After Everest - 'The last innocent adventure' Ian Morris - Tenzing Norgay

After Everest - 'The last innocent adventure' Ian Morris (eBook)

Tenzing Norgay (Autor)

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2024 | 1. Auflage
240 Seiten
Gibson Square (Verlag)
978-1-78334-261-7 (ISBN)

On 29 May 1953 Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary conquered Everest.Before it had claimed the lives of dozens of climbers, including George Leigh Mallory in 1924. Norgay, the descendant of generations of yak herders, was destined to become a Lama, but his love for the mountains was that much stronger and he ran away from his Buddhist monastery. He had but one dream despite the deaths of many mountaineers: to conquer Everest. For thirty years expeditions had been struggling to scale its fiendishly difficult icy slopes until he and Hillary finally succeeded. His memoir is a unique and eloquent tribute to Zen and the art of mountain climbing.

Tenzing Norgay was born as Namgyal Wangdi in a family of small mountain farmers and herders. Destined to become a lama in a monastry that gave him his new name, he chose his own path despite having little money or schooling. In 1953, members of the Himalayan Club in Darjeeling sniggered at a 'carrier' who thought he could conquer that peak, but Tenzing, confident of his skills, insisted that he would join the British climbing team only as a full climbing member rather than as a sherpa.

1: Never the Same Again

Twenty years and more have passed since the summit of Mount Everest was first reached by man and I stood with Edmund Hillary at the highest point on earth late in the morning of 29 May 1953. Twenty years is a long time in a man’s life, and a long time too in a quick-changing world. Many years and a lot of effort had brought me a little unexpectedly to that high and lonely place in the thin air, under an incredibly blue sky, with a whole world of mountains spread out around and below us. I was nearly forty years of age. It was my seventh expedition to the mountain and the fulfilment of a dream. It was also the fulfilment of the efforts of a whole generation and more of climbing men, who in their own ways had had the same dream as mine, so if the achievement created a sensation it is not surprising. It was celebrated throughout the world, though differently with each people.

It was in fact a most important moment. The news of our success was intentionally delayed and was only broadcast in Britain some days later, on Coronation Day, 2 June. But we had a long march back and everyone knew about the ascent of Everest long before we returned to civilisation. Then in Nepal and in India people went crazy. Politically-minded men rushed in to gain some benefit from my own part in the climb, invented stories about it and twisted the truth, proclaiming me the hero of Nepal, of India, or of the East, and so on, simply because I had been lucky enough and persistent enough to reach the top of the world and the headlines of the newspapers too.

This was a difficult time for everybody in the expedition. I could not help being pleased at this personal reception; anyone would be. But the attempt to split me from Edmund Hillary and the rest of the expedition and to create trouble amongst us was really frightening and it has left a dark mark on my memory of our victory. Also the frenzy of the crowds was almost terrifying, even before we got to Kathmandu, though worse afterwards, and so were the mobs of excited pressmen who never left us for a moment.

Now it seems hard to believe the excitement; it is such a very long time ago, and so much has happened since then that the significance of the event no longer seems as great, no longer seems real, even to me, but especially to a generation that has been born or has grown up in the interval. They cannot remember it anyway.

Even then, in 1953, I had the feeling that nothing would ever be the same again—for me, for the Sherpas, for Solu Khumbu, for mountaineering as a sport. And nothing was. It was not that by climbing Everest nothing was left for the mountaineers to do. Not at all. Rather the reverse. Now there was everything to do; nothing was beyond man’s ambition and there was plenty of that everywhere. The sport grew as never before, especially in the Himalaya because they offered the most ambitious and the most varied climbing of any range in the world. And in growing it gave me a career I would not have thought about a few years earlier. The great Himalayan and Karakorum summits that had not so far been climbed—they were many—began to fall one after the other to expeditions from many lands: Kangchenjunga, Makalu, Pumori, K2, Dhaulagiri, Cho Oyu, Nuptse,

Lhotse, Manaslu, Broad Peak…. The list of those that were climbed in the next few years is very long indeed, and of course there were casualties, many casualties, among the Sherpas too. In a year or two few of the really famous main summits remained unclimbed, though there are to this day numbers of mountains still unclimbed—secondary summits, of course, but still very big ones. Anyway, after Everest nothing seemed impossible.

This is what the event meant for mountaineering in the Himalaya: a sort of obstacle -physical, mental—had disappeared and the flood of expeditions came in. Of course, it caused plenty of practical problems in the area. For one thing, the mountains now had to be shared out among the eager rival expeditions; permission to climb the peaks had to be applied for very early and the popular ones were soon booked up for a year or two in advance. The authorities simply did not want an unregulated scramble for the peaks. Supplies of everything from food to porters were not unlimited, and as a result of the invasion there were times of quite serious shortages. At one point all expeditions in Nepal were stopped completely by the Government for a time.

For me personally the change was rather different, and that is the main subject of this book; my life took on a new direction. As for the Sherpa people who live on the road to Everest—and had lived there undisturbed for centuries—also for the rest of Nepal, from now on fully open to the world, the changes were very serious and this is the other subject of my book.

Since that great moment when Edmund Hillary and I shook hands on a high patch of snow, looked down on the huge panorama of peaks and glaciers and valleys and clouds, and remembered for a moment or two—we were only on the summit for about fifteen minutes – those who had tried before us and failed, then thanked God for our own success and prayed for a safe descent, and scratched in the snow to bury little things like a pencil and a bag of sweets and a cat made of black cloth—since that moment a new generation of men and women have been born both in Solu Khumbu and in the world outside that now wonders what the fuss was about. You would have to be nearly thirty years old today actually to remember it and you would have to be really middle-aged to have taken part in the celebrations and listened to the lectures given by the climbers when they got home. I have been strongly aware of this in recent times when talking about Everest to groups of people in distant places and realising the age of those who really understood what I was talking about. I am not saying that the young do not enjoy the story. They do, just as they enjoy all good adventure stories, on the mountains or on the sea or anywhere else.

It is like this: for the final ascent of Everest there was a long build-up for the climbers themselves and for those who followed the adventure. For me too. For everyone therefore the ascent in 1953 was a great climax. For many, many years, ever since Everest was recognised as the earth’s highest mountain, men had tried to conquer it. It was almost a permanent challenge. Mostly they tried by the northern route through Tibet, and all had failed, though there were some tremendous achievements, especially when you take into account the real lack of knowledge of very great heights and what was needed to survive them, also the primitiveness of much of the equipment and clothing and supplies, and finally the mental attitudes which held people in check. For me it was very interesting, for instance, to compare what I saw of the expeditions from the north before the war with those from the south, two with the Swiss in 1952 and one with the British in 1953. Of course, in experience and information there was no comparison and the equipment bore no resemblance to older times. You have only to look at the photographs to see the difference, especially the clothing, the boots—and even hats! Yet the will to succeed was the same and very great skill and courage. How else could Mallory and Irvine have got as high as they did with all those disadvantages—some say that they actually got to the top and fell on the descent? Others, too, like Smythe, Norton, Somerville, Odell, who got very close to succeeding.

So our excitement in the end is very understandable, I think, the sense of accomplishment at having done so much at last, climbing on the backs, one might say, of all those who had gone before, Sherpas as well as Europeans; for quite a few of my own people had died on those expeditions and among those who did not die were some who got very high on the mountain.

I can only give a very personal story of what has happened since 1953. In the book which James Ramsay Ullman wrote down for me after a long time spent in giving him the spoken story, I told of my beginnings, what set me on the road to Everest and the many adventures I had until then. There would be no point in repeating them here; in Tiger of the Snows the details are all to be found. Yet for the benefit of readers who do not remember those days and have not read my first book, I must repeat very briefly those facts which they need to know if the story of what happened afterwards is to be understood.

My name is Tenzing Norgay and I am a Sherpa; that is to say, I am of Tibetan race, for it was from Tibet that our people came, as I shall explain. I was born in Thami, a village close to all the great mountains of the Everest region and on the way from Namche Bazar to the Nangpa-La, a high pass into Tibet. I was the eleventh of thirteen children and we were very poor until after I was born, when our herd of yaks began to grow until eventually it numbered some three or four hundred beasts. From then on we were modestly prosperous.

But my name was not always Tenzing Norgay. My mother’s name was Kinzom and my father’s was Ghang-La Mingma. Amongst our people a child...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	11.4.2024
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte
ISBN-10	1-78334-261-7 / 1783342617
ISBN-13	978-1-78334-261-7 / 9781783342617

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