How the Everest was tamed

Lt Gen Baljit Singh (retd) 

The geological creation of the highest pinnacle on Planet Earth and that of the Indian subcontinent, per se, are inextricably coterminous with the tectonic collision in the Southern Hemisphere of the break-away Gondwana land mass with mainland Asia, aeons ago. Yet in the realm of recorded history, the precise geographical determination of that ultimate pinnacle is very much of our times; both its acknowledged, magical moment-in-time as also the subsequent assignation of a name lie ascribed to the offices of the Survey of India, Dehradun in 1848!

For, in a corner of his spacious office, Captain Andrew Waugh (later the Surveyor General of India) studied the plethora of instrumental observations and the resultant mathematical computations which intersected each other inside a one-inch square space of a grid sheet but not at one common point. In the event, Waugh was contemplating how best to unravel what the surveyors call the Cats-Cradle! After much deliberation and summoning his Indian Army discipline and integrity, Waugh marked a sharp dot, circled it and wrote on the margin: “Peak b and possibly the highest mountain in the world, in Tibet.” 

For the moment, Waugh’s assertion raised no eyebrows. Six years later, he further added that Peak b was worshipped in Tibet as Chomolungma and in Nepal as Sagarmatha, both names translating into English as “Goddess Mother of the World.” But the world at large would truly sit up in astonishment only in 1856, when Waugh announced the mathematically computed height of this latest summit unequivocally at 29,002 feet above sea level! In 1865, Peak XV would be conferred the name Everest after the surname of the then Surveyor General of India.

Some seven decades later, the first man who came within a whisker of the Everest summit on June 5, 1924 was the immaculate Indian Army officer, Lt Col EF Norton, DSO, Royal Horse Artillery. But the effort had to be aborted when his companion, Dr Somervell, dropped out on account of an acute throat inflammation and bleeding. Norton persevered alone for over an hour before wisely turning his back on Everest. No one could better their achievement till the fateful morning of May 29, 1953 when Tenzing held aloft his ice axe, flags of UK, India and The Alpine Club fluttering from its shaft, and Hillary froze that image on camera-film for posterity.

Now, the 1953 British attempt on Everest was partly sponsored by The Times, London, as indeed were all expeditions beginning with 1921. But this time the stakes seemed higher than usual. The correspondents of The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail positioned themselves at Kathmandu and indulged in Oriental intrigues, to be “the first with the news.” With an element of mischief and deception, James Morris of The Times devised a secret code to cover the names of the climbers, of success, failure, etc. And two sherpas practically ran the distance of 48 km, handed in the message to the radio operator at the Nepalese Police checkpost at Namche and collected a bounty of 30 pounds!

The coded message taxed by Morris deliberately read like a failed attempt: “Snow conditions bad stop Advance Base abandoned May Twenty Nine stop Awaiting improvement stop All Well”. However, when decrypted in London at 4.15 pm on June 1, 1953, it read: “Everest climbed Hillary Tenzing May 29!” Just as “hot tears had sprang to the eyes” at the Base Camp, so presumably they did at The Times, London office. But the Editor was in a quandary whether to break the news in their evening edition or keep it “hidden” till the Queen’s Coronation the next morning?  Buckingham Palace approved the latter option, and the rest is history. 

Soon, the British monarch would personally felicitate Hillary and Norgay at the Buckingham Palace. The Indian Air Force had already provided a layer of icing on the Everest cake by flying two Westland Liberator Bombers especially fitted with cine and still cameras, for over an hour each on June 6 and 7 to film the outstanding documentary, Conquest of Everest, which received accolades the world over.

Sadly, in the last three decades the ascent to the summit was first reduced to a vulgar commercial enterprise (US $ 60,000 per head) and lately made a pawn of petty power play when the Chinese government laid claim to the entire Everest massif. The moot point which remains unaddressed is whether in the process man would have simply vandalised the mystique surrounding the summiting of Mount Everest by sportsmen, forever?