Tellingly, Sir Edmund did not simply cash in on this fame and while his days away in early retirement (nor did Norgay, who taught mountaineering and dictated several books about climbing before his death in 1986). Quite the contrary, he continued his explorations: In the '50s and '60s he undertook another half-dozen Himalayan ascents; in 1957 he trekked across Antarctica; in 1960 he embarked on a much-ballyhooed expedition to find the Abominable Snowman; and in 1977 he journeyed by jet boat to the source of the Ganges.

In this sense, Sir Edmund can be seen as the last branch in the great historical tree of terrestrial explorers, a direct descendant of such adventurers as Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, Lewis and Clark, Stanley and Livingston, Perry and Scott and Amundsen, Sir Richard Burton, Charles Lindbergh -- explorers who drove themselves to do what no one had done before, "because," in the famous words of Sir George Mallory, "it is there."

In 1958, Hillary himself edited a book devoted to just such explorers. It was called "Challenge of the Unknown," and it contained excerpts from accounts by such adventurers as Lindbergh; Antarctic explorer Adm. Richard E. Byrd; Thor Heyerdahl, who sailed from Peru to Polynesia on a balsa-wood raft; Sir Ernest Shackleton, who crossed the sub-Antarctic Ocean in a whaleboat; and Col. P.H. Fawcett, who would lose his life looking for the lost mines of Muribeca. In the introduction to that book, Hillary wrote:

"Modern developments in machinery and equipment have produced major changes in the technique of exploration. Aircraft and vehicles are in many cases replacing the human legs; oxygen bottles are giving new strength to air-starved lungs in the thin air that clothes the giants of the Himalayas; and radio communication has removed the loneliness from the most desolate land. But despite all this I firmly believe that in the end it is the man himself that counts. When the going gets tough and things go wrong the same qualities are needed to win through as they were in the past -- qualities of courage, resourcefulness, the ability to put up with discomfort and hardship, and the enthusiasm to hold tight to an ideal and to see it through with doggedness and determination.

"The explorers of the past were great men and we should honour them. But let us not forget that their spirit still lives on. It is still not hard to find a man who will adventure for the sake of a dream or one who will search, for the pleasure of searching, and not for what he may find."

Most impressively, the challenges Hillary undertook during these years weren't only of the geographic kind. He was also using his fame to aid the people who had helped him reach Everest: his beloved Sherpas. In his speech at the Fairmont Hotel, Hillary recounted how an elderly Sherpa from Khumjung village, the hometown of most of the Sherpas on his Everest ascent, had come to him a few years after that expedition and said, "Our children lack education. They are not prepared for the future. What we need more than anything is a school in Khumjung."

So Hillary established the Himalayan Trust, and in 1961 a three-room schoolhouse was built in Khumjung with funds raised by the tireless mountaineer. In its first decade the fund focused on education and health. Then, in 1975, tragedy struck: Hillary's wife and 15-year-old daughter were killed in a plane crash while flying from Kathmandu to a school dedication ceremony.

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