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| Version 2 | Version 3 |
|---|---|
| Everest: the ascent | Everest: the ascent |
| (4 months later) | |
| I was a rank outsider with the 1953 British Everest Expedition, the first ever to reach the top of the world. I was no climber, was not particularly interested in mountaineering and was there merely as a reporter. My only task was to see that news of the expedition went home fast, safely and exclusively to The Times of London. The assignment was any journalist's dream; I was young and highly ambitious, and I did the job in a condition of perpetually delighted excitement. All I wanted was what we then called a scoop, and I got one. | I was a rank outsider with the 1953 British Everest Expedition, the first ever to reach the top of the world. I was no climber, was not particularly interested in mountaineering and was there merely as a reporter. My only task was to see that news of the expedition went home fast, safely and exclusively to The Times of London. The assignment was any journalist's dream; I was young and highly ambitious, and I did the job in a condition of perpetually delighted excitement. All I wanted was what we then called a scoop, and I got one. |
| Sixty years on, I look back on the experience differently. Now I recall it allegorically, lyrically perhaps, even a touch poignantly, because the coincidence of its success with the distant Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II seems to me now a last hurrah of British Imperial glory. | Sixty years on, I look back on the experience differently. Now I recall it allegorically, lyrically perhaps, even a touch poignantly, because the coincidence of its success with the distant Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II seems to me now a last hurrah of British Imperial glory. |
| Essentially, though, I think of Everest '53 as an innocent adventure: all its protagonists, it seems to me, were good people. I think of it as essentially decent: Europeans and Asians, Sherpas and Englishmen, New Zealanders and Welshmen, scholars and soldiers and scientists all climbed and worked as friends upon that mountain. And above all of us, night and day, in weather fair or foul, with its plume of driven snow streaming tremendously from its summit, the great mountain itself looked down on us benignly – for not a soul was lost, nor a reputation sullied, on that happiest of adventures. | Essentially, though, I think of Everest '53 as an innocent adventure: all its protagonists, it seems to me, were good people. I think of it as essentially decent: Europeans and Asians, Sherpas and Englishmen, New Zealanders and Welshmen, scholars and soldiers and scientists all climbed and worked as friends upon that mountain. And above all of us, night and day, in weather fair or foul, with its plume of driven snow streaming tremendously from its summit, the great mountain itself looked down on us benignly – for not a soul was lost, nor a reputation sullied, on that happiest of adventures. |
| And to my mind it is this grand allegory, nature at its most tremendous surveying the myriad puzzling intentions of humankind below, that is the ultimate subject of this collection of images. | And to my mind it is this grand allegory, nature at its most tremendous surveying the myriad puzzling intentions of humankind below, that is the ultimate subject of this collection of images. |
| Everest is published by Ammonite Press on 22 May, priced £40. To order a copy for £34, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846 | Everest is published by Ammonite Press on 22 May, priced £40. To order a copy for £34, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846 |
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