Some people regard mountains as a challenge to be overcome; by climbing them they experience a sense of personal triumph, and obviously the higher or more difficult the mountain the greater the sense of triumph. Others find in mountains a peace and serenity that they find nowhere else; the challenge to them is a secondary motive, but by exploring and climbing mountains and by mastering the art of moving freely on and among them, they can in a sense get closer to the country they love, they can understand it better, and so they can experience more fully the joy it offers. The same thing applies to the sailor and the sea.
For the general public, of course, the climbing of Everest had a special appeal. Everest is the highest mountain in the world and people regarded the attempts to climb it with just the same feelings of excitement as our fathers and grandfathers, who may have had no special interest in polar exploration, had watched the attempts to reach the North and the South Poles.
Mount Everest is not an isolated mountain standing on its own. It is one among thousands of other peaks of the Great Himalaya Range which stretches for nearly two thousand miles across the southern part of central Asia. To give you some idea of the tremendous extent of the Himalayas you should realize that the distance between Everest and the second highest mountain, K2 (28,250 feet), is about the same as the distance between Boston and Chicago, while the total length of the range is more than double that distance.
By far the most difficult parts of the world to explore are the great mountain ranges, for the simple reason that travel among them is so extremely slow and laborious. It often takes weeks to cover a very short distance. For example, when I went from Kashmir in Northern India to Kashgar in Chinese Turkistan, a distance of only 370 miles as the crow flies, the journey took me nearly two months; and yet I was marching over a well-known trade route. In the unexplored parts of the Himalayas I have often taken a week to cover seven miles.
