On 29 May 1953, the thirty-threeyear-old
beekeeper from Auckland
crawled out of his tent perched
on a rocky ledge high on Mount
Everest. A ferocious wind had
whipped the tent all night. Hillary
said it sounded like rifle fire. His
Nepali climbing companion, Sherpa
Tenzing Norgay, said it sounded like
the roar of a thousand tigers. With
temperatures at minus 27 degrees
Celsius, the men set off on the final
leg of their amazing climb. For five
hours, they tackled rock and ice
faces, some of them vertical, until,
at 11.30 a.m., there was nowhere
else to climb. They were standing
Over the next fifty years, Sir Edmund was to have many more
adventures and important roles. He led expeditions to the
South Pole, travelling on tractors over crevasse-covered
glaciers and deep drifts of snow. He jetboated from the
mouth of the mighty Ganges River, with its fearsome rapids,
to its source in the Himalayas. He was New Zealand’s High
Commissioner to India. But of all the adventures he had, the
one that dominated his life was working among the Sherpas,
high in the Himalayan mountains.on the top of the world.