by Jan Morris
*
The Sherpas, nevertheless, led a hard, exacting life. Their homeland was harsh and sparse, so unfriendly that they must move their yak-herds from pasture to pasture through the seasons. Sometimes they grazed them at 14,000 feet, at the beginning of a glacier; often they led them in convoy, carrying merchandise from India, over the 19,000-foot pass of the Nangpa La. Though many Sherpas lived in Darjeeling, in those days their own country had been little affected by western influences. There were no wheels in Sola Khumbu, except prayer wheels; no telephones, of course, or printing presses; no roads; no doctors; only one or two dark secluded shops, selling the bleakest of little cheap trinkets. Theirs was a shuttered and anachronistic existence, tucked away in their beautiful inaccessible land.
I suppose it was this seclusion that led them to their worst excesses of boisterous bawdy when a foreigner appeared. No doubt to some deep-hidden cell of the Sherpa mind his arrival signalled a warning of alien danger, and set the Sherpa organism a-prancing with practical jokes. But indeed the very shape of the Sherpa seemed designed for horseplay. His dress was functional but wonderfully quaint, and his body was made for laughter. The Sherpa’s face was round and brown (about as brown as a sunburnt Neapolitan’s), creased and wrinkled with fun, with slanting Mongolian eyes and high cheek bones, the whole reminiscent of a slightly Oriental Toby jug. His stocky body was tough and agile, and extremely dirty. He wore a sort of shirt surmounted by a cloak. On his head was often a tall conical hat, gold brocade for the top of it, fur for the bottom, and on his feet were high embroidered boots, colourful with flowers and ornamental designs. What a sight he was as he came roaring down a mountain path, fit and supple as a goat, his face wreathed in welcoming smiles, drunk as a king from chang, the very embodiment of good fellowship and broad humour! Falstaff would have liked the Sherpas.
But oh! when the evening drew on, how the old Sherpa women screamed to each other through the dusk, like screech-owls in the woods! When they were young the Sherpanis were fragile and touching. Dressed in their gay aprons and Dutch bonnets, with flowered boots peeping through their long skirts, they stood on the outskirts of the throng, smiling faintly, their babies carried in boxes on their backs and totally smothered with blankets. They looked like fresh young sprites, from Alpine meadows. But middle-age fell upon the Sherpanis like thunder. Their faces soon became haggard and drawn, their voices inexpressibly awful. Swiftly their movements lost their grace, and their complexions their fresh mountain bloom. They would ogle you still, if you inadvertently allowed your eyes to appear above the rim of the chang bowl, and they were always ready with a chaff or a quip, which, hurled across the floor to an acquaintance on the other side of the room, whipped past you like a meteor. They never lost their brazen confidence, however advanced their state of decomposition; for the Sherpa men always treated them as equals, and they played an important or even predominant part in the affairs of the community. So who would not be a Sherpani? Beautiful in youth; desired in womanhood; a real scream in middle-age; respected and consulted until the final throes of dotage. Theirs was a triumph of enlightened feminism.
Almost every day, as I travelled through their country, the Sherpas annoyed me again with their irritating intrusiveness. Privacy was an abstract totally beyond their conception, and anyone might walk freely into anyone else’s house. Nobody stole anything very much; everyone knew everyone else. It did not in the least surprise me, listening on the radio one day to Dennis Brain playing a Mozart horn concerto, to find a whole covey of hillmen bursting through the tent flap to hear him too. Nor was I much put out, returning once to camp at Thyangboche, to find one of the oldest, dirtiest and merriest of the lamas trying on my spectacles; he did not take them off when I approached, but looked at me for a moment, trying to get my blurred image into focus, and then sat down with a heavy bump on my sleeping-bag, convulsed with laughter. If he thought I looked funny, he should have seen himself.
But au fond, beneath it all, they were the most lovable and loyal of friends. For every moment of annoyance I had, the Sherpas gave me a hundred moments of pleasure. When the old harridan had done her screeching, she would lift her sixty-pound burden without a murmur and stride off through a blizzard on to a glacier. At any time of day or night your Sherpa would bestir himself to cook your meal, heat your water, carry your pack, climb your mountain. He asked no more than a reasonable fee, and perhaps any old pieces of equipment you had finished with; in return he would do far more than his duties required, giving you always splendid service and good company, and caring tenderly for your health. I spent some days with Sonam at his house in Chaunrikharka, recovering from a bout of illness; sleeping in a temple-room, in the company of eight hundred figures of the Buddha; visited throughout the day by swarms of curious well-wishers; fed with tough roast chicken and rakhsi; and treated always with great kindness and courtesy. Before long, I am afraid, the Sherpa as we knew him in 1953 will be a figure of the past, obliterated by fame, fortune and foreign innovations; and I am glad to have caught a glimpse of him first.
Two moments in particular I cherish as characteristic of the Sherpa people at their best, away from the harsh hilarities of the valley. The first occurred at Base Camp one night, when I was sitting with Sonam and two other Sherpas by the entrance to my tent. It was a lovely clear evening, with the mass of the icefall looming like a phosphorescent cliff above us. We had been talking of the old days of Everest, the days of the old heroes – Mallory, Norton, Tilman, Shipton – and I had brought out from my bag W. H. Murray’s book on the history of the mountain. Flicking through its pages, I came across a picture of the old Abbot of Rongbuk Monastery, on the Tibetan approaches to Everest, in his lifetime one of the most revered figures of Sherpa Buddhism, and a man of great piety and kindliness.
‘Look there!’ I said to Sonam. ‘There’s a picture of the Abbot of Rongbuk. Do you remember him?’
Sonam did not answer me, but took the book and looked fixedly at the page, gradually turning it, in a rotatory motion, from the upside-down to the correct position. At last he had it straight, and an expression of great seriousness and respect crossed his face. Putting down the mug he held in his other hand, he looked long and hard at the photograph, and then, very slowly, bent his head and touched the image of the Abbot with his forehead. Slowly and in silence he passed the book to his companions, as an acolyte might pass the chalice, and in silence they made obeisance to it. The last man looked at it gravely for a few seconds after his gesture of salutation, shifting it slightly in front of his eyes as if that enabled him to see it clearer. Then suddenly he snapped the book shut and handed it back to me. The spell was broken; somebody stirred the fire; ‘More cocoa, sahib?’ Sonam inquired.
The second moment occurred one morning when I was travelling alone between Namche Bazar and Thyangboche, after a brief sortie from the glacier. The track wound its way around the hillsides like a path on a Somerset moor, in pleasant heathland country. I was walking fast, for I was in a hurry to get back to Base Camp, and presently I saw far ahead of me another solitary figure, moving in the same direction. It was a robust Sherpa woman, wearing long aprons and a high embroidered hat. Despite her hampering skirts she, too, was making good time, striding healthily along the path, unimpeded by shopping bags or umbrellas; but gradually I overhauled her until, in a narrow bend of the track, I was able to overtake her.
She had given no sign that she knew of my presence, never turning round or looking over her shoulder, just ploughing steadily on like a colourful battleship. As I passed her, however, her left hand suddenly shot into mine; for a moment we touched; we neither of us spoke, and I was too surprised to stop; but I felt some small hard object pass from her hand into mine.
I looked down to see what it was, passed so strangely from traveller to traveller, and found it was a small brown nut. When I turned around to thank her for it, she grinned and nodded and waved me on; so I pushed ahead up the hill, cracking its shell between my teeth.
8
Practice
By the middle of May my sturdy runners were doing the journey back to Katmandu in astonishingly good time, urged on by a rate of pay that must have seemed to them quite Rockefellian, and which, I am ashamed to say, is alleged to have forced up prices in general throughout the Sherpa country. Their basic fee for the run to Katmandu (180 miles of difficult country, in the heat of summer) was about £10. This rate, I found, did not stimulate them to any notable degree of speed; it was what they earned for doing the journey at all. Accordingly I instituted a sliding scale, and this is what upset the Sherpa economic balance, almost forcing the Tibetan sang off the gold standard. If the runner took eight days or more for the journey he was paid his £10, no more; if he did it in seven days, he earned £15; and if he only took six days, he earned the fabulous sum of £20. I did not myself consider this amount excessive, for it was a tremendous feat of endurance and strength to run the distance so swiftly, and nearly always my dispatches were delivered to ‘The Lines’ safely and promptly. Moreover, most of the runners insisted on taking a companion, for company and safety, so part of the money presumably had to go to him. Still, over the weeks the expenses certainly mounted up, and there were some raised eyebrows in London when I added to my account the charge for a yak I had slaughtered for its meat. More brazen demands have been made to newspapers, though; during the Abyssinian War the Christian Science Monitor was presented by its correspondent in Ethiopia with a bill for two slaves.
The runners were certainly pleased with their earnings; but I am sure they also ran so swiftly from a sense of loyalty. Two of them, travelling alone, actually did the journey in five days, an astounding achievement: an average of nearly 35 miles a day, including the crossing of three mountain ranges more than 9,000 feet high, and a gradual diminution in altitude from 18,000 to 4,000 feet.
Sometimes, returning from their journeys, these rugged messengers would bring me small presents, generally stunted hen’s eggs wrapped in leaves. One man, scornful of the local rakhsi, brought me supplies from Meksin, where the brew was especially potent, drinking a good deal of it on the way home, but generally able to produce a cupful or two in the bottom of his bottle when he arrived back at camp. They were a strange, attractive company. Their faces were gnarled and smiling, and they moved through the ice pinnacles like characters from a fairy tale. I used to like to watch them setting off from Base at the start of a journey. Off they would go from my tent, two odd figures in high hats, voluminous cloaks, pigtails and woollen boots, jumping agilely over the boulders and across the scree. Men of an inferior breed would have stopped around the corner for a smoke; but I knew that these people would keep moving steadily through the hills until their task was done, sleeping in caves, houses or the shade of trees during the midday heat, travelling silently through the night. There they would go down the glacier; and on the last ridge beyond the camp they would pause for a moment, turn, wave me a farewell, pat their chests to show that the dispatches were safely immured inside their cloaks, and then lope out of sight down the moraine: two unlikely mountain men, travelling to Katmandu with the news from Everest.
They were often stopped and questioned on the way, and I was later given a pleasant description of a well-known British correspondent who had lured one of these wild figures into the bar of the Nepal Hotel, and was vainly trying (with the help of a whisky or two) to extract some information from him: like interrogating an unwilling ant-eater. For by now our competitors were active indeed, and by almost every returning runner I had a sombre bulletin from Hutchinson, warning me of the intricate nets laid across the way to catch our news. The monitoring stations were monitoring hard. The Sherpas were being intercepted and pumped. Every scrap of rumour from the mountain was being seized and elaborated upon. My own dispatches were picked up after publication, sent back to Katmandu, and rewritten for use elsewhere. The outgoing cables were filched. Once a mail-bag arrived at Katmandu with its lock broken and its bearer, one of the expedition’s runners, reticent.
But so far as I could tell, nobody was getting the news before The Times, thanks partly to our simple ciphers, which we never used twice; and my dispatches were now appearing in the paper seven or eight days after they left Base Camp. The mechanics of the operation seemed to be efficient; but it was, of course, not the progress of the expedition that chiefly interested our competitors, but the outcome. What worried me more than anything was that Izzard or somebody else might arrive at Namche and firmly appropriate the wireless station there; or worse still, that a correspondent might actually come to Base Camp bringing a portable transmitter, with which, when news of success or failure came down the mountain, he would flash a message to Katmandu in the twinkling of an eye. My Sherpas, sensing that I had this interest in the arrival of strangers in that country, constantly brought me rumours of unknown travellers approaching Sola Khumbu. Two distinguished English clergymen, they told me, had mysteriously arrived at Meksin and had set up camp on the high ridge overlooking the village; try as I could, I could summon up no convincing mental vision of such unexpected visitors, squatting there in their vicarage hats, spreading Gentlemen’s Relish on their chupattis; but anyway they faded, and the runners’ descriptions of them grew more and more confused, and their images grew less and less probable, until one day a Sherpa told me that it was all a mistake, and there had never been two distinguished English clergymen at all. Then there was an American lady, alleged to be looking for rare flowers in the country below Namche; and a sinister party of strangers rumoured to be approaching the Nangpa La from Tibet; and a perpetual blurred representation of Ralph Izzard, who was always being reported somewhere or other, coming or going, climbing or descending, like some misty figure of allegory; and finally one evening, like a shot from a cannon, the firm announcement that a big party of Indians, including a newspaper gentleman, had that very morning begun its march up the Khumbu Glacier!
*
This was undeniably alarming. The expedition had reached a crucial and exciting phase. A route had almost been established up the brutal face of Lhotse; soon, if all went well, a camp would be established on the South Col, and in ten days or so the first assault would be launched. The thought of this party of marauders advancing inexorably up the glacier made me nervous. What were they like, I asked? What kind of equipment were they carrying? Well, said the Sherpas, there was Mr. Tiwari from the Indian radio station at Namche; and that big Sikh with the black beard, you know the one; and some Indian policemen; and the gentleman from the Press, an Indian too, who had cameras slung all over him, like a saddled yak, ha! ha!; and they had tents and sleeping-bags and boxes, as if they were planning a long stay; oh yes, and one of the policemen had a big box thing on his back, very heavy, rather like your box, sahib, that you listen to the music on, only different; and Mr. Tiwari looked rather tired, they thought, but the Press gentleman was going well.
Through the long hours of those glacial days I waited for the arrival of this cavalcade, and peered anxiously down the moraine for the first glimpse of that ominous box, which could only be, I thought, a radio transmitter – perhaps, indeed, the Indian transmitter itself, upheaved for the occasion, bicycle and all. How ignominious a conclusion I foresaw for my adventure, with The Times hopelessly beaten on its own story! As the days passed, and there was no sign of them all, I instructed each of my runners to put it about, further down the valley, that if any radio transmitter appeared at Base Camp it would inevitably be destroyed with an ice-axe by that ruthless correspondent sahib up there; and I threatened them all with instant decapitation if they told anyone of events on the mountain. Nevertheless, the ferocious image of myself thus propagated did not prevent the arrival of the Indians; for one cold afternoon I saw a few humped, weary, dejected figures approaching the camp, with many a breathless halt and heaved sigh (how well I remembered mine!) and many an anxious searching for signs of hospitality. The competition had arrived.
Of this unwelcome party, much the freshest and most cheerful
was the correspondent, a likeable Bengali who had been engaged by a London paper to undertake this adventure. Mr. Tiwari lowered himself on to a packing-case with heavy gloom; he was feeling the altitude badly, and I stuffed him hastily with aspirins and tea. The big Sikh, in his fur-lined jacket, was tired but seemed to be enjoying himself; though he was stationed at Namche he had never penetrated to such harsh mountain places before. Two other Indians, they said, had fallen behind on the glacier and would be arriving later. (Oho! said I to myself. The men with the transmitter!).
They had a number of Sherpa porters with them, and I was afraid that if these men came into close contact with the few expedition Sherpas then at Base Camp, they might well obtain some information from them. So with an unpardonable assumption of authority, as if I were Lord of the Glacier by some antique but ill-defined writ, I ordered them to set up their camp as far away as possible from mine; and our Sherpas were commanded not to talk to theirs. I do not normally behave in this autocratic way, except at the breakfast table; but I was given a certain spurious position of superiority by our respective degrees of fitness. The Indians, poor things, were naturally exhausted from the altitude, even the policemen, who lived all the year round at 9,000 feet; but by now I was at the very peak of my physical form, all surplus weight discarded, my muscles trim, my wind excellent, my brain (at 18,000 feet, anyway) relatively clear. So I issued my brazen directives without much fear of contradiction; and sure enough, they were obeyed. Mr. Tiwari soon withdrew into his tent anyway, only anxious to get some sleep; so did the big Sikh; and the correspondent and I settled down for a most agreeable evening over the rakhsi.
However, as the night came on it occurred to us to wonder what had become of the other Indians, who ought surely to have found their way up the glacier by now. It would soon be dark, and the moraine would then be dangerous, and the men, who had no tents or sleeping-bags, would soon begin to feel the cold. I thought we ought to look for them; so summoning a few of our Sherpas I set off down the glacier. The moon was up, and lit the ice pinnacles with a ghostly shine. The air was deathly still and silent, and our feet crackled on thin ice or stumped and slithered over the boulders. One of my Sherpas had brought a primitive horn with him, and from time to time as we walked he would blow a thin blast upon it, which echoed, silvery and haunting, up and down the glacier, rebounding between the mountains. We shouted, too, and our voices swept away down to the south, into the valleys; and we shone our torches into the gullies, so that from a distance the glacier must have seemed alive with spirits. At last we found them, two or three miles from camp, already huddled together on the scree under their overcoats, like big woolly animals hibernating in a hole.