Memories present themselves to us as life-like images while the spaces between are bridged by thoughts and ideas. Gradually the images fade, until only the words and the vaguest shapes remain. With the passing of time my photographs of Everest only show me vignettes of the experience, while my writings conjure up the whole panorama. Perhaps it is appropriate then that White Limbo is being republished, nine years after the event it chronicles, with only a few pages of photographs.
It is strange to write about Mt Everest again after almost a decade. No tatty notebooks this time. My fingers dance around on my keyboard and the words appear as if by magic on the computer screen. The success of White Limbo encouraged me to write more books so that these days much of my time is spent remembering or inventing characters, scenarios, and conversations. My computer has become as familiar to me as my crampons and ice-axe.
Meanwhile, the highest point on Earth continues to attract climbers from around the world. The total number of ascents of Mt Everest is now over 300. More people have stood on its summit in the nine years since our expedition than in the 31 years between our climb and the first ascent. Our expedition was the 38th to succeed while as many again had failed.
Such statistics do not help me judge our own climb, so I reach behind me and pull from the shelves one of the latest additions to my library of books about the mountain and turn to the index. I look up my name and flip over to page 488. At the end of a precis of our climb is the following paragraph:
Australia is not a nation with any great tradition of mountaineering and yet the Everest Expedition of 1984 was a model of what an expedition should be. Not only that, their actual achievement was astonishing; one of the greatest climbs ever done on the mountain.
It is sobering to read these words, because this work is the most complete and authoritative history ever written about Everest. It makes me feel I should take our climb more seriously. It was serious enough at the time, of course, but life moves on.
To be ranked as a great achievement, our climb needs to be viewed in historical context. Our expedition took place when fewer than a dozen people had climbed the mountain without the use of oxygen-breathing apparatus. Most of those climbers took established routes and were backed up by other climbers who were using oxygen. In the two seasons before our ascent, three people reached the top without oxygen, but all three died during their descent from the summit. The barrier of the impossible had definitely been broken, but there was scant information about vital issues such as the extent of brain damage caused by oxygen deprivation. For us, attempting a new route on Mt Everest without oxygen was very much a pioneering experience, not only personally but in terms of the style of exploration we brought to the mountain. The unknowns for us—none of whom had climbed over 8000 metres before—were enormous.
The physiology of survival at extreme high altitude is much better understood now than in 1984, and this, combined with even better equipment and greater knowledge of the mountain’s topography, means that the psychological barriers are now much lower. As if to compensate, the mountain was resurveyed not long after our climb, and the previously estimated height of 8848 was extended by 26 metres.
Everest’s magnetism persists, and whenever a rapid and seemingly straightforward ascent of a difficult route leads me to think that the Big E is getting easier, it is followed by the death of some climbers whom I would have thought too competent to have yielded to the forces of the mountain. An example is the death of Narayan Shresta, a close friend from ascents of Ama Dablam, Annapurna and Everest as well as many other treks and climbs. He died in an avalanche while camped on the West Ridge in 1988. So it seems the stakes remain high and the spin of the wheel is as unpredictable as ever.
One of the reasons we are prepared to risk our lives is the capacity of mountaineering to concentrate the essential parts of one’s existence. For the few months of an expedition the complexities of modern living are forgotten. A goal is set and one’s world is redefined to include only the climbers and the mountain. The climbing of the peak becomes the purpose of life for the duration of the expedition—such an intensely focussed approach is necessary if the climbers are to avoid the mountain’s many dangers. Senses are heightened, and the climbers become very aware of the nuances of the environment and of the way that mood modifies perception. Simply put, they are in touch with themselves and their surroundings.
Such was the situation for us on Mt Everest. The huge mountain left no room for anything but devotion to our task. In reaching our own personal limits we came close to death. We understood the meaning of the world we had limited ourselves to, and the feeling of fulfilment was immense.
Our other major Himalayan climbs had allowed time for us to savour our experiences. With those climbs, apart from ourselves only our friends and families were involved. Not so with Everest. As the highest point on the earth’s surface, Everest is regarded as public domain, and so—we learnt—are Everest climbers. Upon our return to Australia we were obliged to share our experience with everyone who was interested and, for a short time at least, that seemed to be most of the people in the country. Our climb was put into a completely different context to the routes on other mountains which had challenged us just as much. This disorientating experience led to a feeling of anticlimax amongst most of us. I avoided the feeling by putting all my energies into writing. I treated people’s endless questions as clues about what non-climbers wanted to know about our experience.
Everest changed the direction of all our lives, except perhaps for Geof Bartram. His life has always been full adventure and, afterwards, he regarded Everest as no more than an adventure that was more intense and more dangerous than the others. Geof loved the romance of the mountain but had no time for the publicity that came with it. He returned to his cycle of guiding climbs in South America for six to nine months each year. Rather than spending the off-season in Nepal he learnt to raft and sea-kayak, then guided trips in Australia and Fiji. These experiences spurred him to undertake a bold sea-kayak trip through the fjords of Patagonia, where he and his friends climbed amongst some of the least explored mountains on earth. Geof is always looking for new horizons, and as I write he is helping to research cane toads in Venezuela.
For Andy Henderson the legacy of Everest was impossible to ignore. A surgeons’ strike in Sydney, and the fact that Andy’s frostbite injuries were somehow classed as elective surgery, meant that he waited five months for the shrivelled claws of his fingers to be amputated at the first knuckle. The surgeon did a superb job with skin grafts, which meant that after a few weeks of physiotherapy Andy was again pulling the green stalks out of the ends of strawberries. Some of his friends gave him a tiny sheath knife which he called his Fingernail, and thus equipped he let himself loose on the world again. He returned to rockclimbing and managed to climb many hard routes, though his choice was limited because many climbs were impossible without full-length fingers. He abandoned his one attempt at mountaineering—a new route on India’s Mt Shivling—because the sensitivity of his hands to the cold made climbing in snow impossible.
Tim Macartney-Snape used the confidence he gained during the 1984 expedition to attempt harder climbs. A new route on the difficult Karakoram peak of Gasherbrum 4 in Pakistan was followed by an attempt on K2, which was foiled by bad weather. K2 is the world’s second highest mountain, and because it is located a long way further north, it suffers even worse weather than Everest. Climbers regard it as the toughest mountain in the world. In 1990 Tim climbed Everest a second time, alone, and starting his journey at the Bay of Bengal in India. In a remarkable feat of endurance he became the first person to climb all 8874 metres of Everest, from sea level to the very summit.
Greg Mortimer’s eyes turned southwards to the most remote mountains on Earth. He led an audacious trip to Antarctica to make the first ascent of Mt Minto, then the following summer became the first Australian to climb Vinson Massif, the highest peak on the frozen continent. In 1990, Greg returned to the heights with
a climb of the North Ridge of K2, and by doing so he became not just the first Australian to reach the summit of this formidable mountain (a feat he shared with fellow climber Greg Child) but also only the fourth person to have climbed the two highest peaks in the world without oxygen equipment.
My own mountaineering tools are used only occasionally now, although as well as several minor climbs in Nepal since Everest, I accompanied Greg to Mt Minto and made a shorter trip to the glaciated equatorial peaks of Irian Jaya. Both Antarctica and Irian Jaya are amongst the world’s last great wildernesses, and climbing in such places gives the sense of exploring new frontiers.
I allow less dust to gather on my rockclimbing equipment than on my ice-axe and crampons. Hundred of kilometres of steep sandstone cliffs skirt the plateau of the Blue Mountains, reaching to within a few hundred metres of where I sit at my desk, making it a simple matter to slip out for an afternoon when my head is cluttered with too many words. I savour the contradictory emotions brought about by the combination of air beneath my heels, warm rock beneath my fingertips, and a knot of fear in my stomach. It is harder to find the time to climb further afield these days. Publishers have deadlines, and my two young sons often need assistance with the construction of castles and rocket ships out of clip-together blocks.
A few months ago I watched Sir Edmund Hillary’s slides of the first ascent of Everest four decades ago. Until he and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit no one really knew whether success was possible. Listening to Sir Edmund talk, I was struck by how immense the psychological barriers were back in 1953, and how much the climbing scene has changed in that time. And I thought how strange it must be for Sir Edmund to have spent the last 40 years answering questions about Mount Everest.
Times have certainly changed. The names Hillary and Tenzing rank with Scott of the Antarctic and Christopher Columbus as enduring symbols of adventure. In 1985 our fame was already fading. Less than a year after our climb, Tim and I spent several months travelling in a van from Daintree to Adelaide giving slide shows about our expedition. We were to begin the lecture tour in northern New South Wales, but the night before our first show we were still in Sydney. Our last chore before the all-night drive was to stick the transfers advertising Mt Everest onto the sides and rear of the van.
We were doing this at a service station in Mona Vale when a man in his mid-twenties flopped past us in shorts and thongs. The smell of his meat pie wafted towards us. I deduced from his figure that late night junk food was a regular habit. He paused to watch us for a minute.
“Mt Everest, huh?” he said.
He glanced from the transfers to Tim and me, then wiped some tomato sauce from his chin. “Yeah? Well, I play First Grade for Manly.”
With that remark he turned his back and wandered off into the night.
Lincoln Hall
February, 1993
Exciting stories, whether real or imagined, tend to depict a world apart from the rest of us. The heroes and heroines of bestselling thrillers never have repayment problems with their Lamborghinis and never suffer jet-lag. The storyteller omits details in order to keep unlikely characters plausible, or to avoid disturbing the reader with too many reminders of reality. After all, the important thing is to track down, somewhere in South America, the fascist spy ring which terrorises Switzerland and Bondi. This, or some other equally gripping goal, leaves no room for human weakness, apart from love, of course.
The world of climbing Mt Everest is apart from us for different reasons. When the book of the climb is written by a mountaineer, much is left out, partly because it seems unexplainable to the uninitiated and partly because to other climbers those omissions are unwritten truths. The only question asked in the story is “Which mountain?” never “Why climb at all?” The consequence is a tale of overcoming the bone-chilling dangers and impossible obstacles which lie between the climbers and the summit. The climbers seem to be almost inhuman in their disregard for danger and discomfort.
When you are part of a climbing story, as I have been often, you know that the only cardboard characters are the people modelling gear in the pages of the climbing magazine that someone brought along to Base Camp. You know that on the mountain emotions do run high and close to the surface; nobody is superhuman; no one is never frightened.
My wish to show people the human side of climbing Mt Everest led to this book being written. The facts are here as well, but I have expanded the record with my impressions and my feelings, so it is very much my story. How much of the essence of our adventure I have managed to capture is impossible for me to judge. Perhaps we will seem more convincing as people if I add that on our return to Australia we all suffered from jet-lag.
Lincoln Hall
31 March 1985
9 October 1981
Once our path topped the ridge it dropped straight down to the river as if it, too, needed to escape the icy wind. The wind seemed to have felt no sunshine since leaving the frozen wastes of Mongolia, one thousand kilometres to the north.
At the crest I threw my heavy pack from my shoulders and sat back against it to wait for my five friends. This spot provided our last panoramic view of the mountains amongst which we had been climbing for the past month. I sat with my thoughts while I watched my three climbing companions approach and pass me, each alone and silent. Following a hundred metres behind, Mr Ran and Mr Zhung were talkative. No doubt our interpreter and liaison officer were eager to see their wives again, and to return to the basic luxuries of their homes in Xining, the capital of the Chinese province of Qinghai.
The end of an expedition allows time for reflection. One’s mind is no longer concerned with uncertainties: whether the snow will be firm enough to climb upon, whether the glacier is passable, what that type of cloud means in this part of the world. There had been so many unknowns here on the northern limits of the Tibetan Plateau. Until this season no foreign expeditions had climbed this range. When we had arrived in Beijing six weeks before we knew nothing about the Anyemaqen massif apart from the names of its principal peaks. Now, with the main peak climbed by a new and difficult route, our minds were free to cope with the questions that mountaineering always leads one to ask.
I looked to the mountains. All were visible except for the snowy tip of Anyemaqen. Only that peak broached the sea of dark cloud which floated above the tumble of ridges and glaciers. Neither I nor my three companions needed to see the hidden summit. We knew what was there. The clouds were heavy with snow and misery for anyone who was up there now. An imaginary suffering, for with our departure the range was empty again.
There had been times when the suffering in the mountains had been real. A sudden storm can turn a peaceful day into a nightmare. The horror of the cold and danger is forgotten when every thought and all one’s energy are needed for survival. We had been lucky on Anyemaqen. The only storm we had experienced hit us late in the day when we were above the avalanche-prone slopes of the mountain, and it had abated entirely during the night we spent huddled on ledges hacked out of the snow face.
On this our last day of walking from Base Camp it was appropriate that the weather should be so foreboding. On days like this, I thought, the best thing to be doing in the mountains is to be leaving them. That raised the question that so often plays in my mind: why be there at all?
Part of my mind dismissed the question as irrelevant. My existence was irrevocably bound with the challenge, the friendships and the lack of confusion which makes mountaineering separate from the illusions and pretensions of everyday living. It did not matter that there was no pot of gold at the top. It was enough to climb the rainbow. I suppose it was the danger and fear of dying that made me ask myself why I climbed mountains. Without that moderating fear caution would be thrown to the winds. And that caution is the only thing that keeps mountaineers alive. In the mountains all decisions have to be weighed very carefully but one is never certain that everything has been considered; there is always the worry that a vital factor has been overlooked
with consequences that could be fatal.
We were pleased with our climb here in China. The route had not been easy, nor the conditions favourable. We felt content that our experience and judgment had taken us to the top and back safely. But more than that, the climb reminded us of the value of everything on earth, from the feeling of companionship one experiences struggling against the cold and the danger together, to sunsets so beautiful that our eyes and ears ached from the colours and the silence. Now, back on comparatively level ground, our minds were relaxed but alert, eager to appropriate all that was happening around us.
At times our thoughts would drift to the future. Already we had expeditions planned for years in advance. An unclimbed spur of Annapurna II was the next big objective for Tim, Andy and myself, and Mt Pumori for Geof. These were the challenges nearest to hand. However, what preoccupied us was Qomolangma. In Tibetan the name means Mother Goddess of the Earth, but to people around the world the peak was known as Mt Everest.
Though the crest of the Himalayan range forms the border between Tibet and Nepal, the bulk of the mountain lies in Tibet. When in Beijing six weeks earlier we had asked about the possibility of attempting Qomolangma. We wished to attempt the only-once-climbed North Face. The Chinese Mountaineering Association considered our application and agreed, granting permission for 1984. We greeted the news with excitement and apprehension, then put it to the backs of our minds. Anyemaqen was our immediate concern.
Now, with Anyemaqen climbed, we had time and room in our heads to think about Everest. Were we ready for the biggest mountain of them all? Were our plans overambitious? Though far from the steepest mountain in the world, Everest’s size made it the ultimate mountaineering challenge. Even here, with our most recent success still in sight, the question took a permanent place in each of our minds. Could we climb Everest? We all knew there was only one way to find out.
White Limbo: The Classic Story Of The First Australian Climb Of Everest Page 2
