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BY JAN MORRIS | What a difference a generation makes! In a few weeks it will be 45 years since a British expedition became the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the top of the world, yet already it seems an event out of another age. Unless you are old enough to remember the day -- May 29, 1953 -- it is hard to imagine what a thrill it was, how it helped to inspirit half the world and how transcendentally important the climbing of a mountain could seem in those days of lost simplicity.

It was the year of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, fondly proposed by contemporary English pundits as the start of the new Elizabethan Age. The British Empire, though clearly on the way out, was a proud living entity for most Britons. The United Kingdom was a unity still, almost every citizen was an enthusiastic monarchist and a kingdom that had recently emerged battle-scarred, bloody but unbowed from a fearful war was all too ready to be confirmed in its belief that British was best. What could be better, and more British, than being the first to climb Mount Everest?

For to the British, Everest had a symbolic importance not just as the highest peak of them all, but as a traditionally "British" mountain. It was named for a British surveyor-general of India, it stood like a watchpost above the northern marches of British India and for half a century successive British expeditions had tried to get to the top of it. It had been, so to speak, a fief of the Raj, and although now that India was independent, climbers from other countries were beginning to eye Everest, still among mountaineers it was generally thought of as a British specialty.

So that spring an almost allegorically British team set off for Nepal, the 12th full-scale expedition to make an attempt on Everest from one side or the other. Its leader had been one of Field Marshal Montgomery's staff officers, and it included two New Zealanders (in those days thought of just as overseas Britons), a clutch of former public schoolboys and army officers and one correspondent of the London Times, the venerable organ of the Establishment that had helped to finance nearly all Everest expeditions since the first in 1921.

The reporter was, as it happens, me.

N E X T+P A G E+| Onward and upward for Empire