by Rosie Thomas
I first saw Phil Bowen when he appeared to give the pre-trek briefing in the Kathmandu hotel. His pale straw-blonde hair was cut in a long thick wedge that he kept raking back from his forehead as he talked. One of the women murmured beside me, 'At least he's got some hair.' If the Marines' bristles were all lopped off and laid end to end they wouldn't have added up to an equivalent length, let alone blended to make such a glamorous gilded pallor.
After the briefing we all queued up with our individual questions and anxieties. I'd brought the wrong sort of jacket, a steamy waterproof one instead of breathable Gore-Tex. Phil prodded it.
'Don't worry. If it rains and you feel too much like boil-in-the-bag rice, you can wear mine.'
'Won't you need it yourself?'
'Nah.'
Obviously not because you're so hard, I thought uncharitably.
There was a very early morning flight up to the mountain airstrip at Lukla. The men all turned out for breakfast dressed in their mountain boots and combat pants and fleece jackets, with jingling crampons tied to their backpacks. One of them had an ice-axe as well. I wanted to sit down and put my head between my knees.
At the airport I felt even worse. The bleary departure area was packed with Japanese waiting to take sightseeing flights around Everest, but we were shepherded out on to the tarmac outside the building and waved towards a helicopter. I am a bad flier even with some avuncular Captain Tony Hetherington at the controls of a British Airways 747 bound for somewhere manageable like New York or Boston, and now I was going to have to step aboard this contraption. Asian Airlines' flight to Lukla was a decommissioned Russian Army machine, oil-slick grey in colour, with both side panels hanging open to reveal a greasy mess of machinery. Several unshaven men in cheap leather jackets were hanging around beside it, gazing into the cogwheels and muttering disconsolately in Russian. Inside the cabin were two rows of hard seats bolted to each side of the fuselage with the space between heaped high with camping equipment and our personal baggage, all of it anchored under netting. One of the leather jackets climbed in after us and handed around the in-flight catering and entertainment packages – a boiled sweet and two cottonwool balls. Two more leather jackets followed and casually yanked the door shut. These were not airport hustlers or blackmarket currency dealers – they were the pilots.
The engines started, more or less, after a couple of splutters. No emergency drill, no cosy reassurances about oxygen masks and removing high heels. We lifted and tilted, and the runway slanted abruptly away beneath us. Sharp little needles of draught lanced in through the holes in the fuselage. I rammed the cottonwool knobs into my ears and promised myself that if I could survive this, if I could just get my feet on the ground again without a dented grey metal coffin of ex-Russian army helicopter wrapped around me, I'd walk uphill until my legs dropped off and sing hymns of praise for the privilege. Far beneath us there were steep terraces of green and sepia farmland, and jagged snow-covered peaks ahead piercing the thin layers of cloud. I imagined how the rotors would stop, and how we would plummet downwards to torpedo into a ledge where stringy beans were effortfully growing.
An hour later, we landed at Lukla. An hour after that, having acquired a train of sherpas and porters and a dozen hair-skirted yaks, we were walking. I was duly grateful for the exoneration.
The path led beside the milk-white frothing water of the Dudh Khosi river, zigzagging over plank and rope bridges and climbing steadily. It was a two-day journey up to Namche Bazaar, the ancient Sherpa capital; at the close of the first day I spent my first-ever night under canvas and slept well and warmly swathed in the Rebecca Stephens bag. The pace of walking was bearable, almost easy. One or two people in the group had already succumbed to stomach bugs. Ang the sirdar led from the front and Phil accompanied the walking wounded at the back. At the after-dinner briefings around the mess-tent table he repeatedly warned us about the dangers of altitude beyond Namche. We must drink at least four litres of fluid every day, never any alcohol, and walk slowly and steadily, not in fast showy bursts. Any uncomfortable symptoms were to be reported to him immediately. Acute Mountain Sickness is quick to take hold, and it can kill.
I began to revise my initial unfavourable opinion of Phil. He had taken to wearing a little blue woollen beanie hat, and as his hair welded into greasy points he stopped making quite such an issue of it. He was unfailingly good-humoured and encouraging. He dealt comfortably with us and our blisters and feeble stomachs, although he wasn't exactly cloyingly sympathetic either. In the worst grip of the runs, one of the men stumbled on the edge of the brimming shit pit. He fell in, and came up mired to the elbows. There was no water anywhere. It was touch and go whether Phil would give himself an embolism laughing.
'Can you remember,' he gasped, 'how much you've paid to be doing this?'
Above Namche, on a crystal blue morning, we walked over a wide carpet of springy turf overlaid with gentians and turned a corner. There ahead of us, flanked by Lhotse and Nuptse and with its lower reaches modestly veiled in some translucent cloud, rose Everest. It was breathtaking and familiar at the same time, the peak like a composite of every photo image I had ever pored over, outlined sharp as a blade against the bare sky. Even the steady flow of boys' jokes that was the main refrain of the journey died away into silence. I found that my face was wet with tears.
After that, the climbing changed. It stopped being such an effort to put one foot in front of the other on the endless chest-burning ascents. Instead, I felt every step carrying me closer to a goal. My stride lengthened, and my lungs expanded as my waistline shrank. For days as we forged closer to Everest I felt invincible, and the men began to make jokes about bionic women.
But the truth was not that I had acquired some extra physical strength, nor that I was fitter than I had imagined . . . it was just that I had tapped a reservoir of self-confidence. As if the sight of Everest, at last within reach, had flipped the lid off an interior well and allowed me to drink from it. I had propelled myself here, and every fold and convolution of the territory offered a new and closer perspective. I wasn't afraid any more of not being able to make it: the shroud of fear and anxiety lifted and floated off my shoulders. Without it, I felt light and suffused with steady strength.
We passed by the string of iridescent turquoise lakes at Gokyo and scrambled over the snow and ice of the Cho La pass before dropping across the Khumbu Glacier.
The variation in the scale of the landscape was breath taking. All around us rose a circle of saw-toothed 8,000-metre peaks, Lhotse and Nuptse, Everest and Cho Oyu and Ama Dhablam, pinnacles of silver and black against the melting sky, while at our feet in the crevices of the rocks grew tiny, perfect gardens of powdery gold and blood-red lichens. Overhead the jungle crows circled incessantly. Their call was like a low, mocking laugh – ha ha, ha ha – at our feeble efforts to integrate ourselves into this hostile world.
We came to the point, at a place called Lobuche at just under 5,000 metres altitude, where the various trails of the region merged and ran on up the glacier valley towards Base Camp. A brief wander around the immediate environs confirmed that Lobuche is aptly named as the capital of the Toilet Trail. We camped overnight, and the temperature dropped to –20 outside and –8 inside my tent. I had never experienced anything like that bone-penetrating Himalayan cold. To go to sleep I wore all the clothes I had brought with me, including a ski-hat, and I went down on my knees, as I had done every night of the trip, to thank Rebecca for my miraculous down sleeping bag. Signor Armani never enveloped any woman's body as luxuriously.
The day after Lobuche marked the outermost point of the trip and the objective was to climb Kalapathar, the highest point of the trek. This is a small peak, 5,545 metres high, overlooking Base Camp, the Khumbu Glacier and the Everest panorama.
We were woken at 4 a.m. by one of the porters thrusting a bowl of watery porridge through the tent-flap. Groggy with cold and lack of sleep, I promptly spilled mine into my sleeping bag. By 4.30 we were walking
in the frosty, dead-black night. Dawn was a long way off. Most of the Marines were keyed up with competitive determination to be first and fastest, and they set off at a cracking pace behind Ang Sirdar. The halt and the sick were moving much more slowly, under Phil's direction. Within half an hour of crabwise progress along a steep and narrow track above a ravine, I found that I had fallen way behind the leaders, but was still a distance ahead of the hospital party. I stopped climbing to listen. There was no sound except the faint clatter of displaced pebbles rolling down into the blackness; even the jungle crows hadn't begun their day's mockery. No one was in sight or earshot. Then the trapezoid beam of my head torch suddenly shortened and thickened. It yellowed a swathe of rocks as I turned my head, before failing altogether. I was in darkness; the only glimmer of light was a lead-grey streak painted across the eastern horizon.
I took a single tentative step forward, thinking of the drop to my right. I knew that the path switchbacked ahead somewhere between boulders and chasms, but I wasn't sure now whether I had been following the right course before my torch failed. Sitting down on a rock to wait for the tail-enders to catch up therefore wasn't an option; I might sit there all day and never see anyone again.
I waited a minute and tried to decide what to do. It became clear that going on was the only choice. Slowly I began to climb again. After a while my eyes accommodated and I could just distinguish the greyish upwards turn of the path. It was very steep, seemingly much steeper than before, and I had to scramble up and over rocky obstacles. I was breathing rapidly in shallow gulps and as I moved forward in panicky surges I knew that my confidence had all blown away. I felt ill and exhausted as well as afraid. I was lost, and in the darkness I was going to blunder off this path and fall. I would break my leg, or worse, and therefore I wouldn't make it all the way to the top of Kalapathar. I would have failed.
The audible groan of despair and frustration had to have broken out of my own mouth – who else would be lurking amongst the rocks like a Chorus to my solitary tragedy? But still the sound of it shocked me. I had failed to estimate the extent of my grim determination to get as far as the trek went, and my buried desire to match whatever the fittest Marine might do. I was desperate to get up there. Suddenly I knew that I would kill to get to the top of this tourist peak that was conquered on a daily basis by bands of guffawing Aussies and children and little old ladies.
It was a moment of self-recognition like I had never known before.
I plodded onwards, thinking about it, and minute by minute the sky lightened. After another half-hour I saw, up another steep incline in the distance, the crampons tied on the backpack behind the bobbing head of the last of the Marines.
Two hours after leaving Lobuche we stumbled into Gorak Shep, the Graveyard of Crows, at the foot of Kalapathar. Beyond lay the glacial moraine and the trail to Base Camp. This was the last outpost of what passed for civilisation, in the shape of a tiny rough-stone tea house. Burned with a hot iron into the unpainted wood planks of the door were the words and figures 1. Kalapater 5,545m, 2. Everest B. C. 5,300m, 3. Goraksep 5,260m. I sat down on a broken dry-stone wall to try to even out my ragged breathing. It was fully light now, and the snows of the peaks were washed shell-pink.
Phil was the last to arrive at the tea house enclosure, faithfully bringing up the rear of his straggling group. At the sight of him all my fears and anxieties torched into a blaze of anger. I leapt to my feet and sprang into his path, a tirade of accusations frothing out of my mouth. This was intolerable. He was inadequate, negligent, criminal. We were ill-briefed and unprepared to undertake a hazardous journey in the dark. I might have died. Any of us might have died. He was lucky, luckier than he deserved as the embodiment of such incompetence. Et cetera.
I have no idea where I got the breath from. Rage lent me eloquence. The Marines gathered open-mouthed in a silent semi-circle to listen.
Phil stood there and took it. At the end he said gently, 'I'm sorry you feel like that.'
Deflated, I flopped down on the wall again, trying hard not to cry in front of everyone.
Five minutes later, he brought me a bowl of hot noodles and a Coke from the tea house. I remembered that I hadn't eaten for twelve hours, and I was ravenous and weak with the effort of legging it uphill over the boulders. I ate and drank, the best meal I have ever tasted.
'Go on, go for it,' he advised casually when it was time to set off up Kalapathar in Ang's wake. It was still only half-past seven in the morning. Phil had to stay behind with the bravest member of the party whose chest infection finally threatened to defeat her. Her lips had turned a frightening slate-blue.
From the peak's summit, the face of Everest seemed close enough to reach out and touch. The ice-fall was a terrible chaos of spilled grey ice-blocks, the South Col lay like the palm of a cupped hand to the right of the summit. Beneath my feet were the egg-box peaks of the glacier and the miniature huddle of Base Camp. I stood and gazed. It was bitterly cold, and the wind pasted my hood across my face. Elation swelled and expanded to the point of pain in my chest: I knew I had done something measurable. Different from writing a novel or two, this could be quantified in metres of achievement. I was up here, and even I would find it difficult somehow to convince myself later that I hadn't actually done it all. Even better than most of that, it was awesomely beautiful. A rainbow-shot veil of spindrift trailed from the peak, and the ice-fall glittered and dazzled with tiny points of light. None of the pictures I had seen and saved in my head did it the same justice as being there, and seeing that view for myself. For perhaps an hour I sheltered in an angle of rock and silently committed it to memory.
The return descent to Gorak Shep took less than an hour. On the way down Adrian, the biggest and noisiest and kindest of the Marines, led me to one side.
'You owe him an apology.'
Anger and fear had dissipated together. 'Yeah. All right. I know I do.'
Phil was sitting outside the tea house in the suddenly warm sunshine with his blue hat rolled down to shade his eyes. It was the middle of the day.
I said awkwardly, 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean any of that. I'm really sorry.'
For the first time, we took appraising stock of each other.
He stood up, grinning, and put his arm around me. We were so insulated by layers of Gore-Tex and down and Capilene, it was like being embraced by the Michelin man.
'Don't worry. It happens.'
A week later, Phil saw us to the airport at Kathmandu. His next group, bound for the base of Kanchenjunga, would arrive within twenty-four hours and the whole cycle would start over again. To me, longing as I was for the comforts of home and the solace of family, this seemed an unendurable prospect. Yet Phil was, as usual, perfectly cheerful. He had got himself a pretty sharp new haircut in Thamel.
'Bye,' I said to him at the departure gate. I didn't imagine that we would see each other again. 'Thanks for everything. It was a great trip.' I meant it.
'Yeah, nice one.'
I was proud of what I had seen and done, but I was thoroughly relieved and happy to be home. There was work to be done on the novel in progress, and there was a half-pleasurable and half-guilt inducing sense that Caradoc and Charlie and Flora had missed me more than they were willing to admit.
Christmas was coming, and Caradoc's big birthday party.
Then Phil's note arrived. By the time I responded to his message, he had gone to lead a group on a four-wheel-drive tour of the Yemen. It was the middle of January before he came back and we could arrange to meet and discuss the idea. In the meantime my imagination had been nibbling and then gorging on the prospect. To drive across China, and into Tibet. To cross the Himalayas, via Base Camp on the Tibetan side, and wind down to Kathmandu via the hairpin bends we had overflown in the helicopter. To follow the Silk Route across Iran, and pass from Asia into Europe via the Bosphorus, before making our way to Paris via Greece and Italy and the Alpine passes of Austria . . . Sixteen thousand kilometres in all, with the challenge of a
motor rally thrown in.
Good sense suggested that I should politely decline the invitation. I didn't have the time or the money to spare and I thought I had already used up the family goodwill, and all the brownie points owing to me, on my Everest trip. Very tentatively I mentioned the idea.
'You've only just come back,' Charlie pointed out, accurately enough.
Caradoc thought about it. 'It sounds to me,' he said at length, 'like an opportunity you can't possibly turn your back on.'
Over-articulated gratitude sounds phony. I nodded, as if I were still just considering the possibility. 'At least, I can go and meet Phil and talk it over. That's not exactly committing myself to anything, is it?'
Phil telephoned me when he arrived back from the Yemen. As we exchanged greetings I could hear him at the other end nervously lighting a cigarette. It wasn't just me who was unsure of what we might be about to embark upon. We arranged to meet for dinner in a restaurant near my house.
Phil wasn't used to driving in London, and got hopelessly lost on the way from Fulham. When he finally erupted into the restaurant he was almost an hour late. While I sat and waited I had veered from impatience through anxiety to plain fury.
I pushed the table back and squared up to him. He was looking very tidy and clean and apprehensive.
'Phil. You're asking me to drive half-way around the world with you, and you can't even find your way to a Cal-Ital restaurant in fucking Hampstead?'