The Conquest of Everest

The mountain had names long before it had that one. In Tibetan it is Chomolungma; in Nepali, Sagarmatha. The name the rest of the world uses was fixed in the nineteenth century, after the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India — a vast mapping project that measured the subcontinent with chains, theodolites and years of arithmetic — calculated the height of a distant Himalayan peak from stations more than a hundred miles away, without ever going near it. The survey concluded that this summit, known for a time only by a number on a chart, was the highest point on earth, and it was named after George Everest, a former Surveyor General who had not seen it and was uneasy about the honour. Once explorers had reached both poles, attention turned to what newspapers began to call the third pole. Nepal, however, was closed to foreigners, so expeditions had to make for the mountain the long way round — from the north, through Tibet, with permission from Lhasa and weeks of marching across a cold plateau simply to reach the foot of it.

The British went back again and again through the 1920s, and the name most people remember is George Mallory. Asked by a journalist why he wanted to climb it, he is reported to have answered, "Because it's there" — a line that has outlived almost everything else said about the mountain. In June 1924, Mallory and a young partner, Andrew Irvine, set off from a high camp on the northern side and were seen through a break in the cloud, high on the ridge, moving steadily. Then the cloud closed and they were never seen alive again. Whether they reached the summit before they died is one of the great unresolved questions of exploration. Mallory's body was found in 1999, remarkably preserved, but it settled almost nothing: Irvine's fate stayed uncertain for decades, and the camera the pair are thought to have carried — which might hold a photograph from the top — has never been recovered. The truth has proved genuinely elusive and historians remain divided: most think it unlikely that the two men got up and down the final rock barrier with the equipment of the day, but nobody can prove it either way.

The difficulties were not simply steepness. Above roughly 8,000 metres lies what climbers call the death zone, where there is so little oxygen that the body breaks down faster than it can repair itself: you cannot acclimatise there, you can only hold out a while and then go down. The cold is severe enough to take fingers and toes. The jet stream, a river of wind in the upper atmosphere, sits over the summit for much of the year, and the only reliable gap is a narrow window between the end of winter and the monsoon. Even the equipment was contested: supplementary oxygen was heavy, unreliable and, to some climbers of the 1920s, close to cheating — it was mocked as "English air", and there was a long argument about whether a summit reached with a cylinder on your back counted at all. Meanwhile every load went up on the backs of porters, mostly local men, who did the most gruelling work on the mountain and were rarely named at home.

After the Second World War the political map turned inside out. Nepal opened its borders; Tibet closed as Chinese control tightened. The mountain had to be approached from the opposite side, up a route nobody had climbed, and a British reconnaissance in the early 1950s found that a way through might just exist. From the Khumbu valley the route rises into the Khumbu Icefall, a slow-motion avalanche of collapsing blocks and hidden crevasses that grinds downhill day and night and is still the most treacherous part of the climb; teams cross it on ladders and hope. Above the icefall the ground eases into the Western Cwm, a silent, blinding, furnace-hot valley of snow, then rears up in the Lhotse Face, a wall of blue ice leading to the South Col, a stony saddle at nearly 8,000 metres where the wind almost never stops. From the col a ridge runs to the top. In 1952 a Swiss expedition came astonishingly close on this route: Raymond Lambert and a Sherpa named Tenzing Norgay pushed to a great height on the ridge before their strength and their oxygen began to give out, and they turned back.

The British expedition of 1953 was led by Colonel John Hunt and organised like a military campaign: a siege, not a dash. Hundreds of porters walked in from the lowlands with tents, rope, stoves, food and oxygen cylinders. Camps were established one above the other, each stocked by climbers carrying loads up and coming back down, so that a tiny team at the top of the chain could be launched at the summit with all it needed; acclimatisation was planned in stages over weeks. Two men were chosen for the first summit bid: Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, using an experimental closed-circuit oxygen system. On 26 May they climbed higher than anyone had ever been proved to climb, reaching the South Summit — a false top from which the real one is at last visible. There they stopped. Evans's oxygen apparatus was faltering badly and they were running out of daylight, and although Bourdillon wanted to press on, they made the correct and bitter decision to turn back. It was the closest anyone had come, and it was not enough.

Three days later the second pair took their chance. Edmund Hillary, a lanky New Zealand beekeeper, and Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa of exceptional experience on what was his seventh expedition to the mountain, spent a broken night in a tent pitched on the ridge and set off early on 29 May 1953. The last obstacle was a step of rock and ice about twelve metres high, which Hillary climbed by wedging himself into a crack between the rock and a fin of snow; it has carried his name ever since. Beyond it the ridge rolled on, one false crest after another, until there was nothing above them. They stayed at the top for a quarter of an hour. Hillary photographed Tenzing holding up his ice axe; there is no photograph of Hillary, because Tenzing had never used a camera. Tenzing buried a small offering of food in the snow, and Hillary left a crucifix given to him by Hunt. Then they went down, low on oxygen, into a fame neither had imagined. The two agreed at once to say only that they had reached the top together, and for the rest of their lives they refused to be drawn on which of them stepped up first — a question put to them relentlessly, and one with a nationalist charge neither had asked for. Years later Tenzing stated plainly, in his own account, that Hillary had stepped up ahead of him.

The news went down by runner to a radio post and out in a coded message, so that no rival newspaper could scoop it, reaching London on the morning of 2 June 1953 — the day of the coronation of Elizabeth II. Crowds in the wet streets read it on the front pages, and a mountaineering result became, overnight, a national symbol. The fame that followed was not shared equally. Hillary was knighted, as was Hunt; Tenzing, who was not a British subject, received the George Medal instead. He was claimed by both India and Nepal, each insisting he was theirs, and pursued for the rest of his life by the question of who had been first, often put to him with an edge. Neither man had set out to be a symbol. What they had done rested on the work of hundreds of others, most never named: the porters who carried loads to the lower camps, the Sherpas who fixed rope and broke trail, the cooks and radio operators and runners. In the version printed in 1953 that half of the expedition was almost entirely unsung, and it took decades for the balance to begin, slowly, to be corrected.

Hillary spent much of the rest of his life giving something back to the valley he had climbed out of. Through the trust he founded, schools, clinics, hospitals, bridges and an airstrip were built in the Khumbu region, and he returned again and again, long after his climbing days were over, taking a close interest in what the money was actually doing. He was also honest about the costs: the airstrip and the tracks he helped bring in made the region reachable, and reachability changed it beyond recovery. Tenzing became the field director of a mountaineering institute in Darjeeling, where he trained a generation of climbers from the region — work that quietly insisted Himalayan people were mountaineers in their own right, not merely load-carriers for foreign expeditions. Between them the two spent fifty years turning a single morning's ascent into something more useful than a headline, though neither could control what the mountain was about to become.

What it became was a business. From the 1990s commercial operators began guiding paying clients up, and the numbers climbed steeply; on a good day in the short window, dozens set off from the high camp within hours of each other. Photographs of a queue of climbers strung out along the ridge, waiting their turn in the death zone with their oxygen running out, have become the modern image of the mountain. In May 1996 a storm caught several parties high on the peak and eight people died; the disaster became books and films that made the crowding famous without slowing it down. Rubbish and abandoned gear have accumulated for decades, and bodies of the dead lie where they fell, because bringing them down is often impossible. The risk is not evenly shared: Sherpas cross the icefall many times each season to stock the camps, and in 2014 an avalanche there killed sixteen Nepali workers in one morning. The wages are good by local standards; the danger is far higher than any client's. Whether a mountain sacred to the people who live beneath it should be climbed like this at all is a question that sharpens every year.