After Everest

by Paul Little

  Ed says in High in the Thin Cold Air that he was astonished that this group had attempted Ama Dablam—a claim that seems more than a little disingenuous. He knew full well that with time on their hands—and the researchers had everything well under control on the scientific side of things—there is really only one thing fit young mountaineers will do in the vicinity of a magnificent, unclimbed mountain. It would be like putting an ambitious, competitive man in a direct line to the South Pole and telling him to stop halfway there.

  The government had spoken, however. So Ed had to turn around and go back to the low altitude of Kathmandu, where he spent several frustrating days as an unwilling participant in a game of bureaucratic musical chairs. Eventually, on payment of a not particularly extortionate sum, permission to attempt Makalu was given.

  This, after all, was what most of the previous year had been about—preparing a team at high altitude for an attempt without oxygen on the fifth highest mountain in the world. It was a great mountaineering challenge. However, not long into the attempt, Ed showed the first signs of altitude sickness. He decided not to go past 6460 metres. Four days later, with no improvement, he went lower again. There was still no improvement; on the contrary, when he woke up the next morning he was unable to speak properly. Ed had suffered a small stroke.

  Michael Ward assessed him and instructed him to stay below 4570 metres, which effectively meant he was no longer in control of his own mission. Ward took over. Pugh wanted Ed to return as low as Kathmandu, but he was determined to oversee the school building project he had started at Khumjung. He also turned down offers from Peter Mulgrew and Mingma Tsering to stay back with him. Eventually he was well enough to undertake the 15-day walk out of the area.

  So the assault on Makalu continued without Ed. On 17 May a group of Sherpas nearly perished when one fell and the five roped to him fell with him. Only two, including Tsering, were injured, and they were sent back. The others continued as far as 8320 metres before leaving Peter Mulgrew, Tom Nevison and Annullu, a Sherpa, ready for a final attempt.

  Then, heartbreakingly close to the summit, Mulgrew collapsed in great pain, struggling to breathe. He had suffered a pulmonary embolism—a blocked artery—in his right arm. This might have been enough to kill him in his garden in Auckland; at 120 metres from the top of Makalu, the outlook could hardly be bleaker—especially when it became clear that Annullu was also in pain with a cracked rib. Nevertheless the Sherpa went for help, and water, oxygen and a tent reached Mulgrew.

  There was no radio contact between Mulgrew’s group and anyone else, but eventually word got to the others. The attempt on Makalu was now in tatters, with men spread across the mountain at various camps in various states of ill health, injury and exhaustion. Slowly, painfully and against all odds Peter Mulgrew was brought down from Makalu. He was alive, but in appalling shape.

  It would be almost another twenty years before anyone managed to climb Makalu without oxygen.

  Ed was greatly disappointed by the outcome of this expedition—the worst of any he had been involved in, even though, miraculously, no lives were lost. It seems clear that what befell him on the mountain was the direct result of his trip to regain permission for the attempt. After spending so long at a relatively low level, he had not had time to readjust to the higher altitude before the climb began. He continued to believe that if he had been able to stay in charge, the outcome would have been much better—especially for Peter Mulgrew.

  Some good came out of the expedition. Griffith Pugh published the results of the expedition’s research in the British Medical Journal in 1962. His conclusion stated: ‘The party appeared to acclimatize well to 19,000 ft. (5,790 m.), and card-sorting and other psychological tests revealed no evidence of mental impairment. However, all members of the party continued to lose weight, and this makes it doubtful if they could have stayed there indefinitely. Newcomerson Mt. Makalu, after four to six weeks’ acclimatization, were, if anything, fitter and more active than men who had wintered at 19,000 ft. (5,790 m.).’ Another of the physiologists on the trip, Jim Milledge, wrote in High Altitude Medicine and Biology, ‘Many of the findings were not repeated for many years, and none has been refuted.’

  In his own summary of what was learnt about high-altitude existence, Ed noted that any gains achieved by habituation to low levels of oxygen were offset because it was so difficult to exercise in that state; this meant that keeping in climb-ready physical shape proved impossible.

  As had happened on other occasions, Ed’s leadership was called into question in the wake of what happened at Makalu. It’s not easy to lead when you’ve just had a stroke, and there’s no way of knowing whether Ed’s certainty that things would have been different if he had stayed in charge would actually have proved correct.

  The expedition did leave room for some of the flaws in Ed’s style to become apparent. Without his impetuousness he might have stopped after returning from low altitude and reacclimatised; and this would probably have prevented his altitude sickness.

  Peter Mulgrew’s own account of these events, No Place for Men, is a small, witty masterpiece of Himalayan mountaineering literature. It is also an interesting footnote to the literature of drug addiction. In terrible pain, he was prescribed pethidine, a highly addictive opiate. He tried to do without it but the pain in his feet was too great, and only the drug could ease it. ‘Thus began the gradual infiltration of that insidious drug throughout my nervous system,’ he wrote, ‘accompanied by the relentless sapping of my willpower. In the months to come, my dependence on the drug became so great that I was unable to differentiate between pain and the need for pethidine.’ Before long the nurse was having trouble finding a clear space to administer the two-hourly injections.

  Hospital visitors did not include the British ambassador to Nepal, who at this time also served as New Zealand’s diplomatic representative and might have been expected to call. Mulgrew noted that this personage went out of his way to avoid any contact with the expedition or its members. ‘Maybe he had the well-bred Britisher’s horror of wild colonial boys,’ wondered Mulgrew. Or maybe he had the well-bred Britisher’s horror of recalling the embarrassment of the ‘race’ to the South Pole.

  Ed arranged, courtesy of the sponsors, for June Mulgrew to be flown up to be with her husband Peter while he was treated for his injuries. She did not know how badly hurt he was until she arrived, but she took the situation in her stride and set about doing what she could, including learning how to administer the two-hourly injections of pethidine under supervision.

  June added to her medical mien by wearing a white shirt back to front, and was delighted when she heard herself referred to as the Memsahib Doctor. Her husband reported that her first shot practically ‘pinned my arm to my chest’. She was accommodated in a guesthouse outside the window of Mulgrew’s room, and he drew comfort from the fact that they could talk to each other from their beds on still nights.

  It was decided to return Mulgrew to hospital in Auckland. Ed and June were on the flight with him; and the patient noted with some chagrin that his companions were treated to champagne that was forbidden to him. The Auckland Star was there to capture an incongruously jolly photo of the three of them sitting in the back of an ambulance on arrival.

  Not long after his return, Mulgrew agreed to the amputation of both his legs below the knee. June was on hand when he woke from the operation; he then received a huge dose of morphine and lapsed into unconsciousness, gripping one of her fingers so tightly she could not free it, but had to wait until he awoke. Subsequently, pethidine would be the addictive painkiller administered. There followed a long recuperative period.

  Ed gave Mulgrew a copy of Reach for the Sky, the biography of Douglas Bader, the former World War II air ace and double amputee. Mulgrew liked the gesture, though he didn’t warm to the subject.

  When the hospital told him it had been slowly reducing his dose of pethidine, he decided to go cold turkey. On hearing that decision the doctors sent h
im home, believing the more congenial surroundings would aid the process. He went through three days of terrible withdrawal symptoms and many more weeks of pain before finally learning to walk on artificial legs. He would go on to achieve success in business. June showed remarkable courage and patience all through Peter’s recovery. It would not be the last time her devotion would help a man back to normal life.

  For Ed, the era of the great swashbuckling adventure was almost over. Instead, he was about to embark on a very different kind of adventure, one that he would regard as his greatest achievement.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE BEST ADVENTURE

  Climbing a forbidding mountain and travelling halfway across a frozen wasteland are impressive achievements; but as Ed would have realised by now, they don’t really change anything except the names in record books. They have no purpose. They are as much aesthetic activities as practical ones. Once you’ve been up a mountain, all that’s left to do is go down again.

  Building a school, however, changes lives.

  Ed was brought up not just to do, but to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Percy and Gertrude had planted the seeds of social conscience, and it was a big part of his character. ‘A lot of it was a background of experience from my parents, who were very respectable,’ Ed explained to the BBC in 1999. ‘And my father in particular had strong feelings about Westerners supporting third-world countries. I suppose I absorbed this. When I became very friendly with the Sherpas and saw what they lacked—no schools and no medical facilities—I thought I should do something about it and I did.’

  This is why he would always say the achievement of which he was proudest was the work he did with the Himalayan Trust. He would be directly involved from the time of its first project to his death, and the Trust itself continues to carry out an ambitious aid program to this day. It’s not the wildest conjecture to believe that Percy would have been much more impressed by the work Ed did here than any number of mountains climbed.

  The Trust took shape over a number of years. The first project was a school at Khumjung, an idea that had come up in a casual conversation around a fire with a group of locals. Ed asked if there was anything he could do for the people of the region.

  ‘Burra sahib, our children have eyes but they are blind, therefore we request you to help with the school,’ answered Sirdar Sherpa Urkien. Work on the school went on during much of the HSME, with Ed even managing to get funding for it from the expedition sponsor.

  The fame that came from Everest was not an end in itself, but it could be a means to an end. Ed saw early on that it could open many doors. Everyone wanted to meet the Hero of Everest. And once he got in front of them, it seemed everyone wanted to give the hero money to help people in a remote, almost unknown part of the world. But Ed only pushed this up to a point.

  Sarah Hillary suggests it may have contributed to the ease with which he shouldered the burden of fame. ‘The fact is he had to be famous,’ says Sarah. ‘He had to have a profile to get the funding, so he realised that that was a necessary part.’

  Peter Hillary, though, isn’t convinced the fame was necessary. ‘He did what he did because he wanted to do it,’ says Peter. ‘Everest gave him fame, but for him Everest moved right into the background fairly early on. You don’t need to be Neil Armstrong or Ed Hillary to get a profile. [Success] comes down to your energy and drive. If he had been the second person to climb Everest, in which case no one would have known who he was, I am not sure he wouldn’t have built the schools and hospitals, and I am not altogether sure he wouldn’t have become famous for it.’

  Peter credits Percy, as much as Everest, for the direction Ed’s life took. ‘Because of that family background—they were a deep, philosophical family, searching for things, for a good way of living, and I think the Himalayan Trust was his way of fulfilling that childhood experience. “What is the right way to live? Well I am going to build schools and hospitals in Nepal.” ’

  Another man who segued from climbing mountains to changing lives—particularly those of young people, through the likes of the Sir Edmund Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre, which he launched in 1972—was Graeme Dingle; he believes Ed treated aid work like climbing a mountain.

  ‘I am not sure you could say Ed was generous, actually,’ says Dingle. ‘It would be better to say he was a humanitarian and he was driven no matter what he did. So you go out to build a school for the Sherpas; you are not going to stop at the first road block you get to. You either go around it or you go through it.’

  Ed himself told Mark Sainsbury that if he hadn’t climbed Everest he would probably have spent his life as a beekeeper.

  As with many other aspects of his life, when Ed was doing something that no one had done before, he made it up as he went along. That included learning how to capitalise on the value of his name. He was pushy on a mountain, and yet anything but pushy in other ways, as the folks at World Book Encyclopedia had noted.

  ‘The thing that surprised me at the beginning was the lack of sophistication in the humanitarian stuff,’ says Dingle. ‘At one level there was huge intelligence, but you know with a name like [Hillary] you would go to a construction company and say, “Give us a module of a school.” But he didn’t do it like that. He would go and say to the Sherpas, “We will knock down a few houses, so we can get a supply of stones, cut down some forests so we can get some trees and we’ll get roofing from New Zealand and carry it in.” It didn’t look particularly sophisticated but it was good because it got the Sherpas contributing equally.’

  Dingle experienced the full force of Ed’s reluctance to capitalise on his name—or let it be used in any context unless absolutely necessary—while he was helping the aid effort in the Solukhumbu. When the building of a hospital at Khunde was completed in 1966, Ed asked Dingle, who was a competent artist, to paint a sign for the front of the hospital. The eager young adventurer asked the hospital doctor what he should put on the sign.

  ‘He said “The Hillary Khunde Hospital”,’ relates Dingle. ‘So I had to make the board, plane it down and paint the sign—“Hillary Khunde Hospital”. Then I went off to do a trek, and when I came back the sign had been torn down and this really rough thing left in its place. I was really pissed off, so I asked, “What’s happened to my sign?” Ed had ripped it down because he didn’t want his name associated with anything to do with the hospital. It was that modest side to him, and politically it was better for him that it wasn’t up there. So there were murky things like that, that sort of disturbed him about me for years pretty much always throughout our relationship.’

  Dingle had worshipped Ed as a young man, and became a lifetime friend after a rough start. ‘I’d been selected to go to Antarctica and it was potentially a great exploratory journey,’ says Dingle. ‘There was no reason to choose me except I was really enthusiastic. Before the trip, I fell off a mountain and smashed myself up, but I still kept my place and went on the training week at Waiouru.

  ‘I had with me one of the best Italian mountaineers, Carlo Mauri. He was incredibly sophisticated, confident and determined to get to Antarctica. One day we were milling about when suddenly Peter Mulgrew and Mike Gill and Ed Hillary appeared outside. [Ed was preparing to go on a different expedition.] Half of the guys just stood in awe of these three demigods.

  ‘Carlo stuck his hands in the small of my back and said, “Go ask Sir Ed Hillary if I can go with him.” This nineteen, twenty-year-old kid limping up to him with my smashed arm strapped to my chest. Ed was actually incredibly rude. He just went, “NO”. It was absolutely brutal. I mean, I started off quite gently: “Ed, I want to introduce you to Carlo” and he said, “NO” and he looked absolutely blank. I thought, this guy is a really well-known mountaineer. Why wouldn’t he know him? I told Ed he’d climbed a mountain with Walter Bonatti. When I mentioned Walter Bonatti, there was some recognition. I said, “He wants to come to Antarctica with you.” He just went “NO”. There was nothing else to talk about.

>   ‘I thought he was a rude prick at the time. I thought that was a huge disappointment. But when I started to become quite well known and was the first climber of all the European north faces in one season, Ed wrote to me and said, “Do you want to come to the Himalayas with me?”

  ‘I said, “Yes, absolutely,” so as soon as I met him I fell in love with him.’

  From the start Ed was determined to give the Sherpas what they wanted—not what a Western philanthropist might decide they needed. At the same time, he wanted to make sure there was commonsense to it all, and that any initiatives would not do harm in the long term.

  ‘He would never say, “Well if I was building this thing I would put a chimney on it,” ’ says Dingle. ‘He would say, “How would you like it made?” They might say, “Well we don’t like chimneys on buildings because that makes them cold,” so Ed would say, “Let’s make a building that’s a compromise between what will work and what will work in your country.” ’

  In the case of the school, for instance, he had tried to ensure that it would not become a factory turning out young people who no longer wanted to live in and contribute to their own area but would be seduced by the brighter lights of the big city.

  ‘He didn’t outright give money,’ says Sarah. ‘He would always expect something from the community as well, which seemed successful for the Himalayan Trust. If the community wanted it, they would have to provide the materials for the labour so it wasn’t just handing over the money, which is a good concept and he actually did it with us as well, unfortunately.’ Ed worked hard to ensure his own children didn’t take money or possessions for granted: they had to work for something if they wanted it.

  Much later he took a stand that was unpopular with many locals when he opposed the building of a luxury hotel that would have served as gateway accommodation to Everest. Ed was not against encouraging visitors as such, but this particular plan would have put an airport through Khumjung village, wiping out potato fields and houses. The locals were tempted by a generous offer and it took Ed no small effort to persuade them of the dangers the plan held in the long term. An alternative site was found.