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Video: Sir Edmund Hillary's obituaryKEY POINTS:
Queen Elizabeth II, whose coronation coincided with Sir Edmund Hillary's ascent of Mount Everest 55 years ago, has expressed her sadness at his death.
A royal official told AFP the monarch would be sending a private message of condolence to the climber's widow and family.
Britain's Prime Minister
Gordon Brown also paid tribute to Sir Ed, describing him as a "truly great hero who captured the imagination of the world" and a "towering figure who will always be remembered as a pioneer explorer and leader".
In Australia, acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Sir Edmund's name was "synonymous with adventure, with achievement, with dreaming and then making those dreams come true".
Tributes also flowed in Nepal, where Sir Ed carried out so much humanitarian work and was much revered.
Nepalese news website kantipuronline.com features a picture of Tenzing Norgay's son, Jamling Sherpa, mourning in front of a picture of his father and Sir Ed at a memorial service in Thamel, Kathmandu.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said Sir Ed dedicated his life to the preservation of Himalayan heritage and inspired several generations of mountaineers worldwide.
The Hindustan Times reported Singh as saying all people could seek inspiration from Sir Ed's sense of adventure, enterprise and love of nature.
"He lived an exemplary life of seeking to attain the seemingly unattainable and drawing our attention to the grandeur of Mother Earth," Singh said.
Other newspapers around the world led with obituaries and called for people's thoughts on the great man's passing.
The New York Times said in terms of heroic exploits, the scaling of Mount Everest by Sir Ed and Tenzing Norgay ranked alongside Roald Amundsen's first trek to the South Pole in 1911 and Charles A. Lindbergh's first non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927.
The article describes Mt Everest as it was 55 years ago: "By 1953, nearly a century after British surveyors had established that the Himalayan peak on the Nepal-Tibet border was the highest point on earth, many climbers considered the mountain all but unconquerable.
"The summit was 5 and a half vertical miles above sea level (up where today's jets fly): an otherworldly place of yawning crevasses and 100-mile-an-hour winds, of perpetual cold and air so thin that the human brain and lungs do not function properly in it."
London's TimesOnline also backgrounds the harsh conditions Sir Ed and his companions faced in 1953: "Ten previous expeditions have learnt their lessons of Everest; at least 16 men have died in the learning," wrote Times correspondent James Morris, who was the only reporter to accompany the British-led expedition.
"Today, high above the rugged Nuptse ridge, Everest looks as surly, as muscular, as unattainable as ever; but after 30 years of endeavour the greatest of mountains is defeated, and many are the ghosts and men far off who share in the triumph."
The Times also refers to the messages being left by readers at nzherald.co.nz and speculates whether the tributes suggested by some - "a day of mourning or even a national holiday" - might in fact come to fruition.
The Sydney Morning Herald's lead article quotes Australian mountaineer Tim Macartney-Snape as saying Sir Ed was "a great humanitarian".
Macartney-Snape, who has climbed Mount Everest twice, said the Solu Khumbu district in Nepal would be in mourning for a long time.
"Many of the people who are there now, the younger people, went to Hillary's schools or their lives would have been saved by those clinics," he said.
The article also claims that Sir Ed in fact attended his own wake in July 2003, when a group of climbers decided to hold their own remembrance ceremony for him ahead of time.
"Ed was quite matter-of-fact about it, the former New Zealand Alpine Club president Dave Bamford told the paper. "He was very pragmatic."
Bamford said they knew the mountaineer's death would become a global event so they decided to honour him while he was still around to hear what they wanted to say about him.
The Los Angeles Times details Sir Ed's struggle to become accustomed to his new-found fame following his historic ascent.
"I was a bit naive, really," he told the Detroit Free Press in 2000. "I was just a country boy. I thought the mountaineering world would be interested, but I never dreamed that it would have that effect on people who didn't climb."
Ed Viesturs, who has climbed Everest six times and was the first American to climb all of the world's mountains over 8,000 meters without supplemental oxygen, said Hillary was "definitely a hero of mine".
"He's iconic," Viesturs told The Times. "I mean, he went to a place where no other man had gone before."
In Germany, the Frankfurter Allgemeine establishes the challenge Sir Ed and Tenzing Norgay faced that day in 1953: "Edmund Hillary couldn't look up his goal on Google Earth before he left. On May 29, 1953, he couldn't use a satellite phone to predict whether a storm would hit Mount Everest. The world only learnt of his success three days after the event - just in time for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey."
The article, titled At the peak of impossibility, goes on to say that there isn't even a photo of Sir Ed atop the world's highest mountain, as his only companion - Tenzing Norgay - did not know how to operate a camera.
It also makes mention of his now legendary post-climb uttering: "We knocked the bastard off".
"Somewhat gruffer than Neil Armstrong's pre-designated catch phrase 'One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind'," the article concludes, "but it was precisely because of this that he appealed to people."
