Return to Everest In the Himalayan foothills, Kathmandu long has been a crossroads its streets and holy places filled with travelers enroute to a thousand destinations many may never reach. Watched by the gods, some go to market to sell or buy, some seek to earn a higher form in their next reincarnation, some climb the steep steps to Nirvana, hoping to escape the tumult of daily life. Sometimes the destinations are only disguised beginnings. For sir Edmund Hillary, first conqueror of Mount Everest, his greatest journey would only begin at the summit. It would traverse not only the great landforms of Earth, but a less visible geography the private landscapes of one man's passage through the years. At last among the long isolated Sherpas of the Khumbu region south of Everest, it would bring a new challenge, a new adventure, hardly 20 miles from where his journey began. Today Hillary is a folk hero in the Khumbu. With ceremonial scarves or katas, the Sherpa children honor not the great sahib who climbs mountains but the friendly giant who has brought them their first glimpses of a world they never knew. It has been a trade of sorts. In changing their lives, Hillary has changed his own.