"S
now conditions bad stop advanced base
abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement" wrote
Jan Morris, then James Morris, in 1953 in a coded
message to The Times of London, relaying the information
that Sir Edmund Hillary and Norgay Tenzing had
successfully scaled Mount Everest. In a 2008 article in
The Guardian, Morris recalls the modesty and eccentricity
of Hillary, whom she came to know while covering the
expedition for The Times: "He was a winner, in a gentle
sort of way".
Morris paints, in a few deft pages, a portrait of a man
whose tenacity in pursuit of a dream was tempered by
"quiet thoughtfulness", a man who "treated adventure as
something that wasn't just fun. There was some sort of
philosophical urge too."
HYLAND
