On Himal Chuli he set a furious pace uphill, and used a technique of forced breathing that I have found very effective at altitude. You breathe faster than feels necessary, and on the exhale you purse your lips and force your breath out. This increases air pressure in the alveoli and improves oxygen uptake. It is supercharging for humans. You can hear the Sherpas doing it as they steam past you up the slopes, and I was reminded that Mallory said he had a secret way of breathing that he would reveal once he had climbed the mountain. In fact, he mentioned it in one of his writings:
The principles were always the same – to time the breathing regularly to fit the step, and to use not merely the upper part of the lungs, but the full capacity of the breathing apparatus, expanding and contracting not the chest only, but also the diaphragm … Probably no one who has not tried it would guess how difficult it is to acquire an unconscious habit of deep breathing.1
Mallory would be breathing deeply as he lifted his leg for the next step, just to cram more thin air into his lungs. This seemed to give an extra lowering of the diaphragm on the step up, breathing in time with your steps, but it is hard to do. It is similar to the costal breathing technique used by opera singers. I find the Sherpa method easier.
My personal trick was hyperventilating (by panting hard) as I approached a rise in the route, so that my blood-oxygen level would also rise before I tackled the difficulty. I use the same technique at the end of a rest period, before hoisting my rucksack back on and resuming the climb. Because of the panting in dry air you lose huge amounts of water, and so you drink more liquid that you would ever imagine necessary.
I clearly remember Steve and Russell staring aghast at the route that opened up before us. We were sitting on top of the 18,000ft (5,500m) high, previously unclimbed mountain that formed the southern end of a long, jagged, unclimbed ridge leading to Himal Chuli. They had realised that we needed about a mile of fixed rope, and so Russell had to return to Kathmandu to buy it. Meanwhile I kept carrying loads, and in the end that mountain was nicknamed ‘Graham’s Knob’, as my friends claimed it was small and rarely visited.
The ridge was an amazing climb, and I learned all kinds of techniques, such as penduluming, where you swing past a rock tower on a rope dangling down the side of the ridge. I also experienced the excitement of being the first person ever to set foot on a piece of unexplored wilderness.
Mark and I were chosen to team up with Brice on the first summit attempt, but the weather clagged in. I got soaked and frozen, and experienced mild hypothermia. It was interesting to see how my movements became slow and uncertain. It would have been easy to have slipped, and I thought of Mallory’s last hours.
We lay in a tent for three days in a blizzard. After the first morning we had each told our life stories, and we lay there gazing at the roof of the tent, wondering what to do next. Luckily Mark had brought a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals, a breathily written romance, and Brice had a penknife. We carefully cut it up into three parts. Mark, as owner, was allowed to read it in sequence: A, B, then C. Brice got B, C, then A, but I – as the youngest – was lumbered with C, A, then B, and struggled to comprehend both the plot and the characters. On our return Mark contacted Jilly Cooper and told her the story. She was delighted to have been able to satisfy three large men at once with only one book.
While we were lying there Russell told us another story. During a similar blizzard on the Pinnacle Ridge on Mount Everest, Harry Taylor confessed that he was desperate to go to the loo. ‘Piss in the bottle,’ replied Russell. ‘No,’ said Harry, who is a polite man, ‘it’s the other sort.’ ‘Oh, no. You can’t do it in here.’ ‘But it’s a blizzard outside,’ complained Harry. ‘Get out,’ said Russell. So Harry crawled out, opened the zipped ‘bomb doors’ on his suit and strained for a while over the thousands of feet beneath him. Satisfied, he crawled back into the tent.
After a while Russell wrinkled his nose. ‘Did you stand in it? There’s a terrible smell in here.’ ‘No, no,’ protested Harry. He’d seen it go. After a search they found the offending object resting in Harry’s hood. The whirling winds of Everest had whisked it up and deposited it back into his possession.
That’s how we spend our time in tents in storms.
On our summit attempt I learned another important lesson. Our team had to turn back because of bad weather, despite all the hard work we had put into the climb. The second party had better luck and topped out. But I realised that it is not shameful to turn back. On the contrary, it is a sign of maturity as a climber. As in sailing, only the cautious survive.
Every now and then you get a lucky break in life. You just have to recognise it and be ready to grab it. My happiest Everest expedition was my first, and it was the people on the trip that made it so good.
In 1990 the director John-Paul Davidson had finally managed to get funding for a BBC film about Mallory: Galahad of Everest. The high-altitude cameraman was to be David Breashears, already making his name in the field, and soon to be a famous IMAX film director. The bulk of the filming was to be on the north side of Everest in Tibet. I desperately wanted to go, but my friend Dave Blackham was selected to be the BBC soundman. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for me, he injured a knee in Bhutan and I was instructed to get myself out to Nepal on the next flight. I also carried a spare circuit board for a malfunctioning Arriflex film camera.
The chief character in the film was Brian Blessed, an actor I knew was fascinated by Mallory and the early Everest expeditions, and who had been pushing hard to get this film made. Brian was well known from his role as PC Fancy Smith in Z Cars, the first tyre-squealing, villain-punching police action series.
After my hire car caught fire on the M4 motorway I only just caught the flight to Kathmandu, where I met David Breashears and Jean-Paul Davidson.
I liked the team immediately. Brian Blessed, our star, was a huge man in every way, with an unlikely physique for a climber. He looked rather like a yeti. David Breashears was an interesting character, slim, dark and intelligent, with an intense manner. He had summited Everest twice in 1985, and was famous for guiding entrepreneur Dick Bass up the mountain that year in Bass’s pursuit of the Seven Summits, the highest point of each of the continents. The Seven Summits objective has now become a way for a wealthy – or determined – person without great climbing skills to see some of the most exotic corners of the world.
So David Breashears had really started the whole Everest commercial guiding scene, with all that it implies. Furthermore, he has now become a film director in his own right. Quite an achievement. In 1990, though, he was working as the high-altitude cameraman-director on the film.
John-Paul Davidson, or JP, as he is known, is one of the most successful TV film directors, and he is also a thoroughly nice person. JP and David were there with their partners. Veronique Choa, a young woman with artistic talents, was soon to become David’s wife. They had met when she had mountain-biked up to the Everest Base Camp on the Tibetan side in 1986. And JP had his new wife with him, Margaret Magnusson, another young woman who was fun to be with. She was then an assistant producer on BBC’s Newsnight, and was part of one of the many BBC dynasties, being Magnus Magnusson’s daughter. (As an aside, I have to say I have nearly always been impressed by the women I meet on Everest. They usually excel in a very male-dominated world.)
Our expedition had a problem, as one of the team didn’t have a visa. We did have a spare passport with a valid visa in it, though, so that night we had to find someone adept at making documents. Kathmandu in those days was full of strange characters left over from the 1960s Khampa rebellion, including a lady CIA operative, and a man I have promised to call Q. It was with some nervousness that we tracked him down in his shady room in the hippie enclave, Freak Street. His matted, long, blond hair and the dense cloud of hashish smoke did not fill us with confidence, but he was clearly a master of his trade. First he cut out the page with the visa on it. He then cut out the corresponding page in the new passport and very
carefully inserted the page into it, with tiny dabs of glue. In the morning it looked terrible. The little wavy lines on the new page were of a different colour to all the other pages.
When we arrived at the frontier post in the vast gorge of the Bhote Kosi river I think we were all a bit nervous. At the ill-named Friendship Bridge between Nepal and Tibet there was a stiff reception from the People’s Army soldiers in their cheap, green-cotton uniforms. We queued up and handed our passports over. The immigration officer started examining the questionable one closely and our hearts sank – he would be bound to spot the addition. Would we be arrested? (In fact I was arrested there 14 years later, but that’s another story.)
There was a sudden stir, the guards jerked round and the safety catches clacked off their guns. I spun round. To my horror Brian Blessed had picked up one of the guards bodily and was staggering off towards the 100-foot drop into the river. Then Brian started bellowing with laughter, there was a pause, and the immigration officer began chuckling, too. The man’s colleagues giggled nervously, and Brian put him down. The spell was broken. The passports were handed back. We were through.
From the border, deep in the gorge of the Bhote Kosi – the river that had been first explored and mapped by Morshead and Wollaston in 1921 – we walked across the Friendship Bridge on to the road that the Chinese have driven south through the Himalayan chain to Nepal: the Friendship Highway. Far from friendly, this is considered by many observers to be a potential invasion route for the People’s Army. Here squats Zhangmu, one of the ugliest towns in the world, possessing all the most unpleasant attributes of a Chinese frontier town: rubbish, prostitutes and concrete doss-houses. Its only redeeming feature is the situation – it sprawls up the sides of a gorge so steep that natural erosion will one day send it swirling down the Bhote Kosi. There have already been several disastrous landslips. Here, in 1990, the hotel hadn’t quite mastered the needs of the Western tourist. I found my room with difficulty, as it shared its number with all the other rooms directly above it. In my room the previous guest had unaccountably defecated in the shower tray instead of the lavatory bowl. It was absolutely disgusting.
After escaping Zhangmu in a couple of hired Toyota Landcruisers we drove up on to the Tibetan plateau and breathed fresh – if thin – air. At once I recognised the landscape. Here were the orange-brown hills and the intensely blue sky of Somervell’s pictures. To the south rose the highest mountains in the world.
The human habitations in Tibet are poverty-stricken and not attractive. If you are struggling with your first altitude headaches the filthy towns do not make you overly keen on the indifferent food on offer, either. Nylam had so many rats in the guest house that they were running up the curtains, and during the night I reached out and put my hand on one. We filmed Brian at Shekar Dzong, where the splendid hill-fort had been visited by the pre-war British expeditions. Tingri possessed a fine example of a caravanserai, a courtyard surrounded by small, stone-built cells used for animal fodder and traders alike. These courtyards were common on the ancient Silk Road, and ours was like the one written about by Omar Khayyam:
Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai
Whose Portals are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp
Abode his destined Hour, and went his way.2
In the past the caravans of pack-animals were driven into the walled courtyard to protect them from marauders. These days the four-wheel drive vehicles fill the morning air with clouds of diesel smoke. After a night at Tingri we drove into Base Camp. At last I was going to set foot on Mount Everest.
I realise that it might be hard to visualise the mountain, so I will try to sketch out its topography. Everest is roughly a three-sided pyramid, and we can climb up the ridges or the faces. As we look at it from the north, hovering in an imaginary helicopter, we would see the West Ridge on the right, first climbed in good style by Hornbein and Unsoeld in 1963. If we then fly over that ridge into Nepal and turn left around the mountain, we will fly up the Western Cwm – named by Mallory on the 1921 reconnaissance – up the famous Khumbu Icefall and then up over the South Col, which is a saddle-shaped pass joining Everest to Lhotse, its neighbour to the south. This is the most popular climbing route. On our left is the South-East Ridge, which was first successfully climbed to the top by Hillary and Tenzing in 1953.
Keep going round the mountain, across the Kangshung glacier with the vast Kangshung East Face on our left. We will have to fly over the North-East Ridge to get back into Tibet, where we started. An important complication is a subsidiary ridge spotted by the 1921 reconnaissance expedition. This runs northwards from the middle of the North-East Ridge. This is the North Ridge, which was the first route to be attempted on the mountain in 1922 during the British expedition. It swoops down to a pass, the North Col, which connects it to Everest’s neighbour to the north, Changtse. It was a good bit of route-finding on Mallory’s part, as the ridge is the only weakness in the mountain’s defences on the Tibetan side. He was also the first to attempt it. In all there are around 18 routes up the mountain, and there are at least two routes still to be done. One is a secret ambition of mine. And I’m not telling where it goes.
You can actually fly over the mountain, as the Duke of Hamilton showed in a Westland biplane when he flew right over the summit in 1933. Helicopters? One has landed – just – on the summit. On 14 May 2005 a Eurocopter B3 helicopter piloted by Didier Delsalle landed there, and he held his skids on the snow for over three minutes. His flight broke the record for the highest helicopter landing, previously held by Lt Col Madan Khatri Chhetri of the Nepali Air Force, who in 1996 rescued climbers Beck Weathers and Makalu Gau near Camp I at approximately 20,000ft (6,096m).
Was Delsalle’s feat sacrilege? I don’t think so. Human ingenuity will always push down the barriers erected by our material world. David Hahn, who was one of the Mallory searchers in 1999 and who has reached Everest’s summit 14 times, said: ‘I look at it kind of selfishly. It improves the possibility of rescues in the future.’
And what of the future? I can envisage the Chinese excavating a spiral railway inside the mountain all the way to the summit, rather like the one that tunnels through the Eiger up to the Jungfraujoch. They could construct a glassed-in balcony for tourists, who would struggle into pressurised suits and plod up to the summit to take photographs. If this sounds far-fetched, don’t forget that flying saucers were seen passing over the summit by an oxygen-deprived Frank Smythe in 1933. They were dubbed ‘Frank’s bloody teapots’ by his team.
The West Ridge is considered to be difficult and produced one of the most extraordinary stories: ‘the Man who fell into Tibet’. On 30 December 1983 a Belgian climber, Jean Bourgeois, was descending the ridge in a storm when he disappeared. His team members searched for him for several days and then abandoned the expedition, returning to Kathmandu in mourning. Then to their astonishment he turned up alive with an amazing story.
Instead of falling off the steep Nepali (south) side of the ridge, which would have killed him, he had fallen north into Tibet. Finding it impossible to re-climb the slope he decided to try to make it to the Rongbuk monastery, which he found ruined and empty. After spending several nights out he eventually reached a village and was detained by the Chinese authorities. They eventually believed his story, gave him 500 rupees and packed him off to Kathmandu.
In 1990 I stepped down out of the truck, and gazed around at the place I had been reading about ever since boyhood. Everest Base Camp North is located in a spectacular setting right at the nose of the Rongbuk glacier, with the vast, three-sided pyramid of Everest rearing up at the head of the valley, usually with a mile-long flag of spindrift flying from the summit at 29,028ft (8,848m). Tethered around the camp, clonking the bells around their necks are the heavy-goods vehicles of the Himalayas: the yaks. These are the most fascinating creatures.
As a friend to the children commend me the Yak,
You will find it exactly the thi
ng:
It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,
Or lead it about with a string.
The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet
(A desolate region of snow)
Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,
And surely the Tartar should know!3
Well, Hilaire Belloc, who wrote that, clearly knew nothing about yaks.
After years spent studying them I now have to say they command my greatest respect. A yak is like a hairy bull with a bad attitude. They carry huge loads up to 21,500ft (6,550m), and seem to live on a mouthful of gravel and a sip of glacier water. They are, however, extremely grumpy, especially when being loaded. They tend to wait until the last rope is being tied and then gallop backwards at high speed. The load comes off and is dragged backward through tents and groups of bystanders. We put Brian Blessed on one and it bucked him off in short order. Once, I foolishly put my hand on a yak’s horn as I squeezed past on a narrow path, and the animal nearly disembowelled me with a vicious, hooking lunge.
The yakkies, their human owners, are actually quite proud of them, as they decorate the horns with red ribbons – unless it is to warn of the dangerous end. You’ll see them in the morning at Base Camp, lovingly feeding their yaks with balls of tsampa – barley flour mixed with butter. Their owners, who are Buddhists, are not supposed to slaughter them for meat, but it is amazing how many fatal accidents they have, and how tasty they are.
Last Hours on Everest Page 14