Coronation Everest (3 page)

It was on the veranda of the Embassy that our caravan was assembled. By some dismal aberration in the Indian independence agreement, it later turned out that this building was now the property of the Indian Government, and the British, who had built it, planted its gardens, and kept it spick and span through the years, had to move to a smaller place down the road; but in 1953 it still flew the Union Jack, and as one worked among the lawns and flowers, with the scent of blossoms heavy in the air, there frequently emerged from the interior of the building conveys of gentle servants bearing cool drinks. In such idyllic circumstances my own contribution to the work was chiefly advisory; but Roberts, who had arrived in Katmandu a few days before me, was very active checking loads, recruiting porters, ordering supplies. He was a Gurkha officer who looked like a witty bear, and he had been on several previous expeditions to the Himalaya. He believed wholeheartedly in living off the country, and was an authority on
chang
, the glutinous
substance used by the Nepalese for beer, and on
rakhsi
, the methylated spirits with which they foster the wild illusion that they are drinking gin. Roberts was on leave from his regiment in Malaya, and had volunteered to convey to the expedition a large number of oxygen cylinders which had been flown into Katmandu too late to be taken by the main convoy.

He sat on the veranda surrounded by porters and bits of string. The coolies, 200 of them, had been recruited with Government help and were now being organized, in a general sort of way, by a couple of foremen, one of them wearing round, goggle-like spectacles and carrying a lantern. The porters were dressed in rags, with funny peaked hats on their heads, and talked incessantly, now and then breaking into a few snatches of abuse. It had been decided how much each should carry, and as soon as the loads were experimentally distributed each man pottered off to rearrange the packages in the most comfortable way, tying boxes on top of one another, shifting the balance of weight, and adjusting the dirty headbands with which they bore a good deal of the burden. Hovering around the edges of this collection were some of the expedition’s high-altitude porters, men of a very different breed. These were Sherpas, members of the Tibetan race which lives in the Everest region and which has for generations provided porterage for Himalayan expeditions. Their faces were brown and Mongolian, their bodies inexpressibly tough, their eyes bright, their movements jerky and decisive. They were all well-known climbing porters, who had forsaken their high native valleys to live in Darjeeling, in India, where they could more easily find work; they wore European clothing, and had a ready grasp of European needs and tastes.

Most of them were young and fit, recruited especially to climb high on Everest. One was rather different. He had come along to act as Roberts’s personal Sherpa during the solitary climbs that officer proposed to do when he had delivered the oxygen. Long, long before this man had made his mark with British climbers, partly because of his excellent qualities, chiefly because of his extraordinary clothes. He had most lively tastes. In 1935, when he had first turned up with an expedition, he had been equipped with windproofs, snow goggles, Balaclava and the rest; and took to them so affectionately that for many weeks, in the hottest days of July and August, he would be seen dressed in the complete equipment of a mountaineer about to make a desperate assault upon some unassailable peak. In 1937, when he was in the Himalaya again, he wore a grey summer suit with thick white stockings worn outside his trousers. In 1949 those who encountered him in the hills reported a pair of sagging cotton shorts and a long-sleeved jerkin, from beneath which a few inches of portly figure protruded, and above which there dangled the coloured beads of an amulet. This year his appearance was no less distinctive. On his head was a brown woollen Balaclava helmet with a peak, like the hats the Russian Army used to wear. His grey sports shirt had polished major’s crowns on its epaulettes. Over long woollen pants he wore a voluminous pair of blue shorts, and on his feet were elderly gym shoes. A confused variety of beads, tokens and Tibetan charms dangled around his neck, and a bracelet hung upon his wrist. In one hand he flourished an ice-axe, in the other a fly-whisk. It was not for nothing that Sen Tenzing, in the old days of gentlemanly climbing, had been christened by his British employers ‘The Foreign Sportsman’.

Our party had responsibility for sixty crates of oxygen,
all handsomely packed, and stamped in large letters: ‘Dangerous: This Way Up’. On the cool veranda we checked the crates against the expedition’s inventory, a list as long as a novel. Each had to be weighed and weighed again, in case the coolies, turning nasty on the road, decided that their burdens were excessive. The accepted load was sixty pounds (which I used to measure mentally in terms of pots of marmalade) and the accepted fee about £4 10s for the fortnight which the porters would spend on the road. A few years before this would have been considered excessive; but a constant stream of expeditions was passing through Nepal, not all of them bound by very stringent financial disciplines, and the porters now found themselves masters of a sellers’ market. Poor things, with their bare corny feet and their spindly bodies, and the meagre pleasures of their lives, it would be hard to begrudge them a little extra money, however maddening the vagaries of their behaviour.

There were a few things to buy in the bazaar, too; rice, flour and paraffin, candles and cotton thread. I bought some American tinned fruit, which looked delicious on the fading paper wrappings, but which had gone bad many long years before. I also acquired a handsome hurricane lamp, made in Czechoslovakia, by the light of which I proposed to read the
Oxford Book of Greek Verse
in the authentic manner of the scholar – mountaineer. It was odd buying things in Katmandu, for there was a perplexing sales-resistance on the part not of the consumer, but the shopkeeper. If you asked for an electric kettle you would be met by a blank if not hostile stare from a recumbent merchant; and if you managed to get hold of one, by forcing your way into the shop and breaking into a cupboard, you would have extreme difficulty in paying for it. I
enjoyed this; for there was something about the veiled reluctance of the shopkeepers, and their persistence in guarding their merchandise, that seemed reminiscent of Katmandu in its palmy days, isolated behind its barrier of mountains, lonely and introspective, and occasionally invigorated by some appalling massacre (like the one when Queen Kot threw fifty of her courtiers down a well in the palace courtyard). The merchants were partly apathetic, but partly suspicious; and on the whole they preferred to have as little as possible to do with you, in case you reported them to the hangman. Katmandu was still a secretive city in 1953. There was a curfew at night, with passwords passed from hand to hand on grubby pieces of paper, by the light of flickering lamps; and the shopkeepers’ eyes, I fancied, were deep with the reflections of conspiracy.

Slowly, despite the complexity of life in this peculiar place, our preparations were completed. Hutchinson had already made his mark with the cable authorities, and our first messages were reaching London quickly enough. There was of course no news from the expedition itself, out in the hinterland. Until the first of the mail runners came back, we were totally cut off from Hunt, so far as we knew; it would take ten days for a man from Katmandu to catch him up, and almost as long for one of his men to get back to us. The climbers, indeed, were out in a void, with Izzard hot on their heels. I spent my evenings studying the map. On its shiny surface (it was a photostat) I traced the course of our journey: by truck for a few miles to the edge of the valley of Katmandu, where the road ended, and thence by foot over the hills. If I had opportunity I would send back some dispatches during the march; otherwise I would begin my messages when I
reached Sola Khumbu, the high alpine region around Everest where the Sherpas lived. In the meantime, no doubt, Izzard would be sending home good exclusive dispatches: but it was the end of the expedition rather than the beginning that was important to us, and that would not be for two months or more.

During these months my runners would be constantly on the move between Everest and Katmandu, carrying reports of progress on the mountain. This would certainly be expensive. At the bank in Katmandu, heavily guarded and run by an enthusiastic philatelist, I collected the money sent there by banker’s order from London. It was several hundred pounds, and I had been assured that nobody in the region of Everest was interested in anything but good hard coin.’

‘No paper money for those boys,’ said the experts. ‘They might accept barter – say ten pounds of
tsampa
for a single journey, or five yards of woollen cloth – but you’d much better pay them in coin.

This jungly advice I foolishly accepted. Many were the tedious hours I spent at the bank, counting out the money, so that my fingers were black from the coated filth upon it, like a bus conductor’s at the end of the day; and when eventually we moved into the hills, two porters had to be paid just to carry the cash to pay the others with, a system which surely violates some fundamental economic law. When we got to Everest, of course, we found that the good Sherpas were just as happy with a ten rupee note as they were with a coin; and I was needlessly condemned to stand watch over two tin boxes of treasure, heavily padlocked and sealed, the sort of things you find in sunken gardens.

One fine morning at the end of March we discovered that all was ready, and loading our baggage into trucks we set off through the valley to the neighbouring town of Bhatgaon, which Roberts said was the end of the road. There we would rejoin our porters, and they would reassume their loads for the march. The valley of Katmandu was full of splendid medieval monuments, but there was nowhere quite so remarkable as Bhatgaon, which lies about twelve miles to the east of the capital. It was a town of dark and glowering appearance, instinct with the spirit
of the Middle Ages. Its streets were narrow and tortuous, and in them you might well expect to meet the funeral procession of a plague, or mingle with branded slaves, or come across some defiant heretic blazing at the stake. Tall buildings with protruding cornices shaded these narrow passage-ways, and here and there were pools of muddy water, dark courtyards and suggestive flights of steps. The doorways and lintels of this shadowy place were decorated with countless mythical images – rats and bears and monkeys, legendary giants, flowers, cabalistic symbols, wrestlers, kings and gods; and the central square, suddenly flooded with sunlight, was surrounded by a splendid series of temple pagodas. What a marvellous and magnificent city to find deposited among the mountains! The Temple of the Five Stages at Bhatgaon is a culminating glory of Nepal’s famous past, when the state was ruled by the Newar kings of old. It rises high and confident above the square, and the steep stone staircase leading to its entrance is guarded by an imposing series of figures. First, squatting at ease at the lowest level, is a giant with drooping black moustaches, carrying a huge club and shield, his great toes splayed out on the pedestal beside him. Next is a splendid elephant, chained and caparisoned. On the third level sits a dragon, baring his teeth in an ominous grin, as if he is about to pounce. On the fourth stands a prim and pompous eagle. High on the topmost level, beside the door of the temple, sits a terrible god, with six arms, a face like a frog’s, a magnificent headdress and two glazed unrelenting eyes. Small boys and old men clamber about these figures, or sleep among their multitudinous limbs; but their total effect is one of awful reproach or warning, as if a whole bench of Judge Jeffreys’ has been frozen in the moment of sentence.

On a green field outside this memorable town our company assembled. It was really a parade ground of the Nepalese Army, and numbers of officers and soldiers watched us as we gathered there. The grass was very green, the sky very blue; hazy hills surrounded us on all sides, some of them thickly wooded, and if you looked hard to the north you could imagine the superb snow peaks which stood shimmering beyond. Nearby there was a pool, beautifully flagged with mellowed stones, and in it an old sage with a white beard washed his shirt unconcernedly. Coveys of small children wandered drooling through our caravan, grubbier and more persistent than an English mother could conceive in her most desolate nightmare.

By now we had about seventy Nepali coolies, seven of them employees of mine. In Katmandu, jumbled and jostling among the congestions of the city, they had looked a ragged army indeed; but here in the open, as they manfully lifted their loads and prepared to move, they acquired a certain gnome-like dignity. Off they set through the streets of Bhatgaon, most of them stopping almost at once for a last good-bye, a farewell onion, or a premature breather. Their silhouettes were strange as they stood on the ridge above the town; some had huge square boxes strapped to their backs, but some were crookedly loaded with baskets or boots, long protruding wireless aerials, lanterns, bundles of rags or frying pans. Some of this stuff was mine; most was the expedition’s; and a little the porters took themselves, to relieve the hardships of the march to the mountain and enliven the long leisurely orgy into which, I suspected, the empty march back again was to degenerate. By mid-morning we were off, to a metaphorical flourish of trumpets and a few rather hopeless cries of ‘Baksheesh!’, swinging away down the valley tracks in fine form. That
night, we said, we would camp at Banepa, on the edge of the valley, and next morning we would be in the hills.