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Rating: “We made our way step by step, hump by hump, waiting to see the summit appear. And finally, we managed to reach it. I looked at Tenzing, and even under the goggles and the oxygen mask, I could see his immense smile of satisfaction. We shook hands, but that wasn’t enough for Tenzing, and he hugged me. We congratulated each other until we were literally out of breath.
It was 11:30 on May 29, 1953, and it was an exceptional moment for both of us”.
What do you feel when, before intercontinental flights, before Sputnik, before Gagarin, you become the highest human being on the planet? Who are you when you climb to the top of the world, the last frontier, the last limit that man can reach vertically with his own, meager forces?
Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary were the first team to overcome all the extreme challenges (and there were many…) of a deadly challenge that had reached levels of obsession. They had chosen each other, the robust and silent New Zealander, driven by the will to surpass his own limits and “beat that bastard”, and the small Sherpa hero, the man who at the time was the most experienced climber of the Mother of the Universe, that pillar of the sky that had challenged and defeated for over thirty years the assaults on its summit. No one, not even him, had ever gotten beyond the devilish South Col, where the mountain slowly sucks the life from climbers. A place that smells of death.
Some Western journalists, from their culture tainted by colonialism, in the stench of the Empire that World War II had begun to rot, speculated on who was truly the FIRST to set foot on the summit. It was Hillary, because at that moment he was leading the rope. Well, he wasn't English but at least he was Commonwealth flesh, they thought. It mattered little to the two; there was no Hillary without Tenzing, nor Tenzing without Hillary.
Who was the first man to be photographed at the top of the world? Tenzing Norgay, bundled up in down jackets, masked against -25 degrees and the lack of oxygen, distinct and triumphant in the nonexistent air of that extreme limit. Higher than anything he could have ever imagined. Except for the gods, for whom he left candies buried in the immortal snow of the summit.
And his ice axe, adorned with earthly flags that the wind nearly entirely hides, lifted even higher, towards that sky that in 1953 seemed unreachable, higher still than his eyes, than Hillary's, higher than anything else on this Earth.
Who has climbed a peak, who has given himself to the mountain, to his team companions, to his own limits, who has dared, even on the most docile and mild peaks of our own, knows what feeling it can give to have reached where no further can be gone, except back. And can you imagine what it meant to be up there, in THAT end of May, with the eyes of the world upon you?
Tenzing Norgay, born from nothing, who breathed less oxygen from his cradle, wanted to reach the summit of the Mother of the Universe to leave something not of himself, but for his children and his people.
Tenzing Norgay, who everyone said was smiling, determined, very strong, stands there at the top of Everest, photographed by the first, by his companion, who would not even have been there without him, and who immortalizes him on the day of his, and their, greatest victory.
Neither Tenzing nor Hillary breathe anymore; but of Tenzing, and of that day, this image will remain, one of the most touching I've ever seen, the simple exultation of one who elevates himself after reaching where no one has ever reached before.
The first. On the Roof of the World.
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