Letters From Everest Read online

  Of them all, Izzard has come out the best. He was rudely received by us, but we feel he has played fairly. He worked and walked for his stories and what I have seen they are quite good stuff. He saw early on that the ‘Times’ man was too active and able to beat on the icefall (James Morris, with our aid reached Camp IV and went up and down the icefall three times – he was at IV when we came down with the news) and he returned to Katmandu and saw the correspondents here fabricating reports from rumour, saw the bribery and went home disgusted. Our respect for him has risen greatly.

  I’m sweating quietly and tired of writing. I have a lot of ‘thank-you’ notes to write so I had better stop.

  The first batch of my cyclostyled letters arrived from Keki yesterday. I was worried about this letter, because Keki is not beyond opening this – and so far he has shown no respect for the trust of mountain news given. A long article under his name appeared – with photographs – in the Indian papers on Ed and his achievements, facts taken from our letters to him. Last year he informed the newspapers of what we wrote him from Cho Oyu and this year we shut up. He used several of my Garwhal photographs and so on. I’m afraid if he gets copies of these Everest letters he will use them. Be most careful about what you send through him. This is not meant to be unfriendly – but he is too enthusiastic, he can’t hold any news to himself and he seems to see no wrong in making capital of it. We have written frankly to him, complaining of his actions, but he sees no reason for our complaint and thinks he is doing us a favour by advertising our achievements. If you have sent any more through him, write him a letter and ask him to air-mail it straight to me.

  The shirts arrived, the morning I left Katmandu. Many thanks. Best wishes to all. In less than a week we’ll all be in London (2nd July) and the next few days here in Delhi will certainly be most interesting. We are really having quite a prolonged ‘Cinderella at the Ball’ experience – with lots of Alice in Wonderland thrown in. I wonder where it will all end?

  Smiles and pleasant hours to all,

  George.

  * * *

  AFTERWORD

  Peter Hillary

  George’s personality shines through from the flanks of Mount Everest in these letters to his sister Betty and his family and friends. His humour and his ability to see things positively are woven into his missives from the front line – he is a terrific writer just as he was a wonderful raconteur.

  George was given the great responsibility of pushing the route up the Lhotse Face, which was the critical upper-mountain barrier to making summit attempts. The hard ice and the grinding effects of the altitude wore them down but after two weeks of team effort they reached the South Col and the climb was ‘on’. George inveigled his way into more of John Hunt’s plans for more high altitude sorties on Everest and he was the only man left on the Col at 26,000 ft when Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay struck out for the top. It was to George that my father revealed their success in the rough-and-ready language between close friends.

  After the Everest endeavour many hoped that Himalayan climbing could settle down into a more normal routine, but of course the summit was just the beginning. Attaining the highest point on earth came to symbolise an ultimate achievement against great odds and that symbolism of humankind pushing the boundaries has stuck. Throughout my upbringing, wherever we went in the world I would hear, ‘That’s Ed Hillary. That’s him. He was the first man to climb Everest’. While my father was 6 foot 2 inches tall most people thought he was a foot taller than that; you could see it in their eyes, that excitement – wonderment even – of meeting someone who had gone into the unknown.

  On 3 September 1953, Ed married Louise Rose in Auckland and friends from the New Zealand Alpine Club formed an archway of ice-axes. Behind Ed is clean-shaven George Lowe, his best man that day.

  Climbing the world’s highest mountain in 1953 was an astounding achievement. Mount Everest is on the cusp of the physiological limits of what people can climb and throwing in the brutal weather, the difficulty of the final ascent, the debilitating effects of the altitude and the long duration of the expedition it is impressive that they not only climbed the mountain but did not lose a single man. Perhaps most importantly they saw their achievement as a team effort – they all played a part in putting two men on the top. Today, with our improved knowledge of the mountain and of climbing at altitude we continue to lose lives in the icefall and up in the ‘death zone’ and today’s climbers largely consider their own success the only objective. But that is not how George Lowe played the game as one of the members of the 1953 British Mount Everest Expedition.

  Some people talk about today’s climbers on Everest in dismissive tones but I don’t agree that the mountain should be off limits to those who want to test themselves upon it. Most of them, myself included, are largely up there for the crazy thrill of it all, riddled with ego and ambition, fear and even uncomprehending – ‘what the … am I doing here’ – when faced with repeated opportunities to depart this mortal coil. Whatever might be said of the modern face of climbing on Everest, it is still a demanding and exacting prospect whichever way you look at it. For the really great mountaineers among us there are three mountain walls and two rearing ridgelines that rarely see a human set foot on them. The opportunities for adventure on Everest are still wide open.

  And that is what is so magical about George’s letters. They exude the excitement of a man on a grand adventure where the outcome is uncertain and the spoils are beyond belief – to stand on top of the world. As the great French mountaineer Lionel Terray put it, we are ‘Conquistadors of the Useless’, perhaps, but the benefits are a lifetime of satisfaction that you made a supreme effort in the face of your own fears. For me to have been there, whether it is high in the Hornbein Couloir on the American West Ridge route without ropes or on the South Summit of the South-East Ridge at dawn, being there is something you cannot take away from those who decide to put everything on the line.

  That is what drew me to go to Everest and that is why I am glad I did. And that is why George Lowe was a serial adventurer too. George, thank you for your achievement on the big ‘E’ and for your love of life. While most of us dabble with our dreams, you just did it. You are the real thing!

  * * *

  Back home in New Zealand, Ed and George were given a heroes’ welcome. A local newspaper carried this cartoon of the pair, with the title ‘NEVEREST!’

  In 1954 the pair waved goodbye to New Zealand once more, heading back to the Himalayas to explore the regions east of Everest.

  THOUGHTS

  Here’s the top peak; the multitude below

  Live, for they can, there:

  This man decided not to Live but Know –

  Bury this man there?

  Here – here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,

  Lightnings are loosened,

  Stars come and go …

  Robert Browning, 1855

  What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.

  George Mallory, 1922

  But we feel it is a great moment in our lives – in fact one of the best we have ever experienced. We think that something is going to happen; we hope devoutly that something will happen; yet at the same time we do not want to be hurt or killed. What is it then that we do want? It is that lure of youth – adventure, and adventure for adventure’s sake.

  Winston Churchill, 1930

  Useless toil, why endure it? Then I thought, with an inward grin, what a fuss there would be if we reached the summit. We would have to endure long adulatory speeches, our digestions would be ruined by innumerable dinners, we would be pestered by autograph hunters. Here on Everest, at least, there was peace.

 
Frank Smythe, 1937

  In these days of upheaval and violent change, when the basic values of today are the vain and shattered dreams of tomorrow, there is much to be said for a philosophy which aims at living a full life while the opportunity offers. There are few treasures of more lasting worth than the experience of a way of life that is in itself wholly satisfying. Such, after all, are the only possessions of which no fate, no cosmic catastrophe can deprive us; nothing can alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived.

  Eric Shipton, 1943

  Was it all worthwhile? For us who took part in the venture, it was so beyond doubt. We have shared a high endeavour; we have witnessed scenes of beauty and grandeur; we have built up a lasting comradeship among ourselves and we have seen the fruits of that comradeship ripen into achievement. We shall not forget those moments of great living upon that mountain.

  John Hunt, 1953

  Everest stands firm. Its flanks and ridges are often cluttered with climbers and it may ever be this way. Perhaps we are somehow to blame for this – we opened the door, we showed the way. We made men and women believe the impossible. We experienced the elation that comes through overcoming anxieties and then mastering our fears in some genuinely tough and life-threatening situations. But we chose to be there and that is the thing. We all chose to take a risk when others, just as able, might have turned back. We rode our luck and we were blessed in return. Our achievement, I hope, will last as long as there are adventurous hearts out there; as long as people still raise their eyes to the summits, and take on a challenge in the simple way that we did – slow and sure, head up, just one step at a time.

  George Lowe, 2013

  FURTHER READING

  John Hunt, The Ascent of Everest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1953). Alfred Gregory, The Picture of Everest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1954). Wilfrid Noyce, South Col (London: William Heinemann, 1954). Edmund Hillary, High Adventure (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955). Edmund Hillary and George Lowe, East of Everest (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1956). Jan Morris, Coronation Everest (London: Faber & Faber, 1958). George Lowe, Because it is There (London: Cassell, 1959). Tom Hornbein, Everest: The West Ridge (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966). Chris Bonington, Everest: The Hard Way (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1976). George Band, Everest: Fifty Years on Top of the World (London: Collins, 2003). Michael Ward, Everest: A Thousand Years of Exploration (London: Ernest Press, 2003). George Lowe and Huw Lewis-Jones, The Conquest of Everest: Original Photographs from the Legendary First Ascent (London: Thames & Hudson, 2013).

  BIOGRAPHIES

  GEORGE LOWE is a New Zealand-born explorer, mountaineer, photographer and filmmaker. He was a leading high-altitude climber on the 1953 British Everest Expedition, on which his best friend Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first men to summit the world’s highest peak. As well as taking photographs throughout this journey, Lowe directed the Oscar-nominated documentary The Conquest of Everest and the following year again joined Hillary to climb in the Himalaya. He was official photographer of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which, between 1955 and 1958, not only traversed Antarctica but also became the first to reach the South Pole overland since Captain Scott in 1912. In later years a teacher, Lowe was the founder and first Chairman of the Himalayan Trust in Britain.

  DR HUW LEWIS-JONES is a historian of exploration with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Huw was Curator at the Scott Polar Research Institute and the National Maritime Museum and is now an award-winning author who writes and lectures widely about adventure and the visual arts. His books include Arctic, Ocean Portraits, In Search of the South Pole, and Mountain Heroes, which won Adventure Book of the Year at the World ITB Awards in Germany. His latest book is The Conquest of Everest, co-written with George Lowe.

  JAN MORRIS is a celebrated British travel writer and historian. Jan’s first experience of mountaineering was her assignment to cover the 1953 Everest expedition for The Times but she now lives with her partner Elizabeth among the mountains at the top left-hand corner of Wales, and there she has written some fifty books of travel, history, memoir and imagination. She is an Honorary DLitt of the University of Wales, a member of the Gordedd of Bards and an Honorary Student of her old Oxford college, Christ Church. She has four children, eight grandchildren and a Norwegian Forest Cat, named Ibsen.

  PETER HILLARY first climbed Mount Everest in 1990, and repeated this feat again in 2002 on a National Geographic-sponsored ascent. With such a famous father as Sir Edmund, it was perhaps inevitable that Peter’s life would be drawn to the mountains. He has now completed more than forty expeditions and, like his father, is deeply involved in development projects for the Sherpa people in the Everest region of Nepal. George Lowe is Peter’s godfather.

  Right: George and Ed gathered together a small team in the New Zealand Alps over Christmas in 1950, and on the reverse of this photograph is scribbled a typical conversation they’d have before a big climb. The best way, they soon discovered, was just to have a go! This kind of optimism is the heartbeat of adventure and their skill and enthusiasm for the mountains would soon take them to the Himalayas and later Everest, the greatest challenge of them all.

  Copyright

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Silverbear, an imprint of Polarworld.

  Letters from Everest © Polarworld

  The right of Huw Lewis-Jones to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Photographs © George Lowe Collection. Every effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce those images for which George Lowe does not hold the copyright. We are grateful to individuals who have assisted in this. Any omissions are entirely unintentional and corrections should be addressed to the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in association with the Lowe family, with the support of Stuart Leggatt and Cameron Treleaven.

  Direction by Huw Lewis-Jones

  Typeset in Sabon by Liz House

  Cover concept by Andrew Wightman

  ISBN 978–0–9555255–5–1

  Printed and bound in Italy by Graphicom, an FSC certified company.

  Silverbear is the new imprint of indie publisher Polarworld – a new home for classic accounts and the very best first-hand narratives of exploration and adventure. Discover more about our titles at www.polarworld.co.uk.