KEY POINTS:
They first wrote Ed Hillary's obituary before his 35th birthday. But the typescript slowly aged in some filing cabinet for the better part of half a century, because Ed had a lot more living to do.
He cheated death a few times in his long life, but he
came closest to it less than a year after he set foot on the world's highest mountain.
Back in the Himalayas a few days before the first anniversary of Everest's conquest, Hillary was leading an ascent of Makalu, on Nepal's northeastern border with Tibet.
He had been merely a member of the team that took Everest - an honorary Brit, in an expedition sponsored by the Joint Himalayan Committee of the Alpine Club of Great Britain and the Royal Geographic Society.
His climbing skills were by now part of legend. But it was his potential as a leader that he wanted to discover on Makalu. And it was there, high on the Barun Glacier, that a leader was born and almost died.
Going to the aid of a companion who had fallen into a crevasse, Hillary himself fell heavily, breaking three ribs. The next morning, as he dressed, he collapsed in his tent. His lungs, prevented by the fractured bones from expanding completely, were filling with fluid. He had developed pneumonia and, high in the thin, cold air, he was slowly drowning.
As they stretchered Hillary down off the mountain, Sir John Hunt who had led the successful expedition to Everest, was commissioned in London to write an obituary for the world's best-known mountaineer.
Whoever asked for the obit obviously didn't know our Ed. This big man, with a heart to match his lanky frame, wasn't about to die.
In the half century since that brush with death, Ed Hillary lived a life which at times suggested he was superhuman. But what made him such a giant among men was, paradoxically, his simple humanity. A man of great physical strength and indomitable determination, he spoke often, readily and frankly, of his frailty.
And it is that candour, as much as his world-beating exploits, that made Hillary the only person in this country's history who was unconditionally and universally loved and admired.
The whole world warmed to him, but we more than anyone, because he embodied so many of the qualities of the ideal New Zealander. He was personable, genial, self-effacing, competent and organised; but what was more - and was obvious from the many interviews he gave throughout a well-documented life - he was completely at ease when reduced to life size. Whether speaking of his terror in his early days at the forbidding Auckland Grammar School or the anguish he felt for so many dark months after his wife and daughter died in an air crash, he showed that the best heroes are just human.
He was not given to overstatement. Unforgivably snubbed by Sir Vivian Fuchs, who treated the New Zealander as a junior member of the 1958 transantarctic expedition, he dismissed the slight as "part of the game".
As he watched that expedition stumble towards failure under Fuchs' inept and vacillating leadership, he could have been forgiven for burning with fury; he later described himself as feeling "rather frustrated".
Never boastful, he also never displayed false modesty. Rather, he simply spoke of his achievements as though each was a stroke of good luck, a happy accident which had taken place just when he happened to be present.
"The media created a hero of Ed Hillary," he said in the 1997 four-part television documentary Hillary: A View From The Top, "whereas I know perfectly well that I am a person of very modest abilities. I just took advantage of opportunities that arose."
Modesty, of course, is a virtue most highly regarded by those with much to be modest about, to use Winston Churchill's words. And, as a nation, we have always been quick to condemn the famous, whatever their achievements, if they commit the unpardonable sin of "getting up themselves".
We have also traditionally queued up to cut down to size those who excel in any field. And it is a measure of Sir Edmund Hillary's stature that, with the sole ungracious exception of the late Robert Muldoon, no one in his life tried to belittle him.
Of all the heroes who people the history of these islands, Ed Hillary stood out because he knew that heroism consisted in extraordinary acts by ordinary folk, of parlaying modest ability into historic achievement.
No man knew more than he the importance of Kipling's advice "to walk with kings - nor lose the common touch". For Hillary, fame was not a resource to be plundered for personal gain but an asset to be invested in the service of others. He moved with such ease in the world because he believed that his fame belonged to us all.
Just above the south summit of Everest, at the base of the summit ridge up which Hillary and Tenzing toiled that morning, there is a piece of rock they call the Hillary Step. There's a wry humour to the name: this "step" is a 12-metre sheer rock face, apparently devoid of handholds and towering above a vertiginous drop.
The crowds that flocked to the top of Everest in the decades after Hillary first scaled it now find the step a relatively straighforward proposition. But on May 29, 1953, Hillary was standing where no man had stood before and looking at a piece of rock no hand had touched.
He figured it out. Wedging himself between the rock and the sheet ice that had slightly parted from it, he dragged himself up as though ascending a chimney. It was typical Hillary, making the impossible possible and then recalling it offhandedly.
"I didn't really think it was that big a deal," he would say later. And he was often to repeat that he never saw himself as having conquered Everest.
"Everest relented," he was fond of saying.
Now, at last, Sir Edmund Hillary has had to relent too, having met a challenge even he could not surmount.
It may be that his was, as he so often insisted, just an ordinary life and his achievements were simply those of a man who took the opportunities that came his way.
We are all the better for having had him among us. This morning the world is a smaller place for his passing.
