ON May 29, 1953 when Edmund Hillary (a reclusive Auckland bee-keeper) and his intrepid Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay emerged above the clouds to finally ruffle Mount Everest's 29,029-foot killer peak, it was the culmination of decades of romantic endeavour at the lung-bursting limits of human endurance. No mortal had set foot this high before. Sagarmatha - or Chomolungma, as the mountain is reverentially known in the Nepalese and Tibetan vernacular - was exclusively the abode of the gods.

Later, in typically understated fashion - entirely without artifice or in the glare of media flashbulbs - Hillary said in an aside to a climbing companion: "Well, George, we knocked the bastard off."

It was another George - George Leigh Mallory, the storied British climber - who famously said of the lure of Everest: "Because it is there", before vanishing with fellow climber Andrew Irvine after being spotted pressing on 300 metres below the summit. His frozen mummified body was found in 1999. Irvine remains unaccounted for.