Journey to the top of the world

By TIM WATKIN in Kathmandu

At ground level, the sun is muffled in smog. Life in Kathmandu's streets is stubborn and rough, a wearying trek.

As we take off, lollies in our mouths and with cotton wool in our ears to ward off the pressure and noise of this twin propeller plane, the city and surrounding hills are just a muddy outline; bumps and creases in the earth.

We climb steadily upwards to the mountains. Or rather, we are carried. This spectator sport that we are enjoying - a one-hour scenic flight with Buddha Air to Mt Everest - bears no resemblance to what Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay did 50 years ago today.

That was climbing like the world had never known. A climb to the roof of the world. A climb into the unknown. A climb that gave New Zealand its greatest hero.

And it was dangerous. Just because Hillary has a gift for understatement and more than 1500 people have scaled Everest since, let's not forget just how dangerous. No one knew what they would find at 8848m, or if they could even survive.

Looking down through a veil of beige there are layered paddy fields, scattered houses and soft fingers of hills.

For a moment I lift my eyes from the hills and suddenly, there at eye level, are mountains. The Himalayas. Hard and abrupt. Fiercely jagged yet coolly quiet. Then behind those first mountains, bigger, higher mountains rise, blotting out half the now pale and perfect blue sky. The pollution below is forgotten.

The Himalayas reach out and on, immense. They sit on a mystery of cloud, detached from the body of the earth. The tops of the hills reach into the base of the clouds, but the mountains rise up out of them. They are rock and snow, colourless grey and white, floating on a cloudy sea.

Nothing can be seen below those clouds. Here, there is only top, no bottom, no earth. And no time, it seems. The 50 years since their highest peak was climbed is barely enough time to take a breath in their aeons-old story.

On and up they go, too high, too much for humans, surely. An impossibility of mountains.

We fly alongside the peaks from Langtang Lirung (7234m), past Numbur (6957m) and Cho-Oyo (8201m). From a distance they look like Plasticine, the snow smoother than a silk sheet. They're only rock after all; the pebbles in our garden piled one on top of another.

That truth endures for barely a second.

You begin to make out the bared teeth of the summits, the walls of ice storeys high, the narrowness of the ridges above deep valleys. This is a mighty, lifeless landscape, no place for humans.

Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb Everest without oxygen, suggested as much yesterday.

"I don't think humans were made for such high places," he said.

The highest permanent human habitation, in Peru, is at 5099m. These mountains are beyond us.

The Sherpas never tried to climb the highest peaks before the Europeans came. Where Mallory, Shipton, Hunt and Hillary came and saw routes and a chance to wrestle with the elements, the Sherpas saw the gods and sacred places off-limit to humans. Everest to them is Chomolungma, Goddess Mother of the Land.

In the plane, we are all looking for that goddess. The other mountains - thousands of them - are beautiful, but a few hundred metres makes all the difference.

Everest steals the show from the chorus line of other peaks. She is the star, her beauty unfading.

She sits in a group of three - flat-topped Nuptse (7855m) to her left and Lhotse (8516m), the mountain that almost conquered the 1953 expedition, to her right. Everest rises sharply above them. Near the top some rock juts out - the South Summit. Above that the slopes to its summit are so steep - another impossibility.

There is a serenity about the scene. It is a lie. The jetstream explodes across the peak at 150km/h or more. At that height, the atmospheric pressure is low. There is only 30 per cent of the oxygen found at sea level and temperatures are minus 20C or lower.

No place for humans. Yet there are people down there. They make weary step after weary step confident they can make it to the top; confident because a New Zealander and a Sherpa proved the impossible was in fact possible.

From up here, all the world below and nothing but sky above, there is nowhere to go but down. Back to life and time and possibility.