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The blessed one

TO THE SHERPAS, a group of Tibetan Buddhists residing in the Himalayas, no one can conquer Chomolungma, or Mount Everest.

For goddess Miyolangsangma grants brief access to her home only to those who climb with pure minds, love and respect, 'like a child climbing onto his mother's lap', wrote Jamling Tenzing Norgay in Touching My Father's Soul.

The goddess is much feared, especially among the Sherpas. Until May 2001, it was estimated that for every 10 who made it to the top, one died. Nearly half of those who perished were Sherpas hired by expeditions to carry supplies and clear the way for them.

But Norgay, also a Sherpa, was a blessed one.

In the spring of 1996, 13 days after the worst mountain-climbing disaster had claimed nine lives, Norgay - part of an 11-member team - made it to the top with a 20 kilogram IMAX large-format camera and its heavy rolls of film.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of his father's historic climb, Norgay recently delivered a lecture, entitled 'Mt Everest: 50 Years', in Hong Kong, organised by the Royal Geographical Society.

The following is his account of the climb, combined from the lecture and an interview:

'In the summer of 1995, I received a call at two in the morning from David Breashears. He invited me to join a filming expedition to the top of the world.

'I have always wanted to join the expeditions but they were too expensive. I immediately agreed.

'My wife was worried. We consulted our family rimpoche, a high-ranking Buddhist priest. The divination predicted deaths on the mountain. But I was determined to go. We sought a second opinion from my wife's family rimpoche. He said conditions were not good, but obstacles could be removed by performing religious ceremonies.

'One of the rituals was the lighting of 25,000 butter lamps at the great Stupa of Boudhanath. The optimum would be 100,000, but we had done our best.

'We flew from Kathmandu to Lukla, which at 9,600 feet [2,925 metres], is the gateway to the Himalayas. From there, it took us 10 days to get to the Base Camp [17,600 ft].

'In 1953, my father and Sir Edmund Hillary had to walk from Kathmandu to the Base Camp, with the journey taking about 30 days. The Base Camp, also known as the Lhotse Sheraton Hotel, would be our home for the next two months. It is located on the Khumbu Glacier.

'Part of the glacier is called Khumbu Icefall. It is as tall as some buildings in Hong Kong and moves a few feet a day. Its crevasses are so deep that sometimes you can't see their bottom. As they move, the crevasses widen or shrink. Almost 40 people have lost their lives there so far.

'Before our climb we performed a Buddhist ceremony to ask for safe passage. We asked for our equipment to be blessed and we prayed to Miyolangsangma so that she would keep us away from natural disasters such as avalanches, which occur almost every day.

'Equipment has changed a lot in 50 years. We used almost 70 ladders during the first section of the climb. In 1953, they used logs. Vegetation don't grow above 12,000 ft, so they carried trees up to the Base Camp and hauled them all the way through the icefall. With the limited amount of logs available, they had to re-use them as they got higher.

'Oxygen bottles weighed about 25 pounds then, now it's only six. As I climbed, my respect for people who had tried to scale the Everest much earlier began to grow.

'We went straight from Camp 1 at 19,500 ft to Camp 3 at 24,000 ft, where all the mountains disappeared below us under the clouds. From there we could move across to the gap called South Col, also known as Death Zone. But we decided to return to Camp 2 at 21,300 ft because we felt it was not safe. There were more than 35 people going up that day, many of them inexperienced. On May 9, the first incident occurred.'

To be continued tomorrow

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