Kingdoms of Experience

by Andrew Greig

  That blow was counter-balanced by the appearance of an exuberant Tony with mail that had arrived with the jeep that had taken Dave Bricknell out. I’d met the diminutive one at the halfway tent, he was bobbing like a helium balloon, his spirits inflated by a batch of letters from his Kathy. He babbled on about her, the photos of her he carried all the time, the wonders of Everest, how well he felt – ‘I suppose I’m lucky having a natural physiological advantage.’ It was innocence rather than immodesty, but the kind of remark the lads would jump on him for. It’s alright to believe you’re stronger than anyone else, but you’re supposed to keep it to yourself! And a particularly unfortunate remark in the light of what was to come. But he certainly looked well, and was as optimistic as Urs and Rick, feeling half a dozen of us could get to the top. He remarked how big expeditions were good in a way – for instance, the rotating rest periods – but it was difficult to maintain interest and commitment. ‘But it’s a beautiful mountain, and such a pure line!’ He grinned, waved and steamed on up the glacier moraine, like a cheery village postman.

  The mail as always brought joy, surprises, pleasure – and crushing disappointment for Chris Watts, who received nothing from his wife Sonja. She had clearly not forgiven him for going on this trip. He was very quiet as the others exclaimed over their letters and slipped off early to his tent. Quantity counts as much as quality in expedition mail, and Rick came out ahead with a whole packet of letters from an entire class of schoolchildren. Jon opened his parcel to find a very squashed hamburger sent from New York by an off-beat climbing client of his known simply as God – no one could top that. No one could eat it either.

  We always look forward to mail so eagerly, yet it probably does as much harm as good. Mail scratches the itch of homesickness. It reminds us of what it might be better to forget, that the world we have left behind still exists. This inevitably to some degree distracts us from the present. Perhaps on an ideal expedition there would be no communication whatsoever with the outside world. In the same way as a severe monastic order might isolate itself entirely from the world to concentrate on the Divine, an expedition might do well to devote itself to the mountain. Then again, it might go nuts.

  It must be the extra oxygen as I descend. My mind is waking up, clearing for the first time in days, like wearing goggles that you hadn’t noticed were steamed up until the moisture suddenly evaporates. This is what we all feel coming down. I look back at Everest and Nuptse and for the first time in days notice they’re awesome and beautiful. I see patches of moss, rabbit droppings between the stones. A red and black bird swishes past. I’m coming back to the world again.

  On impulse I switch off the Walkman. That’s better. Wind over the rocks, the distant sound of running water. I am the Walkman; the world around and inside me is sufficient entertainment.

  Spring is arriving down here. I scurry past two sections where stones now fall regularly, the ‘Rockfall Alley’ that made Charlie Clarke sweat three years ago. It’s no longer safe to cross the ice-lake beside Camp 1½ – Mal fell in here a week ago. Everything’s coming loose. Those firm foundations I’ve been thinking about, they seem exemplified here in this world of loose scree, melting ice, stonefall and shifting moraine. There are no firm and utterly stable foundations within or without, the only certainty is being alive now.

  You can trust the mountain to be itself; you cannot trust it not to fall on you or shrug you off. Same with other people. That’s not their fault. The fault lies in the unspoken, unstable bargains we try to make with the world. Sandy would say if you accept the mountain’s unstable and learn its nature, you can go almost anywhere on it.

  Take a break, fill the water-bottle at this stream. No hurry, got all day. Why do these white clouds fascinate so? All expeditions are sustained inner meditations, speeded up and intensified. If you don’t change and learn something on a trip but only climb another mountain, you might as well not be there. That’s what Sandy’s wrestling with: what am I doing here, why for, what is it all about?

  These clouds … I’ll never forget the sky in Tibet. This chough croaking overhead, the lingering smell of yak, the water running through my fingers. This, this, this. So clear and absolute. Trust the untrustworthy, yes go ahead and climb and love and risk and write.

  Tired ankles, leg-weary now, round the corner of the moraine and there’s the scattered tents. Drop my rucksack by my tent, no one about, and savouring the moment, stroll over to the Mess Tent, past THERE IS A RIGHT SHAPE AND SIZE TO EVERY PHYSICAL IDEA and NOT A SECOND TIME scrawled on the flap, push my way in. All the faces looking up – Nick and Sarah cooking, Bob and Danny locked in a chess match, Andy watching, Urs sewing, Allen reading.

  ‘Is this “the White Hell of Base Camp” or the Costa del Sol retirement home?’

  Attrition

  22ND APRIL – 9TH MAY

  ‘This time I could hear the choir singing …’

  What’s doing on the hill? The eternal Base Camp question. Every morning we’d get up and study the mountain, trying to judge the wind speed up there by the spindrift, and see if more snow had fallen overnight, even though we’d already learned that BC weather was an unreliable indication of conditions on the hill. All we could do was wait and wonder, wash our clothes and ourselves, sit inside the Mess Tent and speculate. It was hard to maintain a sense of involvement and commitment at Base. Towards the latter part of the afternoon we’d find ourselves glancing more frequently up towards the edge of the glacier snout where a descending figure might appear …

  By 8.0 pm the next night we’d given up expecting anyone when Mal and Liz walked in. He had the distant, preoccupied look of someone in extreme pain. He was also ill, because the abscess that Urs quickly diagnosed was letting poison into his body. Problems with teeth are quite common on expeditions – the lowering of pressure causes any tiny air-bubble inside a filling to expand, with extremely painful results. An abscess is far worse, particularly under a wisdom tooth. Urs had no drilling equipment; he’d have to extract it or leave it. Mal went even paler at the prospect. Like Kurt and some of the other climbers, he is a self-confessed coward when it comes to dentists at the best of times (‘I have to have an injection before I can take an injection!’); the idea of having a wisdom tooth wrenched out up here with only a heavy dose of painkillers by way of anaesthetic … He accepted a glass of The McCallan malt whisky. Was there an alternative to extraction? Urs hesitated, then said he could try a high-dosage course of antibiotics, which might possibly kill the infection, together with heavy-duty painkillers to make the pain bearable while they waited to see if it would work. ‘But I have to say, with these drugs you will not be feeling very sensibly, hein?’ No matter; Mal grasped the reprieve gratefully, finished the whisky, took Urs’ pills and staggered off to his tent. We’d see very little of him for the next few days.

  Still, BC had its distractions while we waited for further news from the hill. There was Nick and Danny’s bread, ingeniously and painstakingly baked inside a pan that sat inside another closed pan on a layer of stones, on top of the wildly unreliable Chinese stoves. However successful or otherwise the results were, the bread always tasted wonderful to us and seldom lasted more than half an hour.

  The Basques dropped by for a chat and we exchanged news. They’d established a camp on the North Col and had now pushed up the ridge to 7,500 metres, but were finding conditions very rough up there, with high winds and loose snow on the sloping rock slabs.

  There were guitars (Urs’s and Julie’s) to play with Terry, delving further and further back into our Old Fart past, through the ’70s into the ’60s, finally back to the late ’50s. Like myself, he’d played semi-professionally in many types of bands. Playing music together you can get as close as climbing together – so many shared musical jokes, discoveries, accidents. It was good to laugh, and bring laughter back to the Mess Tent.

  And there was washing, which is like a baptism and re-birth. I peeled off my thermal vests and longjohns for the first time in t
hree weeks. I was very white and thin. I’d almost forgotten I had a body and a skin under these perpetual layers of clothing. In normal life scarcely a day passes without even the least appearance-conscious person seeing themselves in a mirror; on a trip like this you can go for a month without glimpsing yourself, and you start to lose the notion of yourself as someone seen by others.

  On impulse I asked Liz for a mirror, and stared with curiosity and delayed recognition at the strange person therein. He looked half-mad. Hair in knots, burned patches on the cheeks, pale circles round the eyes where glacier goggles had blocked the sun, split lips, and those eyes much, much too intense. He looked angry and primitive, a creature from another culture. I wouldn’t care to meet him on a dark night in the Himalayas. ‘Thanks, Liz. I think maybe I’ll wash and comb my hair.’ She laughed, ‘It might be an idea, Andy. I didn’t want to say, but …’ She was looking thin and well.

  Base Camp was further enlivened by the eruption of a full-scale argument one afternoon, the only such occurrence on the entire Expedition. Inevitably, it involved the two most volatile characters, Nick and Kurt – and Terry, who is a strong character, very determined to have his way. One of his roles here was business and communications manager, for a lot of money and credibility rested on our film and newspaper reports getting out on time, and in making sure all our product-promotional pictures were taken.

  Nick Kurt’s film barrels back in Mess Tent – Terry says ‘Hands up those who want them out.’ Most agreed, so out they went. Later Kurt storms in, ‘Where are ze barrels?’, angry and fuming – puts them back – pushing me out of the way – I think maybe he thinks I did it, he was looking for a thumping and by God he nearly got it – I would like to feel respect for this ‘famous’ man but cannot. Anyway, Terry calmly argues the resentments of all the people here – me, I just got angry and shouted my mouth off – they think they’re so important, and their film. I think a lot of our grievances are based on K. and J.’s attitude to others – I don’t speak just for me – oh God I’m fed-up with this bitching …

  After much shouting and argument, some kind of compromise was eventually reached over the barrels. As Nick indicated and Terry agreed, the real cause was probably Kurt and Julie’s separation from us, the way Kurt never involved himself in cooking or washing up, their refusal to tell us anything of their plans and intentions in filming. Terry would press for some idea of what they were saying in their film reports. Julie would reply she hadn’t transcribed her commentaries. ‘Well, I can just listen to them, then.’ But somehow one never got the opportunity to. Such evasiveness inevitably breeds suspicion and resentment – as did their Karma valley jaunt from which they’d recently returned.

  Still, the argument cleared the air somewhat, and Terry managed to extract a commitment from them to stick by their agreement and make five ITN film reports, and give some idea of their future plans. They intended to go to ABC soon with Danny and finally for the first time go up the fixed ropes to film some of the action there.

  Liz: ‘How do you fancy the Pinnacles, Allen?’

  Allen: ‘Oh, I’ll jumar anything!’

  Four days passed and no returning figure was seen rounding the corner of the glacier snout. It had become much colder and windier at Base. A monstrous scarf of spindrift was flying not only from the summit of Everest but also from the whole upper North-East Ridge. Mal had left Sandy instructions to try to create a Camp 3 somewhere on or beyond the Rock Buttresses, and if that turned out to be impossible or too far from Camp 2, try to find one just before the Buttresses. We knew that would be hard, for camp sites are a major problem of the North-East Ridge. There are few snow banks for digging into and the Ridge offers little protection for tents. At the same time as pushing out the route, many more loads had to go up the hill. It was up to Sandy and the lads to juggle these priorities according to conditions and how they felt.

  So what was going on up there? Had no one come down because they were going so well, or were they stormed in on the mountain and having to eat precious hill-food? They could be nowhere, or in striking distance of the Pinnacles. Mal lay in the woozy, pain-filled world of his tent, trying to read but unable to because of the questions crowding his mind. And was this damned abscess clearing up, or would Urs have to pull the tooth?

  Base Camp emptied out as Nick and Sarah, then Kurt, Julie, Danny, Terry, Bob and Allen, went up to ABC. Again, radio communication would have told us if it was worth their going up; they could be simply overcrowding the camps on the route, or completely wasting their time if the hill was unclimbable in this weather. But they couldn’t afford to wait till the Boy Racers came down and then set off for ABC, for that would mean three days of climbing lost. So on 26th April there was only Liz, myself and Mal left. Mal was on his feet now, stomping about with his jacket over his shoulders like a grizzled confederate general. The antibiotics seemed to be working. That evening the tent flap parted and Chris Watts staggered in. ‘Hello,’ he whispered. His voice was shot from days of coughing, and he had ‘Panda eyes’, the huge circles left where his goggles had protected him. He looked as if he’d been imprisoned, starved, beaten up, and then shut in a spin-dryer. In a way, he had been. He slumped down in his characteristic zombie, arm-dangling, empty-eyed manner, and after accepting a brew, hoarsely told his tale …

  The 22nd, the day Mal and Liz had descended, was a rest-day at ABC as the BRs recovered from the big carry of the day before. Next morning they set out in a stiff wind: the sports plan was for Sandy, Tony and Chris to sleep at Camp 2, then try to fix any necessary section of the second Rock Buttress; Jon and Rick would sleep at C1, then follow the others’ steps to try and site a Camp 3 beyond the Buttresses. This would be a major step forward.

  Sandy I was wearing longjohns, fibre pile and Gorètex windsuit. In my sack was a sleeping bag, down boots, spare gloves, head-torch, down suit, two Gaz, one ‘deadman’, slings, snow-stakes, radio battery, packet of Jaffa cakes, one roll of film, and my Karrimat. Camera round my neck; suncreams, some sweets, bog-roll …

  Chris and Tony were moving very slowly, Tony coughing and I honestly wondered how he was getting on and why he was there, he appeared to me to be very tired. Me myself had a very slight sore head, just a pain passing now and then in the right front section of my forehead like a carousel going around …

  Chris told us he’d been going his usual Old Fart trudging pace and couldn’t understand why Sandy steamed ahead so fast. There was a hollow-sounding section on the glacier that Mal had earlier remarked felt like walking over the dome of St. Paul’s, aware of a vast cavern beneath. ‘You weren’t kidding,’ Chris said hoarsely. ‘This time I could hear the choir singing!’ There was ‘a slight fracas’ on the fixed ropes when Chris realized the BRs were jugging up the same section he was, contrary to all safety practises of fixed-rope climbing. After a short exchange of words he pointedly unclipped from the rope and let them go on ahead and he didn’t follow till they’d passed the next snow-stake. He finally arrived at the Camp 2 to a strained silence. Tony and Sandy seemed to have been getting on each other’s nerves a lot of late, and the tension had finally come to a head. They’d had a short argument, concluded by Tony saying this was the last time they’d climb together – and then Chris appeared.

  Next morning…

  Sandy I went out to move my bowels. Put on my crampons and took down my clothes, then a huge gust of wind came and almost knocked me over. I was not tied to anything, so pulled up my suit and jumped head first into the snow hole – had a vision of Tom Hurly, who died two winters ago on the North Face of the Droites, he had a shit on a bivvi ledge, fell off, died … I was shaking when I came to rest in the cave.

  … Then on up the fixed rope; once at 7090 I waited for the others, but they did not come so I went on, it was still real windy. Once I reached the first gully I had been blown off my feet three times and then one gust came and let me down the face a bit, I stopped with my ice axe into the nevé … Looked back and thought, no, this is no
good. Walked on a few metres to some rocks, left my load there and came back, met Chris. ‘Desperate, ain’t it?’ We all retreated to C2. Gust of wind, ‘Fuck!’ Chris runs out … comes back five minutes later, very composed. ‘My rucksack’s blown away.’ He had tied it to a shovel, in the gust the shovel had come out and his sack went down the hill. He was most upset, I was impressed by his impassiveness and calmness. He packed his gear into a plastic bag, just ‘See ya,’ and went …

  Terry Just stepped outside Mess Tent when a stumbling, staggering figure approached the edge of the ice, hardly able to put one foot in front of the other. Instantly dumped my gear and dashed out onto the glacier to see who. The figure was to my line of sight carrying no gear, no rucksack, and my mind went into instant overdrive thinking about catastrophes etc. and that this was the sole survivor. When I got close enough I recognized it as a severely knackered Chris Watts. His face had a sort of zombie expression and he admitted that he had lain down three times coming across the glacier in order to have a sleep. I took his stuff-sack and had to guide him up over the moraine to the Mess Tent. Fed him lots and lots of drinks till some semblance of normality returned to his eyes …

  Fatigue, bitter cold, a full Everest gale – little tensions, little mistakes. Jon and Rick battled up the fixed ropes to C2, agreed no further progress was possible, and went back down to C1 to doss for another night. Sandy and Tony tried to warm up in the snow cave – the wind chill factor on the Ridge had numbed them to the core. They worked on blocking up the draught, argued some more, finally improved things somewhat and went back to their bags. Two hours later they were still shivering, accepted the inevitable and packed up and went down. Crossing the glacier Tony was blown off his feet several times and even the heavier Sandy was being cuffed around like a kitten by the gale.