KEY POINTS:
In Nepal, Sir Edmund Hillary was a living god. In Antarctica, he enjoyed a similar status - the last connection with a more glorious age. To the bearded, fleece-clad scientific community that calls the frozen continent home, Sir Ed was a living link to the courageous men who
endured - and sometimes succumbed to - the most appalling natural hostility humans can imagine.
But Sir Ed never saw Antarctica as hostile. For him, Antarctica was about camaraderie and laughter in the hut at night, cranking up a second-hand tractor to drive to the South Pole, defrosting tinned beans over a naked flame. "It just felt like I was home again," he said of the moment he returned to the white continent in 2007, for what he firmly believed would be his last visit.
The idea of the trip had kept Sir Ed alive during the past few years, said his doctors and friends - but it was an enormously risky undertaking for an 87-year-old man, even one who had spent his life eating danger for breakfast.
The occasion was the 50th anniversary of his creation of NZ's research station, Scott Base, in 1957. When Antarctica NZ chief executive Lou Sanson invited Sir Ed to attend the January 2007 bash, he knew there was a risk the old adventurer might never make it back. Sanson approached Lady June Hillary to ask what she thought of the possibility her husband could die on the ice. He would be happy to go out like that, she replied.
Today at Scott Base, where the ice of the Ross Sea meets the ice of Ross Island, the scientists are working on conundrums like how the Antarctic fish produce natural antifreeze or exactly how thick the ozone layer is at a given point in the endlessly bright sky.
But on the walls of the base are photographs of explorers who came to Antarctica for a much more simple purpose: To survive.
So having Sir Ed sitting in the base mess, eating the same apple crumble as the modern researchers, drinking the same Milo from the same mugs, was a little like seeing Robert Falcon Scott or Ernest Shackleton walk through the door, stamping the snow from their boots, unbuttoning their fur jackets.
"Our staff at Scott Base always treated him like an icon," says Sanson, who had also organised Sir Ed's previous "last" visit, in 2004, "but he was very, very humble. He was happy to wash his own dishes. He pottered around the base, seemingly getting younger every day. He was drinking more whisky every day. I think, to people in Antarctica, he represented the common New Zealander - he's done these amazing things but he was quite happy to be just one of the team."
Observing Sir Ed for a week at Scott Base, I saw a man at times weary of the constant demands of status. Everyone wanted to say hello; everyone wanted to hear his stories, just as they had for the previous 54 years. At first, it seemed as though it might be all too much for Sir Ed; he needed oxygen equipment on the flight down to the ice, and moved in an awkward shuffle.
But as the endlessly sunlit Antarctic days went by, he became increasingly relaxed and, towards the end of his visit, seemed to be genuinely enjoying the chance to tell the story of how, in 1957, he decided to drive himself to the pole.
"I was," he said one afternoon, "a somewhat bloody-minded youngish man." For Sir Ed was never supposed to go to the pole. His job, in 1957, was to support the British-led Commonwealth Antarctic Expedition, in which explorer Vivian Fuchs was to become the first man to cross the continent overland. The NZ party was to lay supply depots for Fuchs' party and then wait patiently at Scott Base for them to arrive, triumphantly, from the pole.
But Sir Ed was never a man to play support. Instead of waiting quietly, he finished laying the supply depots and then took off for the pole himself.
It was a controversial decision, viewed as unchivalrous by many - only four of his fellow expedition members agreed to push on to the pole - but, in specially modified Massey Ferguson tractors, they made the journey, arriving at their destination on January 4, 1958, 16 days before Fuchs.
The move enraged Fuchs, the expedition leaders and the UK media, which had only four years earlier feted Sir Ed for conquering Everest "for the empire".
At Scott Base, Sir Ed acknowledged his trip "wasn't appreciated altogether. One newspaper wrote that the most hated man in England at the moment is Ed Hillary." Telling the story, Sir Ed paused a moment to allow his audience of journalists and Scott Base workers to laugh.
That pause - the timing of an experienced raconteur - is the mark of how fame changed Edmund Hillary. As a young man, he was so socially awkward he could barely hold a conversation with the young Louise Rose and got her mother to propose to her on his behalf.
He was also horrified by the prospect of a knighthood because of the inevitable public profile it would bring. But he turned himself into an accomplished and entertaining speaker, keeping a store of anecdotes tucked away in his brain, ready to deploy whenever (and sometimes it would be several times a day) he was asked to reflect on something or other.
Over the decades, Sir Ed's pole journey has been described by historians as a statement of New Zealand's emerging sense of independent nationalism, but Sir Ed himself had no patience for such hyperbole, instead casting the decision as one of simple practicality.
"I wouldn't have said that at all," he said on the Scott Base visit. "My feelings were that we had to put these depots out and we were getting a good deal further in advance of the Bunny Fuchs team. We were only 500 miles from the pole [so] I decided to push on."
It was a characteristically blunt response for a man with a reputation for occasional grouchiness - but it also showed a little of the way Sir Ed thought, as a man of physical accomplishment, not given to pondering his contributions to the world.
Perhaps he simply didn't think about such things as emerging nationhood because he was too busy avoiding crevasses - just as, when ascending Everest, he completely failed to anticipate (and was somewhat horrified by) the rapturous reception he would receive across the world.
When the task was at hand, all his faculties were occupied in ensuring each chop of the ice-axe was secure. And that, probably, is why he achieved goals further, and sooner, and faster, than all the rest.
Towards the end of his stay in Antarctica, Sir Ed was invited back for yet another "last" visit. In the packed mess-room at Scott Base, Prime Minister Helen Clark announced she was formally asking Sir Ed to return in January 2008, for another party to celebrate his journey to the pole.
As the audience of Scott Base staff cheered, Sir Ed only smiled. "Thank you very much, Prime Minister," he said. "I'll try."
