May 29 thus became known as Mt Everest Day in Nepal to mark their achievement, a day celebrated with pomp and much celebration. They spent only 15 minutes atop Everest and Hilary clicked the most famous photo of Norgay, one where he is seen posing with his ice axe.
Before setting off with the expedition team Norgay had attempted to reach the summit with a Swiss team and had successfully scaled metres of Mt Everest. Hillary and John Hunt were both knighted and Norgay was awarded the George Medal, a civilian medal of bravery. A point which brought into focus the unfair treatment of Nepali Sherpas who have assisted climbers in their endeavours.
Sir Edmund Hilary hailed from New Zealand and his ascent formed a bond between Nepal and his homeland. Hilary is fondly remembered by the mountainous Khumbu community, where a memorial has been erected in his honour above the village of Khumjung. The revised height of Mt Everest has been pegged at 29, ft, 8, In , a Chinese expedition was the first to conquer the mountain from the Tibetan side, and in James Whittaker became the first American to top Everest.
In , Tabei Junko of Japan became the first woman to reach the summit. Three years later, Reinhold Messner of Italy and Peter Habeler of Austria achieved what had been previously thought impossible: climbing to the Everest summit without oxygen. More than climbers have died attempting to summit the mountain. Traffic jams have been reported near the top, and a fistfight broke out in between three European climbers and more than Sherpas, over what the guides deemed to be rude and dangerous behavior during an attempted ascent.
Meanwhile, the deaths keep coming , including over 10 in But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! In , French explorer Jean Nicolet landed at Green Bay, becoming the first European to visit the lake-heavy northern region that would later become Wisconsin. In , at He was the first American president to be born and then serve in the 20th century.
In , Kennedy enrolled at Some 35 U. In a public ceremony held in Hollywood, city officials renamed the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Avenue—famous for its historic On May 29, , year-old Danica Patrick becomes the first female driver to take the lead in the storied Indianapolis Having previously distinguished herself in the Toyota Atlantic series, Patrick had qualified fourth—another best for a woman—for the 89th Indianapolis Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.
On May 29, , on the advice of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler orders all Jews in occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left side of their coats.
Joseph Goebbels had made the persecution, and ultimately the extermination, of Jews a His presence reflects the change that has taken place in his affairs since May 29th of last year, when he and Edmund Hillary stood on the summit of Mount Everest. That feat earned Tenzing a rest from his career as a climber, which had been arduous, and plunged him into a new career, involving contracts, publicity, and politics, which is a good deal more lucrative but which puts him under another kind of strain.
Not only is he, like many famous men, unschooled in the ways of publicity but he deals haltingly with English, its lingua franca. Just keeping track of his own life, therefore, demands hard concentration. His troubles are compounded by an element of jealousy in Darjeeling—he is to some extent a prophet without honor in his own country—and by a public disagreement, which he is well aware of, as to whether he is a great man or only an able servant.
He has fixed up a small museum in his Darjeeling flat, exhibiting his gear, trophies, and photographs, and he stands duty there from ten in the morning to four-thirty in the afternoon. He is a handsome man, sunburned and well groomed, with white teeth and a friendly smile, and he usually wears Western clothes of the Alpine sort—perhaps a bright silk scarf, a gray sweater, knee-length breeches, wool stockings, and thick-soled oxfords.
These suit him splendidly. Redolent with charm, Tenzing listens intently to questions put to him, in all the accents of English, by tourists who come to look over his display, and answers as best he can, often laughing in embarrassment.
He charges no admission fee, but has a collection box for less fortunate Sherpa climbers, and he seems to look on the ordeal as a duty to the Sherpas and to India as a whole. The other day, I, who have been bothering him, too, remarked on the great number of people he receives. On his trip to England with the Everest party, he took along passports of both countries, but now it is pretty well settled that he is Indian by choice and long residence, Nepalese by birth, and Sherpa—Tibetan, that is—by stock.
Odd as it may seem, this mixture is common, for the Sherpas long ago migrated from the high Tibetan wastes to Nepal, and in this century many of them have moved on to Darjeeling, looking for work; when Tenzing Norkay, or Tenzing Norkay Sherpa, came to Darjeeling in , he was treading a well-worn path. Darjeeling is a town of twenty-five thousand people, seven thousand feet above sea level, on a steep slope in the southern Himalayas. From the plain below, its buildings look like strips of paper pasted on a screen.
For decades, people have come to Darjeeling by a small mountain train, with tiny red cars and a tiny green locomotive, that chugs in and out of the bottom of town, but now one can also make the trip by auto, corkscrewing up a steep road between terraces of the tea bushes that, before Tenzing, made Darjeeling famous. The principal streets are level, running across the face of the slope, and these are intersected by steep, zigzagging lanes and by steps. To see Everest, one must go to a lookout called Tiger Hill, thirteen miles to the southeast.
In the old, imperial days, the British used Darjeeling as a refuge from the heat of Calcutta, three hundred miles away, their main Indian port and the capital of Bengal Province. The Bengal government came up for the hot months, and so did the wives and children of businessmen. Hotels and villas were built and filled, and natives converged on the town to serve as cooks, waiters, grooms, porters, guides, or merchants, according to their talents.
Being hardy rather than urbane, the Sherpas, both men and women, drew outdoor jobs. Sherpa women porters are seen on the streets today, carrying baskets shaped like big inverted cones or pyramids on their backs, and until Tenzing became famous, his wife, a short, strong woman who was born in Darjeeling of Sherpa parents, was often one of them.
But now things are different. The Bengal government, which, of course, is Indian, does not move up for the summer. Some of the hotels and many of the villas are closed. Such tourists as Darjeeling draws are apt to be Indians, who keep few servants and do little hiking, or Americans, most of whom stop by for a day or two, often on their way around the world, to look at the peaks and to photograph Tenzing. There are still quite a few British people in Darjeeling, including a number of tea planters, but their life is not what it used to be, either.
They are beset by inflation—prices are roughly three times what they were in the thirties—and by labor troubles. I have been told that workers in the tea gardens have beaten up several planters, with little or no punishment from the police. To Westerners, Darjeeling is a simple place, but to the Sherpas it is a great city. Sherpa boys run off to it as other boys run off to sea; Tenzing did this himself. The southern edge of the Tibetan plateau is fenced by peaks, including Everest, and then the ground falls sharply toward the plains of eastern India; most of Nepal lies on the higher reaches of this slope.
The Sherpa country is sparsely settled, and the largest village, called Namche Bazar, which apparently means Big Sky Market, consists of a few rows of small stone houses. The Sherpas get along by raising yaks, which thrive on their blizzardy pastures and the thin air, and by growing potatoes; in one spot, they know it is time to begin planting when a frozen waterfall thaws. Another resident of the Sherpa country is the Abominable Snowman, or yeti —a creature who is said to walk like a man and to leave huge tracks.
Many Sherpas believe that the Snowman is supernatural and that the sight of him will kill a man, but others claim to have caught a glimpse of him with no ill effects. Tenzing has not come across the Snowman. A British expedition, backed by the London Daily Mail , is now in the Sherpa country trying to solve the mystery.
There is a strong tendency among Sherpas to leave their difficult homeland. When the men arrive, they are apt to be got up in the Tibetan way, with long, braided hair and huge earrings, but they soon dispose of these. The women, however, usually cling to the Tibetan style—coiled braids, plain, dark dresses, and woollen aprons with narrow stripes in many colors.
The clothes vary in detail, depending on the latest fashion in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, but to the untrained eye they are all alike. Most of the Sherpas in Darjeeling—there are about a hundred families—live in a poor neighborhood called Tung Soong Bustee, a short walk from the center of town.
One sunny morning recently, when the rest of the town was still buttoned up, I went over to have a look. This is the way Tenzing earned his living when he came here. From the square, I made a hairpin turn over to what once was Calcutta Road but now is Tenzing Norkay Road, a dry, hard dirt road with paths running off to houses scattered in the brush below. Soon I was looking down on the tin roofs of the cluster of buildings where Tenzing used to live. A dozen prayer flags, flying from bamboo poles, rose above them; they had been white originally, but were gray with the columns of prayers, thousands and thousands of words, stamped on them.
Flapping in the breeze, they set up spiritual vibrations that, according to Sherpa belief, which is Tibetan Buddhist, would spread far and wide. A few women with the braids, high cheekbones, and small, square build of the Sherpas were filling pails and old kerosene tins with water from a public tap on the road.
I heard hoofbeats and a voice, and when I turned, there was Tenzing. He was riding a brown pony, wearing English-style boots over khaki trousers, and using an English saddle with a bright Tibetan rug under it. The pony was just under thirteen hands, fit, and well groomed; stopping to chat for a moment, Tenzing said it came from Tibet, and showed me a brand on its hind quarters that looked like a Chinese character.
Mount Everest has been a British institution—or at least climbing it has—since a year or two after the First World War. This came as something of a surprise, for Everest does not appear to stand above the peaks around it.
Since then, there have been threats from flash contenders, like Amne Machin, in northwest China, but Everest is still rated highest, even though there have been arguments over exactly how high it is. In , the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, a British project, called it 29, feet—admittedly an approximation. Some authorities say it is 29,—the result of later sightings—but 29, has prevailed, on the ground that no sighting can be reliable and it is better to choose one and stay with it.
A custom developed early in the history of Himalayan climbing whereby, to avoid confusion, different nations in general took on different peaks. In the division, the British got Everest, and except for two Swiss parties, which tried the climb in , with Tenzing along both times, they have had it pretty much to themselves. Between the two World Wars, the only way to approach Everest was from Tibet, because Nepal did not admit climbing parties, and Britain was the only Western country on speaking terms with Tibet.
In , Nepal opened up, and in , with the arrival of the Communists, Tibet closed down. In the days when the road lay only through Tibet, Darjeeling, which is near the caravan track from India to Lhasa, made a natural jumping-off place, where climbers could assemble, start breathing mountain air, check their equipment, learn something about the Himalayas, and, if they liked, be blessed before setting out by lamas from the nearby monastery of Ghoom.
In Darjeeling, too, the expeditions could recruit Sherpas, whose worth as high-altitude porters was discovered at the start of this century and who have helped in all the major attacks on Everest and the other high peaks in this stretch of the Himalayas.
Last year, however, a German-Austrian party climbing Nanga Parbat, near the northwestern end of the range, had to do without them, for Nanga Parbat is in the part of Kashmir now held by Pakistani troops, and Pakistan is not hospitable toward Indians.
Being stopped by a frontier was a new experience for the Sherpas, who, all this century, have drifted innocently and unhindered across the otherwise stern border of Tibet and Nepal. If peaks were forbidden, it was not to Sherpas but to their Western employers—though this amounted to the same thing, since most Sherpas are not interested in climbing mountains by themselves.
For them, it is a livelihood, made possible by Western whim. Katmandu, the capital of Nepal, has become the usual jumping-off place for climbers, but Darjeeling remains the recruiting ground for Sherpas. They are generally hired through an organization called the Himalayan Club, which provides expeditions with advice and services, and which keeps dossiers on more than a hundred Sherpas, listing their vital statistics, their working records, and their good and bad qualities.
The Sherpas report early in the year, often walking from Namche Bazar for the purpose, so that they can have jobs by March, when the climbing season begins, and the Club assigns them tasks from sirdar, or foreman, down to common porter. Tenzing was born in a village called Thami, near Everest and at an altitude of fourteen thousand feet.
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