Word: everest
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...stalking Tansy look-alikes. The murderer can be spotted within a few paragraphs of the title page, but provides a diversion from a suddenly at-one-with-Asia Tansy looking down upon the "tourists" in Bangkok or musing with unconscious irony upon "deluded Westerners" at the base of Mount Everest. Barr even includes Tansy's rambling e-mails home; most people don't want to read those from their friends...
...Sherpa, more than any other, changed this attitude. "In Tenzing Norgay," writes his grandson, "there developed something more, something almost alien to his race, this was a passion for and an ambition to climb mountains, specifically Everest." As a boy, while he herded yaks on the high mountain pastures with Chomolungma?as Everest is known by the Sherpas?looming above, he had grown to consider it his mountain...
...Sherpa companions refused to go on, so he shouldered a double load, climbed to the South Col, descended to the previous night's camp, shouldered another double load and only then was he able to induce the Sherpas to carry on. On that trip, he came close to reaching Everest's summit, but terrible weather and primitive oxygen equipment thwarted the group's ascent at 8,610 m, giving Hillary's team its shot the next year...
...faithful load carriers, the backbone to any climb, but not as true summit contenders. For their part, says Tenzing, Sherpas were bewildered by Westerners' "fascination with these high, cold, dangerous places where the gods lived and men should not venture." Buddhist lamas, consulted before Englishman George Mallory's 1924 Everest expedition, told the Sherpas not to set foot on the summit, because calamity would befall their communities. The Sherpas obeyed; Mallory and Sandy Irvine fatefully disappeared during their climb...
...this testament to Sherpas past and present, Tashi Tenzing is confident that his people will face these challenges with the same determination as their forefathers who faced Everest. "I believe little has changed in the Sherpa heart," he writes, "for whether I meet my family and friends at Everest base camp or Kathmandu, in San Francisco or London, the bond of Sherpa kinship and tradition runs deep and strong...