Top of the World
by Tenzing Norgay
any times I think of that morning at Camp Nine. We have spent
the night there, Hillary and I, in our little tent at almost 28,000
feet, which is the highest that men have ever slept. It has been a
cold night. Hillarys boots are frozen, and we are almost frozen too. But now
in the gray light, when we creep from the tent, there is almost no wind. The
sky is clear and still. And that is good.
We look up. For weeks, for months, that is all we have done. Look up.
And there it isthe top of Everest. Only it is different now: so near, so close,
only a little more than 1,000 feet above us. It is no longer just a dream, a
high dream in the sky, but a real and solid thing, a thing of rock and snow,
that men can climb. We make ready. We will climb it. This time, we will
climb on to the end.
Then I look down. All the rest of the world is under us. Below the
glacier, 16,000 feet down, you can just see in the gray light the old
monastery of Thyangboche. To Hillary perhaps it does not mean much. To
a man from the West it is only a far, strange place in a far, strange country.
But for me it is home.
Beyond Thyangboche are the valleys and villages where I was born and
grew up. On the tall hillsides above them I climbed as a boy, tending my
fathers yaks.
And so we climb, through the morning. About 100 feet below the top
we come to the highest bare rocks. There is enough almost level space here
for two tents, and I wonder if men will ever camp in this place, so near the
summit of the earth. I pick up two small stones and put them in my pocket
to bring back to the world below. Then the rocks, too, are beneath us. We
are among snowy humps. Each time we pass one I wonder, Is the next the
last one? Is the next the last? Finally we reach a place where we can see
past the humps, and beyond them is the great open sky and brown plains.
We are looking down the far side of the mountain upon Tibet.
Then finally, it is the last rise. We stepped up. We were there. The dream
had come true!
I waved my arms in the air and then threw them around Hillary, and
we thumped each other on the back until, even with the oxygen, we were
Top of the World
page
May be photocopied for classroom use. 2015 by Lucy Calkins and Colleagues from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project from Units of Study for Teaching Reading (Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH).
almost breathless. Then we looked around. It was 11:30 in the morning, the
sun was shining, and the sky was the deepest blue I have ever seen. Around
us on every side were the great Himalayas, stretching away through Nepal
and Tibet. And the whole sweep of the greatest range on Earth seemed only
like little bumps under the spreading sky. It was such a sight as I have never
seen before and would never see again: wild, wonderful and terrible.
At that great moment for which I had waited all my life, the mountain
did not seem to me a lifeless thing of rock and ice, but warm and friendly
and living. She was a mother hen, and the other mountains were chicks
under her wings. Chomolungma, The Mountain So High No Bird Can
Fly Over It. That is what all Sherpa mothers used to tell their children
what my own mother told meand it is the name I still like best for this
mountain that I love.
From my pocket I took the package of sweets I had been carrying. I took
the little red-and-blue pencil that my daughter Nima had given me. And
scraping a hollow in the snow, I laid them there.
I am a lucky man. I have had a dream, and it has come true, and
that is not a thing that happens often to men. To climb Everestor
Chomolungmais what I have wanted most of all in my life. Seven times
I have tried. Now at last I have been granted success, and I give thanks.
Thuji cheythat is how we say it in Sherpa. I am grateful.
Tenzing Norgay, The Top of the World, Ask, April 2014. Carus
Publishing Company. Reproduced with permission.
Top of the World
page
May be photocopied for classroom use. 2015 by Lucy Calkins and Colleagues from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project from Units of Study for Teaching Reading (Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH).
