Bold on the last frontiers of the familiar world stands Everest, supreme among the mountains theatrically astride the borders of Tibet and Nepal, so that on the map the hazy line of demarcation crosses its very summit, 29,002 feet above sea level.

This peak is the highest on earth, and for 50 years the ultimate aim of mountaineers has been to climb it. In the first decades of this century most of the great prizes of adventure were captured, one by one the unknown frozen places were penetrated so thoroughly that the very Poles began to sound suburban and undefeated Everest became the last of the simple, classic challenges offered by Nature to the human spirit. After Everest, people felt, there was only the. night of space travel, only such high adventures as could be encompassed within the baffling complexities of electronics and rocket propulsions. Men and women the world over recognized in Everest the most determined of adversaries, but trusted none the less in man's unconquerable spirit.

Before 1953 10 expeditions had entered the spiteless and exhilarating battle with Everest, and at least I6 men had died tragically trying to solve the mountain's strange problems.

For Everest's defences are deep and formidable and some of its obstacles are unworthily tinged (it may be thought) with a kind of waspish ruthlessness. There is first, and throughout, the sheer slogging size of it all. Everest is a formation so enormous that the most triumphantly heroic productions of human genius can seem stunted beside it. Paradise Lost itself, read in the shadow of this giant, is a book of wizened lines, and the great statics of our world, even to Life and death, seem to shrink there to the conceptions of dwarfs. The tented staging camps that must be set up on the mountain's flanks are lost in the immensities of the place. A red route flag planted in the upper snows of Everest, infinitely lonely, indescribably small, can be a moving and a frightening sight.

But bulk is not all. Because of the altitude the very atmosphere becomes man's pitiless enemy : on the last thousand feet of Everest artificial oxygen aids are essential to life. The climate is unhelpful : there are only two periods in the year, the lulls of about three weeks each which generally precede and follow the summer monsoon, when the weather allows an assault on the summit. And the mountain is awkwardly placed politically, between two countries of secretive tradition. Since the war Tibet, through which the first seven expeditions passed, has been firmly closed to westerners the way to Everest now lies through Nepal, by the southern approaches to the mountain.

In the old days of Everest mountaineering the Nepalese side of the peak was all but unknown to westerners but in 1921 George Leigh Mallory, who was Iater to die on Everest, looked from Tibet over the invincible frontier pass of the Lho La, and saw a mighty valley cut in the side of the mountain, at 21,000 feet and more. He called it the Western Cwm. Thirty years later, Eric Shipton’s 1951 expedition, reconnoitring the south-western approaches to Everest, found a way into this combe from the south, and in the following year two gallant Swiss expeditions proved that it offered a practicable route to the summit.

So it came about that in 1952 the Himalayan Committee, organised jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club, deliberated in London on a new British expedition to tackle Everest in the following Spring. It must necessarily travel by the new southern route, and the consent of the Nepalese Government had been won. It was to have the finest equipment that science and experience could provide. It would include the best of the new generation of British climbers. The worthy committee men chose as leader for the expedition Colonel John Hunt, aged 42, a serving officer of the 60th Rifles who, summoned to England from his post in Germany, swiftly began his preparations.

By October, 1952, Hunt had picked his men from that sometimes baffling freemasonry, the fraternity of mountain-climbers. The climbing team was to be of 11 men, besides Hunt himself. Eight came from Britain: George Band, 22, a Cambridge geologist Tom Bourdillon, 29, physicist and specialist in oxygen equipment Charles Evans, 34, brain surgeon Alfred Gregory, 40, travel agent Wilfred Noyce, 35, a master at Charterhouse Dr Michael Ward, 28, physician Michael Westmacott, 28, agricultural statistician and Major Charles Wylie, 33, a serving officer of the Ghurkha Brigade.

Two noted ice-climbers were invited from New Zealand: Edmund Hillary, 34, bee-keeper and George Lowe, 28, schoolmaster. The most famous of the Sherpas – the hardy race of men who have for generations provided porterage in the Himalaya¬ - was to be both sirdar and climber he was Tensing Norkey, 39, a professional mountaineer living in Darjeeling.

For the first time a physiologist, Dr. Griffith Pugh, 43, was to accompany an Everest expedition, and a distinguished photographer of adventure, Thomas Stobart, 35, was to film the enterprise, FinalIy, to this magnificent team was appended your Correspondent, 26, journalist.

Everest, over the years, has sponsored its own cliches, "Each expedition,"' say the pundits sententiously, " climbs on the shoulders of its predecessors." And certainly in choosing and ordering equipment, in planning the tactics of assault, Hunt and his colleagues gratefully benefited from earlier attempts. Burning energy, and a readiness to use new ideas and materials, added bite to the sage precepts of experience. A dozen new designs were commissioned-new boots, new tents, new sleeping-bags, new windproof clothing, new cookers above all, new oxygen equipment.

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