The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel

by Justin Go

  —Wear the gloves, he says. There is a copying machine in the next room. Do not use the feeder, do not bend the pages. Put them in the envelopes when you are done. The correct envelopes.

  The photocopied letters in my shoulder bag  , I ride the U-Bahn back to my hostel at Rosenthaler Platz. My dorm room hovers several stories above the intersection of three busy streets. A group of Canadian backpackers greets me as I enter.

  —Are you going out?

  —Out?

  —It’s Friday night. You aren’t going out?

  The Canadians change clothes and set out for the evening. I undress and climb into the narrow shower stall. I open the tap and let the water grow hotter and hotter, filling the bathroom with dense steam until I can barely see. Wrapped in a towel, I lie damp and dripping on my bunk for a long time. The room is warm, much warmer than the house in Picardie. Mireille must be back in Paris by now. She could be on her way to the same bar where we met two weeks ago.

  I get out of my bunk and get dressed. On the opposite corner of Rosenthaler Platz there is a two-story café that is open late into the night. I order a coffee at the counter and climb the stairs, sitting down at a small wooden table. I spread out the five photocopied letters in chronological order, then set my notebook and pen beside the copies. The pages have Ashley’s familiar script in thick pencil, the letterhead printed MOUNT EVEREST EXPEDITION.

  I pour sugar into my coffee from a glass dispenser, whisking a spoon in the dark foam. The spoon rings faintly on the china.

  Pedong

  28 Mar 1924

  My dear Imogen,

  I hardly knew what to think when I got your telegram. It was right before I sailed & it nearly smashed my mind to pieces; I went through my last days in London & Liverpool in a fog. I thought about you the long weeks at sea, and tore up half a dozen letters, wondering all the while whether I ought to write or not. In the end I knew you hadn’t asked me to write, and so I would not.

  But with you, I never could control my feelings.

  This letter goes Poste Restante to the Berlin GPO and I cable you saying so; you shall collect it if you wish to, and I shall hope that eases my mind. In these spare moments near dusk, the other men take out pen & paper to write to wives & lovers; you are neither to me, but I write to you now anyway, too far away from civilization to give a straw what is proper. To me you are all that is proper.

  From Bombay I travelled by train across the plains of India with two of the other climbers, Price & Somervell. The heat & dust were overwhelming, the train carriage a place of sweltering sleeplessness and ravenous mosquitoes, where I passed in & out of strange reveries and walked the corridors by night. The sole consolation was swinging open the carriage door and standing in the doorframe holding the rail, feeling the night breeze and watching the stars over the horizon, the woodfires burning in lonely huts below.

  We came up to Darjeeling by the narrow-gauge railway, twisting through dense tropical forest, the track crawling to one direction & then the other. I craned my neck out of the window to watch the little blue steam-engine chug along. So steep was the climb that they stationed a man above the engine to throw gravel over the tracks for traction. Noel, the expedition’s photographer, sat on the top of the carriage running his cine camera, ducking flat at times to avoid branches and vines thicker than alpine rope.

  At Darjeeling we stayed at the Mount Everest Hotel. There I packed & weighed & repacked my kit. There I wrote you another letter that went into the wastebasket. There I donned evening dress for the last time and we went to dine with the Governor’s wife.

  We set off from Darjeeling in motors for the first few miles – wonderfully steep driving – then we began our march, a hot breeze carrying us down the hill, the air perfume-scented & bearing huge mountain butterflies. We chased after them with nets for Hingston’s collection: he is our medical officer & a keen naturalist.

  We all have ponies for riding, but when we can Price & I break ahead on foot, for the sake of quiet & solitude. Often in those moments my thoughts turn to you – how you would love to ramble here, how you would admire the scenery & the strange, kind people, the queer overgrown plants, the crystal sky. But I see it only through a glass darkly. For even in steaming jungles I think of the windswept plateau beyond, and high above the snow-covered ranges, one peak the most brutal & majestic of all. Imogen, I’m not ready to see the mountain. She could never be all I’ve imagined, and if she is we haven’t a chance. And yet I want to see her so badly, searching the horizon for snow mountains at the crest of every pass, even though I know we are weeks away.

  I write in comfort on a solid table in a dak bungalow. We shall not enjoy such luxury for long; I save the weightier words for then, for if I finish now this goes with the next mail-runner. You can write to me thus:

  The Mount Everest Expedition

  C/O British Trade Agent

  Yatung, Tibet

  Though I shall not expect it.

  We return to England in August. Am I mad enough to hope your telegram marks the start of something new? I am so mad. As we were once so mad together.

  Yours Ever,

  Ashley

  Yatung

  2 Apr 1924

  My dear Imogen,

  We’ve crossed the frontier into Tibet at last. From Kapup I climbed the whole 3,000 ft to the Jelep La on foot to test my wind. It was hard going, the pass snowblown & rocky, but even in a gale it gave me some satisfaction to walk from Sikkim into Tibet, standing higher than the summit of most Alpine peaks. I felt fit & hadn’t even a headache to trouble me. But am I fit enough? Can any man be fit enough?

  We shall know soon enough. For don’t believe what you see in the papers – we do not climb the mountain, we lay siege to her. Against Everest we field an army of hundreds: for a leader, our General Bruce, who commands the expedition, for officers, the nine of us Britishers. For NCOs, the loyal Gurkhas; for soldiers, the sixty porters and Sherpas, freshly clad in English underwear & gabardine pyjama suits; lastly the mercenary army of 200 villagers we enlist to take us as far as the base camp.

  The stores for the assault, collected from the ends of the earth, ride before us each day on the back of an endless train of mules. Wooden cases of tinned food: Hunter’s Hams, Heinz Spaghetti, every vegetable that can be tinned and some that ought not to be; Maggi soups, Horlick’s powder; legions of biscuits. Also rarer delicacies: crystal ginger; tinned quail with truffles; foie gras au Lyonnais; four doz. bottles of Montebello’s 1915. For the General knows we march on our stomachs. Then our armaments: the sinister oxygen apparatus, with its look of Victorian plumbing; the sharpened crampons, steel stakes & pitons; the Swiss ice axes, coils of flaxen rope; rolled Whymper & Meade tents, boxed Primus stoves & Unna cookers; the countless silver oxygen cylinders, the colour-coded canisters of petrol & paraffin.

  The absurdity of it – the best that man can produce, pitted against a tower of rock millions of years old. And we shall hardly look like men at all, for you would laugh to see my costume for the heights. Heavy boots with Alpine nails, underclothes of Shetland wool & Japan silk; Norwegian stockings, woollen jersey and mittens, Jäger trousers, soft Kashmir puttees, a suit of windproof gabardine. Then a fur-lined leather motorcycle helmet, a six-foot muffler; snow-goggles of Crooke’s green glass. Not to mention that inhuman breathing apparatus. One could say it isn’t fair for the mountain, that it isn’t sporting and it isn’t alpinism.

  And yet she might so easily beat us. This is the signature of her majesty.

  Last night at dinner the expedition photographer Noel told a fantastic tale, evidently true, of how the highest lamas in Tibet are discovered after they have been reincarnated. After the lama has died the high monks use several methods to search for the new incarnation. They may dream of the lama, or some aspect of him; of a location where he may be found; they may note the direction the smoke travels from the previous lama’s funeral pyre & search accordingly; they may seek a guiding vision at a certain holy lake in
central Tibet. Following these omens, they look for a youth born near the time of the previous lama’s death.

  Once they have found a candidate, one of the tests is laying out the personal effects of the old lama amongst a selection of similar decoys. So they put out four sets of prayer-beads, one of which was the old lama’s; or three walking sticks, or five fountain pens. The rightful heir always selects his predecessor’s possessions.

  Somehow this made me think of you. Perhaps the sense of the ordained wedded to the grandest caprice. To scatter the lama each time among the remote ranges of Tibet, only to find him anew every generation – that is to trust in something.

  So I trust in the faithful Tibetan mail-runner – or is he faithless? – that he shall safeguard this letter so improbably across those savage peaks, evading flood & bandits & every manner of temptation, that these pages reach Darjeeling and, in time, Berlin. And then – shall this ever reach you? O Imogen, you would always have believed so.

  You cannot imagine how I miss you.

  Yours Ever,

  Ashley

  Ts-tsang

  8 Apr 1924

  My Imogen,

  I write from the packed dirt floor of a roofless temple, only the firmament & a white-hot moon hanging over us for a ceiling. Somervell & I left Phari a day behind the party; we came upon this convent of Buddhist nuns and stopped for the night. We cannot speak a word to them, nor they to us, yet their hospitality is immense – they treat us like wayward sons.

  Beside me snores Somervell, a kind & agreeable fellow who is a physician as well as an accomplished climber. We are flanked on all sides by prayer wheels, a few of them spinning loose in the wind. From the altar a dried-up billy goat gawks down at us, the victim of some long-forgotten sacrifice. It is very cold.

  Two days ago at Dothak we saw a frozen waterfall, an elegant sliver of a river arrested in movement. We halted at Phari to re-organize. The town is set at 14,000 ft beneath a great peak 10,000 ft higher. It is never warm & never without wind. All the old hands claimed Phari is the filthiest place on earth. It is.

  Rubbish runs through the street up to one’s knees. Crossing these rivers of flowing waste, it could be Ypres again, but for the laughing children & barking muddied dogs. They say the people go from cradle to grave without a single bathe; I saw a mother lovingly coat a naked little girl with yak butter, as proof against the merciless wind & sun & snow. Evidently Phari is the highest inhabited place in the world. The summer is too short for crops to ripen, so the people live off mean food and eat it raw: dried mutton, barley flour, tea mixed with rancid yak butter. And yet they smile sympathetically at us, knowing enough to pity us & our strange quest.

  General Bruce was forced back by recurring Malaria; our physician Hingston shall accompany him to Darjeeling and rejoin the expedition, and we are optimistic the General shall recover. Colonel Norton, a good fellow & an able climber, takes over as expedition leader. Still it is a blow to lose the General, and hardly the best of omens on a journey dependent upon the labour of superstitious hill people.

  It is whispered that evil portents have followed this expedition since its departure: the Bhotia boy who witnessed errant stars in the mid-day sky, then flashes of sunlight upon the evening sky; the band of vultures who pursue us relentlessly across Tibet, hovering beside the camp in spite of the volleys of stones we throw at them; the strange fantastical dreams we have all been having. Hingston attributes the dreams to the effect of thin air upon the sleeping brain. But the porters see the dreams as visions of the past & future alike.

  Most fancifully, our interpreter confided to me that Price’s eyes were as dark as any Asiatic’s when he first came to Everest in ’21, and that they changed colour to blue after the ghastly avalanche in ’22. Of course this is pure fantasy, and yet I had to admit I could not remember Hugh having blue eyes when I first knew him. I could not remember his eyes at all. The porters earnestly believe that Price is marked for death within the month, and that if he were to cup his ears he would not hear the usual whirling sound that marks us as earthly creatures, but only the terrific silence of the dead. I have not relayed this news to Hugh.

  As the landscape grows monumental, all my feelings expand in proportion. One cannot describe how lonely this place is when one is feeling stricken. We are meant to go to the summit – one peak amongst dozens here – for King, country & Empire; to advance knowledge; for human progress; to further our reputations as climbers & as Englishmen.

  In truth each man climbs for his own reasons: the Colonel, from a sense of duty & honour, and a notion of England that should not have survived Victoria, let alone Passchendaele; Somervell, for the love of mountains & their scientific riddles, forever unanswered; Mills, for good sportsmanship & the sheer joy of it, as if climbing Everest were no different than rowing the college Eight; and Price, most elusive of all, who climbs not because he wishes to but because he must, as he alone is privy to the mountain’s deep secret.

  But why should I climb? All my interest in posterity, or winning glory for my country, was long ago buried at Empress Redoubt. Nor can I argue for the advancement of knowledge – for I cannot see how Everest demands more study than any other scrap of the unknown territory around us. I cannot even plead a love of alpinism, for there is no climbing to be had yet: here we trek & suffer, trek & freeze, and the limit of our progress is not our skill with rock & rope, but our capacity to endure.

  So we march through knee-deep snow, in blizzards and under a brutal Himalayan sun. The camaraderie of the party, their fine spirit & the endless toil of everyone make me pray we take Everest. But for my own sake? Most days I’m still the peak-bagger & want the summit beyond anything. When I’m low I don’t give a straw for it, thinking all conquest & records are human folly, and that what I wish for can’t be found on any summit.

  But I deceive myself. This isn’t about Everest or any mountain. And some rare & precious part of me surely survived the Somme, to bring me here intact, vulnerable as I am. All my dreams die hard, but those of you are utterly imperishable.

  Yours Ever,

  Ashley

  Chobuk

  26 Apr 1924

  My dear Imogen,

  I’ve seen it now – I had to write to you straight away.

  Last night we stayed at Pang La below the high pass. We struck camp in darkness this morning & had not gone far before Hugh took me ahead of the party, at double pace & then nearly running until we crested the pass, dizzy & gasping on its summit.

  It was a spectacular vision: layer upon layer of dark barren hills, then the jagged teeth of the Himalaya towering above – Makalu & Lhotse & Cho Oyu – all seeming to bend towards a pink sky, the sunrise dazzling their western flanks. One peak reigned above all, cruel & enchanting, a hurricane of vapour streaming over her summit. It was Everest, as exquisite as the tiger’s fang & as tempting as black oblivion, for she stood miles tall & still I felt I was looking into an abyss. She seemed the remnant of some other world, a place elemental & unforgiving that left behind this mountain, to prove us trifles before the wild & howling universe.

  I waited for Hugh to speak, but he only took out the field-glasses & we scanned the upper mountain for what seemed hours, searching for flattish places to pitch our high camp, imagining obstacles amongst specks of rock 35 miles distant. We shall soon get a better view – we are three days’ march from our base camp, and the sight of Everest puffed new life into our tired party, though already the wind pushed much of it back out.

  We are camped amongst the willows of Chobuk monastery. The tent wall is wet against my head & I halt frequently to grease my face from a little pot that stays beside me all night. For the Tibetan plain has broken my skin raw, which was never made for such a hostile climate. All the other Sahibs have grown beards against the wind, but my attempt was pitiable & I gave it up.

  On a bench outside, Mills wrenches away at the oxygen kit by hurricane lamp. Over in the mess tent, Price & the Colonel debate the plans & personnel for
the summit assault. There shall be two parties of two climbers each, one with the oxygen, one without—for it’s a beastly load at those heights, and there isn’t a fellow here who wouldn’t prefer to summit without. If only we knew that was possible. I should like to be in the natural party, but it’s likely I won’t make a climbing party at all & will be kept in support.

  A runner is departing with the despatches, so I end here. The post caught us at Shegar and though I truly didn’t expect anything, still I stood beside the mailbag like a boy, remembering a parcel that came to me one day at Le Sars, a place wetter than here, but no more hospitable. I felt then – I feel now – beyond the pale, on the far side of every river and boundary that divides civilization from emptiness. But I had you; I had the parcel in my hands, a long walk back to our cellars in the rain, where there would be no dry clothes & never any time to sleep. It didn’t matter. I was young and we were together.

  The post goes out now –

  Yours Ever,

  Ashley

  Rongbuk Base Camp

  29 Apr 1924

  Imogen –

  We arrived at Rongbuk today. I began a meek letter describing our journey, but I’ve just burned it. For I’m cold & exhausted & there isn’t any time for half-truths – the post goes out tomorrow.

  How I miss spring in this wasteland of grey moraine & ice; how I miss true earnest spring of primroses & grape hyacinths & long English grass. When I return, I shall know I have at last earned such luxury.

  For seven years I tried not to look at your photograph, nor your handwriting, nor any trinket that could bring you to mind. It wasn’t any use. For even here I can picture you reading this, how you recline holding these sheets, the string of beads around your neck, everything.

  It’s no good sending letters Poste Restante to someone who surely has a fine postbox of her own; but even if one knew the address, one never knows whose fortunate hands reach into that box. My own hands have only the fortune of touching the mountain, a cruel mistress who leaves them red & sore & cracked – but isn’t suffering the true proof of love? Quod Erat Demonstrandum.