The sky looks different from the top of Mount Everest. For one thing, there is more of it. You are looking down on the world, rather than up at it, as most of us city dwellers do, and the heavens tend to dominate.
For another thing, it’s darker at its apex, a deep, rich blue rarely seen in the middle of the day. This dark hue points to the origins of the sky as space, that vast and rather frightening expanse in which our tiny planet sits, spinning round its lonely orbit.
At the top of the world’s tallest mountain one is that bit closer to space, that bit closer to leaving earth altogether.
Most of us, of course, will never see the sky from the top of Mount Everest.
We have other, generally safer, things to occupy our time. But for the curious, it may be worth taking a trip down to the El Sawy Culture Wheel in Zamalek, where Egyptian mountaineer Omar Samra is showing photographs of his 2007 expedition to the top of the world.
Samra made the news last year as the first Egyptian to achieve this feat, and since his return, the 29-year-old London Business School graduate has been showered with offers from various media and arts outlets to tell his extraordinary story and exhibit his photographs of the historical trip.
His current exhibition of photos tells the story of his nine-and-a-half week adventure in Nepal, starting in the capital, Kathmandu, journeying through the lush Himalayan foothills to Base Camp at the foot of Everest, and the exhausting and often dangerous climb to the top.
The story opens with the iconic image of the Buddha statue, sitting cross-legged and smiling in a temple courtyard in Kathmandu. Following this are images of the Khumbu valley, through which Samra and his team trekked for two weeks of acclimatization and mental preparation.
The scenes are much the same as any holiday trekker might encounter: wooded valleys and icy rapids, brightly painted village dwellings and local wildlife. Two Himalayan gazelles are seen perched on a rock apparently considering their next move; a shaggy yak stands outside a village cafe offering “fresh ground coffee to weary travelers; a rust-coloured bird rests for a moment amid tattered Tibetan prayer flags draped across the rocks.
Religion is a recurring theme in Samra’s images. Nepal is a deeply religious nation, a mix of Hindus and Buddhists, and it is Tibetan Buddhism that prevails in the Everest region. One picture shows strings of bright prayer flags in primary colors hanging from a bridge, the caption explaining how the wind is said to blow the prayers’ blessing into the air, creating an aura of holiness. Another image shows neatly piled rocks displaying Buddhist mantras, hand-carved in Tibetan script.
Here Samra displays his credentials as an innocent abroad, wrongly identifying the carvings as “Hindi scriptures. But then, he is a mountaineer, not an anthropologist. If anything, such occasional holes in the fabric lend an air of authenticity to this tale of amateur heroics.
One stop on Samra’s journey was at Pangboche monastery, where his venture received the blessings of Lama Geishi, a bespectacled monk, sat amid a clutter of blankets, books, cups and religious paraphernalia. The peak has claimed almost two hundred lives since mountaineers began assaulting its flanks in the 1920s. Consequently, each expedition that ventures near makes sure to receive the blessings of local lamas and make offerings to the god of the mountain in order to improve the odds of success.
As the journey progresses, the weather deteriorates. The yaks bearing the climbers’ equipment are seen draped in blankets amid a heavy snowfall, while the Sherpa guides take time out to make snowmen. From time to time, the mountain itself looms in the distance, appearing quite different in each shot, alternately snowy, rocky, dark, engulfed in cloud or basking in bright sunshine. In each shot it might be an entirely different peak.
Once on the mountain itself, it is ice that fills the frame. Setting out from Base Camp, the team was faced with their first hurdle, a massive field of crumbling ice that must be crossed with the aid of crampons, ice-picks and ropes. From a distance, these blocks of ice seem relatively small, mere sugar cubes, but as the camera follows the climbers on their route, each lump looms massive, and the energy required to traverse them in the oxygen-thin air becomes apparent.
Samra was clearly enchanted by the scenery around him. One caption reads: “The blues and whites of the ice, snow, cloud and sky, along with the sun’s reflection, give the feeling that one is on a different planet.
Enchantment turned to horror as the team stumble on the frozen body of a Sherpa who had died on a previous climb. “We decided to keep climbing that day, despite the incident with the dead Sherpa. It was one of the toughest decisions of my life, one which I wish I did not have to make, says Samra.
The team took seven-and-a-half weeks in all to make the climb from Base Camp to summit, alternating daily between climbing up and returning part-way down in order to acclimatize to the altitude. In order to reach the summit and return alive, the team must pass through the Death Zone, the area above 8,000 meters in which the human body can survive for only the shortest of times.
A final dash is made for the summit. Leaving on the previous evening, the team trudges through the night, aiming to arrive at the top before midday. It is generally acknowledged that those who start the return journey down the mountain after 1 pm rarely live to tell the tale.
The team lumbers through the freezing morning air, snaking along a snowy ridge near the pinnacle, and over the Hillary Step, a 12-meter obstacle of rock and ice named after the New Zealander who was first to conquer Everest back in 1953.
Soon they are at the top. Samra unfurls the Egyptian flag he has carried with him, and poses for the shot of a lifetime. It is hard to tell how he is feeling.
His face is shielded by an oxygen mask, head encased in the down-filled hood of his red climber’s suit. Another shot shows him seated at the top, resting, exhausted, and apparently wearing a tentative smile. After all, he still has the journey down the mountain to look forward to, and it is well documented that more deaths occur on the way down than on the way up.
These are not photographs in the National Geographic mould; they will not win any prizes for composition or technique. And Samra is ready to admit as much, stating that his aim in taking pictures was merely to document his experience as a human being on a personal adventure, one which he hoped to share with others.
Indeed, some of the best shots were taken not by Samra himself, but by a couple of his mountaineering comrades, namely Wim Smets and Dr Doug Beal. It is Beal’s pictures that best capture the deep blue sky and the curvature of the earth along the horizon, a feature clearly visible from the 8,848 meter summit.
Samra’s caption reads, “As the sun begins to rise over the Tibetan plateau on summit day, we are so high that we can see the curvature of the earth. The photo pales in comparison to what it actually feels like to see this.
Photos are on display at El Sawy until Feb. 10.
