Coronation Everest

by Jan Morris

  We moved into the big dome tent, and sat around the summit party, throwing questions at them, still laughing, unable to believe the truth. Everest was climbed, and these two mortal men in front of us, sitting on old boxes, had stood upon its summit, the highest place on earth! And nobody knew but us! The day was still dazzlingly bright – the snow so white, the sky so blue; and the air was still so vibrant with excitement; and the news, however much we expected it, was still somehow such a wonderful surprise – shock waves of that moment must still linger there in the Western Cwm, so potent were they, and so gloriously charged with pleasure. Now and then the flushed face of a Sherpa appeared in the doorway, with a word of delight; and as we lay there on boxes, rolls of bedding and sleeping-bags, Hillary and Tenzing ate a leathery omelette apiece, and told us their story. I can hear Hillary’s voice today, and see the lump of omelette protruding inside his left cheek, as he paused for a moment from mastication to describe the summit of Mount Everest.

  The whole world knows the story now: how the two of them had spent a terrible night in the tiny tent of Camp IX, crookedly pitched on an uncomfortable ridge, one half of the floor higher than the other; how they had struggled and talked and dreamed the night away, eating sardines; how early on the morning of May 29 they had crept out of the tent, to find the day fine and clear, so that Thyangboche monastery could be seen there, ten miles away and 19,000 feet below, and the little lake, tucked away below Pumori, that Sonam and I had visited two months before; how they had laboured along the last ridge, and hauled themselves up a brutal chimney, and expected each successive bump to be the summit; until at last, at 11.30 in the morning, they had found themselves truly at the top, with the flags they carried fluttering in the breeze.

  Hillary had planted John’s crucifix, as he had promised, and Tenzing had placed some small offerings on the ground, to propitiate the divinities supposed to live upon that Himalayan Olympus. They had embraced each other, and taken photographs, and eaten some mint cake; and after fifteen minutes on the summit, they had turned and begun the downward climb.

  ‘What did it feel like when we got there? Well I’ll tell you, though I don’t know if Tenzing agrees; when we found it really was the summit at last I heaved a sigh of relief, and that’s a fact. No more steps to cut! No more ridges to traverse! It was a great relief to me, I can tell you. D’you agree, Tenzing?’

  And Tenzing, his hat pushed back on his head, his face permanently wreathed and crinkled with smiles, laughed and nodded and ate his omelette, while the worshipping Sherpas at the door gazed at him like apostates before the Pope. Indeed, he was a fine sight, sitting there in his moment of triumph, before the jackals of fame closed in upon him.

  ‘Yes, but there must have been more than mere relief in your mind,’ I said to him, ‘after all these years of Everest climbing. What else did you feel when you stood upon the summit?’

  This time Tenzing paused in his eating and thought hard about his reply. ‘Very excited,’ he said judicially, ‘not too tired, very pleased.’

  11

  Descent

  Half past two on the afternoon of May 30. I scribbled it all down in a tattered old notebook, drinking in the flavour of the occasion, basking in the aura of incredulous delight that now flooded through our little camp. The talk was endless and vivacious, and would no doubt continue throughout that long summer afternoon and into the night; but there were only three full days to the Coronation, and as I scribbled I realized that I must start down the mountain again that very afternoon, to get a message off to Namche the next morning. This time there would be no night’s rest at Camp III. I must go straight down the icefall to Base Camp that evening. My body, still aching from the upward climb in the morning, did not like the sound of this at all; but at the back of my slightly befuddled brain a small voice told me that there could be no argument. Wilfrid Noyce had always planned to make this last dash down the mountain-side for me; but now I was here myself, and need not bother him.

  ‘I’ll come with you James!’ said Michael Westmacott instantly, when I told them my plans; and remembering the newly oozing ice-bog of the route, I accepted his offer gratefully. We loaded our rucksacks, fastened our crampons, shook hands all round, and set off down the slope. ‘Good luck!’ a voice called from the dome tent; I turned around to wave my thanks, and stood for a moment (till the rope tugged me on) looking at the blank face of Lhotse, just falling into shadow, and the little clump of happy tents that was Camp IV. Christmas angels were in the Cwm that day.

  So we strode off together down the valley. In a downhill climb the most experienced man should travel last; but I was so obviously in a condition of impending disintegration, and the way was so sticky and unpleasant from the thaw, that Westmacott went first, and I followed. At the head of the Cwm, though we did not know it, Wilfrid Noyce, Charles Wylie and some Sherpas were making their way down to Camp IV from the Lhotse Face, where they had been packing up the tents to bring them lower. As they crossed a small ridge they caught sight of our two small figures, far below, all alone in the Cwm and travelling hard towards Camp III. Perhaps there were ghosts about, Noyce thought as he watched our dour silent progress; the angel theory did not occur to him.

  For me it was a wet and floundering march. So soft, receptive and greedy was the snow that at almost every step I sank deeply into it, often up to my thighs, and had then to extricate myself with infinite trouble, with that confounded rope (connecting me with Westmacott) rapidly getting tauter as I struggled, until suddenly there would be a great sharp pull upon it, and Mike would turn round to see what was happening, and find me sprawling and flapping in the snow, like some tiresome sea-creature on the sand. I remember vividly the labour and the discomfort of it all, with the wet seeping into my boots, and the shaft of my ice-axe sinking into the snow, my head heavy and my brain muzzy but excited. As we travelled down the Cwm, so the sun went down, and the valley was plunged into shadow, chilling and unfriendly.

  Here and there were our footsteps of the morning’s journey, barely recognizable now, but squashy and distorted, as if Snowmen had passed that way. Long and deep were the crevasses that evening, and as we crossed them their cool interiors seemed almost inviting in their placidity. The shadows chased us down the valley, and soon I could no longer watch my own image on the snow, elongated like a dream figure, with my old hat swollen on my head and my ice-axe, like a friar’s stave, swinging in my hand. Before long we were peering ahead through the dusk, still struggling and slipping, but still moving steadily down the mountain.

  Camp III again, in the half-light. We stopped for lemonade and sweets, and I looked about me with a sudden pang of regret at the melting plateau, the sagging tents, the tottering wireless aerial, the odd boxes and packing-cases. I would never set foot on this place again: this was my goodbye to the mountain. So befuddled was I by the altitude and the exertion, so feverish of emotion, that a hot tear came to my eye as I sat there shivering in the cold, my boots soggy and my head throbbing, looking about me at the loathsome decaying wilderness of ice that surrounded us.

  Down we plunged into the icefall, and I realized again what an odious place it had become. The bigness and messiness and cruelty of it all weighed heavily upon me, a most depressing sensation. Any grandeur the icefall possessed had gone, and squalidness had overcome it. Now more than ever it was a moving thing; seracs were disintegrating, plateaus splitting, ice-towers visibly melting; and there were creaking, groaning and cracking noises.

  The ice was here, the ice was there,

  The ice was all around;

  It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

  Like noises in a swound!

  Through this pile of white muck we sped, and as we travelled I wondered (in a hazy sort of way) what we would find at the bottom. How many Izzards or Jacksons had encamped at Base Camp in my absence, setting up their transmitters, poised to fall upon the descending Sherpas? Was there any conceivable way in which the news of the ascent could have reach
ed the glacier already? Nobody had preceded us down the mountain, but what about telepathy, mystic links, smoke signals, choughs, spiders, swounds? What if I arrived at camp to find that my news was already on its way to London and some eager Fleet Street office? I shuddered at the thought, and taking a moment off to hitch up my rucksack, nearly fell headlong into a crevasse.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ said Westmacott a little sharply. ‘And belay me if you can!’

  One of his pole bridges, across a yawning chasm, had been loosened by the thaw, and looked horribly unsafe. I thrust my ice-axe into the snow and put the rope around it while Westmacott gently edged himself across. I could just see him there in the gloom, precariously balanced. One pole was lashed to another, and he had to move them around, or tie them again, or turn them over, or hitch them up, or do something or other to ensure that we were not precipitated into the depths, as Peacock once remarked, in the smallest possible fraction of the infinite divisibility of time. This, after a few anxious and shivery moments, he did: and I followed him cautiously across the void.

  Who would have thought, when Hunt accepted me over that admirable lunch at the Garrick Club, that my assignment would end like this, scrambling dizzily and feverishly down the icefall of Everest in the growing darkness? Who could have supposed that I would ever find myself in quite so historically romantic a situation, dashing down the flanks of the greatest of mountains to deliver a message for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II? It was all perfectly – oops, steady, nasty slippery bit! – all perfectly ridiculous. It must all be some midnight dream, by brandy out of Gruyère; or a wild boyhood speculation, projected by some intricate mechanism of the time-space theory. Slithering down the mountain with the news from Everest! What poppycock!

  ‘Do try and wake up,’ said Westmacott. ‘It would be a help if you’d belay me sometimes!’

  I murmured my apologies, blushing in the dark. Indeed by now, as we passed the tents of Camp II, I was a pitiful messenger. All the pieces of equipment fastened to my person seemed to be coming undone. The ice-axe constantly slipped from my fingers and had to be picked up. The rope threatened to unloose itself. The laces of my boots trailed. The fastening of one of my crampons had broken, so that the thing was half on, half off my foot, and kept tripping me up. I had torn my windproof jacket on an ice-spur, and a big flap of its red material kept blowing about me in the wind. My rucksack, heavy with kit, had slipped on its harness, so that it now bumped uncomfortably about in the small of my back. (I have had similar sensations since, in less atrocious degree; for example at airports when, standing there helpless beside the gate, passport in one hand, luggage tickets in the other, mackintosh over one arm, hold-all over the right, a camera around my neck, a book under my arm, a typewriter between my knees, a ticket between my teeth – when, standing there in this cluttered condition, I have been asked by some unspeakable official for my inoculation certificate.)

  Still we went on, my footsteps growing slower and wearier and more fumbling, and even Westmacott rather tired by now. Presently we made out the black murk that was the valley of the Khumbu; and shortly afterwards we lost our way. Everything had changed so in the thaw. Nothing was familiar. The little red route flags were useless. There was no sign of a track. We stood baffled for a few moments, faced with an empty, desert-like snow plateau, almost at the foot of the icefall. Then: ‘Come on,’ said Westmacott boldly, ‘we’ll try this way! We’ll glissade down this slope here!’

  He launched himself upon the slope, skidding down with a slithery crunching noise. I followed him at once, and, unable to avoid a hard ice-block at the bottom, stubbed my toe so violently that my big toe-nail came off. The agony of it! It was like something in an old Hollywood comedy, with indignity piled upon indignity, and the poor comic hero all but obliterated by misfortune!

  But I had little time to brood upon it, for Westmacott was away again already, and the rope was pulling at me. As we neared the bottom of the icefall, the nature of the ground became even more distasteful. The little glacier rivulets which had run through this section had become swift-flowing torrents. Sometimes we balanced our shaky way along the edge of them; sometimes we jumped across; sometimes, willy-nilly, we waded through the chill water, which eddied into our boots and made them squelch as we walked.

  At last, at the beginning of the glacier moraine, I thought I would go no farther. It was pitch black by now, and Westmacott was no more than a suggestion in front of me. I sat down on a boulder, panting and distraught, and disregarded the sudden sharp pull of the rope (like totally ignoring a bite on a deep-sea fishing line).

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I think I’m going to stop here for a bit,’ (as casually as I could manage it) ‘and get my breath back. I’ll just sit here quietly for a minute or two. You go on, Mike, don’t bother about me.’

  There was a slight pause at the other end of the rope.

  ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ said Westmacott: and so definitive was this pronouncement that I heaved myself to my feet again and followed him down the glacier. Indeed, we were almost there. The ground was familiar again, and above us loomed the neighbourly silhouette of Pumori. The icefall was a jumbled dream behind us. I felt in the pocket of my windproof to make sure my notes were there, with the little typed code I was going to use. All was safe.

  Presently there was a bobbing light in front of us; and out of the gloom appeared an elderly Sherpa with a lantern, grinning at us through the darkness. He helped us off with our crampons and took the ice-axe from my hand, which was unaccountably shaking with the exertion.

  ‘Anybody arrived at Base Camp?’ I asked him quickly, thinking of those transmitters. ‘Is Mr. Jackson here again, or Mr. Tiwari?’

  ‘Nobody, sahib,’ he replied. ‘There’s nobody here but us Sherpas. How are things on the mountain, sahib? Is all well up there?’

  All well, I told him, shaking his good old hand. All very well.

  *

  So we plunged into our tents. There were some letters, and some newspapers, and a hot meal soon appeared. Mike came to join me in eating it, and we squeezed into my tent comfortably, and ate and read there in the warm. I was exhausted, for the climb from III to IV and thence down to base was no easy day’s excursion for a beginner; and it seemed to me that the icefall, in its present debased and degenerate condition, had been nothing short of nightmarish.

  ‘Was it really as bad as all that?’ I asked. ‘Or was it just me?’

  ‘It was bad!’ Westmacott replied shortly, peering at me benevolently over his spectacles, like a scholarly physician prescribing some good old-fashioned potion.

  We lay and lazed there for a time, and chatted about it, and remembered now and then that Everest had been climbed, and wondered how the news would be received in London. I made a few tentative conjectures about honours lists. ‘Sir Edmund Hillary’ certainly sounded odd. What about Tenzing? ‘Sir Tenzing and Lady Norkay’? ‘Lord Norkay of Chomolungma’? But no, he was Indian, or Nepalese (nobody quite knew which) and could qualify for no such resplendent titles: he would be honoured royally anyway. We heaved a few sleepy sighs of satisfaction, and presently Westmacott eased himself gradually out of the tent. I thanked him for all his kindness on the icefall, and we said good night.

  Before I could go to sleep, though, I had a job to do. Leaning over in my sleeping-bag with infinite discomfort, for my legs were as stiff as ramrods and patches of sunburn on various parts of my body made movement very painful, I extracted my typewriter from a pile of clothing and propped it on my knees to write a message. This was that brief dispatch of victory I had dreamed about through the months. Oh Mr. Tiwari at Namche and Mr. Summerhayes at Katmandu! Oh you watchful radio men in Whitehall! Oh telephone operators, typists and sub-editors, readers, listeners, statesmen, generals, Presidents, Kings, Queens and Archbishops! I have a message for you!

  Now then, let me see. Pull out the crumpled paper code; turn up the flickering hurricane lamp, it’s getting dark in
here; paper in the typewriter, don’t bother with a carbon; prop up your legs with an old kit-bag stuffed with sweaters and socks; choose your words with a dirty broken-nailed finger; and here goes!

  Snow conditions bad stop advanced base abandoned yesterday stop awaiting improvement

  Which being interpreted would mean:

  Summit of Everest reached on May 29 by Hillary and Tenzing.

  I checked it for accuracy. Everything was right. I checked it again. Everything was still right. I took it out of the typewriter and began to fold it up to place it in its envelopes: but as I did so, I thought the words over, and recalled the wonder and delight of the occasion, and remembered that dear old Sherpa who had greeted us with his lantern, an hour or two before, when we had fallen out of the icefall.

  All well! I added to the bottom of my message.

  *

  ‘Take this envelope to the Indians at Namche!’ I said at daybreak to the runner, a lanky young man with a long face, notably fast and reliable. ‘Go by yourself, be swift and silent! Talk to nobody on the way! Hand it to the Indian sahib, and then run on to Chaunrikharka. All right? Good-bye then, and good luck! Mind you are both swift and silent!’

  I watched him leave the camp, and wave his farewell from the distant ridge, and disappear down the glacier. One more task I must do that morning, before I followed him with all possible speed, to meet him on the other side of Namche and make sure that all had gone well. If the Indians declined to send the message, I must go and see them myself and try to persuade them: but I would rather avoid the village, in case they asked me awkward questions about the nature of my message, or the reason for my departure from the mountain. And first I must send a message by the normal route, over the hills to Katmundu. If the radio failed me, the news would still reach London in a week, as I had promised John in the Western Cwm.