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In this first-hand account, Sir Edmund Hillary describes his May 1953 ascent of Mt. Everest in the Himalayas. He and his Nepalese guide, Tenzing Norgay, were the first men to reach the summit of the world's highest peak. Hillary related his experiences to a member of the National Geographic staff.
By Sir Edmund Hillary
Night on the South Col. The wind screeches across the ridge and sets the canvas cracking like a rifle range; an awful noise. I'm braced between Tenzing and the tent wall, no room to stretch out. Whenever my head falls back against the roof it's as if I'd run my brain into a pneumatic drill.
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The other side of Tenzing are Alf Gregory and George Lowe, hunched up in their sleeping bags, twisting, heaving around, trying to find some position less cold and miserable. We're using the oxygen sleeping sets, one liter per minute. Makes it easier to doze. But up here you dribble a good bit in your sleep, and when your bottle gives out you wake up suddenly, as if somebody had turned on the light, and your rubber face mask is all clammy and frigid.
I keep looking at my watch, wondering if it's stopped. The hour hand finally creeps around to 4, and I strike a match. The thermometer on the tent wall reads: —13° F. It is still pitch dark.
I nudge Tenzing, mutter something about breakfast, and retreat callously to my bag. Pretty soon the primus has warmed the tent a few degrees—just enough to make it seem safe to sit up and eat. Scruffy, cramped, somewhat depressed, we gulp down cups of sugary hot water flavored with lemon crystals, munch some biscuits, and argue about which one of us has spent the worst night.
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Greg claims the honor, contending that sleeping between Lowe and Tenzing is like being caught in the jaws of a vise. But Lowe scores heavily when he points to a small heap of snow on his sleeping bag, blown through a pinhole in his side of the tent. Scraping it off, he grins at us and says:
“Well, at least you're having a good holiday. I hope you're feeling better for it.”
Nobody bothers to answer. We sprawl about for five hours, waiting for the wind to die down. It doesn't.
At 9 I bundle up and stumble over to John Hunt's tent, which he's sharing with Bourdillon and Evans. John agrees we must postpone the attempt. He decides, too, that everyone but Greg, Lowe, Tenzing, Ang Nyima, Pemba, and I should go down; no point in depleting the slim reserves of food we've hauled up here.
An hour or so later they are packed and ready. Hunt, gray and drawn but with his blue eyes frostier than ever, grips my arm. Above the howling wind he says:
“Most important thing—is for you chaps—to come back safely. Remember that. But get up if you can.”
We watch them slog across the col, up the ridge, and down the slopes toward the traverse: four tired figures dwindling against the monstrous icy face of Lhotse. Then we turn back to our own chores.
I spend the afternoon sorting oxygen bottles, strapping them to their frames, and preparing our sleeping sets. All day we have used no masks. We can breathe well enough, but we work very slowly.
Night comes on, with the wind still intent on blowing us off the col. We cat-nap through the long hours, not as uncomfortably as before, since there's now more room. Tenzing and I have appropriated the Meade tent for ourselves; Greg and Lowe share the pyramid.
By 8 a.m. the wind has eased off; but when I go to fetch Pemba I find him at the door of his tent, retching his heart out. Obviously he won't be going anywhere today. Which leaves us only Ang Nyima to help on the carry. Blast old Pemba, I think to myself, and with no remorse; the South Col is too high for pity.
We repack our loads and shove off. Lowe, Gregory, and Ang Nyima leave first, at 8:30, with about 45 pounds apiece; they will cut steps for us, so that we can save energy and oxygen. We follow at 10, carrying our sleeping bags, air mattresses, food, and extra clothing on top of our breathing sets.
At the foot of the big couloir we climb up the staircase Lowe has chipped, only to duck as a rolling barrage of ice chunks splatters down at us from 300 feet above. We have to pull aside until the fellows up top have moved out along the Southeast Ridge. Then we scramble after them and catch up about noon at the site of the wind-ripped tent left there by Lambert and Tenzing in 1952.
A nice view from here. We photograph everything in sight and move up to the dump John Hunt had placed at 27,350 feet two days ago. The idea of adding another ounce to our loads brings no cheers from anyone. But the stuff has to go up. Greg packs the oxygen, Lowe ties on some food and fuel, and we all look at the tent.
Finally I say to George: “Look, I'll take the tent if you'll make the route.”
He grins and moves off in the lead. He's going extremely well. In fact, this is George's big day on Everest. He was good on the Lhotse Face, but up here he's really showing what he can do.
With 50 to 63 pounds on our backs we plug on up the steepening ridge. By 2 p.m. we start casting around for a tent site, but the whole slope pitches away like a barn roof. For half an hour we search, climbing and traversing, until finally we come on a ledge about 6 feet by 4, angled downward at about 30°.
“Now, there's a lovely spot for a camp,” says George enthusiastically, and dumps his load on it at once.
The others are pretty keen to get on down the mountain, too, and we can't blame them. Ang Nyima, though he's dead beat, asks politely if he can stay up here to help us down the next day, but we send him along. One more night this high on Everest would weaken him so much he'd be of no use to himself, much less to us.
A lonely moment, watching old George and Greg and Ang Nyima turn back. Now we are really alone.
The tent is our first job. For two hours we scrape at the rocks and the snow and the frozen gravel, trying to make a platform for it. We settle for two terraces about a yard wide, six feet long, and about a foot different in height. Then we spend another two hours getting the tent itself up and securing it to some flimsy rock belays and to oxygen bottles which I bury in the snow.
About 6:30 we crawl into our sleeping bags, light the primus, and get some supper: tinned apricots, dates, sardines, biscuits, jam, honey. The wind comes in gusts. When I hear it whistle up on the ridge, I brace myself against the canvas and try to hold the tent down as it gets ready to take off. In between squalls I doze, slumping on the upper shelf with my legs dangling over onto Tenzing's bench.
We use only four hours of oxygen, in two-hour shifts. In between, Tenzing heats up a few drinks. We don't talk much. I wonder to myself how George and the boys fared going down, what John Hunt must be thinking, even how those bees of mine back in New Zealand are getting along. And over and over again I do my mental arithmetic on the amount of climbing oxygen we have left, the amount we're likely to use...
Four a.m. We poke our heads out of the tent door. The wind is mercifully still. Far off, the valleys of Nepal still sleep in darkness, but the summits of Makalu and Ama Dablam have caught the sun; and Tenzing, pointing past me, picks out the monastery at Thyangboche, 14,400 feet below us, where even now the lamas are offering special prayers for our safe return.
While Tenzing melts water for our tea, I haul the oxygen sets inside, knock the ice off the valves, and test them. My feet had been a bit damp the night before and, in order to let them dry out and warm up, with less risk of frostbite, I had pulled my boots off and used them to prop the toe of my sleeping bag off the cold ground. Now the boots are frozen as stiff as medieval armor.
I cook them over the primus. It takes me a good hour to thaw them, and the smell of leather and rubberized fabric toasting in the little tent is gruesome; but finally the boots are soft enough to wiggle into, and we can set out. Tenzing breaks trail through the powdery snow until my feet have warmed up; then I take over the lead.
Climbing strongly, with a good sense of reserve power, we make for the hollow where Evans and Bourdillon left their oxygen bottles. The cylinders are easy to spot. Pawing the ice from the gauges, I read the pleasant news: about 1,000 pounds pressure—enough to take us down to the South Col if we're lucky. In short, all the oxygen on our backs we can plow into our attack on the peak itself and our return to this niche.
We push on. About 400 feet from the South Peak we are brought to a stop: which route? Bourdillon and Evans took the ridge to the left; then, on their way back, came down the broad face. But I think the ridge looks jolly dangerous, with all that loose snow masking the rocks. We decide on the face.
You can't zigzag up a steep slope like this or you'll undercut it and find yourself aboard an avalanche with a one-way ticket to the bottom. So we go straight up. At least, we go up five steps, walking on eggs, and then the whole crust for 10 feet around breaks up and we slide down again three steps. We don't so much climb the face as swim up it.
Halfway, I turn to Tenzing and say: “What do you think of it?”
“I don't like it at all.”
“Shall we go on?”
He shrugs. “Just as you wish.”
I make a quick decision. In ordinary mountaineering terms, the risk isn't justifiable. I know that. But this is Everest, and on Everest you sometimes have to take the long odds, because the goal is worth it. Or so I try to convince myself.
We go on, and we get a break. A few yards higher up we run into some snow that's packed harder. Chipping steps, we make our way quite rapidly up to the crest. At 9 a.m. we are standing on the South Peak.
We have these advantages over Evans and Bourdillon: Thanks to a higher camp, we're here four hours earlier, and we have more oxygen and more strength left to finish the job. But just how big a job is it? That's something no one can tell us for sure.
To size it up, we scoop out a seat for ourselves just below the South Peak, remove our masks, and study the summit above. The true crown is out of sight, somewhere up above the ridge that turns its blade right in our faces now. It looks a fair cow, all right, as we'd say in New Zealand. Cornices on the right, overhanging a little drop of 10,000 feet to the Kangshung Glacier on Everest's eastern flank; on the left, steep snow sloping to the lip of the big rock wall that looms over the Western Cwm.
We don't need to talk much. It's obvious that our only route lies between the cornices and the cliffs on the left; the joker is the state of the snow. If it's firm, we have a chance. If it's loose and dry, we've come a long way for very little.
I check the oxygen once more. One full bottle left for each of us. That's 800 liters at three liters per minute—about 4y hours of climbing. Enough? Well, it will have to be.
We put our sets on again, lighter for the discarded bottles. I feel very fit, and keen to get at the problem. We crampon down to the start of the ridge, and I sink my ax blade into the snow of the upward slope. It is everything we could have asked—crystalline and solid and well packed. Two or three whacks chip a step big enough even for our elephantine high-altitude boots, and a good shove buries the ax shaft half its length, making a very decent belay.
I lead off, cutting a 40-foot line of steps, resting, and taking a few turns of the rope around my ax as Tenzing comes up to join me. Then he belays me as I carve another flight. We move along steadily, giving the rickety cornices a fairly wide berth and taking an occasional gander over the rock face on our left. About 7,500 feet below I can just make out the tents of Camp IV, and I flap my arms up and down like an Abominable Scarecrow, with no particular hope that anyone will see me.
Tenzing has begun to drag a little on the rope by now, and his breathing seems more rapid. As we halt on one tiny ledge, I ask:
“How does it go, Tenzing?”
“All right.”
I know, however, that like most Sherpas Tenzing has only a vague notion of the way his oxygen set works. He may be getting groggy and not even realize it. So I check his exhaust tube and find the valves almost completely blocked with ice; he's probably been getting no great benefit from his oxygen for some minutes.
I examine my own tube; to my surprise, ice has begun to form here, too, though not enough yet to interrupt my air flow. Obviously, this is something I'll have to keep an eye on for both of us. Fortunately, my habit of doing mental mathematics on our oxygen supply as I plug along, plus the fact that I'm leading the rope, will keep me fairly alert.
We resume the climb, and I cut another line of steps for perhaps half an hour. Then we find ourselves staring at an obstacle we've dreaded ever since we spotted it on the aerial photos and through our binoculars from Thyangboche: a ghastly great rock about 40 feet high, plunked down right across the ridge. No route on it worth talking about. And no way around it except—
Except where the snow cornice on the right, pulling away a little from the rock, has left a thin gap, a kind of chimney.
We look at it with rather mixed emotions. I'm not one of those blokes who says to himself, “I'll get up, come hell or high water.” Mountains mean a lot to me, but not that much. I just say to Tenzing:
“Well, we'll give it a good go.”
He takes a belay, and I jam my way into the crack. With my back to the cornice, I face the rock and grope for handholds along it, kicking my crampons into the snow behind me and jacking myself upwards. I use everything I have—knees, elbows, shoulders, even the oxygen set on my back—trying to get a purchase and exert some critical leverage.
My tactics depend on one little consideration: that the cornice doesn't peel off. Of course, Tenzing has me belayed on a bit of rock, which provides a certain moral support. But if the snow gives way, and I find myself dangling over the Kangshung Glacier, it isn't going to matter enormously whether Tenzing can hold me for five minutes or fifty.
Foot by foot I hump and wriggle and pull myself up the chimney. The crack is only a rope's length long, but it's a good half hour before I can reach over the ledge at the top and drag myself onto it. I lie there, panting like a gaffed fish, surprised somehow that I've scraped together enough energy to make it. Then I give Tenzing a taut rope and signal him to come along. For the first time the conviction seeps through me that we are really going to go all the way.
I check the oxygen sets again. The flow rates seem all right. Turning to Tenzing, I say: “How do you feel?”
He just grins and waves his hand upward toward the ridge. I lead off once more, cutting steps. My ax work is still pretty rhythmical and relaxed; I've been chipping away for well over an hour, but, so far, I've avoided the kind of tension that can turn up a sore arm.
One flight of steps, then another, and another. We follow the ridge as it curves around to the right, wondering where the top can possibly be, or if it exists at all. I cut around the back of one crag, only to have a higher one stare me in the face. It seems endless.
Tiring, I try to save time on one stretch by skipping the step cutting and relying on my crampons. After a few yards I go back to my ax; the angle is still too steep, too dangerous. The zest we have known at the top of the rock step is draining away. Dully, grimly, I hack a route around still another knob.
Suddenly I realize that the ridge ahead doesn't slope up, but down. I look quickly to my right. There, just above me, is a softly rounded, snow-covered little bump about as big as a haystack.
The summit.
One last question concerns me: is the top itself just a large, delicately poised cornice? If it is, someone else can have the honor of stepping on it.
I cut my way cautiously up the next few feet, probing ahead with my pick. The snow is solid, firmly packed. We stagger up the final stretch. We are there. Nothing above us, a world below.
I feel no great elation at first, just relief and a sense of wonder. Then I turn to Tenzing and shake his hand. Even through the snow glasses, the ice-encrusted mask, the knitted helmet, I can see that happy, flashing smile. He throws his arms around my shoulders, and we thump each other, and there is very little we can say or need to say.
My watch shows 11:30. Two hours and a half it has taken us from the South Peak; five hours from our tent. It seems a bit longer.
I turn off my oxygen and remove my mask. In the thin air of 29,000 feet my breathing becomes slightly more rapid, but not too uncomfortable. I fish out the camera I have kept warm inside my shirt; it will be necessary to take shots down every ridge if we're to prove conclusively that we've been up here.
Moving down the cone a few feet, I snap a picture of Tenzing holding up his ice ax with its flags standing out stiffly in the wind—the flags of the United Nations, Great Britain, Nepal, India. It would be nice to have Tenzing take my portrait, too, in some heroic pose, but unfortunately he doesn't number among his many virtues a knowledge of photography, and the top of Everest strikes me as a poor place on which to conduct classes ...
Scooping a small hole in the snow, Tenzing buries a few offerings to the gods that many Buddhists believe inhabit these heights: a small blue pencil given him by his daughter, a bar of chocolate, some biscuits, a cluster of lollypops. I place near these gifts a little crucifix that John Hunt has received from a friend and passed over to me on the South Col.
It's time to go down now. I replace my oxygen mask, suck the air in gratefully, and move off without a backward glance. Reaction has set in; we both are tired.
We crampon along the steps I have cut, moving fast. We know the route; we know what's ahead and what isn't; the certainty gives us confidence and a lift to our stride. Even the rock chimney looks reassuringly familiar; we pop into it and kick our way down as if there's no more danger that the cornice will politely take leave of the ridge.
Back on the South Peak once more, we halt for a swig of lemonade before tackling the section we both dread, the great snow slope on the reverse face. This nasty bit of work skids down the summit at an oblique angle aimed right at the Kangshung Glacier. An ice-ax belay won't hold in the soft snow. If one of us begins to slide, both of us will enjoy a 10,000-foot jump without benefit of parachute.
We begin our descent of this glassy staircase. Facing outward and down, we get the uncomfortable sensation of being too heavy, ready to sway forward and fall. We place our boots down onto each step as if we're walking a high wire. I mutter a few things under my breath when we come to a flight of steps Tenzing has cut with his usual ambitious spacing; I have to stop and chip a new step between each of his.
Forty steps more. Twenty. Five...we are down and can slant over to the relative safety of the Southeast Ridge. We look at each other, and with a kind of sigh shrug off the weight of fear that has sat on our shoulders all this long day. The worst is over; we are nearly down ...
We trek down to our dismal little campsite; already the wind has ripped the tent half away. It is 2 p.m. Tenzing heats up some more lemonade on the paraffin stove, while I change our oxygen sets onto the last bottles and cut the flow rates down to two liters a minute. We sip our drinks, looking rather dazedly down at the South Col where a couple of dots that may be Lowe and Noyce move out now from the camp.
On our feet again, we load up our air mattresses and sleeping bags and stumble off, numb with exhaustion, to the top of the couloir. Here we get a rude surprise: the wind has wiped out all the steps we cut the day before, leaving only a smooth, frozen slope beneath us. With a grunt of disgust, I start chipping a new flight, 200 feet down the gully, pausing only when a particularly vicious gust tries to tear me loose from the mountain and forces me to dig my ax in fast and hang onto it, shielding my face from the pelting snow.
Once at the couloir's foot, it's only a long, rough tramp down to the South Col. Before we get there, a lone figure stumps up to meet us—George Lowe, carrying hot soup and emergency oxygen. I grin weakly at old George and say:
“Well, we knocked the blighter off!”
It is rather pleasant to see his face light up. We have climbed a good bit together, George and I, and it does me good to have some decent news for him after all he and the others have been through to put our team in position. But both Tenzing and I are too fagged to chatter much about our experiences.
We totter down to the camp. My oxygen gives out before we get there; it doesn't seem to matter much any more. We crawl into the tents and collapse on our sleeping bags with a sigh of sheer delight.
Yet we sleep very little that night. The wind, the bitter cold, the delayed-action burst of excitement within us keep us awake, keyed up, reliving the best and the worst passages of the long assault. By morning we are quite weak, though by no means truly exhausted.
We pack up. It takes us longer than it should; Everest, right up to the end, is making us pay for the liberties we have taken with its heights. Trudging up the 200-foot slope above the South Col, we begin the grueling traverse across the Lhotse Face.
Tenzing and I have treated ourselves to the luxury of oxygen on the way down. We don't need it terribly; but we figure that perhaps we've earned it. Even so, we have to move slowly.
As we clamber down the ice steps to Camp VII, which we have assumed is deserted, we're startled by a loud, cheerful shout. It's Charles Wylie and his Sherpas, boiling out of the tents to greet us and press hot drinks into our numbed hands. Charles's voice has a curious effect on me: it seems so unnaturally strong and vital and fresh after our days of deterioration up above that I feel suddenly very relaxed and confident, as though sure at last that everything is going to come out all right.
Our news has an equally pleasant effect on the Sherpas. They crowd around and shake our hands, saluting Tenzing—one of their own—with a new and even more affectionate respect. I hear the phrase popping up here and there:
“Everest khatm ho gya, Sahib! Everest has had it!”
Source: National Geographic, July 1954.
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Tenzing Norgay; Everest, Mount; Hillary, Sir Edmund Percival; Mountain Climbing
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