House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  “These idiots!” the German said to me. I saw his hands had been tied behind his back with red string. “I know what all this is about. It was the pictures I took in Kathmandu, wasn’t it? You’re out to get me.” The German had been arrested coming out of the park with a video camera for which he lacked a permit. He would now be returned to Namche Bazar where there was a small garrison and the headquarters of the park.

  His girlfriend, blond and severely beautiful, came into the office and stood a little behind him. There was blood on her hand and I asked if the soldier had injured her. She shook her head and turned her hand over and I saw that one of her fingers was notched, as though a wedge had been cut from it, almost to the bone. She had a voice that bled indifference. “You know, it doesn’t hurt me,” she said, looking at her finger as though it were a specimen.

  Dachhiri, who looked at me and shrugged at this further illustration of European strangeness, led the way down the hill, back to the mint green waters of the Dudh Kosi and the flowering pink rhododendrons. Even relatively minor changes in altitude brought a change in the density and type of forest. lt was as though you could move through place and time, from summer to spring, simply by walking up hills.

  Ahead of us was the long climb to Namche Bazar, 700 metres in gain to an altitude of more than 3,400 metres, and with my heavy sack it was hard work. There was a dramatic suspension bridge to begin with, whose boards had rotted badly. I could see the river rushing beneath where the wood had gone completely and the whole structure swayed alarmingly. Suddenly it began to bounce as well and I grabbed the thick wire that supported it to steady myself. Looking behind me I saw Dachhiri jumping up and down.

  “Bridge not so good,” he shouted over the roar of the water. Dachhiri’s English may have been limited, although not nearly as much as my Nepali, but he used what he had with considerable ingenuity. Things that were good – lodges, food, bridges – were “’s okay”. Things that were adequate were “not so good, not so bad”. Things that were truly desperate and threatened disease – or catastrophe were “not so good”. His assessments were almost always correct. My biggest problem was keeping up with him. Dachhiri was formidably strong and loved to be on the move. On the long climb to Namche he would wait at a bend in the track as I gasped after him to greet me with a comment like “I love to walk,” or “Not so far now.” At the apex of a bend he pointed to a small subsidiary track and said “Everesh” I followed him for twenty yards and sure enough beyond a wooded ridge the black triangle of the mountain appeared, a long streak of snow blowing from its distant summit like spittle in the wind.

  Finally, just as my weakened body seemed on the verge of calling it a day, we came over a rise and I found myself on the fringes of Namche Bazar, a town I had visited second-hand dozens of times before. I felt I knew it already. Bill Tilman was one of the first people from the West to see it and with his precise intelligence offered this impression of the town in Nepal Himalaya:

  Namche Bazar lies at about eleven thousand feet on the ridge between the Dudh Kosi and the Bhote Kosi, facing westwards across the valley to the peak of Kwangde. The houses are detached as if the owners were men of substance. There are about thirty of these whitewashed, two-storeyed houses, with low-pitched shingle roofs. The ground floor serves as stables and stores, while above is the one long living room, with an open fire and clay stove against one wall, wooden shelves for fine copper ware and cheap china on another, and large trellised window frames set with five or six small panes of glass.

  In several interviews I had read with Ed Hillary, he described the town as having been changed utterly by tourism and I was expecting to be disappointed. But the town’s position, set in a huge natural amphitheatre with a stupa where the stage would be, gives a dramatic appeal which no amount of development could alter. There are more houses now than when Tilman came but not many more and they are constructed in similar fashion, although most now have metal roofs in place of the old wooden shingles. Some of the new lodges are three storeys, but there are plenty of old three-storey houses in Solu, two or three days’ walk to the south. Few if any in the centre of town have a lower storey used as a barn any more but that is not to say that their owners don’t have animals elsewhere. There was some garbage on the streets, but not a great deal and certainly less than I’d seen in towns of comparable size in other mountainous areas of Nepal.

  Dachhiri led the way down a narrow, flag-stoned street, to the Kala Pattar Lodge – “’s okay” – and ducked through the low doorway. The Kala Pattar is a substantial building with three floors, granite walls, and rough pine beams and window frames. There was a fluorescent tube lighting the dining room and a tape machine blasting out Hindi music. Rugs on the walls and benches softened the room’s appearance. Out of the window I could see other houses spreading round the hillside, the prayer flags and white trimming on the windows giving the village the appearance of a ship at sea, straining under the constant breeze.

  In the mud enclosure at the back of the hotel a dozen men were hard at work building an extension, dressing stones and planing wood without ever seeming to stop. Until darkness fell, the sound of hammer on chisel on rock tapped away like a noisy clock. On the other side of the village, another lodge was nearing completion at a cost of some $25,000 for land and construction. I cannot imagine what the cost will be even in twenty years’ time.

  The only other guest was an Israeli who had alarmingly bucked teeth and the type of sunglasses which clip onto spectacles and can be levered up. This is how he always wore them. His guide was a Magar from Jiri called Rudra and he and Dachhiri compared notes in the way all Nepalis do, not just Sherpas: “Where have you come from? Where are you going?” Always the talk was of movement in a nation that still walks pretty much everywhere.

  The lodge was owned by one of the wealthier Sherpa families, people who had benefited most from the influx of tourists. Only a few hundred visited Namche in the early 1970s. Now more than ten thousand come through each year. In the kitchen, a young Sherpani was making tea and I asked her name. Dachhiri and the Magar looked at me, then at her and collapsed in laughter. “Her name is Mayar,” said Dachhiri. “That means love. Heesh-heesh-heesh.” She blushed, tutted loudly and spoke rapidly to Dachhiri in the Sherpa’s own language before disappearing back into her kitchen. I decided to go for a walk.

  Out on the street, two men were playing dice, smacking the tumbler down on a round leather pallet before an engrossed crowd of a dozen men. Another two picked up badminton rackets and batted a shuttlecock over the heads of chickens scratching in dirt. A sign outside the café next door to the Kala Pattar read Hermann Helmers Bäckerei und Konditorei. Inside two Japanese drank cappuccinos and ate fresh doughnuts. A horse grazed on hay spread over a mud bank opposite. Men in baseball caps, often wearing clothes with labels like Levi’s and Patagonia, drifted through the streets. Sherpas are better off than the Rai and other tribes who fill the streets on Saturdays during the weekly market. Few Sherpas from the Khumbu earn their living carrying loads for trekkers, although this is what most in the West believe them to do. Sherpas still act as porters for climbing expeditions, something which is comparatively well paid, but portering along the trails is left to Tamangs and other tribes.

  The fame of their association with early Everest expeditions and their proximity to the mountains are not the only reasons for the success of the Sherpas. They have an inherent ability to trade and much of their income came from this activity when they were still allowed to travel freely over the Nangpa La into Tibet, before the Chinese occupation. Tourism has filled the gap in trade left by the closure of the old trading routes. Now the Sherpas sell surplus expedition equipment back to the Europeans who brought it to Nepal, everything from camping gas and chocolate to novels and ice axes; Namche is the centre for this trade. Providing hospitality is also a long-standing tradition. The first expeditions found lodgings with villagers as other travellers would and this has simply been formalised with the constructi
on of lodges.

  I looked into a pool hall below the Daphne Lodge. A dozen young Sherpas with baseball caps on, their hair swept back into pony tails, were shuffling round the tables. There were pictures of James Dean and Elvis on the wall and bottles of Tuborg on the shelves. Some people find this kind of development corrupting, a dilution of a culture that might threaten its integrity. I found it rather groovy and a little hypocritical of those who visited Namche in the 1950s and 1960s to complain if local people absorbed some of their habits. Adverts round the village inviting me to a video evening and the few satellite dishes confirmed my view. Rupert Murdoch beaming down Star TV onto the heads of communities like that in the Khumbu was going to have a far greater influence on the expectations and attitudes of Sherpas than trekkers ever would.

  Cultural influence and change were hardly new to the Sherpas. They had lived in the Khumbu after migrating from Kham in eastern Tibet – Sherpa, pronounced Shar-wa by the people themselves, means “east people” – for roughly as long as the Spanish had been in South America. During that time there had been all kinds of upheaval from the introduction of the potato in the nineteenth century to the collapse of trade with Tibet. Sherpas once travelled regularly from Lhasa to the plains of India while trading, so I doubted whether James Dean would bring them to their cultural knees on his own.

  Western culture is so pervasive in South Asia and elsewhere because it is delivered so efficiently through satellite television or fashion and Sherpas are open to these changes. Tenzing Norgay, who followed the exodus of Sherpas to Darjeeling in search of work with expeditions, once said that the Sherpas “do not, like people with older cultures, cling to ancient traditions, but adapt themselves easily to new thoughts and habits”. But that doesn’t mean that Sherpas will throw away the things they’ve got right. Wearing a baseball cap or wanting a tape recorder doesn’t necessarily make you rude to your mother. The elders of Namche can also take comfort from the knowledge that their sons are truly awful at pool I can beat these people, I thought. Then I saw the angle of the floor and decided against it.

  Back at the Kala Pattar, Dachhiri and Rudra were drinking tea in Mayar’s smoky, narrow kitchen, the wood stove roaring against a blackened wall. The completion of a substantial hydro-electric scheme at nearby Thamo hadn’t yet resulted in a clean electric cooker at the Kala Pattar. Mayar was stirring a big pot of stew with a ladle. “These are two very good boys,” she said. Rudra made another joke about Mayar’s name and then they both looked at me again. Mayar waggled the ladle at them. I changed the subject, asking whether the showers were electric or not. Several in Namche are. Mayar said no, but that the water was already hot. I pondered the difficulties of explaining the environmental consequences of burning wood so that pampered westerners can wash their bodies and be clean for five minutes but accepted the offer anyway. She probably knew all that stuff and no one else was likely to use the water now it was dark. Why let it cool overnight? There was no light in the shower-room bar a candle.

  In the evening I walked round to the Khumbu Lodge to say hello to Audrey Salkeld who was part of David Breashears’ Everest expedition. Audrey knows more about the early attempts to climb Everest than anyone else alive and was offering his team the benefit of her historical perspective. I found her hunched over a portable computer, typing a letter to the park authority asking permission to establish a weather station on the South Col. There seemed to be no one else to go and have a drink with, so I looked round the lodge which was an altogether grander affair than the Kala Pattar. On the wall was a photograph of the well-known Sherpa Pasang Kami with President Jimmy Carter and Sir Edmund Hillary, each with a stack of white scarves – kathas – round their necks, given on greeting as a mark of respect. (I assume Hillary recycles his, otherwise he would have a collection of several hundred thousand.) The kitchen at the Khumbu was spotless and, more importantly, smokeless, creating an atmosphere of clean efficiency. Posters from mountaineering expeditions lined the walls, attesting to the lodge’s long-standing reputation. I was glad I’d showered.

  *

  Dachhiri had already gone when I woke next morning, so I settled in for a long breakfast. The number of guests had increased by two. A middle-aged Japanese couple had put up a tent in the lodge’s backyard and were drinking tea in the dining room. They smiled and nodded when I pushed through the curtain and sat down but otherwise remained silent, even with each other. I felt, and indeed was, large and smelly in comparison but they remained polite and circumspect, without giving the remotest indication of whether they were enjoying their holiday, a discretion which was rare during my time in the Khumbu where trekkers seemed desperate to report on their condition and attitudes. The woman wore an expensive cardigan draped across her shoulders, her coiffure incongruous in the basic surroundings. They didn’t look like typical trekkers and in fact they weren’t, although I wouldn’t discover that for several days. In contrast to the Japanese, the Israeli kept up a constant monologue of complaint. He changed his plans every fifteen minutes, driving his guide Rudra to silent despair because he was much too polite to respond in kind.

  When Dachhiri returned we walked up the steep hill to the police station to register my trekking permit with them and to help in my acclimatisation. My body would require a fortnight to adapt fully to the reduction in oxygen but the extra day in Namche would help in the process. On the wall of the police station was a map of the Sagarmatha National Park. I was confused by the origin of the word Sagarmatha, which is Sanskrit for “Brow of the Ocean” and has been used by the Nepali authorities as an indigenous name for Mount Everest. One reference to the name has been found in a half-forgotten collection of essays held in a library in Kathmandu but this seems fairly lightweight evidence to base a name-change on, not least because a perfectly good local name that was recognised on both sides of the mountain already existed.

  “Where does the name Sagarmatha come from, Dachhiri?” I asked him.

  “Sagarmatha is Kathmandu name,” he said. “Chomolungma is Sherpa name.”

  In truth, using the name Sagarmatha is another way for the Kathmandu authorities to illustrate their control of the Khumbu. Chomolungma, which is most often translated “Goddess Mother of the World”, seems an appropriate name and I for one regret that most of the world will continue to call it Everest. When the Survey of India calculated that the mountain was the highest in the world in 1852 it already had an official number – Peak XV. Clearly this wouldn’t do and the Surveyor General of India, Sir Andrew Waugh, was determined to honour his predecessor Sir George Everest. Everest was the central force in the success of the Survey of India whose contribution to human knowledge was considerable but he was not that keen on his name being preserved in this way. He pointed out that local people wouldn’t be able to pronounce the name and judging by the number of Sherpas and other Nepalis I met who call it “Everesh” this judgement has proved correct. Brian Hodgson, by then retired as Resident in Kathmandu, told the Royal Geographical Society that it was called Devadhunga. Douglas Freshfield preferred Gaurisankar, which exists but is a mountain entirely separate from Everest. When both these names, supported by such notable experts, were shown to be without foundation, the Waugh faction claimed victory. There was, however, already evidence that the local name was Chomolungma – transcribed as Tschoumou-Lancma – as long ago as 1733, published in a map drawn from information supplied by French Capuchin friars who had established a mission in Lhasa. Other travellers later confirmed this, although the controversy continued well into this century. It is all too late now.

  It may seem like an over-indulgence in political correctness to prefer the local name but I am in good company. Douglas Freshfield argued that “it is impossible to acquiesce in the attempt permanently to attach to the highest mountain in the world a personal and inappropriate name in place of its own.” There are unpleasant colonial undertones to the name Everest, but I suppose it is better named after a geographer than a politician. Mount Gladstone or Disrae
li would have been ghastly. Everest himself died in 1866, too early to be sure that his name would go down in history in quite such a memorable fashion but the Chinese were infuriated that the mountain should be known around the world as an illustration of the range of the British Empire. The current regime has resolutely stuck to its version of the Tibetan name Chomolungma, a situation which is pregnant with irony. In 1951 The Times published a leader on the subject following another attack from the Chinese on the use of the word Everest, although political correctness was yet to be invented, The Times preferring the term “appeasement”. “The whole question,” The Times concluded, “is one which it may take a considerable time to decide; and meanwhile the individual in this country, faced with the choice of talking about Chu-mu-lang-ma [sic] and being execrated as an appeaser or calling it Everest and being reviled as a provocative war-monger with no consideration for Asiatic susceptibilities, had better shun the Himalayas as a topic for general conversation.” Perhaps the final word on the issue of Everest’s name should rest with Tenzing Norgay and his mum:

  Usually Chomolungma is said to mean “Goddess Mother of the World.” Sometimes “Goddess Mother of the Wind.” But it did not mean either of these when I was a boy in Solu Khumbu. Then it meant “The Mountain So High No Bird Can Fly Over It.” That is what all Sherpa mothers used to tell their children – what my own mother told me – and it is the name I still like the best for this mountain that I love.

  INTO THIN AIR

  Jon Krakauer

  Jon Krakauer is an American writer and mountaineer. He was a member of an ill-fated expedition to summit Mount Everest in 1996, which became known as the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, one of the deadliest disasters in the history of climbing Everest. Krakauer is the author of best-selling non-fiction books Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, both of which have been made into feature films, as well as Under the Banner of Heaven, Where Men Win Glory and Eiger Dreams. His magazine articles have appeared in Outside, GQ, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Architectural Digest, Playboy, The New Yorker and The New York Times. In 1999 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Into Thin Air, became a #1 New York Times bestseller and was translated into more than twenty-five languages. It was also Time magazine’s Book of the Year, and was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.