SHERPA SLEEPOVER.(The Talk of the Town; staircase of Rubin Museum site of camp recreating summiting of Mount Everest for children)

"The weird thing," one of the guides was saying, "is that this feels and sounds exactly like base camp at Everest." She gestured around at the surprisingly noisy scene: the guides stowing their gear in the newly assembled mountain tents, the Himalayan wind whistling painfully through the air, the climbers chowing down on a kind of Nepalese protein gloop ("Looks like yak dung but tastes O.K.," one said), while the Sherpas, off in a corner, quietly tested equipment and pulled at harnesses. The Sherpas, four in all, included Kaji Sherpa, who once climbed Everest in a then-record twenty hours and twenty-four minutes. (The usual Sandy Pittman-style guided ascent takes about five days.)

This ascent, however, was supposed to last only around twelve hours, with four hours off for not-actually-sleeping in the tents, and, probably for the first time in the history of mountaineering, all the climbers were smaller than the Sherpas, because the Everest to be scaled was a simulacrum Everest represented by the five-story circular staircase in the rotunda of the Rubin Museum, on West Seventeenth Street. The museum, which is devoted to Himalayan art, was once the original Barney's--the wind was being piped in through the P.A. system--and the climbers were about forty New York middle schoolers. The would-be summiteers were the kind of mixed lot you find on every Everest expedition these days: Daltonites, with that skeptical, seen-it-all Dalton expression; some grimly self-disciplined St. Bernarders, who wore T-shirts with their school name on it; an Ethical Culturer or two; and various P.S.ers. The scene, for the few non-Sherpa adults present, was doubly surreal: in its convincing imitation of a mountain to climb, and in the memory that the mountain-museum had once been the stairs that led you down to the old Le Cafe, up to Chelsea Passage, and through that dangerous pass where they kept spritzing you with Eternity.

A few minutes before, Luis Benitez, the legendary American mountaineer, had gathered the expedition around him and explained its purpose, which was not merely to summit the staircase but also to learn something about teamwork while doing it. Benitez, a handsome, curly-haired, and compactly charismatic man, explained that Everest, these days, is as much a moral testing ground as it is a mountain. "You learn about yourself, and about your self in relation to others. You learn about endurance. You learn about trust," he said. He took some questions from the kids. ("I've got a friend who, like, says that there's a slide that runs from top to bottom?") Then the guides helped ...