Coronation Everest

by Jan Morris

  One more excitement hurled itself upon me at this lively time. When I climbed up my hillock, warming my batteries, and extracted the radio from its cache, it was Band whose voice reached me, in a surrealistic sort of way. We talked with difficulty of this and that; of the South Col and the first assault; of the weather broadcasts sent specially to us each evening by the B.B.C. in London. I had missed the forecast of the day before, and I asked him what it said.

  ‘Oh!’ said he. ‘If you didn’t hear it, congratulations on bubbly bubbly your switch switch!’

  ‘What?’ said I. ‘Can’t hear you!’

  ‘Congratulations your wheeeee zugazug! Jolly good show! They put it in after the forecast, you know!’

  ‘I really am terribly sorry, George, but I simply can’t hear you!’

  ‘Your sugsugsugsug! Your switchabubblebubble! Your s-o-n!’ My son! So I had another son! I must make a note of that.

  9

  Snowmen

  Only a few days to wait, for success or failure! Long and intimate were the conversations I had with my Sherpas during these hours of suspense; and so charged was the atmosphere with mystery and excitement that often enough our talk would turn to that celebrated Himalayan character, the Abominable Snowman (homo niveus disgustans); or, as the Sherpa people called him, the yeti. Since then expeditions have gone to the Himalaya specifically to solve the problem of this legendary creature, but the Snowman remains no more than a legend still, with little but his occasional great squashy footprints in the snow to mark his presence. On our expedition we saw nothing of him; somebody heard a strange whistle on the glacier which was said to be a yeti call; innumerable tales about him reached us from the Sherpas; but he only hovered about us shapelessly, never, alas, assuming any tangible form, merely flitting clumsily in and out of our conversations.

  The Khumbu Glacier seemed to be ideal Snowman country, and sometimes I would wander off into its gullies and ravines hoping to catch a glimpse of some shaggy Snowman head, and wondering what on earth I would do if I chanced to stumble across a family of them: throw stones at them? run away? hide? I hugged my camera determinedly on these outings, but never a shaggy head did I see, nor hear the cavortings of any baby Snowmen. All the same, it was rather eerie creeping through these grim alleys among the moraine, with not another human being for miles, only the little tailless rats scurrying about the scree; in a silence only broken by the creaking and grinding of the glacier and the cracking of ice. It was the last week of May, and the thaw had set in, so that many of the high ice pinnacles were shrinking dejectedly, and the rivulets were swollen. Through this wilderness I tramped resolutely, whistling a little obviously, my mind torn between the yeti and the South Col.

  To my Sherpas, as we sat beside the big camp fire talking, there was never a doubt about the existence of the yeti. He was something they had grown up with; if you asked them whether they believed in the Snowman they answered with an air of pitying wonder, as if you had asked a London bus driver whether he believed in Tower Bridge. All had some experience to recount, and some claimed to have seen the Snowman. Several were present on a famous occasion when a yeti appeared on the hill above Thyangboche in the middle of a religious festival, well attended by the Sherpas; the monks, casting about for a method of getting rid of him, wisely ordered the monastery band to strike up a serenade on its drums and conches, and in a trice the yeti, blocking his ears, had loped away into the snows. Others claimed that the roofs of their family houses, secured in the Alpine manner by piles of stones, had been rudely removed by marauding Snowmen. One said he had even seen a Snowman grubbing for roots in a garden. What did he look like? ‘Exactly like you, sahib,’ said the impudent minion, to raucous laughter from our companions. I ordered the removal of his ears, but nobody took any notice.

  It was difficult, as a conscientious reporter, to sift fact from fancy in their accounts of such experiences; and often I recognized echoes of hobgoblins, Cornish gnomes, forest sprites, leprechauns and other products of the peasant imagination.

  ‘Come now,’ I would say, ‘stop being funny, and tell me exactly what this thing was like, that you say you saw eating onions on your uncle’s veranda. How big was it? Bigger than you?’

  ‘A little, sahib, a bit smaller than you, but very big this way. It was brown, and covered all over with hair, very rough. Sometimes it walked on all fours, and sometimes it walked upright. It made two kinds of noises. Sometimes it grunted, like this – urgh! urgh! – and sometimes it sort of whistled. It had toes, just like us. It moved very fast. It had two eyes. It had ears. It was covered all over with brown hair. It had a sort of crest of hair on its head. Oh yes, and it had its feet on backwards, sahib!’

  Feet on backwards, breasts dangling so low that the female could only run uphill, arms strong enough to crush a yak, a liking for chang – all these picturesque details somehow detracted, I thought, from the scientific value of such accounts. But there emerged through the wild fancies, all the same, a brown, vaguely anthropomorphic figure, covered with hair, with a crested head, on which all the Sherpas seemed to agree: and coupled with this common image was a fear of the thing tinged with loathing, as if the yeti were evil or dirty (he must be very dirty indeed to cause the Sherpas any qualms). ‘He is bad,’ they would say, ‘and sometimes he eats yaks, and sometimes humans, and his hair is unpleasant.’ I often wondered just how bad he was, as I wandered through the moraine in search of him.

  ***

  Months later, when Everest was far behind us and we had all tasted a little of the fruits of fortune, I was travelling in a train with Ed Hillary, Charles Evans and George Lowe, between Philadelphia and Washington. It was very late at night. The Philadelphia lecture was over, and in the morning there was to be a ceremony at the White House. The train, a slow local, rocked and clattered clumsily through the night. Two elderly ladies gossiped breathily in one corner, and three men lay in another, their feet on the seats, their felt hats tipped over their eyes, snoring. Sometimes a sleepy man in a white overall wandered through, selling milk and soft drinks. The conductor sat in a window-seat puffing a big cigar.

  As we chatted, Evans chanced to pull out his wallet, to find his railway ticket; and as he did so I noticed tucked away in one of its pockets a small cellophane envelope, containing what looked like a tuft of rough brown hair. It was really none of my business, but I could not resist asking him what they were; for though Evans is a brain surgeon, it seemed an odd thing to be carrying about so close to the heart, the hairs having little in common with those sweet ribbon-bound curls sometimes to be found in the recesses of swains.

  ‘Oh,’ said he casually, idly pulling the envelope out, ‘they’re some hairs from the scalp of an Abominable Snowman!’

  The conductor puffed away at his cigar; the three men snored; the ladies shared their sewing-circle antipathies; and we Britons, suddenly galvanized into awareness, eagerly examined this queer trophy. It was a bizarre moment. Charles, now showing more interest himself, displayed the hairs with a distinctly proprietorial air; and I rashly offered, on behalf of my newspaper, to buy them from him for examination. As we swayed over the Delaware that night it really seemed to me that we might at last have mastered the secret of the Snowman.

  With infinite calm Evans told us how he had acquired the bristles. After the Everest expedition he had stayed behind in the Sherpa country to do some mapping, climbing and exploration on his own. One night he and some Sherpas had settled for the night in a yak-herder’s shelter called Thagnak, at about 16,000 feet, and the conversation had turned, as it so often did, to the yeti. The Sherpas made their usual muddled contribution to the discussion, all agreeing again on the general characteristics of the beast, and describing its details with inelegant variations; and in the course of the talk one of them remarked to Evans: ‘Of course, you know there’s a yeti scalp at the Buddhist temple at Pangboche?’

  Evans knew nothing of the kind, and was naturally excited. This might be just the kind of yeti trace that
would settle the identity of the thing. When their survey work was finished, he and the Sherpa Da Tenzing crossed a pass and arrived at Pangboche.

  ‘There was a little Sherpa, dressed in rags, in charge of the temple, and we asked him to show us round. When we had looked at it – it was a dark and dingy place – we asked if we could see the yeti scalp. He didn’t object, so we climbed up the stairs to a room where they kept all the ceremonial masks and robes. Everything was very dusty and disorderly, and he couldn’t find the scalp at first. We were beginning to wonder if it was there at all when at last he pulled it out and dusted it with his coat-sleeve and held it out to us.’

  ‘Well, what was it like? Go on!’

  But Evans was never to be hurried. He blew his nose with dignity, and continued: ‘It was a piece of hard black skin, somewhere between a dome and a cone. If it was a scalp, it had been cut off above the ears and eyes, and on the outside of it there were stiff bristly hairs, black and chestnut, about an inch long.’

  ‘The ones you’ve got!’ said I.

  ‘Wait!’ said Charles. ‘On each side of the cone these bristles lay flat. In some places they’d been worn away. But over the top of the cone, in a straight line, they stood up like a sort of crest. It was really very like the Sherpas’ description of a Snowman’s head!’

  Evans had never seen a head of this shape. The nearest he could think of was a gorilla’s, which comes to less of a peak and has softer hair. Nobody knew how the object had come to Pangboche, though it was associated with a magician of antiquity named Tsang Dorje, who was supposed to be able to fly. When they had finished looking at the scalp, it was turned upside-down and passed around by its keeper as the hat is passed round, and with the same intention. As a contributor Evans thought he was justified in pulling out a couple of hairs; and so it happened that we were examining them in that squeaky old American train, in that dark American night, 7,000 miles away.

  As Evans said, they obviously did not come from any of the animals known to frequent the region of Pangboche – the yak, the wild sheep, the fox, the wolf, the musk deer and the tailless rat. They were genuinely ‘x’, the unknown quantity, plucked from the skin of an unnamed creature, taken by a Tibetan magician to a Buddhist temple in the shadow of Everest.

  ‘Very interesting,’ said Hillary. ‘Reminds me of the time we were crossing the pass between the Gunara and the Khumbu in ’52 – remember, George? It was about 19,500. We had five Sherpas. The side we were climbing was pretty steep, believe you me; we were about half-way up, and I was helping two old Sherpas who were making heavy weather of it. They both stopped and I turned back to help them along. I found one of them showing the other something he’d picked up off a rock. I asked them what it was, and the chap who was holding the thing held it out for me. It was a tuft of bristles, very coarse and blackish, like these.

  ‘Well, I knew they couldn’t be yak hairs. It was much too steep for yak. Anyway, the hairs were too coarse. I asked the Sherpas what they were, and they said they were yeti hairs. I tried to take the tuft-thought I’d take them triumphantly back to civilization, you see – but the Sherpa holding them said, “Very bad!” and he threw them over the bluff. He was obviously repelled by them. I remember the hairs especially because they were so stiff; but I certainly wasn’t going to go over the bluff to examine them more closely. As I remember them, they were very like these.’

  Fired by these tales, the first thing I did in Washington was to arrange for the hairs to be flown home to England. John Hunt, in America for the White House ceremony, agreed to take them home for me, and took charge of them with an air of infinite responsibility, as if he were delivering the blue-print of a hydrogen bomb. In London they were taken to the Natural History Museum in Kensington; and they were also examined by the Forensic Laboratory at Scotland Yard, an odd job even for that versatile institution.

  Away in America we waited with bated breath for the outcome of these examinations. The more we thought about the hairs, the harsher and stiffer and stranger they grew: the more mysterious in my imagination became that old Tibetan wizard, flying through the glaciers scalping Snowmen; the more pregnant with significance became the scalp itself, now back in the dust of the upstairs room, among the devil-faces, long saffron robes, bones and weird ritual instruments. As our tour continued, we took to visiting the local zoos, hanging over the railings that surrounded the big bears and measuring the feet of langur monkeys. At Central Park Zoo in New York a friendly but baffled superintendent allowed us to test the hair of an orang-utang for texture, and to inspect with a peculiar intensity of interest the scalp of a young gorilla. The more we considered the circumstances, the more possible it seemed that we were about to solve the mystery; and the more convinced I became that Evans had, by these odd means, discovered the presence in the Himalaya of some unsuspected primate (perhaps a gorilla).

  But there are creatures that even the American zoos do not show to their visitors, and holy men in India and Nepal whose relics are evidently of dubious sanctity. Bang went my conception of the magician; back on his pedestal of mystery strode the yeti. In Denver, Colorado, the truth arrived in a cable from London, and a few days of high excitement degenerated into a moment of hilarity. ‘All experts are of the opinion,’ the cable ran frigidly, ‘that hairs are those of a hog repeat hog. What can you do to recover our money?’

  *

  Since then that poor scalp at Pangboche has been raided again for its bristles. A later British expedition extracted some and sent them to England. A wandering Indian scientist took some more, and had them examined at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. The poor little custodian, in his rags, must constantly be running up and down the stairs, scrabbling among the ceremonial masks: and nobody has had the heart to tell him that it is probably only the skin of a pig – perhaps not even a scalp, they say, but a bit of rump or a hog’s back stretched and shaped to assume another form.

  But all this was unknown to me as we sat around the fire on those pleasant May evenings, and when I peered with such nagging forebodings into the gullies of the glacier. If anyone had told me there was a yeti scalp at Pangboche, I would have packed a bag of potatoes and walked there overnight: for there is something obsessive and irresistible about the enigma of the Snowman.

  10

  Ascent

  The day of the first assault came and went, and I heard over the radio one evening that Evans and Bourdillon had reached the South Summit, higher than any man had climbed before, but had fallen back to the South Col exhausted. As expected, the climb directly from Camp VIII had been too far for them; their new oxygen kit had given them trouble; they had stood upon that little bump I had noticed from Pumori, only 500 feet below the summit, and after seeing something of the cruel final ridge had withdrawn to the Col.

  Now there approached the moment of the second assault, the more powerful of the two. Hillary and Tenzing would have many advantages. The weather was fine for them, and the snow that still fell on Base Camp each evening petered out two thousand feet above us. They would have a last camp, pitched at 27,900 feet, from which to make the final spring to the summit. Their oxygen equipment had been thoroughly proved. They were fit as fiddles still, and greatly encouraged by what Evans and Bourdillon had achieved. If it helped at all, the good wishes of the world by now went with them (for over the months, what with Hunt’s frequent authoritative messages, my own dispatches, and the incredible potpourri of misinformation that emanated from Katmandu, a public beyond the dreams – or nightmares – of the old Everesters now had its eyes glued greedily on the mountain).

  May 29 was the chosen day. On the evening of the 28th I had as my companion at Base Camp Griffith Pugh, the physiologist, and we sat late beside the fire drinking and talking, while he puffed at an odd angular French pipe. I always enjoyed his company. He was full of peculiar knowledge, and passed it on at surprising moments in a hesitating, slow-spoken, pipe-puffing manner; as if some gentle country parson, settling down for a quiet
scriptural chat with his parishioners, were suddenly to present some theories about Kafka, the dipping hem-line, or space travel. That night, I remember, we did in fact discuss religion, or at least those activities, such as yoga and Moral Rearmament, which leap and linger around the fringes of it.

  At last, when the fire began to die and the cold night air came creeping chillingly up the glacier, we arose and stretched and moved towards our tents.

  ‘Are you coming up the mountain again tomorrow?’ he said. ‘I’m moving off about eight, if you’d like to come with me.’

  I said I had not planned a climb, because I thought I should stay near my communications for the final news, and I was afraid some of our competitors might arrive at Base Camp at the crucial moment.

  ‘I think you’re wrong,’ said Dr. Pugh. ‘I think you ought to be up in the Cwm when they come back from the assault. What if somebody does arrive here? You’ll be bringing the news down yourself, so they can hardly get hold of it before you do.’