Beyond the Edge Page #4

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"if I was one of the lucky ones,"

You 're all chosen

as basic climbers to go to the top,

but there are all these

other jobs to be done as well,

My father

was absolutely determined

that he was going to have an opportunity

to climb this mountain,

One of the conditions

for my father to go

with the English team

was that he'd have a chance

to go to the top,

There was no other climber

quite as accomplished,

All of us would have

liked to have a crack at the top,

but the first attempt on the summit

was to be made by

Tom Bourdillon with Charles Evans...

..and, "If needed,

the second attempt," he said,

"is going to be made

by Ed Hillary and Tenzing,"

I'm sure my father

would have loved to have

been in the first team,

Tenzing was probably

quite conflicted by it,

The next stage,

and the really crucial one,

is up the Lhotse Face

to the South Col,

John Hunt said, "OK,

Tom Bourdillon with Charles Evans,

"We'll send the two

of them up first,

"They can do a huge leap

from the South Col

"right to the summit in a day,"

The first major task

in this plan fell to George Lowe,

He was to make a route up

the Lhotse Face and prepare the way

for the high-carrying parties

to reach the col,

This was to be finished by 15 May,

Basically what he said was,

"We want to be in a position

to climb Everest on May 15,"

because there was a constant fear

in the back of Hunt's mind that

"The monsoon would come

and end all our hopes,"

But they had to get up this thing

called the Lhotse Face,

This is a vast

4,000-foot snow-and-ice face

leading up steeply

to the South Col at 26,000 feet,

George Lowe, my fellow New Zealander,

spent much time and energy

bashing a route

up this difficult problem,

Well, the work on

the face was very difficult

and made more difficult

and atrocious

by the weather and daily falls

of snow which covered the tracks,

I shared my high perch

for a long time with Ang Nyima,

a splendid little Sherpa,

George Lowe

worked on the Lhotse Face

without oxygen for over a week

up to about 24,500 feet,

The cold was terrific

and the wind was bad

and all the time I was hoping

to get the traverse complete

and the route right through

to the South Col,

But I was thrashed by the weather

and the altitude was affecting me,

We didn't seem to be able to make

the last 1,000 feet to the col,

John Hunt's big mistake

was that he underestimated

the Lhotse Face,

It's just so big,

He didn't give enough

support to George Lowe,

It really was

myself and Ang Nyima,

Whenever they did send up support,

within 24 hours, they were

not able to carry on,

Being at high altitude,

you never feel very well,

Each breath of air

we take in at high altitude

has fewer oxygen molecules

so we need more breaths in order

to get the same amount of oxygen,

Put a pillow

over your mouth

and try and breath through it

as you're running,

You just suck in air,

you're trying to get enough air

and the oxygen debt builds up

until you just can't go any...

You have to stop,

Take three, four breaths to a step,

five breaths to a step,

six breaths to a step,

15 breaths to a step,

You 're just not getting the air,

Up there, your mind

somehow gradually accepts slowness,

I thought I was going

extremely well,

but in fact we were staggering about

like men in a dream,

We had spent

10 days on the Lhotse Face -

considerably more

than I'd reckoned on -

but we had still not broken through

to the South Col,

The time factor

was becoming critical,

Watching the progress

on the Lhotse Face,

there was no doubt that

the momentum of the attack

seemed to be winding down,

and the first inklings of the monsoon

were building up

in the Bay of Bengal,

It was

a very, very critical time,

You could imagine Hunt

feeling that this whole great enterprise

was just unravelling

and, "If we don't get

a grip on this thing soon

"we're going to lose our chance,

"The monsoon will arrive

"and we won't even have reached

the South Col, let alone the summit,"

This is London calling

the British Mount Everest expedition.

Here is the latest weather bulletin.

Western disturbance

apparently moving eastwards

across the extreme north of Nepal

is likely to cause

cloudy to overcast skies

with occasional thunderstorms...

The later in May it was,

the more likely

that the monsoon would arrive,

When the monsoon comes,

you get huge dumps of snow and they

make climbing much more difficult,

You don't want to be climbing through

large amounts of soft snow,

wading your way through it,

The British expeditions

of the 1930s had all failed

because the monsoon had come early,

And so all of this was

piling on the pressure, you know?

So even though the route

hadn't actually been made

all the way to the South Col

John Hunt had to make

a sort of crucial decision

to start sending up

the team of 14 Sherpas

to carry all the stores we needed,

Nothing must endanger

the getting of our stores to the col

in time for our

attempts on the summit,

On 21 May,

Tenzing and myself

led a band of 14 high-altitude Sherpas

up the Lhotse Face,

13 Sherpas struggled up to

the col that day, without oxygen,

The 14th only just failed to make it,

and his load was carried on,

We were proud of them, and grateful,

It was a 10,5-hour day,

They carried 30 pounds each,

and their only nourishment

was a single cup of tea apiece

for breakfast,

And so we were able

to equip the camp properly

with tents, sleeping bags,

oxygen equipment and food,

and that was one of

the biggest achievements,

The South Col is probably

the most barren spot in the world,

The continual strong wind

is always blowing over

the dreary waste of rock and ice,

Adding an air of desolation

are the remnants of the Swiss tents

of the previous year,

with pieces of tattered cloth

still clinging to them,

1952, the Swiss

had invited my father to climb Everest,

and he had been up

where no human had been before,

but bad weather turned them back,

I remember Andr Roch,

of the Swiss party, said,

"On the col

there's a smell of death,"

We thought that was

Continental dramatics,

but when we'd been there,

we understood,

I'm telling you, the cold,

you can feel it

coming up the extremities,

You know you're gonna freeze

your hands and toes,

and you just feel the cold

creeping up,

It's a race between the body

and what you hope you can do,

You know that you're dying

a little bit up there,

A major step

had been achieved,

and we then returned

once more to the Western Cwm,

Without wasting any time,

we brought into action our assault plan,

Hunt wanted to have

two attempts on the summit,

but he realised

that he couldn't have two attempts

which were using

open-circuit oxygen sets,

In the open-circuit,

when you breathe out, the

expired air goes to the atmosphere,

and when you breathe in,

the atmospheric air comes with

an addition of a puff of oxygen

from your oxygen set,

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