Coronation Everest (14 page)

Since then that poor scalp at Pangboche has been raided again for its bristles. A later British expedition extracted some and sent them to England. A wandering Indian scientist took some more, and had them examined at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. The poor little custodian, in his rags, must constantly be running up and down the stairs, scrabbling among the ceremonial masks: and nobody has had the heart to tell him that it is
probably only the skin of a pig – perhaps not even a scalp, they say, but a bit of rump or a hog’s back stretched and shaped to assume another form.

But all this was unknown to me as we sat around the fire on those pleasant May evenings, and when I peered with such nagging forebodings into the gullies of the glacier. If anyone had told me there was a
yeti
scalp at Pangboche, I would have packed a bag of potatoes and walked there overnight: for there is something obsessive and irresistible about the enigma of the Snowman.

10

Ascent

The day of the first assault came and went, and I heard over the radio one evening that Evans and Bourdillon had reached the South Summit, higher than any man had climbed before, but had fallen back to the South Col exhausted. As expected, the climb directly from Camp VIII had been too far for them; their new oxygen kit had given them trouble; they had stood upon that little bump I had noticed from Pumori, only 500 feet below the summit, and after seeing something of the cruel final ridge had withdrawn to the Col.

Now there approached the moment of the second assault, the more powerful of the two. Hillary and Tenzing would have many advantages. The weather was fine for them, and the snow that still fell on Base Camp each evening petered out two thousand feet above us. They would have a last camp, pitched at 27,900 feet, from which to make the final spring to the summit. Their oxygen equipment had been thoroughly proved. They were fit as fiddles still, and greatly encouraged by what Evans and Bourdillon had achieved. If it helped at all, the good wishes of the world by now went with them (for over the months, what with Hunt’s frequent authoritative messages, my own dispatches, and the incredible potpourri of misinformation that emanated from Katmandu,
a public beyond the dreams – or nightmares – of the old Everesters now had its eyes glued greedily on the mountain).

May 29 was the chosen day. On the evening of the 28th I had as my companion at Base Camp Griffith Pugh, the physiologist, and we sat late beside the fire drinking and talking, while he puffed at an odd angular French pipe. I always enjoyed his company. He was full of peculiar knowledge, and passed it on at surprising moments in a hesitating, slow-spoken, pipe-puffing manner; as if some gentle country parson, settling down for a quiet scriptural chat with his parishioners, were suddenly to present some theories about Kafka, the dipping hem-line, or space travel. That night, I remember, we did in fact discuss religion, or at least those activities, such as yoga and Moral Rearmament, which leap and linger around the fringes of it.

At last, when the fire began to die and the cold night air came creeping chillingly up the glacier, we arose and stretched and moved towards our tents.

‘Are you coming up the mountain again tomorrow?’ he said. ‘I’m moving off about eight, if you’d like to come with me.’

I said I had not planned a climb, because I thought I should stay near my communications for the final news, and I was afraid some of our competitors might arrive at Base Camp at the crucial moment.

‘I think you’re wrong,’ said Dr. Pugh. ‘I think you ought to be up in the Cwm when they come back from the assault. What if somebody does arrive here? You’ll be bringing the news down yourself, so they can hardly get hold of it before you do.’

It was the radio transmitters I was thinking of, and the havoc they could wreak with all our well-laid plans; but
he convinced me, and before I went to bed I untangled my crampons and made sure that my ice-axe was still standing, an esoteric talisman, in the snow outside my tent. As I sank into my sleeping-bag, I sleepily considered my situation. I would certainly hear of the ascent of Everest, or the failure of the attempt, before any other correspondent. I had runners at Base Camp who would get my news back to Katmandu in six or seven days. There the Ambassador was ready to send a brief message over his radio to London. I reckoned that a message sent in code by this means would be in the newspaper eight days after the event.

But there was always the radio at Namche Bazar. There was a risk attached to its use, for a message might easily go astray, or somehow leak out and be miraculously deciphered by those many correspondents who hung about the Indian Embassy in Katmandu: but it would get my news to London in a matter of hours, a marvellous possibility. I fumbled about in my baggage in the dark, and extracted that new and nasty code whose key, I knew, was safe in Katmandu. How did it go?
Message to begin: Snow Conditions Bad
. Oh Mr. Tiwari, I hope you will both help me and forgive me! Remember all those aspirins I gave you!

‘We’ll go straight up to Camp III,’ said Pugh as we tramped away to the foot of the icefall. ‘Nobody uses Camp II nowadays, it’s unnecessary anyway and it’s getting to look rather dangerous. You’ll see some big changes in the icefall.’

And indeed I did. Gone was the track intermittently visible between the snowfalls, a week or two before. The whole messy crumbling cataract was messier and crumblier than ever before, for the summer heat had melted many of its huge
seracs
, widened its crevasses and made
its ice-bridges soggy and ominous. Michael Westmacott had been working inside this horrible place for ten days, keeping some kind of route open, so that the climbers in the Western Cwm would not find, when it was time to descend, that they had been trapped up there by its slow and sticky disintegration. Here and there were signs of his work, and I could picture him vividly working there alone, with a silent Sherpa to belay him, cutting steps, fixing ropes, moving ladders, all in the white empty wilderness of the ice. In one place a crevasse had widened so severely that he had lashed a couple of poles to the aluminium ladder that bridged it. Elsewhere, jumping and scrambling among the pinnacles, he had cut away dangerous and tottering
seracs
, hammered in pitons, and tried to discipline those little red flags which, egged on by the thaw, persisted in sliding away from the route. I have often thought of Westmacott since, immured there in the icefall, and marvelled at his tenacity.

We climbed slowly. Now and then we exchanged a few words, but for most of the time I thought about our adventure, and wondered what was happening at that very moment, in the middle of the morning, May 29, 9,000 feet above us. You could see nothing from the icefall, except the empty valley behind you and an occasional ridge of the soaring rock walls that hemmed it in; and on such a day one felt blind and helpless shut in there. We stopped at Camp II for some lemonade and boiled sweets. The two tents were still there, muckier and more forlorn than they used to be, but a huge decaying tower of ice seemed about to fall with a clatter on top of them, and just beside the camp a big insidious crevasse had split the small plateau as a wedge splits a stone. No longer did we have to boil the snow to get some water. The Sherpas took
our mugs and, striding off across the snow, came to a little glacier puddle, a gift from the thaw. Camp II was an ignored and abandoned place; whatever happened on the mountain, our expedition already had a dying fall. Hunt had plans for a third assault, but I suspected that most of the climbers were as tired as those two small wind-blown tents appeared to be.

The afternoon came, free of snow, and we pushed into the upper part of the icefall. This was an entirely new landscape to me, as if some petulant child, tired of his sand castle, had kicked it about with his tiny feet and made a different kind of slobber out of it. After an hour of climbing we came across a sharp straight gully, running downwards parallel to the route we were following. Suddenly I heard from the top of the gully a rumbling, roaring, clattering noise; and there rolled by us an avalanche of ice, snow and stones. Pugh and I threw ourselves hastily to the ground; but it swept past us imperiously, with never a glance in our direction, down through the ice castles and leaning blocks, with a noise like the passage of a million marbles, until the last stone and the last lump of ice had rattled away out of sight and hearing. We picked up our axes and our rucksacks, and continued our journey wearily.

Camp III, as the evening arrived, with a few wisps of snow, no more, and a glorious sunset colouring the face of Lhotse far ahead of us: I walked through the snow to a little plateau outside the camp, overlooking the valley below us. There the icefall crawled down the mountainside, huge and shapeless in the dusk, and Pumori and its sisters stood in shadow above the glacier. Far down the hill ran the Khumbu between its mountain walls, twisting a little, like a crumpled ribbon, but marching steadfastly to
Thyangboche. That was the way my news must go, down the green and into the blue. It was all dark and deserted; for the first time since I had come to Everest, I felt lonely looking at it, and wished there were a few lights twinkling down there, with a warm fireside below mountain meadows, or an English inn, with tankards, chicken, old waiters in frayed tail coats, prints of forgotten horses, and trout for breakfast. Now that the adventure was approaching its last climax Everest felt an especially aloof and unfriendly place, a blind thing that took no notice of us, but simply went its senseless seasonal way – snows and sunshine, heat and cold, thaw and monsoon – like some mindless robot, deposited to tick away in silence in an empty corner of the world.

I shivered, and kicked myself for morbidity, and returned to camp.

So at last to Camp IV again, out of the cruel white desert of snow. The tension and suppressed emotion that now filled this camp emanated from it like ripples, so that far down the Cwm, when the tents first appeared as blobs on a distant ridge, a sharp tang of expectancy suddenly struck us. It was midday, and most of the climbers were gathered there. The months had left their mark on them, as on the mountain itself. I remembered them all as I first saw them, at the end of March: Evans, Gregory and Bourdillon at Thyangboche; the New Zealanders crawling out of their tents at Lake Camp; Band, Ward and Westmacott, cheerfully hauling me up the icefall; Noyce, Wylie, Stobart and Pugh, in the big dome tent at Base Camp; Hunt himself, the leader, cream-faced at Lobuje. They were gay and friendly still, but indelibly marked by the strains of the campaign. Evans and Bourdillon, fresh from 28,500 feet,
were visibly weakened by their
tour de force
. Bourdillon’s huge graceful frame looked shrunken; Evans, beneath the queer half-beard dictated by his oxygen equipment, looked a great deal less rubicund than he had a month or two before (and infinitely less Dickensian, in every way, than he was to look in future months over a port and a good cigar at many a London dining table). Even Alfred Gregory, sharpest and liveliest of men, was moving a little slower than usual, and his incisive Lancashire voice had lost some of its edge. Westmacott was there, in his wide bush hat; George Band, tall and sprawling still, who was later to stand upon the summit of Kanchenjunga; Stobart with his camera; and a cheerful company of Sherpas, many of them fresh from the South Col, and proud of the fact.

And there in his shanty-tent was Hunt, still hideous with ointment; a heroic figure, I thought, like some grizzled Hannibal in climbing-boots, awaiting the arrival of the elephants. This was nearly the end of the adventure. Soon, within an hour or two, we would know whether all his careful plans had succeeded, whether his own wonderful climb to 28,000 feet had been justified, whether the loading tables had been correct, the choice of climbers wise; whether the weather he had trusted had turned sour on him, whether the equipment he had chosen had proved sound; or whether, when Hillary and Tenzing returned defeated from the last ridge of Everest, he would have to begin all over again, threading his teams of porters through the dangers of the icefall, computing his tables again, naming his teams, and preparing (as he had planned) for the third assault which he himself would lead, come what may. He had given Hillary a small white crucifix to place upon the summit of Everest, if he reached it; if Hillary did not get there, Hunt would place it on the top himself.

I joined him in the shade, and ate thirteen more of the Swiss biscuits.

‘Well, dear old James,’ he said. ‘It’s nearly over now, I suppose. Supposing they climbed it, now, how soon d’you think you could get the news home to England? A week? Or less?’

I told him I thought I might get a brief message back to London rather quicker than that, if all went well; and a longer account of Hillary’s and Tenzing’s climb, well, yes, about a week.

‘Of course it would be marvellous,’ said I, ‘if we could get it back to London in time for the Coronation, wouldn’t it? Let me see, May 30 today. Coronation Day is June 2. Thirty days have September, April, June and … Three days, really, counting today. I suppose it’s just possible, John, but don’t count on it. What do you think, it would be rather good, wouldn’t it?’

But he was listening to me no longer. Tilting back in his canvas chair, like a rather unorthodox Hollywood director giving instructions to the gantry camera, he was looking through his binoculars at the Lhotse Face in front of us. I looked hard through mine, but could see nothing, only the endless mass of ice-blocks, rumpled
seracs
and snow.

‘There they are!’ someone shouted. ‘There! Just behind that big
serac!
See them? You know the one, Charles, that brute of a thing with the big crevasses just behind it. See them? There they go! Just crossing the gap!’

I looked again, and high, high on the face of the mountain sure enough, there they were. Five little figures were moving slowly down the snow: Hillary, Tenzing, Lowe, Noyce, and the remarkable Sherpa Pasang Phutar. How were they walking? Jauntily, like men who have reached a summit? Or dragging their feet in the
depression of failure? Nobody could tell, for they were just specks on a mountain wall.