by Ed Douglas
When mountaineering did resume in 1969 a new generation of climbers arrived, with new ideas and huge ambitions: Reinhold Messner, Chris Bonington and the charismatic Polish expedition leader Andrzej Zawada, whose team were first to climb Everest in winter. These were the sorts of mountaineers Liz admired, larger than life, the kinds of people who could dominate a press conference. Under the force of these personalities, her record of mountaineering in the region gathered momentum, becoming a database of human achievement, suffering and loss unparalleled in the history of adventure. It occurred to me soon after meeting Liz for the first time in the mid 1990s that, having arrived in 1960 at the tail end of the fashionable, moneyed era of Nepali tourism, she now found herself in a less attractive, more demotic age. She seemed a little bored with it all. Commercial expeditions, with paying clients on familiar routes, were becoming more and more common and there wasn’t so much juice there. Her wry sense of humour and the integrity of her record keeping kept her going. Given the often self-admiring but brittle nature of elite mountaineers, I took her lack of personal interest as a positive advantage. She could be imperious and beady, staring impatiently over the frames of her glasses. It was no surprise to discover her accountant grandfather had been part of the fight against organised crime in Chicago in the 1930s.
Liz was laughing when the phone rang. We’d been talking about the assault of three European climbers the year before at camp two on Everest, among them the Swiss Ueli Steck, then one of the stars of world mountaineering. When a team of Sherpas fixing ropes had kicked ice onto them, Steck’s Italian companion Simone Moro had called them ‘motherfuckers’ in Nepali. The cell-phone footage of Sherpas striking a European climber had gone round the world. Liz rolled her eyes and then struggled to her feet to get the phone. I half-listened to the conversation at first, and then more keenly. ‘Eleven dead,’ she said. Then: ‘At least eleven.’ In fact the number was sixteen: sixteen high-altitude workers, most of them Sherpa, buried in ice that had fallen from high on the shoulder of Everest as they carried loads to camp two in Everest’s Western Cwm. In all her long career this was the worst climbing disaster Liz had ever encountered. An hour later, once Liz had generously shared all she’d learned, I left to organise a flight to Lukla, the closest airport to Everest, for the following morning and start the trek to base camp. That was the last time I saw her.
*
Five days later I was at Everest, much too quickly for an unacclimatised journalist with a story to write. Nursing a headache, I took in the sprawling village of tents staked out on the shifting ice of the Khumbu glacier. Each time I returned to Khumbu I was amazed at the changes tourism had brought. In 1964, the psychologist Jim Lester, who had done fieldwork during the American Everest expedition the year before, had spotted the first advertisement Jimmy Roberts had run for his new trekking business. He mentioned it in a letter to the American mountaineer and writer James Ramsey Ullman, who had covered the climb for National Geographic. ‘All the jokes we made about the lemonade concession at Namche etc etc, may yet turn out to be prophetic.’ And how. Namche Bazar, the largest town in Khumbu, now has an Irish pub and a German bakery serving the sixty thousand or so trekkers who now pass through each year. Cell-phone reception at base camp is better than many mountain towns in Britain or the United States. Helicopters were coming and going with astonishing frequency, ferrying climbers back to Kathmandu over country that had once taken weeks to traverse. Huge mule trains clog the trails, bringing food supplies for the tourist lodges, creating another waste problem that adds to the environmental pressure.
The narrative the year before, when the fight on Everest had been reported, was either that arrogant Westerners had abused Sherpas or that Sherpas had lost their cheerful naïvety in a rush for business. (The businessman Tashi Sherpa, who owns a famous clothing brand named Sherpa, employing fourteen hundred local Nepalis, mostly women, snorted at that one: ‘Do you still want the Sherpas to be the same, uneducated, simple folk? No. We want our children to be educated, to go out into the world.’) This year it was simpler: the selfish ambition of pampered foreign climbers, ‘blithe cretins’ as one British columnist put it, had cost sixteen fathers and sons their lives. The same columnist also claimed that Everest was becoming more dangerous for Sherpas. This wasn’t quite true. Liz Hawley’s statistics, tabulated with Richard Salisbury, showed that since 1950 the death rate among high-altitude workers in the dangerous Icefall had more than halved. Yet it was absolutely the case that local staff, mostly Sherpas, faced a much higher risk than foreign clients, who make very few trips through this dangerous terrain. It seemed grotesque that men and occasionally women should risk their lives in this way to meet the overambitious aspirations of foreigners, who mostly couldn’t cope without their support.
It was a confused scene at base camp, as you would expect following a tragedy of that scale. I had watched footage of a spreadeagled body slung beneath a helicopter being flown out of the Icefall, like a darker version of the opening scene in La Dolce Vita. Groups of Sherpas hung around looking angry or bereft; many foreign climbers were deeply sympathetic while a few wondered if they would still get a chance to climb. Most had spent many tens of thousands of dollars to get there. There had been demonstrations and even a few threats of violence against any Sherpa continuing with the climbing season, threats that were exaggerated in the media but passed around base camp by those reading news online. Some climbers were shocked at this, still believing in the romantic portrayal of Sherpa culture they had read in books by their heroes.
Change had come quickly to Khumbu. Tashi Sherpa’s grandfather Gyalzen recalled in later life how before the expeditions began most of them led lives of extreme poverty. ‘There were few houses. Most Sherpas worked as coolies transporting loads for the few rich traders that lived here. The expeditions changed that.’ Ed Hillary’s schools, the boom in tourism and the soaring value of real estate in Khumbu gave the Sherpas who were born there an opportunity they took with both hands. The Austrian-born Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was the first anthropologist to visit Khumbu in 1953 and got to know the important village of Khumjung well. He returned in the 1980s to research a second study he called The Sherpas Transformed. By then the closure of the Tibetan border had wholly disrupted ancient trading patterns and the economy was now driven by tourism. Revisiting every house in Khumjung, he tracked how pervasive trekking and climbing work had become. The rate of change only accelerated after that and Khumbu experienced a construction boom. Sherpas used the cash from climbing to build trekking lodges or open restaurants. The next generation went to private schools in Kathmandu and to college in Australia or the United States. This generation chose to live in Kathmandu for much of the year, or else migrated abroad. There are now as many Sherpas in New York City as Khumbu.
Media coverage of Everest leaves an impression that climbing is all Sherpas do, but for most of them, Everest had simply been a springboard for their kids to do something safer: becoming businesspeople, pilots or doctors. They don’t have to farm their fields any more: they can use migrant labour to do that, providing fresh food for their trekking lodges. In the late 2000s, following Nepal’s civil war – when Maoists were busy pulling down statues of the old Shah royal dynasty – tourism began to recover and has since been booming. Sherpas comprise just half of one per cent of the Nepali population but their economic impact has grown out of all proportion to their numbers. Namche Bazar is among the very wealthiest parts of the whole country, despite not having a road. Yet for every pilot or doctor, there are still a hundred more Sherpas, not born on the trekking route to Everest, desperate to get their foot on the first rung of the tourism ladder, even if that ladder is bridging a crevasse.
Out of the confusion at base camp, two themes emerged that I soon realised applied across much of the Himalaya and not just to this small group living in the shadow of Everest, and not only now but through history. Western media tended to focus on the rich people who pay for the Everest industry b
ut paid little attention to what was in effect an industrial accident. Much more could have been done to keep workers safe. Some victims recovered from the Icefall were found to have been carrying loads far above the legal limit. Some weren’t sufficiently trained to deal with the challenges of the job. It isn’t hard to imagine the panic, struggling under a monstrous weight, hearing the ice crack and the rumble above your head, the rush of adrenalin, and all this for twenty dollars a day. Yet those asking high-altitude workers to carry more than they should or accept more danger than necessary were Nepali, not foreigners. The Nepali regulatory system is weak and riddled with corruption, which is as true for construction workers or truck drivers as those working on Everest. A week after the accident in the Icefall, another sixteen men were buried, this time in a landslide at a hydropower construction site north-east of the tourist town of Pokhara. This time there was a happier outcome: thirteen men, including three Chinese engineers, survived. But police had to cordon off the site when the families of the dead and injured staged a protest demanding compensation. Unions called on the government to punish construction companies not following the law: the same case could have been made on Everest. It was a cruel irony that Dorje Khatri, one of the most effective and honest union leaders in the trekking and climbing industry, was killed on Everest that day.
For centuries, lack of opportunity had driven Nepalis abroad to look for work, as soldiers, porters, tea-garden workers and labourers. The rapid growth of Darjeeling was predicated on their labour. Not much has changed in the twenty-first century. Population growth and a stagnant manufacturing sector means there’s a ready supply of people. In the decade before 2018 the Nepali government issued three and a half million permits for its citizens to go abroad to work. That’s around ten per cent of the population. The remittances these workers send home make up a third of Nepal’s economy; half of the population of Nepal relies on them. Foreigners often assume tourism is Nepal’s most important industry but it accounts for only 4.3 per cent of the nation’s economy, well below the world average of 5.2, a minnow compared to migrant labour. Indeed, one of the few areas to see rapid growth within Nepal is the banking sector, thanks to all that cash flowing into the country. But migrant labour has been tainted with corruption, since ordinary Nepalis are often desperate to get the necessary papers. Nor have politicians always stood up for the interests of its citizens abroad, since the nation’s economy is at stake. The deaths of Nepali migrant workers building stadia for football’s world cup in Qatar in 2022 have attracted headlines, but those workers are at risk wherever they go because they are seen as less powerful than migrants from elsewhere. As a Nepali friend told me when I got back to Kathmandu: ‘Forget Everest, there are three body bags a day arriving back at the airport. People should write about that.’ I assumed by ‘people’ he meant me.
Something else struck me about the protests on Everest that spring, something harder to analyse or define but which sprang from a combination of identity and sovereignty. Put simply, I was left with a question: who owns Everest? In 1960 B P Koirala and Mao Zedong had discussed this issue, Koirala claiming the whole mountain for Nepal, Mao archly pointing out that Nepal didn’t even know what to call it. The people living either side of the mountain, more or less the same in terms of language and culture, weren’t invited to that meeting. Now, more than fifty years later, Sherpas were expressing their anger that while the government in Kathmandu collected millions of dollars in tax revenues, it was Sherpas taking the risks. A government minister was flown in, breathing bottled oxygen to keep him upright, as he nervously reassured protestors their grievances would be answered; the Sherpas looked at him sceptically. They had heard it all before.
A quarter of a century earlier, shortly before the Maoist rebellion began in 1996, a leading Nepali journalist had told me how encouraged he felt that Nepal had not split along ethnic lines. Yet as they whipped up support for their insurgency, the Maoists had zeroed in precisely on ethnic differences, hoping they could energise the grievances of minorities, the so-called janjati groups, like Tamang and Rai, and those on the plains like the Tharu and Madhesi, people marginalised by the Brahmin–Chhetri majority of the middle hills who continue to dominate the government. Over the course of the civil war, the expectations of these minority groups had been raised and then disappointed as the Maoists failed to deliver on their promises. Their leaders proved no less corrupt than other Nepali politicians. Having been the largest party at elections held in 2008, the first since the declaration of the republic, they sank to third at the next vote in 2013. The concerns of minorities, however, were not going away; the idea of identity, as in so much of the world, had become a potent factor in Nepal’s febrile political discourse. It was a great irony that one of those at Everest base camp in the spring of 2014 taking political advantage of the tragedy was Prakash Dahal, son of the Maoist guerrilla leader and former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal. Here was the chance for a few populist headlines to remind voters that the Maoists still cared about ethnic rights.
Many Westerners thought it sad that Everest, a symbol of our shared humanity, a physical challenge to the boundaries of our minds, should have been mired in this way, struggling under a weight of human excrement, both real and metaphorical. Life on the roof of the world had once seemed above all that kind of confusion and mess, a better place where we could find ourselves. The familiar welcoming smiles on the faces of local people had been replaced by angry scowls. There was, however, another perspective on the Sherpa protests that spring: they reminded the world that although empires and distant populations had often treated its peoples with indifference or hostility, the Himalaya is a real place with its own history and cultures. Look where we come from, the Sherpas seemed to be saying from their place in the mountains: see what made us.
Illustrations Insert
1. A photograph of Everest, centre frame, taken looking south from Space Shuttle Atlantis in November 1994. The peak’s vast east face is lit with morning sunlight while the north face remains deep in shadow.
2. A rock sample collected from the summit of Everest in 1956 showing fossilised fragments of a crinoid, or sea lily, proof that it had once been under the sea.
3. Part of the jawbone of what paleoanthropologists believe is a Denisovan hominin from the Middle Pleistocene, found on the Tibetan plateau in modern Gansu province. Genetic analysis suggests that the evolutionary adaptations of Tibetan peoples to the hypoxia of high altitude may have originated in Denisovan DNA.
4. The fortified palace of Yumbu Lhakang above the Yarlung Tsangpo river, a hundred miles south of Lhasa and the focus of the Yarlung dynasty. Most probably constructed in the late seventh century, it was badly damaged in the Cultural Revolution, the structure having since been restored.
5. The Diamond Sutra, the world’s earliest printed book for which we have a date: May 868. It was found in the Mogao or ‘Peerless’ Caves near the city of Dunhuang in modern China’s Gansu province. Tibetan manuscripts found in the caves transformed our understanding of early Tibetan history. The Diamond Sutra is among the most important scriptures for the Mahayana form of Buddhism practised in the Himalayan region.
6. A view of Jomolhari from the Tibetan plateau taken by Freddy Spencer Chapman as the British mission returned to India in 1937. This was the peak Sir William Jones had spotted from the plains of India in 1784, suggesting the Himalaya’s immense altitude.
7. A photograph from the 1870s by the British photographers Bourne & Shepherd, of Kathmandu’s Durbar Square.
8. Crowds gather in Kathmandu to celebrate the birthday of Prithvi Narayan Shah, founder of Nepal, born in Gorkha on 11 January 1723. This statue has also been the target of demonstrators protesting for ethnic minority rights.
9. Six furlongs to the mile: the first known map of the Kathmandu valley, drawn from surveys carried out by Charles Crawford, later surveyor general, who commanded the detachment accompanying the Knox mission of 1802.
10. Jung Bahadur with
his senior queen Hiranyagarbha Devi, two daughters and attendants, photographed by Clarence Comyn Taylor, who had been badly wounded in 1857 and turned to political service, arriving in Kathmandu in 1863 as assistant resident. These were the first photographs of the valley, part of a wider British effort to document the peoples of India.
11. Christ Church in Simla, completed in 1857 and designed by John Theophilus Boileau of the Bengal Engineers. The Simla district Boileaugunj is named for him.
12. Born in County Sligo in 1821, Eliza Rosanna Gilbert spent her early years in India and later found fame as ‘Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer’. She was the lover of Ludwig I of Bavaria, wielding great influence, and Jang Bahadur, de facto ruler of Nepal.