The Everest Story by Tim Vicary. Part 1.
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Everest – Level 3 – 10,245 words
Chapter One | The body – 1999
A group of five climbers move slowly across the north face of Everest. Suddenly, one of them sees something strange on the rocks below him. Something whiter than the snow. Carefully, he climbs down towards it. Then he calls his friends on his radio.
‘Come down here,’ he says. ‘Look at this.’
Coming closer, they see it is the dead body of a climber. The wind has blown some of the clothes from the body, and the skin is clean and white, like new stone. In the icy cold, it looks like the body of a man who died a few days ago. But the bits of clothes that are still on the body are old, brown and grey – nothing like the brightly coloured clothes that modern climbers wear. The body is lying face down. Above the head, the fingers of one hand are dug into the icy ground. One leg is broken in two places below the knee, and the other leg is lying over it. The body looks strong and healthy, they think, like the body of a runner or dancer.
The climbers photograph the body carefully. Then, very gently, they touch the dead man’s clothes – the hobnail boots, the trousers and shirt made of wool. How little he was wearing, they think, on this icy cold mountain. ‘I walk out on the street in Seattle with more clothing than he had on,’ one of them says. Yet here they are at 8,155 metres on Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world.
Who is this man? He can only be one of two people, they think. But which one? Then they find a name inside his shirt. ‘George Leigh Mallory’, it says.
But who is George Leigh Mallory? Why are these climbers so interested in him? How did he die, and what happened to him before he died? Where is his friend, Andrew Irvine?
And the most important question of all – was this man, George Mallory, the first man to reach the summit of Everest?
Chapter Two | Dangers
The climbers do not stay long with the body, because Mount Everest is one of the most dangerous places in the world. There are many things that make it difficult to stay alive here. The most important of these is the height.
The top of Everest is 8,850 metres above sea level. As you climb up the mountain, the air becomes thinner – it has less and less oxygen. Most people live less than 900 metres above sea level, where the air is full of oxygen. Above 2,000 metres the air is thinner, and people find it harder to breathe. At 4,000 metres it is harder still, and at 5,000 metres most people begin to feel ill. They get headaches, feel tired, and breathe quickly all the time, like someone who has run a long way.
In 1921, when Mallory first went to Everest, no one had climbed a mountain higher than 7,500 metres, and many people did not think it was possible. ‘If climbers don’t have enough oxygen, they’ll be too tired to climb,’ they said. And they won’t be able to think clearly, either. So they will make stupid mistakes – forget to eat and drink, or talk to people who are not there. Perhaps they’ll die.’
But the need for oxygen is not the only problem on Everest. There is also the weather. Almost every week there are winds of 100 or even 200 kph (kilometres per hour). It is difficult to walk or even stand up in these winds. The wind can blow climbers off the edge of the mountain, thousands of metres to the valley below. Climbers sometimes sit in their tents for days, unable to sleep because of the noise, and afraid that the wind will blow their tents away.
And then there is the cold. Temperatures on Everest often fall below -20 degrees, but the wind makes that feel much colder.
But before anyone can climb Everest they have to get there. Tibet in China is to the north of Everest, and Nepal is to the south, and until 1950, Nepal refused to let any foreign climbers enter their country. So the earliest climbers, like Mallory and Irvine, had to get to Everest from the north, through Tibet. And that was not easy at all.
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