by Jan Morris
‘Aha, sahib!’ the sage replied slyly. ‘I know better than that! I am not so simple! I know that through these miraculous glasses you can see under the surface of the earth, so that you know where the gold lies, and the diamonds, and all the other treasures of the mountains! One more look, sahib, I beg you, through the miraculous glasses!’
They were a peaceable people, the Nepalese of the foothills, who would never dream of harming you; and during my entire stay in Nepal nothing was stolen from me. But they gave themselves a threatening air by carrying at all times the famous Gurkha dagger called the kukri. It was a curved and murderous instrument, worn prominently in the waistband, and chiefly used for cutting meat, chopping wood, opening tins, and other such mild activities. Almost every male carried one, and the little Nepalese, who wore nothing much but a hat and a jerkin, were sometimes all but dwarfed by the huge knife strapped firmly to their stomachs.
The women, though unarmed, sometimes managed nevertheless to look more ferocious. With their matted hair and low brows, their tattered dark dresses and their bangles, they sat like witches over the big pots in which they brewed their chang, pouring the coagulated liquid from one receptacle to another, stirring and filtering it with sticks or their dirty fingers, sometimes breaking into raucous laughter, and finally thrusting a pan of the drink viciously in the direction of the passing sahib. I was generally much too alarmed by these wild ladies to refuse the stuff, however thick and sticky its consistency, and whatever the conditions of its brewing. Sometimes I remembered that I had not been inoculated very thoroughly against Eastern diseases; but I reminded myself, as I masticated the brew, of Lord Fisher’s favourite dictum: ‘Do right, and damn the odds!’
These hill villages were busy places. A constant stream of foot traffic passed through them, taking produce to Katmandu. Every day we met convoys of half-naked porters, loaded high. They passed us silently, moving deliberately, smelling of sweat and dirt. Often they carried vast quantities of onions, with the green leaves still on them; sometimes they had wicker cages of small chickens, with roosters tied by the leg to the topmost cages and flapping their wings impotently. The porters carried only blankets, cooking pots and a few minor implements for themselves; at night they bought their food locally, cooked it over an open fire, and rolled up in their ragged bedclothes beneath a rock or in a gulley. It was a hard life. Their bodies were riddled with disease, and for most of the year they were out on the hill tracks, away from their wives and families.
One morning, a few days out of Katmandu, I met a group of such men travelling in the direction of the capital without any loads. They at once stopped and greeted me, and turned out to be the first of Hunt’s returning porters, who had taken their loads to Sola Khumbu and were now journeying home. All was going well, they said. The expedition was safely in the Sherpa country, and Mr. Izzard, they were happy to be able to tell me, was somewhere in the region of Namche Bazar. I asked them to wait for a moment, and sitting down beside the track wrote a short dispatch describing our progress and reporting the ubiquity of the cuckoos: this I gave them, together with a letter to Hutchinson, and they delivered it safely.
*
Our progress was not very swift, but was steady enough. The heat was intense, and the flies trying. Sometimes gigantic beautiful butterflies floated past us; sometimes a malicious buzzing heralded the arrival of an enormous flying beetle, large enough to make you duck and shield your head. Often we stopped for a swim in some clear swift stream running down from the mountains, or climbed a neighbouring eminence to catch a glimpse of the distant snowpeaks through the obscuring haze.
So we reached the big bazaar village of Meksin, the half-way mark, and felt ourselves approaching Everest. (On the map this place was bafflingly called Those, a name which seemed to mean absolutely nothing to its inhabitants; but poor map, it proved to be so hopelessly inaccurate throughout the journey that I grew quite sorry for it.) We approached the village down a beautiful narrow valley, thickly wooded and watered by a delectable rushing stream, a first hint of the alpine country that was to come. Meksin itself, though, was still a village of the foothills. It had a wide market street, thronged with idlers and lethargic merchants, and a few open shops where you could buy such luxuries as lamp-glasses and mirrors. On the outskirts there were one or two fine old houses, in the manner of the Newar architects, one of them looking strangely like an English coaching inn, so that as I passed I half expected to hear fruity English voices from the taproom, or smell the Brussels sprouts. They do some iron smelting at Meksin, and through the open door of another building we glimpsed the glare of furnaces and the strong bared muscles of the iron men.
We camped on a wide grassy space outside the town, on the banks of a river; and that night I typed out a second dispatch. ‘Summon me,’ said I to the watching crowd, ‘summon me a runner!’ A runner appeared at once, miraculously, and named his price. I sealed my package, paid him half the fee, and instructed him to collect the other half when he arrived at ‘The Lines’; and that same evening, before the sun went down, I saw him stride off into the gorge that led to the west.
Our own way led firmly into the east, into mountain country, staunchly Buddhist, strongly Tibetan in flavour. The woods and thickets we passed through now were gorgeous with rhododendrons and magnolia; the air was sharp, and the grass of the high meadows deliciously green. One afternoon I was stumbling down a rocky track in a thick wood when I heard a sharp chattering, and the sound of footfalls approaching me through the trees. What’s this? I thought, for there was something odd and pungent about the noises. Goblins? Dwarfs? People who live in the trees? A moment later, and they appeared around a corner, four men and three women. They were small brown beings with gleaming faces, talking and laughing very quickly, with great animation of expression. The men wore brown woollen cloaks, slung around their waists like bath towels, and embroidered woollen boots; the women, their skirts tucked up to their knees, had pretty coloured aprons and little linen hats. All seven carried on their backs huge bundles of indefinable matter, closely strapped and packaged. These strange folk were moving through the wood with an almost unearthly speed and vigour, dancing up the track with a gay sprightly movement, like fauns or leprechauns, still chattering and laughing as they went. They smiled at me as they passed, white teeth gleaming beneath almond eyes; and as they swept away up the hill I knew we had entered the country of the Sherpas.
Soon the symbols of Tibetan Buddhism were all around us. The mystical slogan of the faith, Om Mane Padme Hum! (Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus Leaf!) appeared on walls and shrines in Tibetan characters. Tall white prayer flags flapped in the breeze from their poles, and at every pass the pious had affixed small fluttering pieces of fabric to trees or sticks in gratitude to the divinities. Here and there were prayer wheels, rotating drums inscribed with prayers which could be turned by an indolent flick of the hand from the faithful. Several times we stopped at monasteries, and were greeted by kindly monks with greasy butter-tea. I remember well the serene face of the Abbot of Risingo, who walked out to our camp with his two little dogs playing about his heels; a crowd of his congregation jostled about him, eager to touch his clothes or kiss his hand, and he talked paternally to each one. The villages were more spacious now, the houses well built and inviting; and though we were among devout Buddhists the villagers readily sold us tough and scraggy chickens for dinner, only stipulating that we must wring their necks ourselves.
We were still alternately climbing hills and slithering into deep valleys; but gradually the altitude was increasing, and one morning I walked around a grassy slope, in lovely open country, and suddenly saw in front of me a dazzling panorama of the snow peaks. It was the most wonderful sight I had ever seen. The mountains stretched from one end of my horizon to the other, some of them streaked with shadow, some ineffably clean and sparkling. They were as cool, still and silent as figures of Greek sculpture; but they looked strangely friendly, too, for all their majesty. I very much liked th
e look of these marvellous things.
Presently the track, crossing a high mountain range, tumbled helter-skelter down into a valley, and at the bottom we found the rushing stream of the Dudh Khosi. This river flows southwards from the Everest region into India; I looked at it with interest, for it was on these turbulent waters that I was supposed to float my watertight dispatches to that unhappy colleague at Jogbani. There was a rickety bridge made of motley poles and branches, across which we cautiously crept; and on the other side we found ourselves in a beautiful green valley of enchantment, fragrant with pine leaves, with the tumbling water shining beside our path. There were wide meadows to camp upon, and always above our heads, peeping through gulleys, suddenly standing sentinel at the heads of passes, were the snow peaks, now very close.
This was Sola Khumbu, the central province of the Sherpas. At each hamlet the inhabitants turned out with bowls of chang or mugs of rakhsi, and our own westernized Sherpas got steadily drunker as we advanced. For long hours they would sit upon the terrace of some friendly house, drinking and laughing boisterously, only bestirring themselves towards the end of the day in time to catch up the caravan, erect the tents and prepare the camp. The youngest of the three, Ang Nyima, was the most difficult of them. He would stagger into camp with a foolish grin on his face and a cigarette hanging from his lips, looking more like a London street hawker, selling sub-standard nylons, than a Himalayan climber; but there was a sense of fun about him, all the same, that I sometimes found obscurely agreeable, and a feeling of latent strength and energy, as if he were only sowing a few preliminary wild oats before the job began.
We were now only two days from Hunt’s rear base, established at the Buddhist monastery of Thyangboche, south of Everest. As we were late Roberts decided to push on with part of the caravan to deliver some of the oxygen. I was to usher in the rest. Accordingly I was alone when, the following morning, I walked around a corner in the track, in a lonely and exquisitely beautiful part of the valley, and found myself face to face with a European coming the other way. I instantly recognized him. Ralph Izzard and I had first met in Egypt some years before; but he had forgotten the occasion, and since it had never been made public that a correspondent would be accredited to the expedition, he now thought that I was one of the climbers. He was an imperturbable soul, and said ‘Good morning!’ rather as if we were meeting in the underground on the way to Blackfriars.
‘Good morning!’ I said. ‘Nice to see you!’
‘Have a cup of tea,’ said he, ‘and a bun.’
So we sat down upon a rock, and his excellent cook provided a pot of tea and some cakes. It was a curious encounter. His bold journey had surprised the climbers, who had scarcely expected to find a Daily Mail correspondent wandering unattached around the glaciers, but had not broken their nerve. Faithful to their contract with The Times, they had given him very little information, and he had been chiefly restricted to descriptions of the scene, accounts of his own experiences, and whatever he could actually see of the climbers’ activities. He had climbed to the very foot of Everest, up the Khumbu Glacier, and although the movement on to the mountain had not yet begun, was now on his way back to Katmandu. I found this decidedly suspect; and since he was as keen to know of Hunt’s plans as I was to know of his, we settled down happily to pump each other. He was understandably reticent. Yes, he was going back to Katmundu. For good? He wasn’t sure. He had to go down to Calcutta, for one thing and another, and then – perhaps back to Nepal? It depended partly upon his newspaper. He had been in the Himalaya before, and did not want to renew his acquaintance with the leeches of the monsoon. But there, one could only wait and see.
What about me, now? He didn’t suppose I could say much, in view of our contractual obligations, but would I mind if he took my photograph, at least?
‘Oh by all means,’ I said, ‘fire away!’
But it never appeared in the Daily Mail, for my resolution failed me and I told him the truth. I was no mountaineer, but a reporter like himself. We had several more cups of tea on the strength of it, discussed at length the affairs of newspapers, and parted. When I looked around, from an eminence higher on the track, I could see his long lopsided figure striding away through the pine trees.
I had not dared to mention the Namche transmitter, in case he had not come across it; and he would obviously not mention it to me. I had a horrible feeling that he had arranged matters satisfactorily with the radio people, and was now going back to India to collect new equipment during the opening stages of the climb; returning to Everest to scoop the world when somebody reached the summit. The idea haunted me as we marched, and now that I had seen the country I knew how easily a fit man could settle down among these people for a few months, waiting only to seize upon a Sherpa coming down from the mountain to extract the great news from him and send it winging home.
Before long I reached Namche myself. The track up the valley suddenly climbed a steep hill, thickly covered with pines and junipers, with the sound of the rushing water far away through the trees. At the top of it was the village, set in a bowl of the mountains, with a background of snow peaks. It was built like an amphitheatre, thirty or forty stout little houses erected in a cirque, all facing down the hill, as if they expected to see some kind of performance in the open ground at the bottom. The altitude was about 9,000 feet, but the village looked a cosy and comfortable place, with its heavy wooden doors and crooked lanes. Namche Bazar is the capital of the Sherpas. Many are the celebrated mountain porters who have come from this place or from neighbouring villages; and as I walked into it I noticed several brown and smiling men wearing odd bits of mountain clothing – windproofs, Swiss boots, and big quilted jackets.
*
‘Good day, Mr. Morris. Major Roberts told us to expect you!’ said a voice. I looked around to see an enormous bearded Sikh, in some sort of uniform topped by a fur-lined jacket. ‘Please! Come this way, Mr. Tiwari would like to see you.’ He led the way, at a spanking pace, off the track and through a number of backyards; up and down the various strata of construction that seem to characterize the outskirts of Sherpa villages; round and about low walls, in and out of little alleys; until we arrived at a large, low wooden building with two or three Indians, in different stages of uniform, chatting outside it. We entered and climbed a flight of stairs, and there in the dark recesses of an upstairs room was the wireless transmitter. It looked quite a powerful one, and near it was a contraption like a stationary bicycle used to generate its electric power.
Mr. Tiwari was the Indian police officer in charge of this small but significant post. He was a stocky man muffled in thick clothes, and greeted me affably; stumping about the room and shouting instructions through the window and down the stairs, he soon organized a cup of tea and a tray of miscellaneous delicacies. Sure enough, Hunt’s message about the oxygen had come over his radio, for he had been told by the Indian Embassy in Katmandu to transmit any urgent messages for the expedition. He talked to Katmandu, as I remember, twice a day. ‘What on earth do you find to talk about?’ I inquired, but he was not anxious to discuss these things. In fact, this strange little unit was placed there to keep an eye on the traffic that crossed into Nepal from Tibet. Namche was not far from the Nangpa La, the chief gateway into eastern Nepal from the north. A constant stream of traffic crosses this 19,000-foot pass, the yak caravans carrying rice and vegetables north into Tibet and salt south into Nepal. There was little doubt in 1953 that Communist agents were using this difficult route to enter Nepal, and thence India; and the Delhi Government was understandably anxious, under the terms of its agreement with Nepal, to keep some check on their movements. Occasionally Indian aircraft flew overhead, presumably on photo-reconnaissances (and once during the expedition an aircraft that looked like a Spitfire approached the region from the north). This was one of the ideological frontiers of the world. There were rumours that the Communists were building air bases on the high Tibetan plateau over the mountains; and this little radio s
tation was a side show of the cold war.
Tiwari knew all about Izzard, but I could not make out if he had arranged to send any messages for him. He would, however, if I liked, transmit a short piece to Katmandu for me. It would go to the Indian Embassy, and they would pass it on to Mr. Summerhayes. I jumped at the offer, and hastily typed out a short dispatch. When, two days later, it appeared in the paper, a kindly sub-editor headed it with the dateline: ‘Namche Bazar (by runner to Katmandu)’: thus giving any competitors the salutary impression that our employees could run 170 miles in forty-eight hours. I thanked the Indians, we exchanged compliments, and I wandered off into the village to find somewhere to sleep.
I was perplexed by their attitude. Had they really made an arrangement with Izzard long before? I had emphasized the nature of my connexion with the expedition: but might they not be open to suggestion from any other correspondent who turned up in Namche when I was away on the mountain? Would any news I sent over the radio be available to all corners at the receiving end in Katmandu, thus ensuring that other newspapers got it before we did? Kind though Mr. Tiwari had been, in conversation with him I felt we were somehow sparring with each other; it might have been his police training; or he might, quite reasonably, suspect that I had come with some shady political motive. It was all very difficult, but the essence of the discovery was good: here within a few days’ march of the mountain was an instrument that could get the news from Everest back to civilization in a matter of minutes, thus altering the whole complexion of my assignment. The problem now was to ensure that it got back safely and to the correct ultimate destination.