The Other Side of Everest

by Matt Dickinson

Roger patiently answered these and more for hours on end, his supper often untouched and congealing in front of him. From that point on, Brian parodied our aviation obsession ruthlessly. Whenever there was a lull in the conversation he would fire a question at our resident pilot:

  “The Messerschmitt one-oh-nine, Roger, is it true what they say about the stall rate?” or “Ever shot down a Junkers, Rog?”

  At the end of each meal I would retreat to the comparative warmth of our two-man tent and massage my frozen feet back to life.

  Next door to our own mess tent was the Sherpa canteen. If ours was the “officers’ mess,” theirs was very much a workingmen’s club, sensibly annexed to the cook tent so that the maximum heat was retained. Much has been written about the “us” and “them” of eating arrangements such as these, but Sherpas are far too wise to be done over in matters of comfort. Their mess tent was warmer and far more sociable than our own, with an occasional barrel of alcoholic “chang” on hand to keep out the cold.

  Our two Base Camp cooks were Dhorze and Dawa, ever smiling, ever busy, ever chopping onions with the chipped blades of machetes in the dark smoky confines of their kitchen. Like all cooks they had their good days and their bad days, but somehow their bad days seemed to outnumber the good. They were far better company than they were chefs de cuisine, but no one had the heart to tell them—we liked them far too much.

  “I’ll have you know that Dhorze spent a week in the kitchen of a major Kathmandu hotel,” Simon said grandly one night, alarmed by the rising tide of complaints after just a few days at Base Camp.

  “Cleaning out the bins?” was someone’s cruel response.

  On soups they were at least consistent, producing cauldrons of steaming broth pepped up with ginger and the prolific use of garlic. Their main courses were geared for bulk intakes of carbohydrates, with huge mounds of rice, pasta, and dumplings, garnished with boiled cabbage and strangely scented lentils. It always looked all right. It just didn’t taste very good.

  Sometimes what the eye beheld was not backed up by what the taste bud revealed. Strips of cabbage could taste like boiled soap, mild-looking lentils could attack the tongue in a searing rage of chili pepper, and even the humble baked bean could leave the victim with a lingering aftertaste of cheap aftershave, like gargling with Brut 33. Inevitably, the craving for more familiar fare was hard to resist, and the bottles of steak sauce and tomato ketchup were soon in strong demand.

  “Got any Spam fritters?” was Al’s daily request.

  “Eggs! Give me eggs, goddamn you!” was Brian’s.

  Still, we cheered heartily every time the food was brought into the mess tent, unwilling to disappoint our cooks. Later, back in our own tent and feeling faintly traitorous, Kees and I dined on cheese and oatcakes, rounded off with mints and a splash of Courvoisier brandy from my personal food supply. Others, like Tore and Brian, who had no supplies of their own, found they could not stomach much of the food and so ate badly. They said little at the time, but the complaints would become a lot more vocal before the expedition was over.

  Occasionally, when mutterings reached a fever pitch, Simon would graciously declare the next meal a “Wayfarer” meal, and let us loose on the prepacked foil pouches of ready-cooked Western food. He timed these announcements perfectly, basking in the tidal wave of gratitude like a headmaster who has just announced an unexpected school holiday, and cunningly diverting attention from the other minor grievances that fester away on all expeditions. “Wayfarer” days were eagerly awaited by all, and were the only times I saw Brian eat anything like a substantial meal.

  While we bickered about the food in the “officers’ mess,” the Sherpas were consulting with the Lamas of the nearby Rongbuk Monastery to determine an auspicious date for the puja ceremony. This was fixed for the morning of April 14; we would leave for the trek to Advance Base Camp the following day.

  The preparations for the puja ceremony had begun in Kathmandu with the purchase of strings of prayer flags paid for with a 200-rupee donation from each team member. At Base Camp, the Sherpas built a two-meter-high (six-and-a-half-foot-high) stone cairn just outside the camp and collected the food and drink that would be consumed at the ceremony. Kees, Ned, and myself would not be able to participate in the main part of the event, because we intended to film it, so I donated my precious liter of Paddy’s Irish whiskey in the hope that the gods would excuse our absence.

  After breakfast, the entire expedition gathered by the cairn, dressed in full high-altitude regalia complete with the heavy down suits and wind layers. Crampons, ice axes, and harnesses were also brought along and placed against the cairn to be blessed along with canned foods, biscuits, and bowls of rice. It was a colorful scene, played out beneath a perfect azure sky—one of the clearest days we had seen, with no more than the lightest of winds.

  I had expected the lama to be a venerable old man in an orange robe, but in fact the ceremony was led by a young Nepali dressed in brightly colored fleece and a pair of expensive sunglasses. He sat reading from a prayer book as incense was burned, lifting the prayers to the gods.

  Just as we were preparing to film, our DAT sound recorder started to misbehave, affected perhaps by the subfreezing temperatures in which it was kept. Kees spent several frustrating minutes trying to reanimate it but it stubbornly refused to transport the tape. He changed the battery and tried again. Still nothing. I was starting to sweat inside my down suit: the puja ceremony was one of the film sequences we could not afford to miss.

  Ned started to shoot mute pictures with the 16-millimeter Aaton and I ran to the tent to get the standby digital camera, forgetting that my short sprint would leave me gasping for air at this altitude.

  When I returned, we recorded the sound on the backup camera, keeping fingers crossed that the result would still be in sync. It was the first serious equipment failure, and it did nothing for my peace of mind. I was already haunted by the fear that we would have a camera failure high on the mountain, but, foolishly, had never considered the possibility of our gear giving up at Base Camp.

  Despite the problems, Ned managed to shoot the puja ceremony through to the climax when the prayer flags were unfurled and attached to specially built cairns. The group stood together for the final chants, throwing handfuls of rice and Tsampa toward the flagpole with a rousing cry. Then the whiskey and beer were broken out, and toasts drunk to the success of the expedition.

  It was an auspicious start to the expedition, unlike the puja for Simon’s previous attempt at Everest, where the central flagpole had broken in the wind just seconds after it was raised (an ill omen, understandably greeted with horror by Sherpas and members alike).

  “To Everest!” Brian said as he raised his glass. “We come not to conquer you but to befriend you! Chomolungma!”

  Then we retired to our tents. At 5,000 meters (16,404 feet), a single glass of whiskey was enough to wipe us out for the day. I dozed fitfully, visited by nightmares in which our cameras suffered horrible fates: spontaneously jumping out of packs and sliding into crevasses, tumbling down seracs, and getting crunched under the feet of stampeding yaks.

  When I woke up, I found a real nightmare in progress: mad professor Kees with a voltmeter and screwdriver in hand, and with one of the backup cameras and the DAT sound recorder in pieces around the tent. Odd screws, tightly coiled springs, and other crucial-looking components were strewn around him in the most alarming fashion.

  “Kees! What the hell are you doing?”

  “Oh just tinkering.”

  “Tinkering? If you screw those machines up, Kees, we’ve got no bloody film! What the hell’s that, for example?”

  I pointed to a printed circuit board from the DAT that seemed to have fallen into one of Kees’s climbing boots. Kees looked wounded.

  “Oh. Not quite sure. But I think it has a problem.”

  Kees has always been the master of the vague response and under pressure he sometimes clams up completely. He gave me one of his “trust me�
�� looks, and resumed his tinkering, pushing the metal probes deep into the guts of the DAT machine like a backstreet surgeon performing a dodgy transplant operation.

  “And what’s wrong with the camera?”

  “The microphone is falling off. I’m just removing the plastic casing and reassembling it.”

  “I think I’d better go for a walk.”

  Unable to watch, I left Kees muttering over his voltmeter and went to the Catalan camp to see if their ham was finished. When I returned, he had both pieces of equipment working perfectly. “Oh ye of little faith” was his final word on the subject before wandering across the moraine to celebrate with a bath in the freezing-cold river.

  It was the last chance for a wash; our trek to Advance Base Camp would begin the following morning.

  — 5 —

  At dawn on April 15 the reluctant yaks were herded into huddles as we took down our tents and packed up the equipment, ready to leave. From their depressed air and collective bad temper, it was pretty clear the yaks knew what was coming: the trek to Advance Base Camp is “hard drill,” as Simon described it, particularly if you are a yak carrying a fifty-kilogram (110-pound) load.

  In theory, the yak herders and their beasts work on a price structure laid out by the Tibetan Mountaineering Association. To read their literature, the hiring and organization of yaks sounds no more difficult than, say, hiring a redcap baggage porter at Heathrow. In practice, the scene at Base Camp on the morning of our departure was gloriously chaotic, with chief sirdar Nga Temba besieged from all sides by yak herders objecting to the size of the loads, and haggling for bonuses.

  Tibetan yak herders are not coy; they do not find it awkward to express their displeasure like many Westerners do. Negotiations are carried out with a dazzling array of scowls, ugly pouts, and murderous glances. Nga Temba remained calm, which seemed to infuriate them more. Soon, he was surrounded by a jostling, yelling mob, with no sign of a single pack being loaded.

  Just as it seemed violence was inevitable, a Tibetan negotiator in a brightly colored silk hat emerged from the TMA building and tried to pacify the yak herders. None of us had any idea what he said, but his words whipped them into an even bigger frenzy. Individual loads were now under discussion as the mob moved from one pile of equipment to another. Boxes were lifted and rejected as too heavy, packs were tested and thrown contemptuously aside.

  Then, bewilderingly, the mood abruptly changed. The arguments finished and the yak herders split into groups to load their animals. Agreement had been reached and everyone was happy, with not the slightest indication that they had been close to a riot just minutes before.

  We ate an early lunch, and then left ahead of the main body of the expedition, to film the team members and yaks together as they came toward us up the Rongbuk Glacier. We had three or four false starts, with a film jam in the 16-millimeter camera, but Ned pulled out his spare magazine in the nick of time and got a wonderful series of tele-photo shots, through the shimmer of radiation haze. I operated the DAT sound, recording the eerie whistling of the yak herders echoing off the walls of the valley.

  After leaving the broad moraine plateau the track takes the left-hand, eastern side of the valley, and funnels into a constricted gulley between the glacier and the crumbling slopes. These shed a continuous fusillade of runaway stones and boulders, whose clattering approach sets the nerves on edge. In the gulley there was ample evidence of big rock slides, where football-field-sized sections of the valley walls had given way and slumped down to the glacier ice.

  Because we were one of the first teams to leave Base Camp, the trail was barely broken through the snow. The yaks had a hard time of it, frequently stumbling to their knees or getting stuck in the compacted narrow path through the ice. The herders had to maintain an almost constant barrage of shouts and yells to encourage them to go ahead.

  “Huioy!” was one of the mildly threatening shouts, but the one to clear a really bad yak jam was “Irriaaaargh!”—a terrifying roar that almost always shifted the blockage. Where words failed, a substantial rock was lobbed at the yak’s rump. That never failed.

  The Rongbuk Glacier is a huge mass of ice, but so much rubble lies on it that the ice itself is barely visible on the lower stretches. Only after one treks an hour or so does the glacier start to reveal crevasses and distant ice pinnacles, but they too are stained dark gray from the glacial dust.

  Three hours after leaving Base Camp, we began the steep climb up the spur that marks the beginning of the East Rongbuk Glacier. Brian pointed out to me how easy it had been for Shipton to miss the significance of the narrow valley on the survey expedition of 1922.

  At a casual glance the valley gives no clue that a huge glacier system lies behind it, so cunningly does it conceal its true significance. The mouth is little more than an innocent cleft in the valley wall, when seen in scale with the rest of the landscape. A pathetic trickle of water (it is more a brook than a stream) runs out of the defile down toward the Rongbuk Glacier. There is no sign of any ice, and anyone looking up the valley from the Rongbuk sees nothing more than an unpromising stony ravine.

  No wonder Shipton got it wrong; he dismissed exploring the valley in favor of continuing down the Rongbuk proper on the “direct” route that leads straight to Everest. Now that I could see the situation for myself, I was not at all surprised by his decision—the direct route didn’t seem just the obvious option, it seemed the only one.

  The orientation of the East Rongbuk Valley is another confusion. It looks as if it leads away from Everest. Trekking into it, there are thus two surprises—first, that the glacier system contained within it is every bit as significant as the Rongbuk itself. The second is that the East Rongbuk Valley and its glacier curve unexpectedly in an elegant southerly arc, right to the foot of the North Col. The mystery of why so little water apparently escapes from the mouth of the valley is thought to indicate that a huge underwater river runs unseen beneath the rock.

  Shipton couldn’t know it. How sad it is that he had no air support, for one aerial pass would have unlocked the secrets of the East Rongbuk in a matter of minutes. But the East Rongbuk was the hidden key that would ultimately unlock Everest’s North Face. It would take a further expedition, and another two years, before this vital geographic twist would be surveyed, after the “obvious” route proved to be too technically daunting and rebuffed all attempts.

  For a further two hours we made our slow plod up the spur and into the valley, where a boulder-strewn path snaked along the northern side of the milky stream. The yaks picked up speed once we started to climb, and they soon overtook us. The yak herders followed them with astonishing ease, sure-footed and fast in their plastic shoes and old canvas army boots, even when crossing treacherous ice patches. They were endlessly singing and whistling, finding spare breath in their lungs where we had none.

  With an hour of daylight remaining, we established camp on a small cliff above the river, beneath a slope that showed signs of massive instability. It was our first attempt at putting up the Mountain Quasar tents, and Kees and I had to enlist Al?s help to work out which poles went where.

  We ate together in a makeshift cook tent and then crashed out exhausted by 8:00 P.M. As I tried to get to sleep, boulders popped out of the nearby cliff and crashed down into the river with horrendous bangs and splashes. A horrific thought occurred to me: Kees and I were in the most vulnerable of the tent positions—just a couple of meters (six feet) from the cliff edge, which was obviously in the process of falling to pieces. If our section of cliff suddenly gave way, we would be dumped twenty meters (sixty-five feet) down into the river in the midst of hundreds of tons of rock.

  With every new stonefall my heart leaped and my breathing rate increased. For an hour or more I lay in a state of terror and then fell into an uneasy sleep, filled with dreams of falling and the rumble of landslides.

  I am sure that at sea level I would scarcely have thought about the risk; or would have reduced it to a logical as
sessment based on the knowledge of how many millions of years that piece of cliff had been in position. But, here at 5,800 meters (19,028 feet), my brain seemed more prone to fear and paranoia—another of the insidious effects of altitude.

  Kees had his own problems. For the last three or four days he had been developing a raging sore throat, which had now evolved into a racking cough. The nights were particularly bad.

  “You’d better see Sundeep about that throat, Kees.”

  “Oh, I don’t think I’ll worry him about it yet,” he replied, then collapsed in another coughing fit.

  Typical Kees. He’d have to be in the final stages of acute mountain sickness before he would voluntarily seek a doctor’s help. In the end I bullied him into seeing the doc, but most of Sundeep’s medicines had been lost with the barrel that vanished en route from London to Kathmandu. Sundeep could only offer cough drops and lozenges—or antibiotics. Kees decided to see how the condition developed and continued to cough through the nights.

  The weather deteriorated the next morning, with gray clouds threatening from the west. The wind was bitter, forcing us to put on every thermal layer beneath the windproof Gore-Tex clothing. I protected my face with a scarf and a silk balaclava, preserving precious warmth by breathing into the woollen fabric of the scarf. Occasional snow flurries whipped down the valley as we rounded a rocky pass, crossed the small glacial river, and began the trek up the East Rongbuk Glacier.

  Conversation tailed off as we began to pick our way up through the dirty mounds of ice. We were all struggling to force enough air into our lungs to cope with the erratic trail. The path was inconsistent, sometimes rising, sometimes falling, and defying any attempt to get into a rhythm. Splashes of red blood marked the snow at regular intervals, for many of the yaks had cut their feet on the sharp terrain.

  I felt exhausted and irritable after the restless night, and found that the muscles in my legs were devoid of power. Every time the path began to climb, my pace slowed to a crawl, with impatient yaks and their herders shouting behind to get past. The rucksack, which had felt fairly light back at Base Camp, now pulled down on my shoulders as if it were loaded with ballast.