Coronation Everest

by Jan Morris

  6

  Climbing

  Towards the end of April I made my first journey on to Everest. The runners were performing smoothly, leaving at regular intervals with my dispatches, and generally doing the journey to Katmandu in eight or nine days. Between us, Hunt and I had described in detail the march out to the mountain, the period of acclimatization, the move up to Base Camp, the first reconnaissance of the icefall, the establishment of a route through its shifting dangers. It was time, I thought, to see something of life higher on the mountain.

  I left one fine morning after breakfast, with Band and Westmacott, and followed them across the crisp brittle ice-lane that led us, wandering through the moraine, to the foot of the icefall. There we roped up – three sahibs, four or five Sherpas. This was my introduction to mountaineering, and clumsy indeed were my movements as we moved off. If ever a rope could tangle, it was mine. If ever a pair of crampons would not fit, they were those kindly issued to me by the expedition. My snow-goggles were nearly always steamed up, making it extremely difficult to see anything at all. My boot-laces were often undone, and trailed behind me forlornly. Nevertheless, buckling my rucksack around me, and taking a determined grip upon my ice-axe, I followed the large flat expanse of Band’s back into the wilderness.

  It would be foolish to say that I enjoyed this first climbing of the icefall, especially as I was still ill-acclimatized; but there was a grave fascination to our progress up so jumbled and empty a place. The icefall of Everest rises two thousand feet or more and is about two miles long. It is an indescribable mess of confused ice-blocks, some as big as houses, some fantastically fashioned, like minarets, obelisks, or the stone figures on Easter Island. For most of the time you can see nothing around you but ice; ice standing upright, as if it will be there for eternity; ice toppling drunkenly sideways, giving every sign of incipient collapse; ice already fallen, and lying shattered in sparkling heaps; ice with crevasses in it, deep pale-blue gulfs, like the insides of whales; ice to walk over, pressed and piled in shapeless masses, in alleys and corridors and cavities; like some vast attic of ice, at the top of a frozen house, full of the cold icy junk of generations. All this mass was slowly moving, so that it creaked and cracked, and changed its form every day; and from the high mountain walls on either side, squeezing the icefall together like the nozzle of a toothpaste tube, avalanches came tumbling down.

  Much of the climbing of the icefall consisted of a precarious trudging through this frozen morass; for the new-comer a breathless process, relieved only by hastily snatched moments of rest upon the head of his ice-axe. Now and again, as we climbed, we could see through gaps in the ice-mass into the valley below, with Pumori growing small behind us, and Base Camp out of sight over the lip of the ice. Soon we were on a level with the Lho La, and could see over it into the mysteries of Tibet; they looked to me very like the mysteries of Nepal. On either side of us, as the icefall narrowed, loomed the rock walls of Everest and Nuptse, so that one felt hemmed in and vaguely threatened. Sometimes we stopped for a rest and a draught of lemonade from Band’s bottle; but most of the time we trudged.

  It was a dangerous place, the icefall, chiefly because of its incessant movement. Our route was roughly marked by small red flags stuck in the snow or in the flanks of the ice-blocks; but here and there, deep in dangerous gullies, or high on inaccessible pinnacles, other flags were flying, tilting crookedly, sad and tattered. These odd souvenirs had marked the Swiss route in 1952, and it was poignant to see them now, so far from a safe way, like little red Sirens in the ice – not least because they had been provided by a munificent shoe manufacturer, and still proclaimed the name of his product in what seemed rather a forlorn kind of advertising campaign.

  Sometimes our route lay up the steep side of an ice-block, and there the Sherpas, with their heavy packs, would swing wildly up a fixed rope, groping and scraping and clasping hand-holes, until they were heaved up by their comrades at the top and shook the snow off themselves as a dog shakes off water. Sometimes we squeezed through minute cracks in the ice, our packs catching and sticking, until we pushed our bodies through with an almost perceptible ‘pop’. In one place we had to manoeuvre ourselves through such a gap, slither down a confined ice-slope, jump across a crevasse, and climb up the other side. I floundered my way down this place, poised for a few agonizing moments across the crevasse, wondering which leg to move next, and somehow scrambled up the other side; but during this process I felt my wrist scraping hard along an ice-block, and when next I wanted to find out the time, I discovered that my watch had gone, down into the depths of the crevasse. It was an automatic watch, wound up by the motion of my wrist; and I believe that it is still ticking away there in the blue vaults of the glacier, rocked and stimulated by the movements of the ice, inching its slow way down into the valley, still faithfully recording Greenwich mean time.

  Often such crevasses were too wide to jump, and had to be bridged. The expedition had a few sections of aluminium ladder for this purpose, across which one picked one’s way like a big spider. But there were many more crevasses than there were ladders, and most of them were bridged by another device: a greasy old pole, jammed into the snow on either side, like a huge toothpick jammed between molars. I found these poles unsympathetic. Each climber had to cross alone, his companions hanging on to the rope at either end; and the spikes of my crampons, which were generally loose anyway, used to stick into the wood in a disconcerting way. As often as not the pole would start rotating greasily in the snow as you picked your way across, and it was difficult to know whether to watch it rolling, or to let your eyes slide off into the great hungry depths of the crevasse below you, a hundred feet deep or more, cold and blue.

  As the evening approached it began to snow, as it often did on Everest. In the sunshine the icefall could be a stifling place, for the heat was caught between the walls and pillars of ice, and was able (so few were the available targets) to pick you out personally for a roast. There was a particular malevolence about this heat, as if it were in league with all the other menaces of the place – the shifting blocks, the gaping holes, the greasy poles, the dazzle, the dulling altitude, the avalanches – and even the lovely blue sky and the sunshine seemed unfriendly. So I always welcomed the first soft wisps of snow in the late afternoon. They drifted idly at first, out of a blue sky; but gradually the day turned grey, the clouds thickened, and the great mountain masses were obscured. On went our wind-proofs, and through the rising snow we laboured, the moisture trickling down the backs of our necks; if we looked to the south, down the valley of the glacier, we could see battalions of wet clouds marching up towards us, far below.

  Half-way up the icefall a small staging camp, Camp II, had been placed on a plateau jutting over the morass. This we reached comfortably just as the snow began to be unpleasant. I remember my first night at this camp with especial clarity. The mountain had seemed lifeless and impersonal till now, like a great slab of grumpiness; but the presence of this imperturbable little camp, perched there among the ice, suddenly gave the place a spark of life, and humanized the adventure.

  ***

  There was a cheeky Cockney flavour, I thought, about the very existence of the place; and in the face of so gigantic and uncompromising an overseer as Everest, there was a new attraction in impertinence. I used to like to lie in my tent in such a camp as this watching a team of sahibs and Sherpas come toiling up the monster to the plateau. Over the ridge they would come, their tired bodies bent, with a little extra springiness entering their steps as they saw the tents ahead of them. Wearily they plunge their ice-axes into the snow, unfasten the rope with their stiff cold fingers, and untie (with many a hissed or muttered scurrility) the frozen straps of their crampons. The Sherpas hustle off to some of the tents; the Europeans, seeing that the supplies are stacked properly, into others. Then what a heaving, heavy blowing, bulging, rolling and twisting ensues! Each tent is no more than three feet high, and it has a narrow sleeve entrance near the ground; in
to this small hole the tired climber must struggle, wearing awkward windproofs or thick down clothing. There is a maddening struggle with the flapping sleeve of the tent (the snow dripping, all the while, or blowing past in chilling gusts); boots get caught up with nylon tentage; rucksacks have to be dragged in behind, like stubborn fat terriers on leads.

  Inside the tent is probably a little clammy, for it has been empty since the last party went this way. Litter lies about its floor – a bar of chocolate, a packet of breakfast food, a scrap of old newspaper. There is a smell of lemonade powder, wet leather and chocolate. In one corner is a walkie-talkie set, a tangle of wires and batteries. Once inside this uninviting place, the climber twists himself about laboriously and slowly removes his boots, banging them together to clear them of clinging snow (I always remember the sound of banged boots, most redolent of Everest). He heaves his inflatable mattress from his rucksack, the tent bellying around him, and blows it up in a series of impatient gasps. He stretches it on the floor – it just fits in – and places his sleeping-bag on top of it. A few more contortions inside the tent, like a ferret down a rabbit hole, and into this bag, socks, down clothing, gloves and all, the climber gratefully if ungracefully crawls. He uses his boots as a pillow; if he leaves them loose in the tent they will certainly be frozen hard in the morning, and trying to unfreeze a pair of climbing boots is a frustrating task. If he is far-sighted he has packed a book in his rucksack, for it may only be three or four o’clock, and the hours pass slowly. (The expedition carried a wide variety of literature. Wilfrid Noyce used to sit in the snow romping through The Brothers Karamazov. The two New Zealanders used to enjoy the ineffable respectability of the Auckland Weekly News. The official library ranged from Teach Yourself Nepali to Orwell’s critical essays, with, oddly enough, not a single mountaineering book borrowed from the warped deal bookshelves of the Climbers’ Club Hut at Helyg. I had a proof copy of W. H. Murray’s Story of Everest, though, which we all read at one time or another on the mountain; everybody signed it for me, and it now stands in my library clad in a resplendent binding, its pages marked with the tea-stains and fingerprints of Everest.)

  Before long the climber will be disturbed by a flurry and a commotion at the entrance to the tent, and a grinning Sherpa, puffing heavily in the cold, pushes in some food – pemmican, potatoes, a tin plate of mashed sausage meat. Sweet thick tea follows, tasting faintly of methylated spirits and strongly of the melted snow which provided the water – a taste, I used to think, desperately compounded of winds and desolation, for a raindrop frozen on the slopes of Everest must be a lonely sort of thing. There may be biscuits and jam, packed in transparent packets like shampoo, or perhaps round slices of fruit cake, from a tin. It is not easy to eat delicately in a high-altitude tent. Sooner or later a mug will overturn, and a thin trickle of brown tea will settle into a puddle on the floor; crumbs innumerable crawl inside the sleeping-bag; where the blazes has that fork got to?

  In the evening Hunt tries to link all the camps on the mountainside with a radio call over the walkie-talkie sets. This demands some preparation. Batteries work better when they are warm, so they must be cherished inside the sleeping-bag, like teddy-bears, for half an hour before the appointed time; they are angular things, covered with odd protrusions, sockets, holes and joints, and make uncomfortable bedmates. Then the tangle of wires in the corner must be sorted out, and the long flexible aerial, like a stage property sword, fitted into the receiver. At a pinch a determined man can do it all inside his tent, without once poking his nose outside, and Hunt’s intricate instructions on the next day’s duties can be absorbed in the warmth.

  The call over, the cheerful good nights sent winging up and down the mountain, and it is almost time for sleep. Everest keeps early hours; by seven o’clock the lights are dimmed and the camp is quiet, except for an occasional unaccountable spatter of conversation from the Sherpas. Now and then there is an enormous rumble, like a train crossing Hungerford Bridge, or the warning antique roar of the old elevated railway in Manhattan, as an avalanche breaks and falls somewhere on the mountain ramparts. The climber disregards it; and swallowing a couple of yellow sleeping pills (for altitude often makes sleep difficult) he buries himself determinedly in his bag, muffled in thick clothing like a mummy among the ice.

  Towards the end of dinners given in honour of the Everest party, months later and continents away, when the port was being passed, the ladies were absent, and the old gentlemen with their handsome white moustaches were beginning to warm up, somebody would generally remark that there was one question he had always wanted to ask about the expedition. He had always wondered, now – up there in the snows-it must be devilish cold – jolly difficult to move about, eh? – what happened in the night, now, supposing you – well, you know, supposing you were in that tent now, right up there, and – well, er, Nature called, so to speak? Tell me, now, what d’you do then? There was a copy-book answer to this query. The expedition was provided with small yellow plastic bottles, for this very purpose. But I was an outsider, and had no such bottle, and as the old gentlemen waited for their reply, I used to remember with a shudder those long hours of indecision and rising discomfort, the vagaries of procrastination and resolution, the self-reproach and reluctant preparation, the failing and resummoning of resolve, the twisting and turning out of the sleeping-bag, the fumbling with the tent flap, and then at last the plunge outside into the sub-zero, in the middle of the night on Everest, with the moon harsh and icy, and the deep snow piling up against the tent! (How excellent was the brandy, how suffused the glow, of those long celebration evenings in London and New York!)

  *

  The second half of the icefall was rather worse than the first; and during the first wearying climb up its shaky platforms and avenues I had time to wonder why people wanted to climb mountains; though indeed my companions on that rope, the towering Band, the graceful Westmacott, looked as if they had no motives at all, but simply moved on to the mountain mechanically, like thoroughbreds led to a ring, and were doing (in the words of a forgotten song) what comes naturally. ‘Because it’s there’ has a fine ring of finality about it, and spoken with a hint of sublime mysticism, as if there are bottomless pits of meaning yawning beneath the phrase, is calculated to hush the most importunate of lecture audiences; though I have often wondered if Leigh-Mallory, as human as the next man, did not spit it out in a moment of impatience, after being asked the same question thirty-three times in the same evening. Hillary’s answer is almost as successful. ‘I climb for the fun of it.’ Nobody can complain of that. The simple sportsman can accept it at its face value; the moralist can rejoice at an honest man; the sycophant can tremble at the manly simplicity of it; the mystic-mountaineer can ponder the query ‘What is Fun?’ (between his indignant ruminations on the Ascent rather than the Conquest of his favourite mountain, it being a matter of faith with him, as I remember, that you must never be beastly to the thing).

  Everyone, of course, does these things for a different reason, but I composed a formula as we climbed that might be applicable to most mountaineers. I believe their reason for climbing is partly pride (because they do not care to admit weakness); partly ambition (because a warm caress of glory surrounds the successful mountaineer, even if he only stands, alone and unhonoured, on some minor and ill-respected summit); partly aestheticism (because their sport takes them to such beautiful places); partly mysticism (because they wallow sensuously in a spiritual challenge); and partly masochism (because they actually enjoy the discomforts they undergo, crevasses, avalanches, cold, loneliness, squalor, fatigue and all). Of these component motives it was the last that I found most convincing as we struggled up the mountain.

  The snow fell again that afternoon as we slowly progressed through the maze, swirling and blowing about us and blurring the track we followed. We crossed a few more bridges and poles, slithered down a few more ice-slopes, swung up a few more ropes, squeezed through a few more crevices, and climbed up a rope ladder, re
spectably fitted with wooden rungs, like something at a boy scout camp. ‘Presented by the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Association,’ Band shouted at me through the wind with an explanatory gesture, thus giving our venture an unexpected week-end touch. As the last glimmers of the sun disappeared and the gloom of evening arrived, we stumbled into Camp III: a couple of shapeless tents looking at us through the blizzard, a lonely wireless aerial, a pile of boxes half-hidden in the snow, an occasional sound of voices emerging murmurously from the darkness. I went into a thoroughly disused tent and, sweeping aside the miscellaneous junk inside it, lumbered into my sleeping-bag.

  There was an especial satisfaction for me in resting that night at Camp III, Everest, at the top of the icefall. I was prepared to admit that journalists had written dispatches before from the altitude of Base Camp – 18,000 feet; but I felt almost certain that no one had employed quite so lofty a dateline as this. But despite a certain elation, somewhere discernible at the back of my mind, I was never able to put much heart into my dispatches from such high places. It was not only that my head was generally aching, my limbs exhausted, and my fingers very cold; the altitude also has a dulling effect on the brain, blunting enthusiasms and antipathies, removing mental extremes, clothing experience in a grey and clogging uniformity. Judgement of distance and danger is warped, as everyone knows; but so are aesthetic values and standards of enjoyment and distaste. The great mountaineer, at the utmost limit of human endurance, unaccountably misjudges the safety of a corniche, like ‘a sick man climbing in a dream’; the journalist, at his own level on the mountain, surrounded by the aura of great adventure, in the light of a golden Himalayan moon, can find nothing very memorable to write about.