Quotes of the Day

In may 1996, eight climbers on Mt. Everest were killed during a storm, among them two New Zealanders. As TIME's correspondent in Auckland, I was sent to interview their families and friends — and Sir Edmund Hillary. I thought it would be hard to track him down; that he was probably living in some remote rural area where he could be left in peace. But there he was in the Auckland phone book: "Hillary, Sir Edmund, 278A Remuera Rd." He didn't mind the intrusion, and wasn't too busy to talk to a young reporter.

In that and two later interviews, I asked him, of course, about Everest. He recalled the moment, on May 29, 1953, when he and his guide Tenzing Norgay had stood on the top of the world, looking down on a white ocean in which peaks like Kanchenjunga and Lhotse appeared like frozen waves. He pulled out his camera and snapped Tenzing holding aloft his ice ax, strung with the flags of Britain, India, Nepal and the United Nations. Tenzing dug a hollow in the snow and filled it with Buddhist offerings: a few sweets, a chocolate bar and some cookies. Hillary dug a second hole and buried a crucifix. The two nibbled on some mint cake and, aware that their oxygen supplies were limited, began their descent 15 min. after reaching their goal.

The wind had erased their track, but after more than four exhausting hours they saw fellow team member George Lowe, who'd climbed up to meet them. He asked how the attempt had gone. "Well," said Hillary, "we knocked the bastard off."

Sir Edmund Percival Hillary died Jan. 11 at the age of 88, almost 55 years after the ascent that made him and Tenzing two of the heroes of the 20th century. For one who had reached such heights, he was a strange mix of confidence and modesty, bravado and reticence. He had the killer instinct needed to conquer Everest, and the unassuming nobility to serve the Nepalese people who helped him do it.

His love affair with mountains began at age 16, when, on a school excursion, Hillary sighted Mount Ruapehu, a 2,797-m active volcano. "There was snow everywhere," he recalled over 50 years later. "It was a bright moonlit night, a brilliant, marvelous sight to me." Hillary dropped out of law school to work with his father, a beekeeper. But he skied whenever he could, hiked in the hills, and steadily improved his climbing skills.

In 1951 he joined a New Zealand expedition to the Himalayas. Helped by ever-improving equipment and Nepalese Sherpa guides, mountaineers were advancing further and further up the world's tallest peak. In 1953 a team led by British Colonel John Hunt planned another assault on the mountain the Nepalese call Sagarmatha, "head of the sky." Hillary signed on. The 15-man expedition also included Hillary's friend George Lowe, the renowned Sherpa climber Tenzing Norgay, eight other British climbers, a cameraman, a doctor and James (now Jan) Morris, a reporter from the London Times.

Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans made the first assault on May 26, and got within 100 m of their goal. Three days later Hillary and Tenzing set out in fine weather and, after a five-hour climb, reached the summit, 8,848 m above sea level. "My initial feelings were of relief," Hillary later wrote. "Relief that there were no more steps to cut — no more ridges to traverse and no more humps to tantalize us with hopes of success."

Success, once gained, was never flaunted, simply filed away. Hillary remained always modest, always a little uncomfortable with his knighthood and his hero status. "I never deny the fact that I think I did pretty well on Everest," he said. "But I was not the heroic figure the media and the public made me out to be." Nor was Everest's summit the highest point of his life. "For me the most rewarding moments have not always been the great moments," he wrote in his memoir Nothing Venture, Nothing Win, "for what can surpass a tear on your departure, joy on your return, or a trusting hand in yours?"

Still, he continued to seek out challenges. In 1958, as leader of a support team to Vivian Fuchs' planned crossing of Antarctica, he made a controversial dash by tractor to the South Pole, becoming the first person ever to reach it in a motor vehicle. In 1962 he began working to better the lives of the Sherpas who had so often helped him. His Himalayan Trust built schools and clinics and restored monasteries. The numbers of people — many almost totally reliant on Sherpa guides — who flocked to Everest in his wake left him uneasy. "Everest, unfortunately, is largely becoming a money-making concern," he said in 1992. "If you are reasonably fit and have $35,000, you can be conducted to the top of the world."

Once, Hillary and his friend Michael Dillon, a filmmaker, were on a short trek in Nepal when an American walker stopped and showed Hillary how to hold an ice ax. "Hillary listened and thanked him, but said nothing else," recalled Dillon. "The American went away without any idea whom he had spoken to." The conqueror of Everest didn't see himself as a hero. Others always will.

• Simon Robinson