Coronation Everest

by Jan Morris

  On the glacier we met Hunt, who had come down from Base Camp, at the foot of the mountain. He was a weird sight, for his face was heavily coated with glacier cream, giving him the appearance of an eminent clown, or a performer in some barbaric glacier rite. (He was right to use the cream so lavishly. My own face was already splintered and peeling from the sun, and my lips were painfully swollen.) Hunt is an earnest and a serious man, a leader of genuine inspiration, a superb organizer, and a person of deep religious feeling. I hardly ever met him, throughout the expedition, without feeling flippant, as if I had somehow wandered into the Royal Society reading True Confessions. I had always respected H. W. Tilman’s choice of a Chesterton quotation to preface his account of the 1938 Everest expedition: ‘Still, I think the immense act has something about it human and excusable; and when I endeavour to analyse the reason of this feeling I find it to lie, not in the fact that the thing was big or bold or successful, but in the fact that the thing was perfectly useless to everybody, including the person who did it.’ But one simply could not summon up this feeling in the presence of John Hunt. The thing might only be the climbing of a mountain, but under the touch of his alchemy it became immeasurably important; as if the fate of souls or empires depended upon getting so many pounds of tentage to a height of so many feet. He was authority and responsibility incarnate. Is there a Leader-Figure in the mythology of the psyche? If there is, he was its expression. As a doer of duty he seemed to me invincible; whatever job he was given, the building of a chicken coop or the translation of an Aramaic testament, he would first clothe the task in garments of unapproachable significance, and then proceed to complete it.

  He told us that Hillary’s party had penetrated the icefall, the great barrier of shifting ice-blocks that is the first and most dangerous obstacle of Everest. Hillary and the other New Zealander, George Lowe, were now at a camp farther up the glacier, and we would meet them next day. All seemed to be going well enough. The peak of Everest, now standing clearly above the Nuptse ridge, was grey and free from snow; but this was only because the severe spring winds were still blowing, driving the snow off it and guarding it impenetrably against intruders. There were, it seemed, only two short seasons in the year when Everest might be climbed – during the spells before and after the monsoon in which the mighty winds momentarily relaxed. What would happen, I asked Hunt, if the pre-monsoon assault failed? Would he try again in the autumn? He replied that Everest was reserved for the British during the whole of 1953 and there would certainly be an autumn attempt (after a period of reorganization) if the spring one failed; in England reserve climbers were already prepared for it. After that, it would be the turn of the French, who had permission to come to Everest in 1954. Hunt stayed with us for an hour or two, telling me what had happened already, and then returned up the glacier.

  Our own slower progress, impeded by our columns of laden Sherpas and Sherpanis, was delayed by a change in the weather. The sun had been shining brightly till now, and the temperature was not unkindly; but late in the afternoon it began to snow. The glacier was veiled in misty light, so that the ice pinnacles peered at us suspiciously through the gloom, and the great mountains appeared only momentarily between the clouds. Big snowflakes drifted across our path, wet and cold, and soon the ground was thick with them, and the way all but obscured. Our camp site that night was beside a small lake, mysteriously unfrozen throughout the year, at about 17,000 feet, and by the time we arrived there we were a bedraggled company. The woollen cloaks of the Sherpas were soggy, and the coiled hair of their women clammy. Snow covered the packs upon their backs, and seeped through the bright embroidered wool of their Tibetan boots.

  In such circumstances Lake Camp was a bleak and unwelcoming place. A couple of small tents were pitched above the lake, and from them there emerged to greet us the huge smiling figures of the New Zealanders, eccentrically dressed. Otherwise there was nothing except a few low walls of loose stone, behind which previous travellers had lit their fires. This was far above the line of habitation, and all was hard and lifeless. The snow had developed into a blizzard, driven fiercely across the glacier valley by a vicious wind. It was all very unpleasant.

  The Sherpas, though, took it in their stride. Dumping their loads behind the rocks, they dispersed among crags and boulders; and in a few moments, from unlikely chasms and hidden holes, there came the twinkling of camp fires and the smell of roasting potatoes. The women bustled as energetically as the men, their smiles as broad as ever, their voices just as raucous. When night came I stole out of my tent, huddling my windproof clothes about me, and walked silently about the camp, feeling like Henry V; there the Sherpas lay, bundled in their cloaks, curled up like husky dogs behind heaps of stones or boulders, sleeping peacefully as the snow piled up upon their bodies.

  When we awoke next day the sun was brilliant again, and there was a new hazard to face. The glare of the sun upon fresh snow is dangerous, for the dazzle can temporarily blind a person, and be extremely painful. The sahibs of the party had their sun-glasses and goggles, and so did the climbing Sherpas; but the poor rank-and-file, engaged simply to carry baggage to Base Camp, had no such protection. Already, before the march began, they were feeling the glare, and asking us for glasses. I distributed the spare goggles I had, and the climbers shared out their supplies; but there was nothing like enough for this army of 200 men and women. We improvised. Some of the Sherpas bound odd bits of coloured cellophane around their eyes. Some used pieces of cloth. Some shielded their eyes with newspaper. Some masked themselves with pieces of cardboard, leaving only pinholes for the eyes. Some simply bound their own pigtails around their faces, their eyes peeping through the strands. So, looking distinctly queer, we proceeded a little shakily up the glacier; and before very long a gentle film of cloud obscured some of the dazzle.

  *

  It seemed an eternity up that track, but at last we saw in the extreme distance a gathering of tents. A big pyramid tent in the centre was surrounded by smaller ones, and a little structure of stone had been roofed with canvas sheets to form a kitchen. The tents stood on a moraine hillock in the shadow of the Nuptse spur, so that you could see them from a long way down the valley. As we drew nearer we noticed a small figure in a blue anorak in a gully to the right of it, and heard over the stillness of the ice an occasional snatch of conversation. But we were not there yet. The top of the glacier is thickly littered with ice formations, beautiful and sharp of edge, so that one was always having to make detours, or scramble down into unsuspected depressions. I could see those confounded tents for half an hour before at last I reached the final obstacle, a narrow slippery passage through an ice-block, and after a brisk and self-possessed walk across the moraine collapsed into a tent. It was merely the altitude that had exhausted me. The glacier was not difficult, and in later weeks, when I was better acclimatized, I used to romp up it like a clumsy chamois. But this was the first time, practically direct from Victoria Air Terminal, and I much enjoyed the mug of steaming tea they brought me.

  I would not say that Base Camp, Everest, was a lovely spot. It was too dead and aloof for beauty, rather as if some dread disease had passed this way, killing everything in sight, to be followed by some giant instrument of hygiene; so that the place seemed first to have been effectively murdered, and then sterilized. Directly above the camp was the icefall of Everest, a tangled mass of ice, twisting round to the south to form our Khumbu Glacier. The head of the valley was paved partly with ice lakes and pinnacles, partly with piles of the dull moraine on which the camps had been placed. All around, forming the head of the valley, stood a magnificent cirque of snow peaks; the best of them being Pumori, a serene and handsome mountain, given its name by Mallory.

  High above our heads stood the most romantic of these marvels, the Lho La. This narrow col, between the bulk of Everest and the peak of Lingtren, was the frontier. Beyond it was Tibet. Its lip was lined with a thick overhanging layer of snow, looking as if a footfall might precipitate it in
to the valley: nobody had ever dared to cross it. Bullock reached it from the other side, in 1921, and photographed the then unknown southern side of Everest. (In the same year Mallory peered at this place from another, neighbouring col; marvelled at the mountains of Nepal; and wrote happily in his diary: ‘It is a big world!’ Now nearly all the mysteries have gone, and there is scarcely an unknown country left to peer at.)

  Camping at this place was rather like living among the mountains of the moon. The glacier stretched away to the south like a smear on a lunar map, and the stars seemed closer and clearer, and there was a sense of unreality about the adventure, now that the mountain was, so to speak, in camp with us. When the moon itself came up, jealous of its reputation, it glowed huge and brilliant among the peaks, glinting on all the battlements of ice that complicated the glacier floor. In the morning the sun was generally hot; in the afternoon the snow began to fall; at night the temperature was well below zero. Often there was a rumbling and tearing noise above us, and there on the mountain-side would be a cloud of snow, ice and crumbled rock, marking the progress of an avalanche.

  We were many miles, and several thousand feet, above normally inhabited country; but there were a few indigenous creatures at Base Camp. The famous high-altitude spider, loftiest of insects, certainly lived among the rocks. Choughs flew over us, or pecked their way among the crumbs and potato peel of the camp. Once a flight of storks passed overhead into Tibet (‘Going to fetch salt,’ explained the Sherpas sagely). Scuttling among the boulders of the moraine one could even sometimes catch a glimpse of a tailless Tibetan rat, an endearing brown creature rather like a hamster, with a sniffing nose and whiskers. Otherwise we were all human – the thirteen members of the expedition, the thirty or so high-altitude porters, a few peripatetic wives and children, and my own little band of followers. Odd people looked in from time to time, and there was a regular service of men bringing firewood to replenish the huge pile of sticks and branches that dominated (in its moments of repletion) the entire camp.

  This would be my headquarters, to be identified by the newspaper dateline: ‘Base Camp, Everest.’ I pitched my tent a little apart from the others, for I did not want to seem importunate, and in it I rigged up my radio receiver, with its tall tripod aerial outside. It looked splendidly functional, and I found it handy for listening to Radio Ceylon, the most powerful transmitter in that part of Asia. My books, papers and typewriter were piled about my bed, and underneath it, protruding rather uncomfortably through the canvas, were my containers of money.

  Hunt had said that I must be self-sufficient, and I prepared to eat my own yak-meat in solitary grandeur; but somehow the scheme fell through, and tossing my tins into the expedition’s pool, I took to feeding with them. At night we ate in the big tent, in semi-darkness, helped only by the flickering light of a lamp. In the morning we carried our eggs into the sharp sunshine, to sit on boxes and eat off packing-cases, watched by the tailless rats. These were the early stages of the venture, and almost everyone was then assembled at Base Camp. The first reconnaissance team had penetrated the wilderness of the icefall and the route up it was now being marked, day by day, with small red flags. Next, when the way had been prepared with the necessary ropes, steps and bridges, the sturdy Sherpas would begin taking stores to establish staging camps higher on the mountain.

  Though I had worked at the inventory in Katmandu, it was now brought home to me much more forcibly that climbing Everest was largely a matter of logistics. Scattered around us on the moraine was an extraordinary collection of things, all beautifully crated in boxes stamped with the words: ‘British Mount Everest Expedition, 1953’. There was everything here from a sporting rifle to a pair of shoe-laces, the whole mass overshadowed by the innumerable oxygen cylinders which lay stacked in neat piles in a corner. Success on Everest depended upon getting the right amount of all this stuff at the right time to the right place on the mountain, together with fit and resolute men to use it. On one of my first evenings with the expedition, I mastered this basic truth; for in the shadows of my tent I typed out, for distribution to the climbers, Hunt’s loading tables – an intricate set of figures, dates and weights much more reminiscent, I thought, of Camberley than of Chamonix.

  For the moment these multitudinous supplies were lying in wait, and the climbers were probing and marking the icefall. Next morning I woke to the sound of clattering metal, and looking through the flap of my tent I saw two figures in blue windproofs passing by across the moraine. Michael Ward and George Band were leaving for the icefall. Round their waists were wound their climbing ropes. Goggles were pushed back on their foreheads. Their cheeks were white with glacier cream, above the stubble of their beards; their crampons, not needed until they were in the icefall, were fixed to the tops of their ice-axes, and they clanked as they walked like the armour of knights. Two small squires darted out to shake their hands as they passed by-Sherpas in down clothing, wishing them good luck; and so they clattered away, their voices echoing among the ice pinnacles, until they turned into the labyrinth and were out of sight.

  Soon I would be following them, for I planned to make an early ascent of the icefall; but first I wanted to acquire some more general impression of the shape of the mountain. On the other side of the valley rose Pumori, heavily snow-capped. The lower part of its mass was of bare rock, with the scree of the moraine leading up to it, and it would be easy enough to reach a convenient ledge upon its flank and look across to the mass of Everest. Accordingly Sonam and I set out in the early morning to cross the glacier and climb it. It was a tiring job, for I was still unacclimatized, and the ridge I had chosen as our objective was at about 20,000 feet. The moraine was a bore, for it ran in high ridges intersected by slippery shaly gulches; it took a great deal of effort to cross it and begin the upward climb. By the time we were approaching the ridge, towards midday, I was so breathless that I staggered from boulder to boulder helplessly, bending over each big rock to pant my breath back; but at last we sat there, Sonam and I, and leant back to enjoy the view. We had brought some biscuits and jam with us; and from time to time, spreading a biscuit thickly with the confection, we would reach out a hand for a lump of snow, press it into a convenient block, and enjoy a sort of sickly ice-cream sandwich.

  There it stood, this monstrous mountain; for the first time I could see it as a whole. It seemed to glower at me. Mallory said it was like a prodigious fang excrescent from the jaw of the earth; so sulky and brooding did it look that morning that I thought it must have a toothache. Great mountains surrounded it on every side, but it looked recognizably the greatest (and nastiest) of them all. The rock slabs of its upper slopes were almost free of snow, and only the thinnest plume was driving from its summit; it had a very cold and calculating look about it, as if it were working out the dentist’s bill. We could see almost all the route first followed by the Swiss, and now to be retraced (with minor variations) by the British. First came the awful shattered wilderness of the icefall, a mass of broken, tumbled, tilting, shifting, tottering blocks of ice, intersected by innumerable crevasses, swept by avalanches from the rock walls on either side of it. It looked like a huge indigestible squashed meringue. Beyond it was the valley of the Western Cwm, a cleft cut in the side of the mountain, narrow and overhung, and sunk in an unearthly white silence. The steep mountain wall of Lhotse bounded it, rising as a precipice to the flat plateau of the South Col, at 26,000 feet or more. There the climbers would turn to the north, and make their perilous way up the long final ridge of the mountain. A small bump not far from the top was called the South Summit; after that a precipitous rock ridge led to the summit proper. We could see it all, from the minute tents of Base Camp, far below us, through the successive obstacles of the mountain, to the little empty dome of rock that was the target.

  We could see more; for while the southern side was bathed in sunshine, expectantly, to the north we could see the Tibetan approaches to Everest, suggestively shadowy. This was the route of the old Everesters, from
the glacier of Rongbuk to the North Col, and along wearing snow slopes towards the summit. There were all the landmarks of those old adventures – the first and second steps, the yellow band, North Peak – names familiar to whole generations of climbers and mountain-lovers. An invisible barrier of politics and prejudice shielded those places from us; all the same (it may have been the altitude, or the heat of the sun, or the cold of the snow) I fancied there were spirits watching us still, over the gateway of the Lho La.

  We scrambled down the mountain-side again in the heat of the afternoon, scraping our shins on innumerable rocks, and sometimes slithering uncontrollably down the scree. It was an exhilarating descent. Near the level of the valley floor we suddenly found ourselves standing on the edge of a small tarn, for all the world like some isolated Welsh mountain lake, its water green and unruffled. There was no trace of ice upon its surface, and it stood there demurely, tucked away behind the moraine. Weeks later Tenzing noticed this little lake from high on Everest, and in 1954 members of an Indian expedition trying to climb Pumori set foot upon its banks. They claimed to be the first people ever to reach it, and gave it an Indian name. They were not. Sonam and I were the first, and its name is Lake Elizabeth.

  Down we went, and when next I looked up from the tricky terrain there was the bulk of Everest looming above us. Its summit was hidden by the projecting North Peak, and I could see only the top of Lhotse above the vast frozen morass of the icefall. It looked as if you could lose an army in its secluded corners. For a moment, on my ridge of Pumori, it had occurred to me that if I stood up there on the day of assault, I might see the tiny figures of the victorious climbers high upon the very summit. Now I pondered again upon the gigantic scale of it all, and realized that if ever a pair of climbers reached the top of Everest, only the gods (and those watchful spirits of the Lho La) would be able to see them there.