Victory on Everest

(By James Ramsey Ullman from Adventures in Appreciation, Walter Loban, Dorothy Holmstrom and Luella B. Cook, Eds. 1953)

The Gist of the Essay

This essay is a thrilling account of how Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa finally reached the peak of the Mount Everest on May 29, 1953 at 11:30 a.m. Hillary from New Zealand and Sherpa from Nepal were the members of the British expedition team which included altogether thirteen men. So, the victory on Everest was not just the victory of Hillary and Sherpa, but was of the whole expedition team. Without the cooperation of and coordination with the other team members, the two alone would not have achieved the feat. And it was not the victory of the expedition team or the British alone, it was the humankind’s victory over daunting nature. And it’s not a wise question to ask who got on the top first: Hillary or Sherpa. The truth is they were together on top – together in victory. Moreover, as Ullman says at last, it was “a shining chapter in the sorry history of our century.” The victory belongs to this century – to all men of every place of this century.