Word: ascent
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...classic feat: two men against the unforgiving granite face of a mountain. From a beginning without fanfare, through a frustrating, storm-slowed ascent to a triumphant end, the assault on the Wall of the Early Morning Light -the sheerest approach to the summit of Yosemite's El Capitan Peak-was an atavism. For those who watched, it was like all high adventure, an escape from the ambiguities of ordinary life where seldom are there clean, finite beginnings, middles and ends to anything, and unalloyed success is rarer still...
...master the most difficult path up the 3,000-ft. cliff in their first climb together. Harding, 46, and Caldwell, 27, hauled 300 pounds of equipment. They averaged only 150 ft. each day, screwing expansion bolts into the wall as they inched their way upward. The ascent-originally scheduled to take twelve days-stretched into the longest continuous effort in the history of rock climbing in Yosemite...
...slept roped to the side of the mountain, inside a Harding-designed hammock-tent that was suspended from several pitons. They usually climbed from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m., and during the entire ordeal found only three ledges wide enough to stand on. There were two falls during the ascent: Harding cut his hands and legs after a piton gave way; Caldwell took a similar spill, "slithering down like a ride in an amusement park." Both men were in good condition...
...body was removed from the coffin and lowered into its crypt. The face was carefully turned toward Mecca, 800 miles away across the Red Sea. Nasser's soul, as far as devout Moslems were concerned, was already with God. He had succumbed on the anniversary of Mohammed's ascent into heaven, an auspicious occasion on which...
...secret fear of death in their hearts. From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life, for in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. We grant goal and purpose to the ascent of life, why not to the descent?" Erik Erikson agrees: "Any span of the cycle lived without vigorous meaning, at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end, endangers the sense of life and the meaning of death in all whose life stages are intertwined...