To struggle and to understand. Never the last without the first. That is the law.

Gradually, very gradually, we saw the great mountain sides and glaciers and aretes, now one fragment and now another through the floating rifts, until far higher in the sky than imagination had dared to suggest the white summit of Everest appeared.

Why climb Mount Everest? Because it's there.

To struggle and to understand. Never the last without the first. That is the law.

One comes to bless the absolute bareness, feeling that here is a pure beauty of form, a kind of ultimate harmony.

Half the charm of climbing mountains is born in visions preceding this experience - visions of what is mysterious, remote, inaccessible.

What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money.