by Andrew Greig
Mal had suggested we all made a point of rooming with someone different at each stop on our journey through China and Tibet, so that by the time our trucks arrived at Base Camp we might feel more like a team. Thanks to the Chinese having created a ‘road’ to Everest, there’d be no long walk-in on this trip; and the walk-in is normally the phase an expedition uses to become fully fit and cohesive as a group. ‘I see myself as the loner on this trip,’ Chris said, ‘I’ve climbed with no one on it, I’m not part of a pair.’ From remarks the others had already made, I was beginning to wonder who did not regard themselves as outsiders. ‘I suppose I associate myself with people like Bob and Allen, despite being younger. I like to see the sensible rewarded …’ And with this remark he fell asleep, slumped over the jacket to which he was sewing a Pilkington’s logo.
Peking looked less bleak the next day, probably because we were less grey with fatigue and jet-lag. People walked into the hotel with masks over their faces. In Britain this would be a cue to hit the floor, here it’s a precaution against biting wind and swirling dust. On the streets we started noticing the occasional flash of colour in younger people’s clothes; one or two girls had high heels, and the local wide-boys aspired to rolled-up jeans and wrap-around shades. Only the older people still wore the once-compulsory Mao tunic in dark blue, black or bottle-green. The many small stalls along the pavements, selling everything from Coke to combs to cabbages, were another sign of changing times in China.
The Chinese Mountaineering Association (CMA) had organized an excursion to the Great Wall. It was another chilling day. Clouds of grey dust blew through the city and across the utterly flat countryside; cyclists and workers on foot struggled head-down into the wind with their fur caps’ ear-flaps streaming behind them, disciplined and determined, getting there.
The Wall itself is impressive enough, but to our minds it was slightly disappointing. The only section open to the public was entirely rebuilt 37 years ago. In effect, we were looking at a replica. There seemed to us something very Chinese about this wish to demonstrate what good condition everything is in, as if ruin would be a loss of national face. It’s rather like rebuilding Hadrian’s Wall, or those endless blocks of Workers’ Apartments – an impressive but mis-aimed effort. Much more fascinating were the miles of out-of-bounds ruined Wall, snaking into the furthest distance along the wild crest of the hills.
For the first time we saw Kurt and Julie at work. They wanted a shot of someone climbing on the outside of a guard tower. Tony volunteered. The Arriflex camera was set up, Kurt crouched over it, Julie directed the bazooka-like microphone, Danny did the handclap that would enable later synchronization of sight and sound, and off Tony went. He climbed nimbly up the Wall, crawled through an arch, and ran round to the bottom again, his film career over. But Kurt coughed and said ‘Vun more time please?’ We would come to loathe and dread those words.
Tony climbed the Wall again and again under Kurt’s direction while we huddled in the bitter wind, at once amused and apprehensive. When the climbing take was done to Kurt’s satisfaction, ‘And now, Tony, one more time for the close-up of the hands, yes?’ The hands were turning blue, but Tony complied. Then the cameras were carried to the top of the wall for close-ups of Tony’s face. We began to realize that this film would not be a hand-held camera cinema vérité job. Instead Kurt had a very clear idea of what he wanted; he was manufacturing a reality, and directed his actors accordingly.
Someone remarked that if it was this cold here, imagine what it was going to be like on Everest. Kurt jumped on the remark, ‘Good, that is good! Vill you say that again please … Yes, and then he say …’ So Nick and I made our ‘spontaneous’ remarks half a dozen times while camera and sound were co-ordinated and we finally got it right.
Mixed reactions in the team. Jon admired Kurt and Julie’s professionalism, Sandy was fascinated by the imaginative and technical aspects of filming. Some were amused (particularly those who weren’t being filmed), while others felt unease and the first stirrings of resentment. Are we going to have to do this on the hill? Bugger that. Acting made us feel foolish because we were very bad at it, and that too generated irritation.
‘When he gets behind a camera,’ Jon noted, ‘amiable Uncle Kurt suddenly becomes Joseph Goebbels.’
Signs of private enterprise at the Great Wall included women and boys selling I CLIMBED THE GREAT WALL T-shirts, Red Guard hats, postcards and paintings, at considerably cheaper prices than the official Tourist Shop. This was clearly permitted; our impression was that whatever happened in China was permitted. If it wasn’t permitted, it didn’t happen. Smiling was permitted, and the Chinese tourists at the Wall seemed to be having a marvellous time, taking pictures of the Wall, each other, and of the strange, jabbering foreigners climbing up the guard tower.
Then on to the Ming emperors’ tombs, with lunch on the way, ready and waiting for us in a barn-like restaurant. The tombs are approached by a long, wide avenue lined with giant guardian warriors like 20-foot-high chess pieces, and a menagerie of stone elephants and camels. Inevitably some of the lads tried to climb these. The smooth, rounded backside of an elephant proved too hard, but Chris made his first ascent of a camel, leaping for its ear and mouth then pulling up from there (’Very necky’). He tried to repeat it for Kurt but found himself running out of strength – he’d been much too busy in the last two months to train at all – and had to be assisted by a leg-up from someone remaining out of the shot. ‘Film is to snaps what the Himalaya is to Scotty,’ Jon wrote that night. The tombs themselves are all underground and in the end only Rick, Nick and Sarah, who had managed to escape the filming, had time to see them. Jack checked his watch. ‘And now we go back to hotel.’
Meanwhile Mal, Allen Fyffe and Dave Bricknell had gone to the CMA offices to check over our ‘protocol’ for the Expedition – part schedule, part financial agreement, detailed down to the last Yuan and yak for carrying gear from Base to Advance Base. Then they went shopping for the kind of common, heavy things there had been no point in bringing from the UK: pans, kitchen utensils, kettles and stoves. With a poor interpreter, this turned out to be a struggle.
They were taken to a store that sold electric toasters. Mal eventually explained that these would be of limited use at Base, and said we wanted the kind of stoves rural people used to cook with – thinking of the paraffin stoves used in Nepal and Pakistan. He was told that in that case we’d need to buy an awful lot of coal. It appeared there were no paraffin stoves in Peking, and precious little paraffin. This was baffling, because most of such stoves one finds in the Third World are marked ‘Made in China’. We were assured we’d be able to buy them in Chengdu (our next stop in southern China) or in Lhasa.
The shopkeepers also appeared taken aback when they heard of the one huge and five medium-sized cattle we wanted to buy. Even when the cattle resolved into ‘kettles’ we had little satisfaction, so they too were put off till later.
Back at the hotel, a demonstration of Chinese punctuality. Jack announced, ‘It is now one minute to seven. At seven o’clock we will eat dinner.’ We sat in silence for some forty seconds. ‘Now we go to dinner.’ We descended the stairs and entered the enormous, empty dining room on the stroke of seven.
Dinner as always in China was a survival of the fastest; those who were slow with chopsticks tended to go hungry. Tony fantasized about chip butties as he tried yet again to pick up a slippery fungus. ‘So where’s the tomato ketchup?’ the homesick Lancastrian complained. The food was never inspiring, but this was compensated for by the bottles of Green Leaf beer that came with every meal. ‘Alcohol is very good for the high altitude,’ Urs asserted enthusiastically.
‘Is it really?’ Danny asked innocently, eager to learn from these old-timers’ experience.
‘For sure,’ Sandy replied, ‘it stops you from ever getting there!’
That evening Jack took us through a recognizably ‘downtown’ area of Peking where there was a certain amount of night life, and
turned into a theatre where we were to see a show of acrobats. The theatre was shabby and so was the audience; the sets were grubby, the costumes worn and tatty – holes in the tights and missing sequins – the music and lighting were hamfisted, the magicians were embarrassing with their transparent tricks … Against this shoddy and cut-rate backdrop shone an incomparable display of dance-juggling-contortion-tumbling-gymnastics.
We sat transfixed, hooked to every impossible development. Allen Fyffe reflected that if these near-children ever took up rock climbing, they’d be tackling 6b routes inside a week. The acrobats had that ideal combination of strength, balance, muscular control, nerve and absolute concentration. Like climbing at its most extreme, what we saw transcended the physical and became pure expression, devoid of practical value. In the finale, the whole troupe built a pyramid of themselves, an inverted pyramid resting on one person’s headstand on a chair tilted back on two legs, each branching out higher on each other’s legs, arms, shoulders, heads, backs … If we were to climb our mountain, that is the way it would be done.
Bob So far China has made a very good impression on me, and I found the fantastic, relaxed ability of the acrobats to be inspiring in its accomplishment. At first sight this does seem to be a much more equal society than Western or other Asian ones – there seems to be no grinding poverty, and if there are fat cats then the material signs of them are few. The people are obviously worked hard, but the cheerfulness and tranquillity that is seen in many faces, and the wonderful performances of tonight, make it hard to accept that they are really crushed under the iron heel of socialism!
Next morning we boarded a four-propellered Ilyushin to fly across China to Chengdu, the capital of Szechuan province in southern China. It was a bright, sunny morning and the Expedition was in high spirits. Mal as usual appeared immersed in a book, but was taking in the feel of the conversation round him: anecdotes, jokes, teasing, planning, discussion – yes, we were beginning to pull together. You can’t force people to become a team, only let them. He’d keep a low profile as long as possible. What worried him more were the fragile logistics of the minimal oxygen plan …
Through much of the Expedition, Mal will be reading, lying in his tent, or sitting smoking with his headphones on. And though he will seldom show it except by a now habitual crease across his forehead, there is scarcely a minute when he is not thinking, anticipating, calculating, worrying. He is ageing several years in the course of a few months.
The Szechuan countryside round Chengdu was a mild, green world of order and fertility. Flat fields of rice, rape, beans, lettuce, divided by irrigation channels, hedges and trees. Half-timbered, almost Elizabethan farmhouses hid in clumps of willows; piglets, hens, ducks and goats scratched in the yards. Poplar trees lined the road to Chengdu, where children waited for the bus home from school. There were little outdoor cafés in village squares, old faces placid behind cigarettes, young men playing badminton in a farmyard, two neighbours leaning to talk over a hedge, mothers cycling leisurely home with babies strapped to their shoulders, rosy-cheeked children standing on the saddles behind their fathers. After the winter bleakness round Peking, this seemed a land where it was always spring. An idyll glimpsed from a bus window, of an ordered, organic, peace-filled rural world that was at once lovely and unlikely in the late afternoon haze and mellow setting sun.
Jon looked for the credits to Hornby Model Railways; Bob with his leftish sympathies was gratified by this vision of human, tranquil well-being.
Entering Chengdu at twilight, and more acres of building sites where hundreds of men and women worked with pick and shovel, mixed concrete by hand, excavated earth in baskets on their backs. Stone masons straddled blocks of grey stone, we could see the hammers rise and fall and straight lines emerge from shapeless rock. ‘These are serious people,’ Sandy commented. Serious but not solemn as they remake, reshape this vast country. They work steadily, patiently, often 10 hours a day on a six-day week. They have an absolute guarantee of work, housing, education and medical care; when they retire, their pension will be paid in full by the State. We laugh because their Western-style clothes, shops, buildings, technology are 30 years behind us, but deep down we’re impressed and slightly intimidated by their sense of common purpose.
The downtown centre is lively with small private stalls selling furniture and books, food and toys and clothes. Our hotel is at once swish and half-built. We walk along a gangway in mid-air to enter the plush hangar of a dining room. Acrylic blankets, plastic table lamps, Bakelite telephones, the ubiquitous rose-painted vacuum flasks of boiling water, the tea caddy and handleless cups, pastel-coloured Formica. Across the street, near the only statue of Mao we’ve seen so far, is an empty lot scheduled for building more workers’ apartments and hotels. In it stands a 100-foot-high sculpture in white concrete, in a pure Art Nouveau style: perched on the rim of a colossal wheel, as on the lip of a breaking wave, a man and a woman gaze heroically forward, one hand shading the eyes.
‘What’s that about?’ Sandy asks at my elbow.
‘The future, I should think.’
We stand on the balcony as the light fades. Old-fashioned dance music is playing somewhere, two watchfires are burning the last of the rubbish in the empty lot. The flames light the statue and their smoke obscures it. Here they believe in the future. They believe in it so much they may make it come true, like Malcolm’s expedition. But our sense of purpose extends only to our personal lives and this self-created drama we’re entering. That is how it feels as Sandy and I stand silently in the cool night air until the fires burn down and Jack calls us for the evening meal.
The food that night was more unagreeable than usual, and featured as its highlight ‘1,000-year-old eggs’. ‘So what’s this egg like?’ Allen asked.
‘Um … indescribable,’ Jon replied.
‘That’s not what I wanted to know,’ Allen returned firmly, pushing back his cap.
‘Well, that’s all I can tell you, mate,’ Jon volleyed back, then added ‘In climbing terms you could describe it as “interesting”.’
But Allen had been playing these games for years. ‘You mean, at the limit of your abilities,’ he retorted with just enough stress on ‘your’ to make and win the point, and just enough humour for it to be conceded with honour. For once Jon had no reply and could only shake his head and laugh. It looked as though he’d finally met his match in verbal sparring, and his respect increased for Old Man Fyffe – not that that would stop him from trying again later.
Mal was unwinding in the short break between his responsibilities in Peking and in Lhasa. When after three Green Leaf beers he picked up and swallowed whole a brown putrified egg, it signalled the beginning of a Session. The tired and sensible began to drift away. ‘Get it down your necks!’ Jon urged the remainder. He was in high good humour, the good-time ringleader, drinking and partying late at every opportunity. ‘Well, when there’s this many climbers, you don’t feel the same responsibility and pressure on you to perform.’
That night, after a few more beers were downed, Jon told Mal that he and Tony had agreed that their likely role on this expedition would be that of early revvers who would probably burn out quite quickly. This fatalistic attitude upset Malcolm. ‘Look, Jon, if you’re smart enough to realize you might rev early on and burn out, why not be smart enough not to?’
‘That’s just the way we are mate. We’ll do our bit and then others can take over.’ The argument heated up, with Liz, Andy Nisbet and myself as spectators. Liz was tense in empathy with Mal; Andy knew he was of necessity of the ‘slowly-slowly’ school and wondered if he’d be able to make any contribution on the hill. Tony restated the case: he and Jon wanted to go to 8,000 metres without oxygen and for someone to go to the top. ‘Yes, but what if these conflict? What if everyone just wants to go to 8,000 metres and then leave it up to someone else?’ There was urgency as well as irritation in Mal’s voice. He’d been worrying about this; it could well be that some of the lads had come alon
g for the ride, for a free trip to Everest and a chance to go to 8,000 metres and so break into the big league. Sandy was of the same mind as Mal, had murmured to me in one of his casual asides, ‘I can imagine myself on the top – I wonder if any of these other guys do.’
One did. Rick Allen sat reading the New Testament, wondering who’d be prepared to go through the Pinnacles with him, without oxygen. He had a feeling it would come to that. Or could he solo it? He had never yet failed in the Himalayas, and he was prepared to push the boat out a long way to keep that record. On the other hand, he didn’t want to die. There was a ridge to walk between under-achievement and unjustified risk; he believed it could end in the summit of Everest. He returned to the Bible.
The argument heated up as Jon accused Mal of having too many preconceived plans and projections and computer flow-charts (of which of course he had none, Jon retorted he was speaking figuratively, Liz said you should be more careful what you say then). After another hour’s drinking and arguing they all agreed that one had to have detailed plans worked out in advance, even in the face of the certain knowledge that events would work out differently. If anyone had preconceptions, Liz pointed out, it was Jon and Tony, who still stuck to their picture of themselves as early trail-blazers who would also burn out early. A choir of soloists, I thought, some of them miming, some saving themselves, some refusing to catch the conductor’s eye, some selflessly supporting …
Jon looked across the table at a ruffled Mal and said, with 500-watt blue-eyed sincerity, ‘Yet you know at the end of the day we’ll work our balls off to make this trip succeed.’
I left on this harmonious note. Chris and I were woken in the early hours by Jon pounding on the door, exuberant and giggling. ‘Duff’s on pure babble,’ he reported, and collapsed in the corner. We were treated to the unusual sight of Tony ‘tired and emotional’ as he tried to flop on to his bed, missed, and fell full length on the floor. ‘Oh dear … I don’t think I feel too well … I can’t ket my heys from my hocket …’ Malcolm they had propelled into Liz’s room with a plastic rose clenched between his teeth, and we could hear them shouting at each other two doors down as we floated back to sleep on a sea of Green Leaf beer.
