Beyond the Edge Page #3

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was a big unknown,

It was like sending

somebody into space,

They knew from altitude

experiments in chambers

that altitude can make you seize

and one of the ideas was that people

would haemorrhage in their brains

because their blood vessels

would be so dilated,

There were lots of reasons to think

that there might be a stroke,

Nobody knew whether or not

it could really be done,

When Ed was heading

up the mountain in 1953,

13 people had already

died on the mountain

and I think that for anyone

who would be climbing at that time

it would be something

of a daunting statistic -

13 deaths and zero summits

at that point,

Now, about

six miles up from Tengboche

looking north is the Khumbu Glacier

where we were to place

our main base camp

for the attack on the mountain,

This icefall was to be

our next great obstacle

and I sent a party to explore it,

Ed Hillary led this first party,

The Western Cwm

is guarded by a great icefall...

..a tumbled mass of ice dropping

2,500 feet to the Khumbu Glacier,

We first had to discover whether it

was possible to ascend this icefall,

The icefall was a constant hazard

and we had no alternative

but to make a route through country

which we knew to be unjustifiable

in the ordinary alpine climb,

It's like a waterfall

that's come off and has frozen,

The weight of the glacier

above them is shoving,

It's all a jumble of ice,

It is unstable objective danger

that you have no control over,

Crazy! My God, You 're dumb

to be going up a route like that,

But you just can't go any other way

but through the icefall,

In '52, the Swiss

went up the icefall

and said, "It's a thing

that's always on the move,"

And it's a dangerous place

for that reason,

More people are killed in the icefall

than anywhere else on Everest,

It's immense,

It's 2,500 feet high,

And we had to go

up the middle of it,

Ed Hillary, George Lowe,

Mike Westmacott and myself

were the four of us chosen

to make the first route through

in a week or five days if we could...

..and then of course to make it safe

by a lot of step-cutting,

a lot of fixed ropes

so that eventually

it would be possible

for loaded porters to carry

the stores safely through it,

The icefall was a dangerous place

because things did collapse

without warning

and if you were in the way,

it was a thoroughly bad thing,

You had

these great towers of ice

and great lumps and strips

the size of a row of cottages

that could slump down at any moment,

We gave names

to the more dangerous parts,

There was Mike's Horror,

Hillary's Horror,

an area called the Nutcracker,

the Atom Bomb area,

There are certain...

..what climbers call objective dangers

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