kind to walk past people in distress, especially those living in the shadow of the mountain. As he once remarked, “It was impossible not to see that they lacked all the things we regard as essential. They didn’t have schools or medical care. I decided that instead of just talking about it, why don’t I try and do something. What I’m most proud of is my work in the Himalayas.”

This was the man who was once quoted in the JS magazine as saying, “You never conquer a mountain. The most you can hope to do is to try and conquer yourself.” It was typical of Hillary that one of the first things he did on the summit of Everest was to look for evidence—which he could not find—that it had been climbed by Mallory, the legendary mountaineer who disappeared on the 1924 expedition and whose body was found on the mountain some 75 years later.