I snapped four quick photos of Harris and Boukreev striking summit poses, then turned and headed down. My watch read 1:17 P.M. All told, I’d spent less than five minutes on the roof of the world.

Far from the mountains in winter, I discovered the blurred photo of Everest in Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels.

Then I felt sinkingly as if my whole life lay behind me. Once on the mountain I knew (or trusted) that this would give way to total absorption with the task at hand. But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.

“Beck was so hopelessly blind,” Groom reports, “that every ten meters he’d take a step into thin air and I’d have to catch him with the rope. I was worried he was going to pull me off many times.

The highest peaks on each of the seven continents are: Everest, 29,028 feet (Asia); Aconcagua, 22,834 feet (South America); McKinley (also known as Denali), 20,320 feet (North America); Kilimanjaro, 19,340 feet (Africa); Elbrus, 18,510 feet (Europe); Vinson Massif, 16,067 feet (Antarctica); Kosciusko, 7,316 feet (Australia).

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world. —José Ortega y Gasset

The latrines were so abhorrent that most people, Nepalese and Westerners alike, evacuated their bowels outside on the open ground, wherever the urge struck. Huge stinking piles of human feces lay everywhere; it was impossible not to walk in it. The river of snowmelt meandering through the center of the settlement was an open sewer.

“After all that had happened, I couldn’t believe they’d really go back up there,” Paula admits. “When I heard the radio call, I just lost it.” She was so upset that she left Base Camp and walked down to Tengboche for five days to collect herself.

Hornbein’s and Unsoeld’s ascent was—and continues to be—deservedly hailed as one of the great feats in the annals of mountaineering.