The Nepali Flat

by Gordon Alexander

  It had taken us two and a half hours. Not bad really. I innocently ordered the mixed fried noodles and a small pot of milk tea, and sat down in the surreally warm room, plastered like never before with expedition and trekking group memorabilia. People from Spain, Brazil, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, England, Portugal, Korea, Japan, Australia and Uruguay had all left something behind, and that was only in the small corner I was sitting in. The tea arrived and I added a metric tonne of sugar and sipped at the mountain elixir, feeling my strength returning by the minute. It is hard to mess up tea.

  Then the noodles arrived. Ok, a word of warning. Don’t order mixed fried noodles in the far reaches of the Nepali Himalaya.

  ‘What the fuck is that?’ I stared down at what had been put in front of me.

  ‘This is the mixed noodles man,’ Subash kindly informed me.

  ‘I can see that, but what is mixed in it?’

  ‘Everythings,’ he answered. ‘Noodles, vegetable, egg, cheese, and tunas.’

  ‘And tunas?’

  ‘Yes man and the tunas! You is ordering the mixed.’

  ‘If I’d known tuna and cheese were mixed into my stir-fry then I wouldn’t have ordered mixed fried noodles!’

  ‘Everywhere same!’ he said.

  ‘I hope this tuna is in a can, man. We are a long way from the ocean.’

  ‘Yes, sames.’

  I looked at him blankly, then returned to the plate. It was bloody huge! The biggest meal I’d yet had. I could see Mt Everest staring at me from a chunk of tuna. There was Lhotse next to it. I dug my fork into the repulsive mixture and stared in horror as a bit of tuna jelly wobbled over a bit of fried egg. Then I gagged. I had to try it. I was making a bit of a scene and people were starting to look at me. I put the fork in my mouth and was immediately knocked in the head with a sledge hammer made of cheese. It was like someone had put a snooker ball inside a filthy trekking sock and then smacked me right on the tongue.

  “Heeeeblur…” I made a noise.

  “HEBLUUUR!” Another one, but louder. Then I spat into my napkin as a third noise was bringing with it stuff from deep down. Subash looked at me with concern. I’d eaten absolutely everything put in front of me this trip, but this was not food. They were trying to poison me.

  ‘It’s ok man, just the altitude,’ said Subash.

  I wanted to donk him on the head with the teapot I was now holding, pouring more tea to get rid of that God-awful flavour.

  ‘If you can’t eat no problems man,’ Subash said. ‘You maybe is making yourself a sicks.’

  ‘I can’t eat it!’ I cried, my eyes watering from gagging.

  A menu was shoved in front of me and I cringed. I ordered plain fried rice. I looked across and Nima was getting stuck in to that revolting dish. I’ve owned dogs that wouldn’t have gone near that. As a poor porter, he could not afford to eat such delicacies as tuna and egg this high up in the mountains. The meal cost about $6.

  The fried rice came. As a formula it would look something like this: x = revolting – tuna + egg. I poked at it for a bit, stuffed a few meagre-sized bites in my mouth and then shoved it towards Nima. He ate the whole lot, two of my meals on his own. What a guy.

  ‘So man shall we go to Base Camp?’ Subash enquired, although he was a little coy. I think he was expecting me to get angry.

  ‘Yes anywhere but Gorak bloody Shep,’ I said as we walked out.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Everest Base Camp

  I went up to my room and dumped everything out of my bag save the camera and a bottle of water. The smallest bed I had ever seen was crammed into the smallest room I had ever seen. An Umpa Lumpa would have been claustrophobic in this space. The bed had been cut in half to accommodate the opening and closing of the door.

  ‘Its ok, sir?’ asked Nima, knowing that it wasn’t.

  ‘It’ll do!’ I sighed, then walked out.

  ‘Man hard to find the single rooms in Gorak Shep,’ said Subash when I came downstairs. He knew I’d seen the room.

  ‘No problem! Have I ever complained? Let’s go to Base Camp.’

  The track was mercifully level at first. It was just like walking, except with the accompanying breathing difficulties at 5180m above sea level. After a good 15 minutes we hit the moraine again and began the up and down motion of the morning climb. We joined a steep cliff face, peppered with boulders of dubious stability. Dubious enough to have me quicken my pace. At times the sharp sound of rock-on-rock echoed off distant walls and we’d pause and look around, trying to ascertain if we were about to be in the firing line. We climbed away from the steep cliff face and joined a ridge of lateral moraine positioned about 100 metres from the base of the valley wall, and once we were at the top, the ridge mercifully flattened off. In fact, it flattened off for a long way, and Base Camp re-emerged into view, but this time much, much closer.

  Two people were coming the opposite way. One was undoubtedly a guide, but he was supporting the weight of the second person who could barely walk. Together, painfully slowly, they made their way back towards Gorak Shep.

  ‘Subash can you please ask them if they’re ok?’

  ‘Yes man.’

  He blurted out the question in Nepali to the guide, who seemed a little bit confronted by the enquiry. It was as though we had questioned his honour.

  ‘He said no problems. That she is just a little dizzy from altitude.’

  ‘She looked more than a little dizzy,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but sometimes the guides is a crazy. They is a pushes and pushes to getting the clients to Base Camp, now she is getting the mountain sickness. She needs a helicopter.’

  ‘Can we do anything to help her?’ I asked, and he sensed my urgency.

  ‘No man. First things is they slowly go back to Gorak Shep then is calling the helicopter.’

  ‘Ok,’ I reluctantly replied. It just seemed such an un-Australian thing to do, to let those people struggle all the way back to the next town, when we were there and could help them. I reminded myself that we weren’t in Australia and that I’d essentially been told to drop it, and so I turned my back on the struggling girl and guide and carried on the path to Base Camp.

  Nuptse had followed us all the way up the valley. It really was a magnificent-looking mountain. As we walked it continually changed form, and it seemed to become more impressive with every step that we took. Its long, ridge-like top is crowned by seven summits, ranging from 7861m down to 7695m, but as its topographic prominence is a mere 319m, it does not actually feature on the list of highest mountains. I think that is a terrible shame. I had a real fascination with Nuptse. When viewed from Lobuche or indeed any place between there and Base Camp, what you see is a real, spectacular and ever-changing mountain. On occasion the clouds being violently blown around the summit cleared just enough for Everest to poke its tiny black face through, before disappearing moments later.

  I looked up at Mount Everest, much closer now, as large, fluffy snow-flakes began drifting over my shoulder from the opposite direction. I craned my neck until it hurt. Up there, some of the most famous explorers ever to have graced this earth had lost their lives. I thought, specifically, of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, who were last seen alive by human eyes in 1924, before they disappeared into a cloud. The pair of eyes belonged to one Noel Odell, who had this report of the event:

  ‘At 12.50, just after I had emerged from a state of jubilation at finding the first definite fossils on Everest, there was a sudden clearing of the atmosphere, and the entire summit ridge and final peak of Everest were unveiled. My eyes became fixed on one tiny black spot silhouetted on a small snow-crest beneath a rock-step in the ridge; the black spot moved. Another black spot became apparent and moved up the snow to join the other on the crest. The first then approached the great rock-step and shortly emerged at the top; the second did likewise. Then the whole fascinating vision vanished, enveloped in cloud once more.’

  Odell stated with some degree of certainty that the pair w
ere ‘going strong for the top’, but by the time the clouds cleared, all traces of the two had vanished under a blanket of snow and ice. Debate has raged for years over whether or not Irvine and Mallory were the first climbers to summit Everest, and even the man himself, Sir Edmund Hillary, contested to searching for traces of the climbers when he reached those heights on the first-ever successful summit in 1953.

  Mallory’s body wasn’t found until 1999, when legendary mountain and rock climber Conrad Anker stumbled upon it. The party searched for the mountaineer’s camera, but it was one of the few things missing from the inventory, perhaps the only thing that could have proved they were the first to summit, and then perished on the descent. Perhaps it was in the hands of Sandy Irvine, whose body remains missing until this very day. No one knows. Perhaps in a few decades, history as we know it will be rewritten. No one can say.

  I looked up and thought of the people that had their lives extinguished in the great climbing disaster of 1996. Everest seemed to take the shape of a tombstone. The largest tombstone in the world. Their bodies were still up there, scattered around the place like chicken feed, the effort and logistics required to remove them an unfeasible prospect. And then the clouds that were politely dusting us with snow continued their north-easterly journey and Everest vanished, along with the illusion.

  Now I’d like to lighten the mood. I would like to tell you the story of a man named Maurice Wilson. It ultimately ends with his death on the high slopes of Mount Everest in 1934, but unlike his predecessors and his progenies, if you will, I think the conclusion to his story was meant to be on these slopes. Go make yourself a cup of tea, because it is a cracker!

  Mr Maurice Wilson, or Mozza as he will henceforth be known, was born in Bradford in 1898 and was thrown into the family textile business. However, the Great War called him to the East and he enlisted in the army, where he became somewhat of a hero. During the Fourth Battle of Ypres, he was commanding a machine gun post that came under severe pressure from the German lines. The positions either side of him fell, everyone around him fell, his soldiers and fellow officers. Everyone. Yet our hero kept his head down, the Allies launched a counter-attack, and Mozza walked away from the incident with barely a scratch. The London Gazette reported that ‘It was owing to his pluck and determination in holding his post that the enemy attack was held up.’

  Mozza was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery, but before he could receive his award he was near-fatally wounded by machine-gun fire that tore into his left arm and chest. This happened while he was leading an Allied counter-attack.

  So that’s the kind of man we are dealing with in this story. A bloody legend.

  He spent the next few years of his life travelling around the world in an unsettled kind of way. He made his way to New York, before leaving to New Zealand from San Francisco. Eventually he returned to England, but before long he became terribly ill. And then he disappeared. The only note he left for worried friends read: ‘I must shake this thing off. If I come back you’ll know that I am all right. If you don’t see me again you’ll know that I am dead.’

  Not a great deal is known about where Mozza went and what he did. The little that we do know is that he did not take his illness to a doctor, but to a spiritual man that claimed to be able to cure all sicknesses. This man advised Mozza to fast for 35 days, only allowing small amounts of water into the body. After the fasting period, he told him to pray to God that he may be born again. And to Mozza, it was so.

  While recovering, he came across, quite by accident, a newspaper clipping of the aforementioned 1924 expedition to Everest that saw Mallory and Irvine meet their makers. It planted a seed in his head. He knew that fasting and faith had saved his life. He knew that fasting and faith would be enough for him to do anything he set his mind to. And to prove it to the world, he said he would climb Mount Everest all by himself. So our mate Mozza conjured the greatest plan ever devised by a human being. He would crash-land a plane on the lower slopes of Everest and then be the first person to climb to the highest point on earth. The fact that he was neither a pilot, nor a mountaineer, didn’t seem to bother him.

  His training consisted of taking long, long walks. He was a demonic walker. He often walked from London to Bradford, a distance of 315km (195 miles) in less than five days. He walked in the Lake District and in the Welsh mountains, but at no point did he ever decide to grasp even the most fundamental basics of mountaineering. He purchased a 1930 Gipsy Moth, a two-seater aeroplane, and then named it Ever-Wrest. He learned to fly, but was an atrocious pilot. As his departure date loomed, Mozza decided to fly north to Bradford to bid his family farewell. And he almost made it. On his final approach, his engines spluttered and then died altogether, while he desperately tried to bring the diving aircraft under control. With less than a 1000 feet to spare, he brought Ever Wrest under control, spotted a field littered with a dozen cattle and attempted to land on the soft grass. Naturally, he got it all wrong, undershot the field and shredded his way through a waiting hedge. The plane flipped, leaving Mozza hanging upside down, the only thing preventing him from being dumped on his head was his seat belt. The story goes that he was found by a small boy, who helped him down and within minutes a Press photographer had arrived and the newspapers the following day had pictures of Mozza’s proud face plastered over the front covers.

  When his plane was fixed and ready to go once more, Wilson received a letter from the deputy director of Civil Aviation instructing him that flying over Nepal was strictly prohibited unless prior permission from the Nepalese government was first obtained, a step, they assured him, that was highly unlikely.

  ‘I’m going on as planned,’ he informed reporters that were following his story. ‘Stop me? They haven’t got a chance!’

  He received a telegram forbidding him to take off from British shores, but he tore it up and boarded his one-man plan and hit the runway. A decent-sized group of both friends and reporters had gathered to witness the occasion, but to their utter horror Mozza had forgotten one of the most basic rules of flying a plane. He took off with the wind at his tail and he almost did not make it. Instead he reached the end of the runway and scampered over a patch of grass before rising inches above a hedge that waited like a spider’s web at the perimeter of the airfield. He was off. Just.

  First he flew to Freiburg in Germany and then Passau, over Lake Geneva to Marseilles, Pisa, Rome, Naples, across the Mediterranean Sea to Tunisia. An incident with the local police dictated a need to refuel himself from some rusty, old tanks, but unfortunately for Mozza, there was water in the fuel. He experienced engine trouble, yet as the engine started to splutter and die, he was able to make an emergency landing in Libya. With the problem solved, he continued to Tripoli, Benghazi, Tobruk, Sidi Barrani, Alexandria and Cairo. It had taken him seven days, but he was right on time.

  He departed for Suez, Gaza, Bethlehem and Gadda, before arriving in Baghdad. All the while he was being hassled by the British government, who had ‘misplaced’ his permits to fly across Persia. So Mozza found a different way. He flew to Bahrain with the intention of making the epic journey across the Arabian sea via Sharjah in the UAE. The British government refused Mozza’s request to refuel after arriving in Bahrain, and told him they would not allow him to fly to India. So Mozza promised them he’d backtrack to Baghdad. They fuelled him up and he took off, heading east for India. I like to imagine him holding up his finger as Bahrain decreased in size, with a wry smile on his face.

  In Ruth Hanson’s excellent biography of the man himself, Maurice Wilson: A Yorkshireman on Everest, she puts his achievement into perspective quite nicely;

  ‘The little Gypsy Moth had carried him safely over 5000 precarious miles (8047km); she had been pushed to the limit in extreme temperatures and with variable fuel, but through all the cramped, lonely and wearing hours of concentrating, and listening for any change in the steady sound of her engine, Ever Wrest had kept going.’

  Mozza sold his plane having
been denied permission to fly over Nepali airspace, and took a train to Tibet, where he began his assault on the mountain.

  And he gave it a bloody good shot too. Maurice Wilson died at 23000 feet above sea level, a little over 7000 metres. What he accomplished in flying that far would have been an outstanding achievement for an experienced, seasoned pilot, let alone a complete amateur with limited ability. He was an outstanding navigator, relying on maps (often really bad ones) and compasses to get him to his destination; even though some of the flights were right at the extent of Ever Wrest’s flying range, and that getting lost even for 10 minutes could have meant the difference between life and death. He wasn’t a mountaineer, but he climbed to a height of over 7000m, about the height of the 120th highest mountain in the world. He did it by himself.

  *

  The ridge of moraine we were traversing once again joined the steep valley wall, and once again I was left to nervously glance upwards to see the biggest boulders hung hazardously on a surface comprised of loose dirt and pebbles. Everywhere rocks, some the size of bowling balls, came crashing down to rest on our (yes, our!) walking track. It was most disconcerting.

  ‘Subash, does this look a little dangerous to you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he answered, looking up. ‘One day these rocks will kill some the groups.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Yes I know. Don’t worry man, you is hiring me so safe.’

  ‘What you gonna do, tackle me out of the way if one comes hurtling down?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied matter-of-factly, turned and carried on walking.

  ‘Awesome,’ I muttered to myself and followed him within tackling distance. I then had visions of him trying to tackle me, little Subash, half my size, and me instinctively palming him off like you do in a game of rugby. Oops. Splat!

  The ridge abruptly ended and we climbed down over a scree field with a barely discernible path. At one stage Subash called out to another guide leading the group of Estonians, who had inadvertently taken a wrong turn and was now leading the group towards an awkward section of exposed glacial ice. It was obvious from our lofty position, but down there it was a different story altogether. Realising his error, the guide called out a quick thank you and then altered his course accordingly.