Seen from the Tibetan Plateau, Everest’s greatness does not need theodolites for confirmation, it is, indisputably, head and shoulders above everything else on earth, with a grandeur, a presence, that far outweighs that of other Himalayan giants.
I had seen the summit of Everest before, from Namche Bazar in Nepal, but that view was nothing compared to the vision now revealed to us. From the south, Everest is shy and elusive. I had seen just a glimpse of its very peak, the last 10 percent of the Southwest Face. Crowded as it is, by Nuptse and Lhotse, you have to climb right into the Western Cwm, above Base Camp, before the Southwest Face is truly revealed. Even from Kala Pattar, the famous Everest viewpoint for trekkers, only a frustrating portion of the mountain is visible.
From the north, Everest does not hide behind any veil, it reveals itself in all its glory with no preamble or guile. It just sits there alone, proud and magnificent, a pyramid of rock, sculpted by the most powerful forces on earth over millions of years. No other peak encroaches on it—none would dare. It effortlessly fills what seems to be half of the horizon. The view from where we stood left no room for any doubt at all: this was the ultimate mountain.
Today, as on most days, the famous “plume” was trailing impressively from the Northeast Ridge. Simon estimated it was about thirty miles long. This white mane of Everest is evidence of the ferocious winds that scour the higher reaches of the mountain, a visible manifestation of the invisible jet stream that runs from west to east across southern Tibet. When these winds hit Everest at anything up to 150 kilometers (93 miles) an hour, ice crystals are clawed from the rock and spirited into the air, where they fly, held horizontally in the grip of the air flow, until they fall to earth far to the east.
The plume has a compelling, hypnotic quality, like the northern lights, or ocean waves breaking on a shore. Once you start watching it, it becomes hard to tear the eyes away, so seductively does it shift and reshape with the passing of time. Seen from the plateau, the plume is silent, but, like watching someone scream behind soundproof glass, the mind has no trouble imagining the sound that must be accompanying it.
Awestruck, we climbed back into the Toyotas, each wrapped up in his own thoughts. Brian, Al, Barney, and Simon had seen this view of Everest before; they, undoubtedly, were already under its spell—that was why they had come back. The rest of us were experiencing new emotions. The mountain, which during the weeks preceding the expedition had existed only in our dreams, was now a tangible and frighteningly real presence. The North Face had looked utterly forbidding and steep, even at this great distance. For the first time, the hard realization hit me that one or more of us could die on those slopes in the coming months. It went very quiet inside the vehicle as we drove onward along the bumpy track.
By midafternoon we reached the town of Tingri, home to a sizable army camp and several basic eating houses that cater to conscripts and passing tourists. We ate a filling mutton stew in a smoke-filled lodge and washed it down with cups of bitter Tibetan tea. On the walls, flashy posters advertised Sektor Italian watches and Gore-Tex alpine clothing brands—goods that mean as much to the average Tibetan as space suits and bulletproof vests do to the average Westerner.
Tingri is built on the edge of a swamp, with several shallow lakes surrounding it. Al had stayed here many times and he demonstrated how in certain places the ground behaved like jelly when it was jumped upon. We spent an entertaining few minutes jumping up and down in our heavy mountain boots, feeling the earth wobble beneath our feet, and causing some watching children to break up with laughter.
Leaving Tingri, we passed through a military checkpoint and arrived at Shekar Dzong, our night stop, by five o’clock in the afternoon. The town itself is uninspiring but behind it sits one of the most wondrous monasteries in Tibet. Built many centuries ago, this marvel of construction sits on a knife-edge ridge, regally overlooking the surrounding plains. In its heyday, the monastery was home to hundreds of monks. In 1950, during the Chinese occupation of Tibet, it became a seat of resistance and the scene of fierce fighting. Finally, the Chinese sent in MiG jets and the monastery was bombed into submission. Today it is still in ruins, a poignant monument to the savagery of that event and the many hundreds of other acts of destruction that were characteristic of the Chinese invasion.
Our “hotel” in Shekar was chosen by the liaison officers and it immediately made us wish we were back in the tents. The hallway was so cold that a dripping samovar had created stalagmites of ice on the concrete floor. The rooms were like prison cells, with sagging metal beds and a single hairy blanket. The communal toilets had evidently never been cleaned since the days of Mao. We gathered in the restaurant to pick at some food with the Sherpas. It was a meal not even Brian’s jokes could lift.
The biggest joke of all—somehow the Chinese always seem to have the last laugh—was that this travesty of a hotel was costing us sixty U.S. dollars a head for the night, the official, Beijing-set rate for foreigners. Rip-offs are always annoying, doubly so when they are official ones.
We put the 16-millimeter film gear together the next morning and filmed the expedition convoy leaving Shekar on the final stage of the journey to Base Camp. The Chinese drivers, perhaps not surprisingly, got very irritated by my requests for them to stop and start as we leapfrogged ahead several times to shoot a selection of traveling shots, but we got the sequence we needed, and finished as the vehicles crossed the Pang La Pass, 5,750 meters (18,864 feet), our clearest view yet of Everest.
On the southern side of the Pang La, the track descended and deteriorated sharply, the large potholes giving us a bumpy ride. Reaching the valley floor, we turned west for the first time since leaving Kathmandu, taking the stony trail that leads to the Rongbuk Monastery and Base Camp. Here, the villages were richer and better-built than the others we had seen, with elegant painted houses, and well-fed horses in the fields. The valley sides, by contrast, were rocky and almost devoid of vegetation except for one or two splashes of vivid green where a hamlet lay tucked with a few precious fields and one or two hardy trees.
Although Everest was now obscured by intervening hills, the milk-colored river we now followed was fed by its snows. Here it is known as the Rongbuk, draining the northern slopes of Everest and Makalu and flowing in a great loop across the Tibetan Plateau before cutting boldly in a series of deep gorges through the Himalayas at Tsanga to enter Nepal as the Arun. In the south of Nepal it is joined by the Sun Khosi, and then flows on across the Indian plains to merge with the Ganges at Katihār.
The mystery of how the Arun performed its miraculous crossing of the Himalayan watershed was one that perplexed early geographers. The problem was solved in 1937 by L. R. Wager, a geographer and explorer who mounted an expedition into the then unknown gorges of the Arun. His conclusion was that the river had formed long before the Himalayas began to rise, and that it had maintained its course by cutting progressively deeper gorges as the mountains uplifted. Wager published his theory of antecedal drainage in the Geographical Journal of June 1937, establishing beyond doubt that the Arun River predated the greatest mountains on earth.
With winter barely over, the Rongbuk River was little more than a stream, fed by a trickle of silt-laden meltwater from Everest’s glaciers. Within a few months, with the rising temperatures of summer, the river would change character completely, becoming a raging torrent of meltwater. We passed the remains of numerous destroyed bridges—testimony to the power of this seasonal flood.
Crossing the river on an impressive newly built bridge, we continued west on the southern bank, passing teams of strong-looking yaks on their way to Base Camp. Laden with fodder and the supplies of their herders, the yaks are driven up each spring to coincide with the arrival of the premonsoon expeditions. They have plodded along the same trail for centuries, bringing supplies to the monastery that has existed at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier for at least four hundred years.
The track gradually turned south, rounding the valley spur until we we
re looking right down the Rongbuk Glacier, with the North Face of Everest looming massively ahead. Fresh snow had fallen on the Face in the hours since we had last seen it from the Pang La, and many of the dark areas of rock were now a dirty white color. Once more we stopped the vehicle and assembled the film equipment, shooting half a roll before clouds blew in and obscured the view.
Much to the frustration of our drivers, who were by now jumping up and down with impatience, we filmed again at the Rongbuk Monastery, interviewing Brian in front of one of the gold-capped stupas. He was in a pensive mood, and talked openly about his fears for the months ahead:
Sometimes I feel full of confidence, and then I just die with fear. It’s such an awesome mountain. I’ll have to take it one step at a time … one day at a time. And if she’ll allow us, we’ll make it to the top. But, by God, it’s not going to be easy.
Finally, with a freezing wind at our tail, we drove the last axle-twisting twenty minutes along the glacial moraine, and arrived at Base Camp, 5,500 meters (18,044 feet), with just enough daylight left to clear platforms and pitch our tents. As we struggled with the canvas, the cloud momentarily cleared on Everest, revealing the summit bathed in fiery red light. It was April 11, nine days since we had left Kathmandu, twelve days since leaving the UK. The traveling was over; now the expedition could begin.
As a child I had often wondered what a “Base Camp” really was; like a “snow hole” or a “bivouac,” it sounded exciting—but what was it exactly? The best mental picture I could achieve was a collection of pretty alpine-style huts filled with jolly climbers enjoying mugs of steaming cocoa. Lit by roaring hurricane lamps and warmed by an open fire, it was a reassuringly cozy place, a world apart from the blizzards that raged outside.
A short visit to Base Camp on the northern side of Everest would have quickly put me right, and shattered a few childhood fantasies. A more hostile, less heartening, spot would be hard to imagine outside of the polar regions. Arriving expeditions scatter themselves far and wide across the glacial valley, seeking out shallow dips and hollows that they imagine will protect them from the wind. They are wrong. The wind of Tibet is inescapable—it is part of the fabric of the place, like the stones and the dust. And the smell of stale yak shit.
This was no fleeting visit. Our camp here would be home for the next ten weeks, a place to return to each time we came back from the higher camps on the mountain. The process of acclimatization is a slow one and it is usual for even experienced teams to spend at least six or eight weeks letting their bodies adjust to the paucity of oxygen prior to a summit attempt.
Every tiny feature of the Rongbuk Valley conspires to make life more difficult. The ground is frozen, and cannot be penetrated by even the sturdiest tent peg. The rivers are frozen too, or where they run they are filled with silt and cannot be drunk. Sleeping bags, put out to air, are picked up by the wind and whipped away. Washed clothes freeze as stiff as boards. The air is dry, adding to the draining effects of altitude. Throats become sore. Lips become cracked. Fingers split and get infected. Minds start to wander, thinking of home—thinking of anything but the terrifying mountain that sits above the valley.
I was excited to be at Everest Base Camp, but I can’t say I liked it.
The old hands, Barney and Al, built substantial stone walls around their tents to prevent the wind from destroying them. Others, lazier like Kees and myself, made a halfhearted attempt to copy them and had to rebuild their tents several times after bad storms.
Base Camp is an easy place to get very depressed, as several members of our team were to find out in the coming months. “Glacier lassitude”—the disease so brilliantly introduced to the world in the book The Ascent of Rum Doodle—is pervasive and all-consuming once it has you in its grasp.
One team member who I thought unlikely to become a victim of depression was Brian; he had been here before and had his own ways of dealing with it.
“Take care here, Matt,” he advised, “or you’ll go fucking crazy. Just get your tent as comfortable as you can and make sure you read plenty of books.”
I took his advice. In the first five days at Base Camp I read the eight-hundred-page Scramble for Africa; a biography of Sherpa Tenzing; a biography of Paul Getty; Trainspotting; two Patrick O’Brian novels; Our Man in Havana; and Paul Theroux’s Jungle Lovers. Kees was less prolific, or perhaps a more diligent reader. In the same period he read fewer than one hundred pages of the German war epic The House of Krupp, lingering over each page like a connoisseur relishing a fine cigar.
A new fear began to grip me, almost as powerful as the fear of what could befall us on the mountain: the fear of running out of reading material.
Simon chose a prominent site for our camp, not far from the place chosen by the British expedition of 1922. Nearby was the small moraine hillock picked by the Chinese as the location for the TMA base, an ugly stone construction with an overflowing toilet block nearby. In this cheerless place, unsmiling liaison officers ticked off the days, resentful of this “hardship” posting, and entertained only by a fuzzy television set fed by a satellite dish that would not look out of place at NASA.
We were some of the early arrivals, beaten only by the Norwegians and the Japanese. On each of the four days it took us to establish our camp, the rumble of trucks announced newcomers. Soon there were German, Catalan, Slovenian, and Indian expeditions scattered around the glacier. Some, like the Catalan expedition, consisted of just five or six team members with very little Sherpa support. Others, like the Indians, had more than forty members, and substantial Sherpa teams.
In total, more than 180 climbers (only a handful of which were women) would be attempting the North Face of Everest during this premonsoon season, a sign of the growing popularity of the northern side, and a dramatic increase from the early 1980s when getting permission from the Chinese at all was extremely difficult.
Al, a member of the high-altitude elite, was in his element, catching up with old friends. He knew climbers from many of the other expeditions and spent long hours swapping news of who had climbed what, by which route, and who had died since they last met. On the occasions I could listen in on these conversations, they always fascinated me; serious high-altitude mountaineers discuss avalanches, falls, and ferocious storms in the same matter-of-fact way that normal mortals discuss the football results. A death here. A camp obliterated there. Fatalities are reported with the same sense of inevitability that casualties are reported from the front line of a war, the news digested with the barest nod of the head, or a raised eyebrow.
Inside they must be wondering when their turn will come.
The rest of us made contacts at our own pace, lured into rival camps by the gravitational pull of freshly ground coffee and the aroma of newly baked bread—or in Sundeep’s case perhaps by the discovery that the Indian expedition had two pretty girls on board. Each camp had its own idiosyncrasies, as we quickly discovered. In the Norwegian camp, an ingenious diesel-powered heater warmed the team members while they tinkered endlessly with their satellite fax, munching on dried fish and strips of reindeer meat.
In the camp of the Indian expedition, the tents were like Mongolian yurts, the members sitting cross-legged on exotic carpets imported from Delhi. Visiting it, you felt as if you had stumbled into the domain of a wandering Moghul king. The Indian leader was Mohindor Singh, a high-ranking official in the Indo-Tibetan border police, from which ranks he had formed his team. With thirty-nine members, Singh was in charge of a huge expedition and his logistics (and therefore his logistical problems) were on a far grander scale than ours. Nevertheless he attacked them with military efficiency and within days he had his members setting out up the glacier to establish Advance Base Camp.
My favorite “other home” belonged to the Catalans, six climbers from Girona in the north of Spain. What their mess tent lacked in structure (it was constructed mostly from plastic sheeting), it more than compensated for in the warmth of the welcome and the excellence of its coffee. T
hey had thought carefully about their food: a large ham was hanging from the roof, and a deliciously pungent cheese stood in pride of place on the table.
The Catalans were, like the Russians, attempting a more difficult and more avalanche-threatened route than our own proposed line. Instead of turning left up the East Rongbuk Glacier, they planned to carry on to the eastern side of the North Col where they would establish Advance Base. Assisted by just three Sherpas, they hoped to ascend the difficult ice face from there to the Col and then continue up the North Ridge. With so little support it was an ambitious proposal even though several of their team had considerable 8,000-meter (26,246-foot) experience.
“I think we need more Sherpas,” one of the Catalan climbers confided in me. I could only agree. They left Base Camp before us, taking everything with them, as they had neither the resources nor the man-power to keep a permanent camp at the foot of the Rongbuk.
The deficiencies of our own mess tent became clear as each day passed. With no heater and just a single flimsy layer of canvas, it was extremely cold, particularly at night. Dressing for dinner meant putting on thermal gloves and outer gloves, along with (as a minimum) a down jacket or down suit.
Roger quickly became the focus of our early conversations in the mess tent; we were endlessly fascinated by his job.
“How safe are those jumbos?”
“What’s the nearest you?ve got to crashing?”
“Any babies born on board?”
“Can you loop the loop in a seven-forty-seven?”
The Other Side of Everest Page 9
