Into Thin Air

by Jon Krakauer

As I heaved hard on the rope Tenzing wriggled his way up the crack and finally collapsed exhausted at the top like a giant fish when it has just been hauled from the sea after a terrible struggle.

My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.

But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind.

It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum.

Continuing a Raj-era tradition established by expeditions of yore, every morning Chhongba and his cook boy, Tendi, came to each client’s tent to serve us steaming mugs of Sherpa tea in our sleeping bags.

“Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams,” he penned to a girl named Vanessa. “Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop dreaming.”

“It’s worked thirty-nine times so far, pal,” Hall assured me with a crooked grin when I confessed my doubts. “And a few of the blokes who’ve summitted with me were nearly as pathetic as you.”

Climbers, as a species, are simply not distinguished by an excess of prudence.