Manawatu Standard

A bit knocked off the bastard?

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diminish it.

But now, at least in the physical sense, Everest is in some small way a lesser mountain after confirmati­on that a particular­ly challengin­g near-vertical feature has collapsed.

Fittingly or not, the knocked-off bit was famously known as the Hillary Step.

On the one hand this is hardly a big deal. It’s not as though the mountain’s overall height is affected and the loss of the feature that bore Hillary’s name is scarcely likely to corrode his own legendary status here or internatio­nally.

And yet, implicatio­ns of impermanen­ce are often unsettling. News that a slip had shortened our own Mt Cook by several metres in 1991 occasioned at least a moment or two of nationwide discomfort.

One of our most internatio­nally celebrated natural features, the Pink and White Terraces, were destroyed by, it’s thought, the 1886 eruption of Mt Tarawera.

More alarmingly, New Zealand’s glaciers are nowadays shrinking at a shocking rate.

Then again, sometimes nature taketh away, sometimes nature giveth. After a powerful 2009 earthquake jolted Fiordland, some bright spark went public with the news that the coast had moved 30cm closer to Australia.

Whether or not this was a good thing was merrily debated and cries for cheaper airfares counted for nought. Manapouri man Mervyn Cave was quick to claim this newly exposed land, thereafter inviting tour operators and Transit New Zealand to contact him ‘‘ to arrange continued access across my property’’.

Lest anyone feel too bereft at the loss of the Hillary Step, writer Rick Gekoski in his book Lost, Stolen or Shredded put a case that missing works of art and literature can still be appreciate­d by their very absence.

When the Mona Lisa was temporaril­y in the hands of thieves in 1911, crowds showed up at the Louvre in even greater than usual numbers to see the ‘‘shadowy band of grime’’ on the wall where it had been. Projecting their memories of the famous image into the void ‘‘for a moment . . . almost made artists of them,’’ he suggested.

Might this also apply to the natural world? Perhaps climbers joining the now heavy traffic up and down Everest could in future pause to picture what Gekoski would call ‘‘the absent presence’’ of the Hillary Step. Although we couldn’t say whether or not that would almost make climbers of some of them.

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