Coronation Everest

by Jan Morris

  As they rose creaking to greet us I looked hastily at their baggage, piled beside them in the gloom. Thus I reaped the reward of virtue. No radio was there, and the only box I could see was a large metal tin, obviously intended to contain onions and ham sandwiches on some forgotten foray of Skinner’s Horse. We wandered slowly back to camp, and found our two companies of Sherpas dutifully maintaining their segregation.

  The Indians left next morning. If they had planned to make a long stay at Base Camp, they had changed their minds. Mr. Tiwari did not look at all well, and was probably anxious to get back to his duties. The correspondent seemed unaccountably reluctant to stay any longer, but asked if I would show him a place from which he could photograph the icefall. I took him to the top of a neighbouring hillock, and from there we looked together up the immense white cascade of the ice. He produced a telephoto lens and took some photographs. I let my eye wander farther, to the tip of Lhotse, just protruding above the icefall, and wondered how the climbers were faring up there, whether the Lhotse Face had defeated them, or whether there was now a camp on the South Col itself, 26,000 feet above sea-level.

  That night I had news from the Western Cwm. Each evening I climbed to my vantage-point on the moraine to talk by radio with Hunt. I did not always succeed. Sometimes the atmospherics were too bad. Not all the camps were in communication with each other, because of intervening ridges or buttresses. Sometimes, if batteries were not properly warmed, the transmitters were not powerful enough. Sometimes one could hear a faint thin voice out of the void in snatches and jerks, alternating with long silences or horrible twitching noises. Sometimes you could hear them, but they could not hear you, the most maddening situation of all. That evening, though, contact was established, and I heard that the Lhotse Face operation was not going well. The slope was proving dreadfully difficult, and the climbers were having trouble in preparing any kind of route. Each morning they would cut their laborious steps and fix their ropes; each afternoon the snow would fall mercilessly and obliterate their efforts. For the moment the whole expedition was marking time; until the South Col was reached and stocked with supplies, there could be no thought of an assault on the summit. There was a possibility of complete failure.

  ‘Come on up,’ said the voice, ‘there’s plenty of room at Camp IV and you can see for yourself. And if you’re coming, James, you might bring me a spare length of wireless aerial, and a few bars of chocolate, and The Times if you’ve got any new ones, and any mail of course – oh, and in the wireless box you’ll find one of those large-size interlock spanners, thanks very much. Good night!’

  So I did. Michael Ward, after a short visit to base, was going up again; and Stobart was going to take some shots of the icefall; so we travelled together, Ward in the lead, Stobart holding up the climb from time to time to leap on to some adjoining pinnacle and film us in action. He had just recovered from a bout of pneumonia, with a brief convalescence farther down the glacier, but he was a wiry resilient person and an able climber, and pursued his purposes indefatigably. The fiery Ward endured the consequent delays fairly patiently, and trying to ignore the queer goings-on behind him (the cameraman choosing a likely small crevasse to jam his tripod into, the correspondent inextricably tangled up with his crampons and the rope) climbed doggedly upwards.

  It was an unpleasant day. We did not stop at Camp II, but plodded on through thick snow to the head of the icefall. There was little to be seen of any route, for the snow lay thickly over everything, and Ward had to prod and feel his way through the dangerous parts with great caution. He was a slender, lithesome man, and it always gave me pleasure, even in those disagreeable circumstances, to watch him in action; his balance was so sure, and his movements so subtle, that when he turned his grinning and swarthy face upon you it was as if someone had drawn in a moustache upon a masterpiece by Praxiteles. Our progress was slow, and was later immortalized in a sequence in the film The Conquest of Everest, which magnificently illustrated the discomforts of the afternoon. We crawled into Camp III at dusk.

  *

  The weather changed for the better; and when we awoke next morning and climbed to the extreme rim of the icefall I found myself looking into a Western Cwm dazzling with sunlight, blue skies and crisp, clear snow. How different from the first time I stood at this spot, and peered through the blizzard into an angry rock-rimmed maelstrom! Now all was sharp and sparkling. The sky was flawless, but for two streams of snow and vapour blowing away from the tips of Lhotse and Everest. The surrounding mountains were beautifully defined, and the shadows of ridges and boulders were black and abrupt. At first I thought there was something fundamentally cosy about the Western Cwm, tucked away in the side of the mountain there, protected by the vast ramparts of Lhotse and Nuptse, sheltered from the gales that swept over the South Col, guarded at its western end by the gracious sentry of Pumori. If it were not for one or two insuperable disadvantages, I thought, it might have been a nice place for a picnic; there was something distinctly homely about it.

  This feeling wore off. Later there grew upon me the sensation that there was something distorted and unnatural about the Cwm. It was certainly secluded and protected; but it was so terrifyingly big. The wall of Nuptse rose above it like some vast impenetrable barricade, huge beyond description, three miles long and 25,000 feet high. An unimaginable thing! The rest of the Cwm, too, seemed after a time to be swollen and distended, like something in a feverish dream, and it had a certain devilish precision of awfulness, as if Nature had for once forgotten to smudge the line. But there, I was never properly acclimatized during my visits to the Valley of Silence (as the Swiss theatrically named it), and this is the Cwm seen through sick eyes.

  It was a long wearying walk up the floor of the valley. The gradient was not steep, but the altitude was considerable and in the middle of the day the sun was scorching. Tedious crevasses, zig-zagging across the Cwm, intruded irritatingly into the way, so that you had to follow their meandering courses sideways across the valley until you found a place to cross them. Here and there, spattered on the snow, lay rocks and boulders that had come tumbling down from the heights above. It was a dead and empty place.

  Camp IV was placed towards the head of the Cwm, in the shadow of the northern rampart of Everest. After marching up that high desert of snow I thought its little tents looked ominously like a mirage; but it existed all right, and in a sort of tent shanty, its sides open to the air, I found John Hunt, ghastly with glacier cream, wearing a linen hat with its front brim turned up, and busying himself with some intricate technical problem of weights and measures. I sat down beside him, and ate fifteen of the Swiss Ryvita biscuits which had been found buried in the snow up there from the previous year’s expeditions. Washed down with lemonade, they were perfectly delicious.

  Our fortunes had improved a little since our conversation on the radio. For the first time the afternoon snowfalls were not coming as high as the Western Cwm, and work on the Lhotse Face had been rather easier. Behind us that day we could see great banks of cloud rolling up the Khumbu Glacier, about to unload themselves like possessive matrons upon Base Camp and the icefall. But they would not rise as far as the Cwm. For the first time for many days, the weather was smiling shyly at us. Hunt handed me his binoculars and told me to inspect the face of Lhotse, high above us. Far, far away up its crenellated mass, all crinkly with crevasses, seracs, snow ridges and miscellaneous bumps, I could make out two minute figures crawling ant-like against the white. Lowe and the Sherpa Ang Nyima, who had sown his wild oats so blatantly on the march out, were at work on the route. They laboured up there for ten days, an unprecedented time at such an altitude, and later climbed higher still in support of the assaults. Now their pace was slowing, and their effort was running down. The way was established more than half-way up the face, but no route had yet been cut to the South Col. It looked a long, hard, cruel way up there; the figures on the face seemed pitiably small and slow; and the sky looked limitless.

  ‘Keep
your fingers crossed for the weather, James,’ someone said; and so I did, through the succeeding days, crossing my fingers, touching wood, throwing salt over my shoulder, entreating all the divinities supposed to hover about the summit of Everest to keep the snow and the wind away.

  *

  I was always anxious, during these sorties up the mountain, that something terrible might be happening at Base Camp. More competitors might have arrived. My runners might have struck, leaving me without any communications at all. Somebody might have stolen the treasure chests. So having seen something of events on the Lhotse Face, the great obstacle of the moment, I returned to the glacier and resumed my routine. You might suppose that in that bleak camp, far from normal human habitation, living generally alone with Sherpas, the time would begin to drag. In fact the days slid swiftly by. In the early morning, when the sun broke brightly on my tent, suddenly heating the interior as effectively as if a radiator had been turned on directly beneath my sleeping-bag – in those bright early mornings I would listen to the news on the wireless, sometimes from London, generally from India, or lie for a few minutes pleasantly stupefied by the banalities of Radio Ceylon (one of its regular radio programmes began with a song called Beyond the Blue Horizon). Then breakfast, scrambled eggs in the sunshine, with the Sherpas chatting and eating noisily about me; a wash and a cleaning of teeth, in a flat round basin perched precariously on a packing-case, and often slopping over into my tent. If there was a dispatch to write that day, I would do it in the open air, with the typing paper flapping and tearing in the wind, and the carbon getting caught in the typewriter carriage, plied with frequent cups of tea or lemonade, and watched with cock-eyed astonishment by a few chirpy black choughs. (If only they could talk, I used to think, and tell me what they saw up there! Or run my errands for me up the icefall!)

  There followed the briefing of runners; the payment of an advance of fee; the handshakes and expressions of gratitude; the public sealing of envelopes; and that little routine of farewell that I have already described. Soon after the runners left there often arrived a team of Sherpas from the mountain, generally led by a sahib; and with a clattering of crampons and a gay swinging of ice-axes they would stride into camp like heroes. Sometimes they would bring a note with them asking me to send up some wire, or radio spares, Grapenuts, crampons or cocoa. Often they would bring a little scribbled page of information, dashed off by a kindly climber in a moment of leisure.

  Sometimes in the afternoon I would set off alone for an exploration of the upper glacier. A lake of ice stood to the west of Base Camp, guarded by terraces and battlements of ice; but if you squeezed and scrambled through the pinnacles, and scrunched warily across the ice, you could soon find yourself among the great cirque of mountains that blocked the Khumbu valley. It was very symmetrical, this great horse-shoe of peaks, and with the glacier valley itself running down in a wide strip to the south, the whole formation reminded me strongly of those oblong strips of wood, with rounded ends, that used to slide into the tops of children’s pencil boxes. Sometimes I struggled a little way up the side of Pumori, and looked again over the icefall into the Cwm, and gazed long and hard at the Lhotse Face through my binoculars. (A colleague in London had lent them to me, in return for the camera I lent him to take to Greenland the year before.) It all looked unutterably lonely and deserted; and as the days passed, and the weather shone upon us, I thought Everest itself looked ever more scornful and muscular, a wrestler doing a few exhibitionist contortions before weighing in.

  Each evening at seven o’clock came my radio call from the mountain. Snuggling the batteries inside my windproof jacket, I dutifully climbed my hillock in the moraine and switched on. In the early days I laboured up each evening with the radio set; later I deposited it there in a wooden box, like a cache of gold. The voices on the wireless were still wispy and unpredictable and interspersed with crackling, bubbling and squelching noises. Sometimes I could hear half a conversation – somebody at Camp IV, for instance, talking to Camp VI on the Lhotse Face – and it was rather eerie to hear the distorted silence that represented the other half of the dialogue. Often, though, a voice (generally Hillary’s) would boom cheerily over the earphones like a busker at a fair. The expedition’s radio procedure was terrible; but I soon swallowed my remnants of military pedantry on the matter, and sank easily into their slipshod.

  Finally, gobbling down a plate of boiled potatoes, cooked in their skins and deliciously complemented with margarine and onions, I went to bed. The nights were cold and silent, the moon full and the stars crystal clear; and I would generally only be disturbed by the rumble of an avalanche above me or the sudden disconcerting shuddering of the ground, accompanied by a clatter of displaced stones, that proved our little camp to be pitched upon a moving glacier.

  After only a few days this placid routine was sharply interrupted. Everything suddenly happened at once. First there rose another of those misty disturbing rumours about the approach of a stranger. Again there loomed the spectre of a radio transmitter flashing out its messages there at Base Camp, before my eyes, with the high-altitude Sherpas crowding around it like excited children, and pouring into its receptive mechanism all the latest news from Everest. Frantically I repeated my warnings about the ice-axe; hour after hour I dinned into my poor Sherpas the need for secrecy; and before long, just before tea one overcast afternoon, I saw emerging from behind a distant ridge, like a seal rising for air, the head of Peter Jackson, Special Correspondent of Reuters and an old colleague of mine. For a moment I saw myself in a quandary. I was, perhaps, prepared to prevent any total stranger sending wireless messages from base; but Peter Jackson, well, he had never been anything but kind to me … But all was well; when his body followed his head, to be followed in turn by a small and dead-beat company of Sherpas, I saw that he was travelling very light, and certainly carried no radio.

  It was a happy encounter. Jackson was fit and gay, and we ate a large tea together. He had no intention, he said, of spending a night with me, but planned to return that evening to the glacier lake, and thence to Thyangboche. There he had rented a monastery house, from which he sprang like a spider each morning to intercept my runners; but they were honest men, and he the most scrupulous of correspondents, and they told him nothing. What about Izzard? I asked. Any news of him? Again he was reassuring. Izzard had indeed gone down to Calcutta, and had returned to Katmandu; but he showed no signs of coming to Everest again. And Mr. Tiwari at the radio station? ‘He’s always very pleasant,’ said Jackson, ‘but I don’t see much of him.’ I never liked Jackson better than I did during this conversation; and when he did in fact leave the camp, just as he said he would, my heart warmed to the man; I even wished him luck, I remember, as he started boldly down the glacier. I was to see him once again before the end of my adventure.

  Soon I was presented with another agreeable surprise. There was by now a feeling of rising tension and excitement in the air – even the choughs, I thought, hopped about with an extra portentousness. All of us, Sherpas and sahibs, shared this feeling of expectation; and I was not surprised when one Sherpa, detaching himself from a team returning from the Cwm, strode across to me and handed me a crumpled note, a brilliant smile splitting his grubby face. It was from Noyce. He had reached the South Col, breaking through the barrier of Lhotse Face. Camp VIII was established at 26,400 feet. Now the assaults could go in.

  Noyce’s scrawled little note was like a message from another world, if only because it described his feelings at reaching one of the most desolate spots ever visited by man. As I read it in the sunshine I found it all too easy to envisage the scene up there, high above the Cwm, a little bleak wind-swept plateau swept free of snow by the constant raging wind, and open to the elements on either side. Noyce had climbed slowly up the last feet of the Lhotse Face and peered over the ridge on to the Col. There he saw a creepy sight. In the middle of it, among the stones, there was a tent – a ghost tent, or skeleton; a few bare bent poles, a few tattered shre
ds of material flapping in the wind. It was a memory of the Swiss climbers who had been there in 1952, the only other humans to reach this appalling place. The wind howled about him as he looked; and presently, securing the route as they went, he and his companion, the brave Sherpa Annulu, returned to camp on the Lhotse Face. ‘It was a slightly uncanny sensation,’ said Noyce’s note; and somehow the dirty texture of the paper, the rough scribble of the writing, the wind that seemed to impregnate the message itself, made me shudder as I read. But the Sherpa messenger, perhaps noticing I looked a bit queer, shook me by the hand again and laughed aloud, before peeling off his snow-flecked sweater and stumping away to find some food.

  This was fine news, and I sent it off to Katmandu posthaste. Hunt’s plans had been delayed by the brutal conditions on the Lhotse Face, but there was still no sign of the monsoon, which would have put paid to the attempt, the snowfalls were still staying low, and the wind had abated a little. The sky was blue and serene that day, and the summit looked almost inviting. Few of us thought Evans and Bourdillon would reach the top, handicapped as they were by untried oxygen equipment and by the circumstances of their assault: indeed, Hunt had always called it a ‘reconnaissance assault’. But they would be preparing hopefully for their effort now, and in a day or two Hillary and Tenzing would be following them from the Col, with Hunt, Gregory and Lowe to set up the highest camp in the history of mountaineering – Camp IX, at 27,900 feet. It was all very exciting. I blessed Jackson for leaving us so quickly, and blessed Izzard for not coming back, and uttered an invocation in favour of Mr. Tiwari, whose unwitting help, I thought, would very soon be needed.