by Tom Scott
I landed at Kathmandu airport in a misty, dusty, gathering dusk. When I finally escaped the teeming madness of the international arrivals hall a deep, velvet blackness had descended over the city. There was barely any street lighting. En route to the Shangri-La Hotel, my dilapidated taxi had to circumnavigate sacred cows sleeping smugly in the centre of the streets. We rattled past open fires showering sparks, and past the turmeric glow of kerosene lamps in small pavement stalls. Ghostly figures on ancient bicycles wobbled in and out of a ground mist. It was magical, enchanting and deeply mysterious. I couldn’t wait to discover in the morning what sort of world I had flown into.
I awoke to the caw of large black crows on my balcony. Below me in the exquisite walled gardens of the Shangri-La a line of kneeling men in pristine white tunics and turbans cut the lawn with scissors. There was scent and incense floating in the still air.
I endeavoured to capture the intoxicating strangeness of those first days in an early draft of my screenplay, Higher Ground.
201 EXT. SWAYAMBHUNATH STUPA—DAWN
In a jumble of shrines overlooking a city draped in fog, monks chant, gongs sound and monkeys scramble over stone temple-dogs splattered with wax and red powder.
Far below, roosters crow and dogs yelp—
Beyond the shrouded, ramshackle city, jagged Himalayan peaks are backlit by the rising sun. It is the start of a new day in the fairy-tale mountain kingdom of Nepal.
Super the Title: Kathmandu—31 March 1975
202 EXT. KATHMANDU—EARLY MORNING
HILLARY, now in his fifties, walks with LOUISE, now in her forties, down a narrow alley already teeming with cyclists, monks and merchants.
Incense burns from countless small shrines. Baskets of brightly coloured fruits, vegetables and spice narrow the streets even further—
Mark Sainsbury, his nuggety cameraman Alan Sylvester and I spent four days in the Kathmandu valley acclimatising to altitude, sightseeing and meeting the rest of Ed’s expedition for drinks hosted by tiny, feisty, elderly Elizabeth Hawley, a Reuters correspondent who had never gone home. She was New Zealand’s honorary consul and the world’s foremost authority on Himalayan climbing expeditions. Her house was Somerset Maugham meets Casablanca—tiled floors, thick walls, arched doorways, lots of latticework, heavy furniture, revolving ceiling fans and a much-scolded servant wearing a topi hat serving hefty gins in crystal buckets.
The trekking party included Ed’s old chums, the towering Zeke O’Connor, a former gridiron player from Vancouver, and burly Larry Witherbee, a former Sears, Roebuck executive from Chicago, who ran the Canadian and US branches of the Himalayan Trust respectively, plus a cluster of wealthy donors from north and south of the border: multi-millionaire Alex Tilley, who invented the famous hat bearing his name; his attractive daughter, Alison, whose buxom breasts were always threatening to fall out of her blouse; slow-talking mega-vague, mega-millionaire Ted Lorimar, whose grandfather invented extruded aluminium furniture and tampons (don’t even think about joining those dots—you’ll go mad), and his wealth consultant, whose other major client was the Emir of Qatar (last I heard, this man was serving time in a US prison for fraud, where he is probably advising El Chapo); Barbara, a wealthy Canadian who had been successfully married several times and to dull the pain of yet another annulment was hurling herself into a rugged wilderness with enough creams, potions and painkillers in a belt around her waist to stock a small pharmacy, and two steps behind her a trusty Sherpa carrying a Fortnum & Mason-like hamper of exotic treats and delicacies that no intrepid explorer should be without; and Professor John Redpath, a professor of logical positivism and North America’s leading expert on the writings of Ayn Rand—pretty much what you’d find on any wet Sunday in any tramping hut in New Zealand.
Nepal was due to go to the polls. Kathmandu walls were festooned with strange political logos. Due to widespread illiteracy, a government committee allocated recognisable symbols and names to the numerous political parties. The bicycle party, the bullock party and the spectacles party were happy enough. The frog party and the toilet-brush party felt short-changed.
Professor Redpath asked Mark Sainsbury and me if there was any way he could possibly address the Nepalese people live on television on the evils of democratic socialism and wealth redistribution. Sadly, the people of the second poorest country on Earth were denied this treat, as the weather cleared in the Solukhumbu and we had to head for the hills.
The King of Nepal laid on two of his Super Puma helicopters for Ed. Since it was a religious holiday, sacrificial offerings needed to be made to the gods in order for us to fly. My heart sank when six bleating goats were brought forward, prayers were uttered and a chanting pujaree (priest) cut their throats one by one. Still spurting blood, the twitching carcases were dragged by the hind legs around the choppers, tracing out crimson concentric circles. I will never complain about an Air New Zealand safety video again.
We lifted off in a convoy heading southeast, clattering above paddy fields, soaring over glorious hilltop temples, and sweeping past terraced hillside after hillside, until the terrain became too steep and wild for cultivation. Heading up steep gorges with waterfalls cascading down towering rock faces, the chopper ahead of us was dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape into a child’s toy. A beaming Ed tapped me on my knee and pointed out the Everest massif standing head and shoulders above every other great peak on the horizon. Low sun turned the upper ramparts of Everest bronze. The taste of butterscotch filled my mouth.
Autograph-hunters surged around Ed when we landed at Lukla, the airport he had helped the locals construct in 1964, which is now named after him and Tenzing. With a short, narrow, sloping runway dropping away into a ravine at the lower end and running into a sheer mountain face at the upper end, there is no margin for pilot error and no coming back if engines falter or stall. You never know if you are going to make it. All you know for certain is the pilots have put down their cell phones, have taken their feet off the dashboard and are paying close attention. It is deemed by aviation experts to be one of the most dangerous airfields in the world. They get no argument from me.
Ed alighted as white as a sheet, his damp brow creased with discomfort, and moved urgently and distractedly through the throng. It had nothing to do with his runway.
‘Ed’s got the squitters,’ explained June matter-of-factly.
We set off that afternoon at a leisurely pace up a winding trail through a wide ravine carved out by the raging Dudh Kosi river. We missed the rhododendrons in bloom, but glorious apple and apricot orchards were in full flower. Hens scratched in vegetable gardens. Smoke curled up from cosy Sherpa homes with timber-shingle roofs held down by stones. Above us, through forest, we caught glimpses of icy, fluted spires. It was breathtakingly beautiful.
I walked with June, behind Ed so she could keep an eye on him. He was breathing heavily. Mingma Tsering, his sirdar (head man), gripped the belt of Ed’s trousers tightly and hoisted him up every step. From the rear, in his voluminous, baggy grey corduroys, Ed resembled an old bull elephant.
THE SMALL HAMLET OF PHAKDING was in deep shadow and freezing cold when we arrived. Ed went straight to bed. His old climbing buddy from Everest, George Lowe, was there. George and I later became good friends—he thanked me tearfully for acknowledging his contribution to the conquest of Everest in the fortieth-anniversary documentary I made for UK’s Channel 4, but he was testy and difficult that night in Phakding, fed up I guess at meeting yet another bloody film crew and a writer obsessed with Hillary. He insisted on camera to Mark that Ed was the perfect man to conquer Everest, that he had used his fame to good ends and this fame would have been wasted on anyone else, but there was regret and a sadness lurking beneath the surface of his answers. He was the ‘nearly’ man and you could see he felt it keenly.
From all my research I am convinced that, on that particular mountain at that particular time, George was the second fittest climber after Ed—stronger even than Tenzing Norgay, who
was still feeling the effects of the malaria he had caught the year before while climbing with the Swiss. But there was symmetry and poetry in having a man from the east and a man from the west stand on the world’s highest point together. Had it been a brutally unsentimental All Black selector reading out the names of the first assault team the list would have been:
E.P. Hillary, Auckland
W.G. Lowe, Hawke’s Bay
This is a big call, but I think I can legitimately make the claim. For View from the Top, my New Zealand Hillary documentary, I interviewed or spoke to all the surviving members who made it to the fortieth-anniversary celebrations in Nepal. I later interviewed on camera Charles Wylie, the expedition’s organising secretary, translator and stores master, in his sunny Sussex cottage. During the war he commanded a Gurkha company. On the wall there was an oil portrait of his Gurkha batman, who the Japanese beheaded in front of him as punishment when he was a prisoner of war. After the interview the scholarly, soft-spoken Charles shook my hand and said I knew more about the expedition than anyone he had ever met. The expedition leader, John Hunt, said much the same thing when I interviewed him in Lukla the year before. I was so buoyed by this affirmation I could have skipped up Everest in plimsolls and shorts at that moment.
George Lowe’s most immense contribution to the expedition was on the penultimate day. It was George who led, cutting all the steps up to Camp 9 on the Southeast Ridge. It was George who found the small, precarious ledge that Ed and Tenzing pitched their tent on. As photographs attest, he was still fresh and strong, taking off his oxygen mask and gloves to take photos. He asked Ed if there was room for another man in the summit assault team.
‘Sorry, George,’ said Ed. ‘I’ve done the sums. We don’t have enough oxygen.’
George returned to Camp 8 on the South Col with the English climber Alfred Gregory and the Sherpa Pasang. Gregory had a dreadful night, constipated and howling with pain at the end of George’s sleeping bag, straining to shit into a tin. He descended with Pasang the next morning, leaving George alone to wait for Ed and Tenzing’s return, or to come down alone if they failed to show up. For the best part of a full day he was the mountaineering equivalent of Michael Collins in the command module orbiting the moon on his own while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended to the dead, dusty surface in the lunar module.
Late in the afternoon George saw two specks roped together returning slowly. He made some soup, poured it into a Thermos flask and rushed up to meet them—before realising they were still at least an hour away. Spent from his efforts, he staggered back to his tent, relieved to know they were safe and well. When they got closer he walked up slowly carrying oxygen cylinders and the Thermos flask.
Everyone knows what Ed said to him: ‘Well, George, we knocked the bastard off.’ What is less well known is George’s equally laconic, and should be iconic, reply: ‘Thought you must have. Here, have a cup of soup.’
While Tenzing fell into an exhausted sleep in his tent, the two New Zealanders talked excitedly late into the night. Ed gave George some rocks that he had collected just below the summit.
‘You could have climbed it easy, George,’ Ed told his old friend, which was flattering but small comfort.
The George Lowe we met at Phakding was still extremely fit and supple. Mark and I carried emergency medicinal supplies of Baileys Irish Cream and Jameson’s with us, and after several glasses George relaxed and began reciting poetry. Then to demonstrate his fitness he tucked one leg, then the other, behind his neck in a yoga pose that I don’t recommend.
He was gone early next morning, no doubt racing over some high mountain pass while we struggled up the gorge towards Namche Bazaar. It was steep and hard, but Mark enlivened proceedings by sprinting ahead with Alan, setting up the sticks and pretending to do pieces to camera as June approached. ‘They call her the Bitch of the Snows … oh, hello June.’
If you arrive at the wrong time of the day the Namche hill is a killer even for fit climbers. Infra-red radiation reflecting off surrounding peaks turns it into a 2000-foot-high microwave oven. I was well cooked that first trip.
Near the top, Alison somehow found the energy to approach Mark and Alan with her idea about shooting an improvised romance movie starring herself and using Sherpas as extras. She accepted the concept still needed a little work. Mark foisted her onto me, telling her that I was a really famous film producer back in New Zealand and that she needed to pitch it to me. She bounded over full of enthusiasm, but, fighting for breath, I was in no condition to respond. Spotting a babbling mountain stream she decided she needed to wash her hair, and whipped off her white blouse and got down to her black bra—I think it was black; oxygen deprivation had leached all the colour out of my world at this point. She dashed forward and proceeded to plunge her head into the icy stream. It came out pretty quickly, followed seconds later by high-pitched yelping when she had recovered from the initial shock.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
EXPERIENCES NEAR DEATH
WE OVERNIGHTED IN NAMCHE BAZAAR, an ancient trading post between Nepal and Tibet, and headed over the hill to the village of Khumjung the next morning, where Ed had built the first of his schools. Sherpa children, their dusty, smudged faces and eyes bright with excitement, formed two long lines to drape white silk karata around his neck, chanting, ‘HILAREE ZINDABAD! HILAREE ZINDABAD!’
Later Ed slumped in a chair to watch a boisterous school concert performed in his honour. When snow started to fall, softly at first, then heavily, June persuaded him to leave. With Mingma’s assistance he shuffled slowly up towards his sirdar’s home in the adjacent village of Kunde through stone-walled fields being blanketed in phosphorescent snow.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ I commented to Ed. He smiled. I noticed that his lips were turning blue.
‘You should have seen it when we first came here. Juniper and rhododendron forest swept down to the edge of the fields …’
I put some of what I was feeling into scenes in Higher Ground, dramatising Ed’s very first footsteps into these hills.
EXT. HILL TRAIL TO EVEREST—1951
HILLARY leads at a brisk pace uphill—
They pass a chorten, a long cairn of carefully stacked Mani stones, all carved with the Sanskrit inscription, ‘Om mani padme hum’, which translates to ‘the jewel in the lotus’.
Further back, RIDDIFORD struggles, having difficulty lighting a cigarette on the move—
HILLARY stops and looks back, irritated—
HILLARY: Jesus, Earle, pull finger!
Ahead the trail rises to a stupa and a prayer pole with fluttering flags, beneath which a scruffy SHERPA MAN waits.
ANNULLU: Namaste!
HILLARY: Namaste!
ANNULLU: You Kiwi?
HILLARY: Yes, we Kiwi.
The SHERPA MAN grins as RIDDIFORD arrives panting—
ANNULLU: Shipton Sahib, waiting! Close getting.
RIDDIFORD sags with relief—
RIDDIFORD: Thank God.
ANNULLU: Come! Come!
RIDDIFORD goes to follow, until HILLARY grabs his arm—
HILLARY: Hold your horses, Earle.
Something in HILLARY’S tone makes RIDDIFORD hesitate—
HILLARY (cont’d): I stole a library book once.
RIDDIFORD can’t believe he is hearing this.
RIDDIFORD: I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.
HILLARY waves his battered copy of Nanda Devi—
HILLARY: Nanda Devi by Eric Shipton! The man’s a legend! What’s he going to make of two ragged-arse Kiwis from the back of beyond?
(BEAT/anxious)
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea?
RIDDIFORD: Take a deep breath, Ed, for Christ’s sake!
INT. SHERPA HOME, GROUND FLOOR—1951
ANNULLU, HILLARY and RIDDIFORD enter a dark basement full of calm, contented, steaming yaks.
A pensive HILLARY has to duck his head as they climb a flight of rickety stairs—
&nb
sp; INT. SHERPA HOME, KITCHEN (UPPER FLOOR)—1951
In the gloom the brass on wooden barrels and jugs glows magically. Seated by a smoky stove are four scruffy Englishmen, TOM BOURDILLON, CHARLES EVANS, MICHAEL WARD and a wiry, unshaven older man. He has a pipe in his mouth. He is wearing a fraying jersey and tennis shoes with no socks.
It is ERIC SHIPTON, barely recognisable from the Alpine Club newsreel. He leaps to his feet and warmly extends his hand—
HILLARY is immediately put at ease—
RIDDIFORD stiffens—
SHIPTON: Eric Shipton. Frightfully decent of you chaps to join us at such short notice.
RIDDIFORD bows as he shakes hands—
RIDDIFORD: Riddiford. Earle Herbert Riddiford, pleased to meet you, sir.
SHIPTON: Likewise. It’s Eric.
HILLARY (cheerful): G’day, Eric. Ed Hillary.
SHIPTON: You chaps must have motored. The bush telegraph said you were still days away.
HILLARY’s grin couldn’t get any wider—
While Mingma’s wife, the tiny Ang Dooli, fussed over Ed, her deaf-mute, laughing son Temba, a brilliant painter, served us yak stew and rice in the smoky kitchen. We drank bottles of the local tipple, chang, along with lots of rum and Coke. Ed loved to laugh, so Mark and I told jokes. Mindful that we were hogging the floor, we turned to Alison and Professor Redpath and said it was Canada’s turn.
‘Canadians are not renowned for their sense of humour,’ Alison said wistfully. It was certainly true in the professor’s case.
Complaining of headaches and tiredness, Ed retired to the bright-yellow tent set up for him and June on the front courtyard. June was confident he would be fine in the morning.