Around midday on May 30, 1953, I was drinking a mug of cocoa outside a tented camp at 22,000 feet on the western flank of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain. I can taste the sweet liquid to this day, and as I look back upon the memory now it seems to me that I was experiencing the apex of the 20th century at an ultimate moment in one of the earth’s ultimate places.

All around me was white, blue, and sparkling—the snowy mass of the Hima- layas set against an azure sky. All was still, except for a plume of driven snow from the summit above. All was silent, but for the occasional rumble of a distant avalanche. All was calm, despite an indefinable tingle of excitement in the air. I seemed at peace with all things—in fact, in that remote and inaccessible ice valley, so far from the world’s corrosions, more than ever I felt myself to be a fully paid-up member of the human race.

Alone with my cocoa in the high serenity, in this condition, I found myself contemplating the general condition of the species, halfway through the 20th century. Most of it was not so serene. The threat of nuclear obliteration entered every calculation in those days, affected every policy. An uneasy sort of peace did prevail, but to me it felt as though the planet at large was about to enter an era of incalculable change, bomb or no bomb. Humanity stood on the brink of something epochal, I thought, some sort of historical cliff, but I sensed it rather than understood it, as in a dream.

My own particular segment of the species had one foot over the edge already. I was a British citizen, and I had grown up in the conviction that the British Empire was the ultimate power. Were we British not inherently superior to everyone else? Had we not governed nearly a quarter of the earth’s landmass and ruled its waves as by divine right? Was our language not the lingua franca of the world? Were we not uniquely privileged among the nations?

No, we were not. In the 1950s the British Empire, the fount of our complacency, was dying of old age, over-exertion, and shifts in historical morality. The day of the old empires was over. Bit by bit the Pax Britannica was disintegrating, splitting into a multitude of political particles, from enviable new nations to petty squabbling republics, and leaving our once ultimate Mother Country to the ranks of the second-class.

And what about our oldest ally and staunchest friend, the United States of America, our direct successor in glory? It, on the contrary, seemed unassailable in prestige as in power. It was not only the most respected of the nations but also the most popular—victorious in war, affectionately admired in peace. Its manners were copied and assimilated everywhere on earth; its systems were universally envied; its gigantic self-esteem was not resented.

Little did I realize then that the image of America, too, was about to lose some of its luster. The quagmire of Vietnam awaited first its statesmen, then its people, and already in the distance loomed the tragic landscapes of Iraq and Afghanistan. Within a generation, the glittering confidence of the Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave, the Haven of Happiness, would fade, and leave the world a little less merry without it.

Then there was Europe. Over my cocoa that day the old continent must have seemed almost irredeemable. It was split down the middle by the horrible political frontier that Churchill had dubbed the Iron Curtain. The western half of it was struggling to revive its confidence and prosperity after the miseries of the war; the eastern half was locked in the drab limbo that was Soviet Communism. If change was going to happen in Europe, it could only be change for them better—a new kind of Europe to resurrect the old.

But darkly in the way of such a dénouement was Russia, in effect the ruling power of half that continent, and determined to remold half a dozen of its ancient states in its own ideological image. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the U.S.S.R.—was still a gloomy enigma. It was half-European, half-Asian, secretive, armed to the teeth, and inherently hostile to the loose association that we called the West.

Russia seemed impervious to change, but already beginning to challenge it, and challenging the West too, was arising a new phenomenon, known to us then as the Third World. I could not conceive of the mighty shift in the composition of the planet that was, if we had only known it, already brewing. I could not imagine a backward China, a shambled post-colonial India, a comic-opera Brazil, an unknown Korea, even a tribal Africa, becoming the pacesetters of another century. How could I have foreseen that the Third World would presently become the Developing World, and then a New World altogether? Humanity seemed stuck in its arrangements, in that summer of 1953, and the rumorous suggestions of impending change were no more than that to most of us—rumors, suggestions, intuitions, guesses, nothing more.

Thinking more or less like this, at least in literary retrospect, I strolled away from the camp, across the sunny snowfield, in an allegorical sort of mood.

And at that moment allegory struck. The stillness was suddenly charged. Distant figures appeared on the vast empty slopes, high above our camp against the colossal backdrop of the massif. “There they are!” a shout went up, and out from the tents sprang a muddle of tousled men, Europeans and Sherpas. Panting and slithering, we all rushed up the snow to meet those returning comrades, and one of them brandished his ice ax in an exhausted gesture of triumph.

For a small historic event had occurred right there and then, in May 1953, in that luminous heart of nowhere. Edmund Hil- lary, the New Zealander, and Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa, had just become the very first of all us humans to set foot on the top of the world. “Well, we’ve knocked the bastard off” was Ed’s first comment, before they had some cocoa, too.