Coronation Everest

by Jan Morris

  My camp bed had been set up on much the most public veranda in the whole village, on the terrace of a house kept by a hospitable old merchant. There another cup of tea was awaiting me, together with bowls of milky chang kindly contributed by my hosts. A large crowd of Sherpas stood around the perimeter of my sleeping quarters; in the front row hordes of children, pretty to look at despite their runny noses; behind, the serried ranks of adults, staring at me fixedly, occasionally swopping comments with their neighbours, responsive to my every smile and gesture; so that one could play upon their emotions like an actor with his audience, now elating them with an expression of appreciation, now intriguing them with a search for the toothbrush, now convulsing them with a deft decomposition of the camp bed. Long after the evening was upon us they still stood there, and I could see the men at the back craning their necks for a better view; but gradually they dispersed, as the night came on, and I was left alone on my balcony with an old man with a white beard, wearing a high ornate fur-lined cap, who was burrowing and ferreting in the multitudinous bags of his luggage. The night was clear and frosty, and high above the village, all around us, stood the mountains.

  As I lay on my back in the stillness, only disturbed by the unwrapping of cloths and the tearing of paper from the old man’s corner, I worked out the problem of the transmitter. The first thing was that it was public, in the sense that nothing I sent over it would be confidential. I simply could not afford, however friendly Mr. Tiwari and his associates, to send some important piece of news over it ‘in clear’; it was bound to leak out in Katmandu. Supposing I sent dispatches in code? It would be easy enough to do; the codes were in my pocket. But, I realized, Tiwari could scarcely agree to transmit something he did not understand himself. I noticed he had read my little dispatch that afternoon with some care, and I could not see him accepting mumbo-jumbo. Could I afford to give him a key to the codes, for his own private information? I thought of those keen and unscrupulous correspondents who might well penetrate to Namche during the coming months; I remembered Mr. Tiwari’s professional duties, as a purveyor of information; and reluctantly decided I could not.

  There was only one alternative, and I hope Tiwari has long ago forgiven me for resorting to it. I must produce another code in which messages enciphered seemed to be in clear. Such a message would make perfect sense – but it would be the wrong sense. This meant that for every word or phrase I wanted to encipher, I must devise a code phrase, so that several words run together would emerge as a sensible sentence. Because this would be rather a complicated system, and because I could obviously only use the thing once or twice, I decided that I must deny myself the use of the transmitter, however obliging the Indians, until the last crucial message of success or failure – and I assumed, under the pressure of some psychological compulsion, that success was all I need bother about. This was the code I compiled, allowing me simply to tell London that Everest had been climbed, and to name the members of the successful assault party:

  Message to begin : Snow Conditions Bad

  Band : South Col Untenable

  Bourdillon : Lhotse Face Impossible

  Evans : Ridge Camp Untenable

  Gregory : Withdrawal to West Basin

  Hillary : Advanced Base Abandoned

  Hunt : Camp Five Abandoned

  Lowe : Camp Six Abandoned

  Noyce : Camp Seven Abandoned

  Tenzing : Awaiting Improvement

  Ward : Further news Follows

  Westmacott : Assault Postponed

  Wylie : Weather Deteriorating

  Sherpa : Awaiting Oxygen Supplies

  All else Genuine

  I typed only three copies of this cipher. Two were for myself. The third I later sealed in innumerable containers and entrusted to the most reliable runner I could find; who, in the custom of his kind, took it back to Katmandu as swift as an eagle, and handed it safely to Hutchinson.

  The old man was grunting in his shadows, and there was the clink of coin. I crossed the veranda to talk to him. He was surrounded by the wrappings of his baggage, and was now counting his money. Strange were the coins he was handling, inscribed with queer signs and letterings, and now and again he inspected a crinkly currency note, thick and heavily lettered, like an old parchment. This was Tibetan money, and on the following day the old man would be travelling with his little caravan of yaks, across the Nangpa La into that shadowy country.

  ‘Come with me, sahib!’ he said, leaning over his sacks and baggage. ‘I will take you there tomorrow, and you can help me do my business. We will leave early, at dawn, and travel fast! Why go to the mountains? It is only a hardship. Come with me!’

  But I refused, unable to explain to him why I might never come back again, and helped him to gather up his scattered possessions; and after sharing the last of the rakhsi in the bottom of my water-bottle, we parted and slept.

  5

  Arrival

  Hunt’s rear base camp at Thyangboche monastery was ten miles or so higher than Namche, and next morning I set off again to the north. If I had seen Everest during the march, I had been ignorant enough not to recognize it; but from the ridge directly above Namche it was unmistakable. There it stood, a great crooked cone of a thing, at once lumpish and angular. The vast rock wall of Nuptse obscured its haunches, and on either side, stretching away to the horizon, stood splendid snow peaks, rank upon rank. A plume of snow flew away from the summit of Everest, like a flaunted banner; in a setting so beautiful (diffused as the whole scene was by a gentle haze) it seemed to me that Chomolungma, as the Sherpas called our mountain, was awaiting our arrival with a certain sullen defiance.

  Thyangboche lies at the top of a hill, overlooking the confluence of two streams, and the path up there becomes disagreeably steep. The altitude – about 12,500 – was enough to affect the newcomer unaccustomed to such heights, and I found myself getting both breathless and disgruntled. Often I stopped among the groves of juniper for a mug of water and a meditation; and often cheerful Sherpas would come bounding down the path, staring at me curiously; but it seemed an awful long way up the hill. The poor porters from Katmandu also found it heavy going. This was about the limit of their altitude; they were valley men, who did not like travelling high. Some of them had deserted us already in the night, leaving their loads to be taken by eager Sherpa volunteers; the rest laboured on, breathing heavily, with occasional mutinous mutters.

  But after an hour or two of climbing we emerged on the sparkling green plateau that crowned the hill; and there stood the monastery of Thyangboche. To the Buddhists of that region, it was a very sacred place. The monastery was equal in sanctity to the sister-house of Rongbuk, on the Tibetan side of Everest, and the site was preserved as a sanctuary, where no living thing might be harmed, even by the Sherpas (whose Buddhism is sometimes flexible). The monastery had rather a slatternly look about it, for the cluttered buildings that surrounded it were a little tumbledown, and the piles of stones that served to secure the roofs added to the feeling of incipient dereliction. But a fine knob of gold surmounted the central building, and in front of it were two noble chortens, or shrines, on the edge of the green. Meadows bright with primula stood all about this place, and the sides of its hill were thick with forests of larch, pine and juniper. Musk-deer and pheasant wandered through the thickets. Overshadowing all this green preserve, and giving the scene drama as well as beauty, were the Himalayan peaks, like watchful gods.

  A friendly monk in a russet robe drew me aside into one of the neighbouring buildings and plied me with brick tea and rakhsi. He had a delightful face, fat and impish, and he wrapped his dirty trappings about him with the air of a satyr recently emerged from a debauchery. We had no fluent language in common; but he chatted away volubly, with an appealing earnestness, and after a time it dawned on me that he had a characteristically ecclesiastical request to make: would I care to make a contribution towards the repair of the roof? I suspected there were few societies dedicated to the preservation of Th
yangboche monastery, and there were certainly no archiepiscopal commissions to protect its rotting lintels; so I happily paid my share and presently, rolling a little, I think, from the rakhsi, he ushered me out into the meadows again.

  There I had a second welcome. In an adjoining field I could see the tents of the expedition. There was a big yellow pyramid tent, a number of smaller ones, piles of miscellaneous equipment, the movement of Sherpas and porters, and a general sense of determined preparation, the whole very suitably surmounted by a large Union Jack. A rough rope fence had been placed around the camp, to keep out those many Sherpas who stood transfixed to the spot like yokels at the County Show; and when I walked towards the entrance a man came out to meet me. He was a lithe and eager figure, moving briskly and gracefully, with plus fours and a wide felt hat. As he approached his brown face split into a dazzling smile, and he reached out a hand to welcome me. ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said. ‘Welcome! I am Tenzing!’

  I always remember with pleasure my first sight of this famous person, there in his own country, so keen and dashing and unspoilt, still a simple and uncluttered man despite the celebrity that was already accumulating about him. He was thirty-nine then, but looked less, and seemed the incarnation of healthy mountain living; indeed I always thought of him more as some splendid creature of the snows than as a member of our prosaic human species. This was not racial snobbery, as the Indian chauvinists would say; it was biological humility. So, feeling as though Oberon were leading me into the woods, I followed Tenzing into the camp, and joined the expedition.

  Not everyone was there. The climbers had been doing their acclimatization trials, here and there in the surrounding mountains. One team, led by Edmund Hillary, was now making the first incursion into the icefall of Everest. Hunt himself was somewhere up the Khumbu Glacier, the harsh highway that connected Thyangboche with the foot of the mountain. Most of the others were in camp, testing their oxygen equipment, doing obscure things to bits of equipment, and talking a good deal about the doings of climbers, a subject which always seemed to get back, sooner or later, to something called ‘the Climbers’ Club Hut at Helyg’. I have often been asked, of course, what the members of the Everest expedition were really like, and have always felt anti-climatic in having to reply lamely that, well, they were all really jolly nice chaps, you know. But this I will allow myself to say; that after two or three months in their company, in the rigours of the scree or the dangers of the icefall, I developed a passionate dislike for the Climbers’ Club Hut at Helyg. What bleak prospects of communal evenings stretch away from the name! How the conversation must bounce from Schools to the West Face of the Grymwych, and back to Schools again! How tiresome the noise of those elderly sports cars, how mournful the tea stirred with a bent spoon, or the warm beer drunk from the can! ‘Ah!’ they say. ‘But you have to be a climber to understand!’ If I were a climber, I would be a rich one, and stay at the best hotel, and be driven away to the rock-face, and return like the old heroes of Everest to chicken in aspic. The Climbers’ Club Hut at Helyg! Grrr!

  Do not let me give the impression that the evening at Thyangboche was in any way threadbare. On the contrary, it was luxurious. The big tent, in which I was given a corner, was warm and comfortable. The food was excellent, scrambled eggs and pudding. The fire blazed high with logs and sticks, incited by frequent blasts of oxygen from a convenient cylinder. The conversation ranged over a wide field. There were men of many kinds of knowledge in this party. It included soldiers, doctors, a brain surgeon, an agricultural statistician, a movie photographer, the director of a travel agency, a geologist, two schoolmasters, an authority on guided missiles, a bee-keeper, and me. There was nothing we could not talk about. I remember distinctly conversations about the Plymouth Brethren, racing, philately, the cost of education, social development in the Navy, Liverpool, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Climbers’ Club Hut at Helyg. If Wilfrid Noyce could speak with the elegance of a Charterhouse poet, Michael Westmacott could tell us how many cubic feet of turnips equalled a pound of average pig. I dare say there were moments of bickering among these men; if so, I either did not hear them or have forgotten them; and I only remember one moment of active disagreement. It was a team chosen not only for its climbing skill, but also for its ability for friendship; and as a passenger I can vouch for its kindliness.

  Tenzing, whose limited English meant that he could not take his proper part in these conversations, had found a Sherpa servant to stay with me throughout the expedition. His name was Sonam, and he came from the village of Chaunrikharka, a few miles down the valley. He was a small stocky man, mild-mannered and quiet-spoken, past the age for very high climbing, but a fast mover and a most willing worker. I lived in the closest association with him for the next three months, and never once had cause for complaint; and later I became his guest at his house. Sonam gathered around him a wild, smiling team of local Sherpas, their long hair braided behind their heads, their cloaks gathered about them purposefully. All the Nepalese porters had been paid off, and were on their way home. These tough Sherpas (and their wives) would therefore carry my baggage up the glacier to the foot of the mountain. Hunt had insisted that I must not depend on him for food and supplies; so I had to allow not only for my bags, but also for stacks of firewood which must be brought up from the tree line to the top of the glacier. My platoon also included six eager and athletic men, bright-eyed and supple, who had agreed to be my runners. I warned them that if the route to Katmandu proved unsatisfactory, they might have to travel through the Terai jungle to India. They demurred at this, complaining of robbers and wild animals and malaria. I gave them each a packet of anti-malarial tablets and an advance of pay, and they thereupon agreed, on condition that I did not send them that way unless I really had to. I never did. It was a splendid company, my band of Sherpas, honest and faithful always.

  *

  Charles Evans and Alfred Gregory were leaving the next morning for the mountain, and they suggested that I come with them. To be honest, I had rather looked forward to a few lazy days among the meadows. While I had always admired Mallory’s famous reason for wanting to climb Everest, I was convinced that it would still be there next week; but I was ashamed to admit it, and accepted their invitation. We left early next morning, strolling through the delicious woods of Thyangboche among the lovely fresh smells of morning. The grassy path was flecked with blue primula; I picked one or two to send home to my wife. Now and then odd gurgles from the wood told of the presence of some crouching bird, and sometimes we caught glimpses of deer. Unlike the valley porters, my Sherpas moved at least as fast as I did. My gear was now reduced to essentials: a typewriter, a camp bed; a radio receiver; a walkie-talkie, with an aerial and tripod; my two pantechnicons of treasure; some books; lots of paper and carbon; a few cheap items of mountain equipment; and a couple of sleeping-bags. I wore my corduroy trousers throughout the expedition, and on my head I placed a soft felt hat, its shiny lining ripped out of it, which I had bought for a few rupees in Delhi. The day was fine, the climate delightful, and we walked through the woodlands merrily.

  It was about twenty miles from Thyangboche to the foot of Everest, and the first part of this journey lay through green country, the trees gradually thinning, the grass gradually fading, the life withering, as the cold Khumbu Glacier was approached. Not far from Thyangboche there was a collection of small buildings, perched on top of a hillock, with the track running beside them. A few sheep were grazing there, and an old bald and toothless crone, wearing the semblance of a monastic habit, exchanged a few unsmiling words with us as we passed. This was a Buddhist convent, said our Sherpas, inhabited, like the monastery, exclusively by persons of unfathomable purity and spiritual awareness. Half a mile farther on there was another settlement, this one swarming with gay Sherpa folk and their children, and brimming with gaiety. What was this, then? I asked the Sherpas. Oh, that was another place, inhabited by those monks and nuns whose purity had been plumbed after all.

  Soon the t
rack left the hill, crossed a stream by a stout Tibetan bridge and petered into a wide and boggy green valley, overlooked by the savage peaks of Taweche and Ama Dablam. There were a few yak herds’ shelters, small square structures with enclosures for the animals; and here and there the valley was dotted with the statuesque figures of the yaks, who seemed to enjoy standing all alone in the wilderness gazing into eternity. I was invited to buy a yak, load it with all my equipment, drive it up the glacier to 18,000 feet, and then eat it; but they looked such gentle and long-suffering beasts, at once so tough and so cuddly, that I could not bring myself to do it. Instead, Sonam acquired some strips of yak meat; and that night, as we sheltered in one of the huts, he cooked it and embedded it in a huge mound of mashed potatoes, garnished with a rare vegetable called a Thyangboche onion. It was excellent; and since I had brought with me several tins of malted milk, the day closed on a note of exiled domesticity, and one almost expected to see the Sherpas pinning their hair up or putting out the cat.

  Next day we moved on to the glacier. It has been described a score of times since then, but in memory it is still a cold and disturbing place. A great mound of moraine rubble marked its course, and over this uncomfortable ground you had to jump and slither and slide your way, a tiring progression. Dotted over the landscape, and growing higher and thicker as you climbed, were pinnacles and castles of ice, standing erect from the ground; sometimes alone, like fingers of warning, sometimes in shoals or grottoes, so that you could wander among them as you would pick your way through the roots of a banyan tree. It was a grotesque and dispiriting place, made more disagreeable by the altitude. We were now at about 15,000 feet, an uncomfortable height for a newcomer. I found myself more and more breathless as we advanced, so that doing up a shoe-lace would puff me, and more and more reluctant to keep moving. The great mountains were so close to us now, on every side, that it was difficult to get pleasure from their beauty of form; and altogether the prospect was a bleak one.