by Jan Morris
As I dozed in my bag that evening, hall-dreaming of tailless rats and scrambled eggs, in an agreeably muzzy coma, the flap of the tent was thrust aside and there appeared the enormous beaming face of Hillary, beneath an attractive striped linen helmet, rather like those worn by the Foreign Legion, kindly sewn for him by his fiancée.
‘There’s a nasty bit just down here on that last crevasse,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘I’m going down to cut a few more steps in it. What about coming and belaying me? D’you feel like it?’
His tone of voice was, I thought, distinctly nonne, or whichever interrogative it was they used in Latin to expect the answer ‘yes’; and anyway I was too vain to explain that I was prostrate with exhaustion. So, heaving a long inaudible sigh, struggling out of my sleeping-bag, twisting and rolling to get my boots out, catching my feet in the flap, searching for my snow-goggles, I crept miserably out into the snow and followed him. I am glad, now, that he dragged me out that night; for I remember the incident as characteristic of Hillary, and illustrative of his supreme quality as a mountaineer. It was a horrid night, the snow driving and stinging, no moon, only the faint glow of reflected snow and the great shadow of Everest looming above us. I stood at the lip of the crevasse, the rope belayed around my ice-axe, while Hillary scrambled expertly down its face. There he worked in the half-light, huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakeably assured, his energy almost demonic. He had a tremendous bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some bright, burly diesel express pounding across America; but beneath the good fellowship and the energy there was a subtle underlying seriousness; he reminded me often of a musician in the hours before a concert, when the nagging signs of nervous tension are beginning to enter his conversation, and you feel that his pleasantries are only a kindly façade. Hillary was as much a virtuoso as any Menuhin, and as deeply and constantly embroiled in his art; I first detected this strain of greatness in him that evening below Camp III, as the ice-chips flew through the darkness, his striped hat bobbed in the chasm, and I stood shivering and grumbling, all messed up with ropes, crampons and ice-axes, at the top.
We awoke next morning to find the snow still swirling about us; but before we started the return journey we climbed a little higher to the entrance of the Western Cwm. I had seen this trench in the mountain-side from my eminence on Pumori, and wanted a taste of its atmosphere before writing my dispatch. We laboured up through the snow, crossing two deep crevasses, until we stood at the entrance to the valley; but alas, the air was thick with driven snow, forming a shifting, blinding veil. I could just make out the high rock ramparts on either side, and far in the distance I thought I could see the enormous form of Lhotse, at the head of the valley. But then if I had tried hard enough I could have seen anything that morning, for the snow-shielded Cwm was so redolent with mystery, its recesses felt so romantic, my head was so strangely befuddled by the height, and it seemed to me so infinitely improbable that I should be standing there on Everest in the snow. We sat down and drank some lemonade, and presently began our journey down the mountain.
*
I was almost the Everest expedition in microcosm; for my modest adventures paralleled the greater enterprises of the climbers, and I timed my own journeys up the mountain to coincide with the different stages of the attempt. Thus, when I was making my first climb to the head of the icefall, Hunt’s reconnaissance parties were pushing ahead to the head of the Cwm and on to the vast slab of the Lhotse Face that rose above it. Similarly, soon after I returned to Base Camp to get my dispatches away and see to the organization of my runners, Hunt withdrew all the climbers from the mountain for a briefing on the plan of assault. This was a council of war before the attack on the summit. The groundwork had been done; quantities of stores had been taken up into the Cwm; the first examination had been made of the Lhotse Face; the time had come for a decision on the plan of final assault, and on the composition of the assault parties. Men would be made famous by this conference, and legends given birth. It was May 7, a significant date in the story of Everest.
Before the conference Hunt talked things over with Hillary and Evans, who had been made deputy leader of the expedition. He invited me to listen to this, and accordingly I tucked myself away in a corner as they hammered out the plan. It was a lovely sunny morning, and we basked there on the scree as we talked. When I heard that Evans and Tom Bourdillon, Hillary and Tenzing were to be the four men most likely to stand upon the summit, my first reaction was to wonder how their lives might be altered by the chance; whether, one day, Hillary’s name would be as well known as Mallory’s; and whether, indeed, (a supremely selfish thought) they would all come back safely to tell me the news, or whether I should start thinking about obituary notices.
(Goodness, that was a thought! Had we anything in the morgue on the members of the expedition? What about portrait pictures? I must get a photograph of every member, so that if anyone disappeared irrevocably down a crevasse we could provide a reasonable obituary. Let me see, now, what code words did we have for catastrophes? ‘Killed’, ‘Injured’ and ‘Ill’ I knew we had arranged; it might be worth thinking up a few more, for the choice of perils was wide, and if someone was, for example, sucked permanently away by some unexpected subsidence of the ice, it might well be worth reporting.)
‘There we are then,’ said Hunt, smiling encouragingly at me, for he thought I had been working out rates of oxygen flow, ‘we’ll gather all the chaps in the dome tent in half an hour and tell them the plan. How about you, James, do you know all about it now?’
‘Everything, thank you, John,’ I replied, wondering if half a column would be enough for him.
But nobody was killed or maimed on Everest, and for this record Hunt himself was responsible. His planning was impeccable. He was no Gordon, for he was more tolerant than that fanatic commander; and fortunately no mysticism tempered the composition of his Assault Load Tables. Nothing could be more cut and dried than the plan he now unfolded in the big dome tent. The sun had withdrawn by the time of the conference, and the snow was falling again. The wind alternately pushed and sucked at the canvas of the tent, and when from time to time some Sherpa entered, the doors shook and flapped like dervishes.
Almost everybody was gathered inside the tent, Tenzing stiff and upright on a packing-case near the door, the rest of us lounging on sleeping-bags, propped up against tent-poles, or sitting on the floor. Old newspapers were scattered all over the place, most of them tattered air mail editions of The Times. As Hunt began his talk I watched the faces of my companions. Most of them were resolutely abstract or casual: Tenzing sat there inscrutably, graceful and attentive, like a demi-god on parade before Zeus. Three of us, at least, were relatively relaxed – Griffith Pugh, the physiologist, Tom Stobart, the movie-photographer, and myself: for we would certainly be in no assault party or crucial operation high on the mountain. For the rest, there was a distinct sense of excitement, and a sudden snapping of the tension when the two assault teams were named. First Evans and Bourdillon, then Hillary and Tenzing. I thought I saw the slightest flicker of satisfaction cross Tenzing’s face, though in fact (we learnt later) he considered a Sherpa should have been in both parties; Hillary looked as if he had just been picked for the First XI, and was thinking about oiling his bat; Evans and Bourdillon reminded me of two unusually intelligent members of a board of directors, considering how to increase sales to Antigua. In a few moments, the plan was settled. Lowe, Westmacott and Band would be responsible for cutting a way up the Lhotse Face. The movement to the South Col would be led by Noyce and by Charles Wylie, the gentlest and most English of them all. Hunt and Gregory would form a support party, to carry supplies up to 28,000 feet, if possible. Evans and Bourdillon would launch the first assault, using the new and little-tried closed-circuit oxygen, Hillary and Tenzing would follow if they failed, using the familiar open-circuit sets. Michael Ward, the doctor, was to act as reserve.
Had anyone any questi
ons or observations? Hunt asked, looking benignly round the tent with a soldierly air, as if he were about to order his company commanders to synchronize their watches.
‘Yes,’ said Michael Ward, with a vehemence that nearly knocked me off my packing-case. ‘I certainly have. I think it’s a great mistake that you’re going so high yourself. It’s a great mistake. You’ve done too much already. You shouldn’t go with that support team. I feel this very strongly.’
He spat this out with a flashing of eyes and a quivering of his saturnine head; and John thanked him gravely. The passionate doctor proved to be partly right. Hunt, who was forty-four, climbed extremely high with extraordinarily heavy loads, eschewing oxygen to save weight, and going to the absolute limit of his endurance; and of all the climbers he was the most exhausted, so that I used to wonder, after the event, looking at his tired drawn face and thin body, moving with an air of infinite weariness, whether he would ever be quite the same again. But there, it was the sacrifice of leadership.
Ward himself was a distinguished climber as well as a physician, and in a way, of all those present in the tent, he was the best qualified to offer an opinion on the plan; for if it had not been for his vision we would not have been on Everest at all. When, after the war, the Communists overran Tibet and the northern side of Everest was irrevocably closed to westerners, the southern approach to the mountain (which we had followed) was unknown. In 1921 Mallory, who saw the upper part of the icefall from his col on the frontier, thought it doubtful that anyone could get up it. Thirty years later a pioneer Anglo-American reconnaissance party, who looked at it from the Khumbu Glacier, also thought it unlikely that there was a passable way to the summit from the south. Thus for a time it seemed that there was no possible post-war route to the top. Ward, however, was the leader of a group of irrepressible mountaineers who believed that there was such a way, and who pressed their views incessantly upon those dignitaries who have power of life and death over Himalayan expeditions. Their pressure led to a bigger reconnaissance expedition, in 1951; to the Swiss expeditions of 1952; and to our present venture, now reaching, as the wind blew and the tent shuddered, some kind of uncomfortable climax.
The conference ended with mugs of tea all round. I withdrew to my tent to write a long and technical dispatch; and there settled upon the whole party a new and closely-knitted sense of purpose. Not everyone agreed with Hunt’s plan, for reasons too complicated for me to explain; the forthright Gregory, for instance, insisted that the first assault had no prospect of success and would fulfil no very useful purpose; but there was a feeling that a new stage in the adventure had been reached, that duties had been defined and opportunities distributed, and that the direction of our efforts could now be seen more precisely. I sat on my boxes of treasure, typed out my dispatch on my tumbledown typewriter, and wondered if anyone was interested at home.
7
Sherpas
As the climbers slogged their way up the Lhotse Face, hampered by heavy snowfalls, I settled down at Base Camp for a week or more to ensure that my communications were working properly. Living night and day with my Sherpas, sharing their petty pleasures and annoyances, I began to acquire some insight into their strange exotic characters, and to perceive some vagaries of personality behind their brown faces, as smooth and as shining as nuts that have been polished on schoolboys’ sleeves. They were a hearty, extrovert, boisterous people, and I always had to fight a feeling of slight repulsion at their overwhelming insensibility – insensibility truly in the grand manner, overcoming all barriers of custom or manner, so that no secrets were inviolate and no idiosyncrasies protectable. If you have hidden habits, or eleven toes, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover in your sponge-bag, do not go visiting among the Sherpas.
For generations the Sherpa porters, who had helped so many sahibs into the mountains, had been famous for their courage in adversity and for their unfailing good humour. Nobody had ever questioned their fundamental worth, brave, friendly, honest, strong and loyal. All the same, a man is best judged at home, and until 1950 no European had ever penetrated to Sola Khumbu, where the Sherpas come from; the porters of the old expeditions were generally recruited in Darjeeling, where many Sherpas had set up home in the hope of finding more and better work. There were times, I confess, during my own stay in Sola Khumbu when I became no more than a reluctant admirer of the Sherpas, respectful indeed of all their high qualities, but weighed down with the burden of their heartiness.
For example, our first tottering march into the valley of the Dudh Khosi was made hideous for me by the jovial hilarity of the inhabitants. Oh, the plates of chang I drank, and the inexplicable jokes I laughed at, the dances I tried to dance, the backs I slapped, the girls I flirted with, the dear little children whose pranks I laughingly endured! Never a moment did I spend without a crowd of jovial Sherpas to watch me, thrusting their grinning heads between the flaps of my tent, poking their grimy fingers into the scrambled eggs, or simply standing staring, like that insatiable crowd on the veranda at Namche Bazar.
Once during the march I was walking happily up a riverside path, not far from Namche, when I caught sight of Sen Tenzing and Ang Nyima, sitting on the terrace of a house high above the road. They were both extremely drunk, and Ang Nyima was sitting in a kind of daze, an expression of indescribable foolishness blanketing his face. Sen Tenzing, on the other hand, was unnaturally animated. Waving his chang pan he jumped to his feet and shouted to me to join them. I was fond of the old rogue, so I foolishly accepted the invitation and toiled up the path to the house.
‘Ah, sahib, this is the best chang in Sola Khumbu. In the whole of Nepal! There is no chang like this chang! The woman of this household is famous for it. Have some, sahib! Here, take this bowl, and you will find the chang inside the room there, over in the corner!’
I peered into the room, which was very dark, and could just make out some kind of container in the corner. There was a stifled giggle from the doorway.
‘That’s it, sahib! Over there, just open the lid and put the bowl in. Famous chang, sahib! Take your fill!’
I opened the lid and put in my bowl, to find that the container was what used to be called, in more spacious days, a commode. Bacchanalian and uncontrolled was the laughter which now rolled in gusts through the open door. Sen Tenzing was splitting his sides; Ang Nyima was giggling a loose high-pitched giggle. ‘Famous chang, sahib!’ said Tenzing, taking my pack off my back, getting out the tea, and preparing to boil a kettle. ‘Now, would you like some scrambled egg, sahib, or some chupattis with marmalade? Here, sahib, let me loosen your boots!’
*
What can you do with such people, who throw a custard pie at you with one hand and make you a cup of cocoa with the other? Only count ten, and then say thank you. For indeed their kindness was inexhaustible. Often and again I was pushed into the house of a perfect stranger for a meal, lavish in scale and (for a tired traveller, anyway) often delicious in quality. The Sherpa houses are well constructed on two storeys, with paned windows and pleasant tiled roofs. They stand square, squat and wholesome-looking, very different from the squalid shanties of the Katmandu valley. The ground floor is used as a storehouse, and in its gloom you are quite likely to stumble into a tethered yak, wheezing among the hay.
Up the rickety wooden staircase you go, the Sherpas leaping up it gaily, the sahib puffing and scrambling behind; and at the top you find yourself in what seems at first to be some kind of revival meeting or assembly of illegal saints. The whole of the upper part of the house consists of one long room, thick with beams and rafters, not unlike an Elizabethan cottage in England. It is dim and murky. A little light comes through the windows (unless they are piled too high with snow) and the rest comes from a large fire of yak-dung burning merrily in the middle of the room. Smoke from this fire swirls about, and from the outside you can sometimes see it seeping through cracks in the structure, like steam escaping from a Finnish bathhouse.
You may have looked forward, as you heaved
yourself up the stairs, to a quiet evening beside the fire with your host, the two of you attended by his bustling but self-effacing little wife. Such is not your fate. The room is almost certainly packed to suffocation with Sherpas. Some are sitting on the floor, talking loudly to each other. Some are moving about carrying pots and pans. Some are poking the fire. Some are roasting potatoes. Some are feeding children. Some seem to be dead. Many of these people are members of the householder’s family, many (like yourself) mere passers-by; but all are perfectly at home, and all equally facile in handling the baby. Don’t be shy. Crack a joke or two as you join the assembly, or slip on a banana skin.
The walls of this big room are lined with trays, pots, pans, buckets, bowls, and other more obscure instruments of hospitality, and before long you will find yourself eating a splendid meal. The rowdiest old hag will prepare you a plate of boiled potatoes, spiced with salt from Tibet (and garnished with margarine from your rucksack). This is the staple diet of the Sherpas, and eaten beside a yak-dung fire, in the murk of a Sherpa living-room, it can be delectable. There is chang, of course, in flat trays, very thick and sticky; or cocoa brewed by your own attendants; or perhaps Tibetan brick tea, most appalling of beverages. Soon you will feel content among these peasants, for all their loud high spirits, and lean back on your rucksack with a potato and a bowl of chang, the firelight flickering over your face, the chatter of Sherpas loud about you, the aromatic smoke curling around your head, like some replete barbarian monarch resting among his court.
