Coronation Everest (4 page)

But it was not to be; for later that day a queer thing happened. In the heat of the early afternoon Roberts and I, having searched without success for a beer-shop or a tea-house, settled down beside a stream for a drink and a sandwich. The setting was something short of Elysian, for it was a dusty, rocky hillside without much shade; and the stream, though it bubbled pleasantly, seemed to me to come almost directly from the outhouses of some huts on the hill above us. Nevertheless, we sat there comfortably, and ate our meal. It was not long, alas, before we were disturbed. A huge cloud of dust approached us along the track, and from it there gradually emerged a shooting-brake, bouncing and jolting and squeaking along the rough surface. Good Heavens! was my first thought. We could have driven here all the time! But before I had time to reproach Roberts, who had been inspired by the need to toughen us all as soon as possible, there stepped from the car Colonel Proud of the British Embassy, with a look of concern on his face.

A message had come from Hunt, he said, to say that many of the oxygen cylinders taken by the expedition proper were found to be deficient in pressure. Some of them were useless. Would we please check all the cylinders we had with us, to make sure they were not faulty too? This was serious. If they were leaking it might well mean the cancellation of the whole expedition. It would be almost impossible to fly out further supplies before the end of the Everest climbing season, and unless they wanted to make an attempt without oxygen the climbers would probably have to beat a dispiriting retreat.

Roberts decided to move on to Banepa, camp there for
the night, and spend the next day checking the cylinders. It would mean opening sixty well-packed crates, inspecting their pressure gauges, and packing them up again; no simple task with little of the necessary equipment and only a rudimentary knowledge of the dangers of high-pressure oxygen. Proud ushered us into the car and bounded us eastward along the track, overtaking a few toiling coolies, skidding through a number of hamlets, until we could see the houses of Banepa in front of us. As we approached, it occurred to me to wonder how Hunt’s message had reached Katmandu so swiftly. It was March 31, and the climbers had probably just assembled in the area of Namche Bazar, the headquarters village of the Sherpas.
For that matter
, I suddenly thought, jerking myself upright in my seat,
how did the message reach Katmandu at all?
No runner could have come all the way from Namche – 170 miles or more – in three or four days. The village was in almost virgin country, first visited by Europeans only four years before, remote and shuttered. What on earth had happened? Had we overlooked some crucial factor in planning the news from Everest?

‘By the way, Colonel,’ I said as casually as I could, for I hated to bore people with my private anxieties. ‘How did the message from Hunt reach you so quickly?’

Proud was doing something to the lens hood of his camera, but looked up with a smile and said mildly:

‘Oh by radio, you know. It seems there’s some kind of radio station at Namche Bazar!’

A radio at Namche, almost within sight of the mountain! With a great crackling of wrappers and silver paper, I helped myself to a humbug.

4

Travelling

We camped on a green plateau above the village of Banepa, and set about opening all the cases. It was a mucky village, all dirty inquisitive people and fly-blown stalls of vegetables, but the high ground above it was cool and pleasant. The
chang
was excellent, not thick as it is in the higher country, but as thin as pale cider and with rather the same taste. Only a few idlers wandered up to watch us; the main body of the expedition had passed this way, and we were a much less imposing sight. Two Buddhist priests strolled over from a neighbouring temple, dressed in their vivid saffron robes, very young but dignified. One or two persistent beggar girls whined their way through the baggage, impervious to invective; and some of the more horrible urchins of Bhatgaon seemed to have followed us all the way to Banepa. Nevertheless we managed well enough. Soon we found that by prising open one edge of a crate you could peer inside and see the pressure gauge; and by noon on the following day we had done this to all of them and packed them up again. The results were reassuring. Of the 111 cylinders, only eleven were deficient. The expedition could proceed. We handed a report to Colonel Proud, and soon after lunch set off again in majesty into the hills.

I was much preoccupied with the problems of the wireless transmitter. It was apparently operated by the
Indian Government, for Hunt’s message had reached Proud through the medium of the Indian Embassy in Katmandu. The Indians had inherited from the British their old nebulous hegemony over Nepal, and they were of course concerned for the security of her northern frontiers, particularly the passes through the Himalayas which formed gateways into India. But it was extraordinary that there should be a radio station so deep in the wilds, and in a region so secluded. It alarmed me to think what the presence of this phenomenon might mean. Hunt had obviously established friendly relations with its operators; but supposing Izzard or some other roaming correspondent managed to persuade them to transmit messages only for him, to the exclusion of
The Times?
It would not matter how high I climbed up the mountain, as the expedition’s accredited correspondent. Namche was only thirty miles from Everest, and the news of any great event on the mountain would certainly seep through there, by the Sherpa grapevine, long before I could get a runner back to Katmandu. It was a disagreeable prospect; who knew, perhaps Izzard already had the transmitter firmly in his grasp, and was happily sending messages back over the air?

But there was no point in fretting, and since the Everest country was as remote and unimaginable to me as the mountains of the moon, I could not clearly envisage any situation there. Instead I devoted myself to the pleasures of the march, which has since become, thanks to the labours of innumerable chroniclers, one of the best known nature rambles in the world. Ours was a pleasant, leisurely walk. It was the custom of the climbers to begin the march early, and only settle down for breakfast after two or three hours’ marching. Our way was very different.
Long after the sun was beating down on our tents pale hands could be seen groping between the tent flaps; and into them, in a trice, the Sherpas would thrust steaming mugs of tea. Roberts was usually soon outside, checking a load or quelling an incipient mutiny; but my progress into the open air was slow indeed, and agreeable. Gradually I would emerge into the sunshine, to sit on the portals of my tent and clean my teeth, and smell the clean hill air, and listen to the distant sizzling of breakfast. Soon a company of local yokels would gather around to share my pleasure, and we would exchange a few ineffective words of greeting. I had a small radio receiver with me, and before long I would tune it in to London for the news; but generally I had only time to hear of a minor disaster or two, to the incredulous hilarity of the Nepalese, before Sen Tenzing would come rolling up the hillside to tell me that breakfast was ready, sahib, and could he now demolish the tent?

A delightful way to start the day! There was scrambled egg, and tea, and
chupattis
with Cooper’s marmalade, even sometimes bread, for my wife had bought two tins of yeast from the Army and Navy, which gave us a great advantage over other travellers in the Himalaya that season. As we munched, the first of our porters, anxious to finish the day early, would set off along the track in the direction of our next camping site. Harrying their flanks were the two overseers; one still wearing his spectacles and brandishing his lantern, smudged with smoke; the other equipped with a big black umbrella. Their force was certainly varied. Some of the porters were old and grizzled, their shanks withered, their fingers long and bony; some were young and incorrigibly cheerful, always wandering off the route to find some drink or flirt with the local houris. They were
all men from the valley, and as the track climbed higher into the hills they lost some of their vigour and good humour, and began behaving with a certain trade union waywardness; but at the beginning they were willing enough, and waved us good morning as we scraped up the last traces of our scrambled egg.

No ethereal beauty haunted these foothills. They were dusty, brown and drab; the villages sordid and mean, the people terribly poor. Heat shimmered along the track, and at every fountain (gushing from antique iron lions’ mouths beside the way) you were tempted to stop and drink. All in all, I did not much like this region; but Roberts was a Gurkha officer, and most of his gallant men had come from Nepal. He was at pains to assure me that the weedy and cross-eyed young men we encountered in the villages were not altogether typical of his soldiers.

‘Ah yes, but these are the Hindings! They’re
quite
different. Our men come from the Bindung country – over
the hill there –
altogether
different. These people have intermarried with the Pontungs. Wait till you see the Bindungs!’

But no, over the hill the Bindungs seemed as cross-eyed as ever, and before long Roberts was reduced to suggesting that his men came from that country up there, beyond the ridge, pointing to a place so hideously inaccessible that there was no possibility of my ever penetrating to it.

So the days passed happily as we trudged along the tracks, sometimes dozing in the sunshine, sometimes pausing for lunch beside some limpid rivulet. In these foothills there were always interesting sounds to hear. Innumerable ridiculous birds sang the hours away, among them a cuckoo so indefatigable that its thick cry echoed from every hill, very loud and energetic. In the villages there were always drums beating and weird stringed instruments playing rhythmically. In our little camp the porters’ child-like chatter competed with the deep bass crooning of Sen Tenzing, alleged to be the music of his devotions. Often the still was shattered by the distant rasping of cross women’s voices, or the clucking of chickens; at night a hyena sometimes howled out of the darkness.

Why the inhabitants thought we were travelling that way, loaded with such queer implements, I have no idea. Even the porters were vague, I think, about the eventual purposes of their labours; and the villagers in general seemed to accept us merely as quaint animals passing by, on a migration perhaps. Sometimes, though, a sage would detect ulterior motives. In particular, such silly old men were always anxious to look through our binoculars, almost invariably through the wrong end.

‘Why are you so interested in these things?’ we asked one man. ‘All they do is magnify, just like a pair of spectacles.
Look at this typewriter, now – it will write a letter for me, more clearly than the finest scribe. This camera will make an image of you in a trice, for me to take home in my pocket and keep for ever. This small bottle of pills will clear away my headache. This little radio box will bring me voices from places a year’s march away. Why do you always pick upon the binoculars?’

‘Aha, sahib!’ the sage replied slyly. ‘I know better than that! I am not so simple! I know that through these miraculous glasses you can see under the surface of the earth, so that you know where the gold lies, and the diamonds, and all the other treasures of the mountains! One more look, sahib, I beg you, through the miraculous glasses!’

They were a peaceable people, the Nepalese of the foothills, who would never dream of harming you; and during my entire stay in Nepal nothing was stolen from me. But they gave themselves a threatening air by carrying at all times the famous Gurkha dagger called the
kukri
. It was a curved and murderous instrument, worn prominently in the waistband, and chiefly used for cutting meat, chopping wood, opening tins, and other such mild activities. Almost every male carried one, and the little Nepalese, who wore nothing much but a hat and a jerkin, were sometimes all but dwarfed by the huge knife strapped firmly to their stomachs.

The women, though unarmed, sometimes managed nevertheless to look more ferocious. With their matted hair and low brows, their tattered dark dresses and their bangles, they sat like witches over the big pots in which they brewed their
chang
, pouring the coagulated liquid from one receptacle to another, stirring and filtering it with sticks or their dirty fingers, sometimes breaking into raucous laughter, and finally thrusting a
pan of the drink viciously in the direction of the passing sahib. I was generally much too alarmed by these wild ladies to refuse the stuff, however thick and sticky its consistency, and whatever the conditions of its brewing. Sometimes I remembered that I had not been inoculated very thoroughly against Eastern diseases; but I reminded myself, as I masticated the brew, of Lord Fisher’s favourite dictum: ‘Do right, and damn the odds!’

These hill villages were busy places. A constant stream of foot traffic passed through them, taking produce to Katmandu. Every day we met convoys of half-naked porters, loaded high. They passed us silently, moving deliberately, smelling of sweat and dirt. Often they carried vast quantities of onions, with the green leaves still on them; sometimes they had wicker cages of small chickens, with roosters tied by the leg to the topmost cages and flapping their wings impotently. The porters carried only blankets, cooking pots and a few minor implements for themselves; at night they bought their food locally, cooked it over an open fire, and rolled up in their ragged bedclothes beneath a rock or in a gulley. It was a hard life. Their bodies were riddled with disease, and for most of the year they were out on the hill tracks, away from their wives and families.

One morning, a few days out of Katmandu, I met a group of such men travelling in the direction of the capital without any loads. They at once stopped and greeted me, and turned out to be the first of Hunt’s returning porters, who had taken their loads to Sola Khumbu and were now journeying home. All was going well, they said. The expedition was safely in the Sherpa country, and Mr. Izzard, they were happy to be able to tell me, was somewhere in the region of Namche Bazar. I asked them to
wait for a moment, and sitting down beside the track wrote a short dispatch describing our progress and reporting the ubiquity of the cuckoos: this I gave them, together with a letter to Hutchinson, and they delivered it safely.

Our progress was not very swift, but was steady enough. The heat was intense, and the flies trying. Sometimes gigantic beautiful butterflies floated past us; sometimes a malicious buzzing heralded the arrival of an enormous flying beetle, large enough to make you duck and shield your head. Often we stopped for a swim in some clear swift stream running down from the mountains, or climbed a neighbouring eminence to catch a glimpse of the distant snowpeaks through the obscuring haze.

So we reached the big bazaar village of Meksin, the half-way mark, and felt ourselves approaching Everest. (On the map this place was bafflingly called Those, a name which seemed to mean absolutely nothing to its inhabitants; but poor map, it proved to be so hopelessly inaccurate throughout the journey that I grew quite sorry for it.) We approached the village down a beautiful narrow valley, thickly wooded and watered by a delectable rushing stream, a first hint of the alpine country that was to come. Meksin itself, though, was still a village of the foothills. It had a wide market street, thronged with idlers and lethargic merchants, and a few open shops where you could buy such luxuries as lamp-glasses and mirrors. On the outskirts there were one or two fine old houses, in the manner of the Newar architects, one of them looking strangely like an English coaching inn, so that as I passed I half expected to hear fruity English voices from the taproom, or smell the Brussels sprouts. They do some iron smelting at Meksin, and through the open door
of another building we glimpsed the glare of furnaces and the strong bared muscles of the iron men.