Keeper Of The Mountains (17 page)

The expeditions continued to arrive. Next was a huge Italian team with 64 members led by Guido Monzino, bound for Everest. Two helicopters were enlisted to airlift food and equipment over the icefall from base camp to Camp
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in the Western Cwm. Early in the expedition one of the helicopters crashed, so another was requested. They were supposed to use the helicopters strictly for rescue, but the climbers openly ignored the order, having fresh vegetables delivered on a regular basis to Camp
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Elizabeth didn't think much of the size of the enterprise, and she was supported in her thinking by Hillary, who was in the country working on his hospital and school construction projects. Hillary
was outspoken about it, providing excellent grist for the Reuters mill: “What Signor Monzino has shown is that if you have a couple of platoons of alpine troops, which is what he has, and a couple of helicopters, which is what he has, and unlimited equipment and funds, which he also has, then the climbing of Everest by the South Col route is a relatively straightforward procedure. We shouldn't regard this as a mountaineering expedition … it's more of a training program … it has nothing to do with mountaineering.” The Italian embassy subsequently asked for an apology from Hillary. In 1993 at the celebration in Kathmandu of the 40th anniversary of the first ascent of Everest, a delegate from Italy stood up and denounced him. Hillary responded that he hadn't meant to hurt anyone, but his opinion remained unchanged.

At the other end of the mountaineering spectrum, Elizabeth was also reporting on a small American expedition to Dhaulagiri
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. One of the climbers was the young John Roskelley from Spokane, Washington. After 20 days above 7132 metres, Roskelley, Lou Reichardt and Nawang Samden summited, but the price was high for Roskelley. Back in base camp, the expedition doctors thawed his frozen feet, and over the next three days Sherpas carried him down the glacier and across two passes to the village of Tukche, where a plane arrived carrying the finance minister of Nepal to an event in the district. The minister graciously offered to walk the 70 miles back to Pokhara so that Roskelley wouldn't have to. When Elizabeth saw him back in Kathmandu, his toes were badly frostbitten. But from what she observed of this outspoken American climber, she was sure he would recover and return to Nepal.

A Hawley Reuters scoop occurred in 1973 when Elizabeth enlisted the help of a Himalayan Trust doctor. A Japanese team was on Everest trying to be the first to climb the Southwest Face and the first to climb the mountain in autumn. As a result, the Japanese media was giving it a lot of coverage. The team was providing media reports direct from base camp via a runner. As in 1963 with the American Everest expedition, Elizabeth was determined not to be outdone. So she asked the Kunde Hospital doctor to engage a local Sherpa runner to go up to the base camp to find out what was going on. The Sherpa befriended the runner hired by the Japanese, who was on his way to the Lukla airport to report that a Japanese climber had reached
the top (not by the Southwest Face). Elizabeth's Sherpa runner obtained the details of the climb from the expedition's runner and then sped down the trail to the hospital, leaving the other runner enjoying drinks in a bar. Her runner gave the news to the doctor, who wrote down what the Sherpa told him and sent the news in a hospital mailbag by air to Kathmandu. Elizabeth received the bag with pleasure, but then she had to decipher the somewhat confusing contents. The two climbers' names had been transmitted orally from a Japanese to a Sherpa to another Sherpa to a New Zealand doctor to an American correspondent – one Elizabeth Hawley. One particularly confusing name could have been Kartok, Kato, Kano or Kondo. She decided on Kato and filed the story. Thirty years later, Elizabeth describes the incident with glee. “Their expedition had a mail runner, too, but my guy was faster – by a day. We got that story! The other reporters complained and the
AFP
guy was a particular moaner and groaner … I got chastised … I was naughty!”

In fact, the moaning Agence France-Presse guy did more than groan; he caused Elizabeth serious trouble. Within a year the Ministry of Tourism banned her from reporting on mountaineering expeditions. By 1975 her “very friendly competitors,” as she described them, had lodged a complaint with the minister of tourism, and that cinched it. She was not even allowed on the ministry premises to learn of mountaineering news. She solved that problem through a friendly Kyoto correspondent she had previously cooperated with. He would go to the ministry and pick things up for her, but she could still not report on what she learned.

The first expedition attempting to climb one of the highest peaks in winter arrived in Nepal in December 1974. The Polish team led by the famous mountaineer Andrzej Zawada had 8516-metre Lhotse as its goal. They reached 8250 metres by Christmas Day, but continuous high winds and bitterly cold temperatures finally defeated them. A new variation on the Himalayan climbing theme was born – winter ascents.

By spring the Hawley household was facing serious problems, as both Tigger and Sindhu were sick with distemper. The vet attended to them both, but within two weeks her “dear, lovable, lively Tigger” died during the night. She missed him terribly. The indestructible Sindhu hung on, although his near blindness caused him to wander
from one piece of furniture to the next, bouncing and colliding as he went. It didn't seem to bother him, though – he would simply change direction and carry on. Now age 17, he had become an institution.

Upon returning from a short trip to Europe, Elizabeth became the proud owner of a new apso dog. The three-month-old puppy was “lively,” causing considerable annoyance to poor old Sindhu but providing endless entertainment value for Elizabeth, chasing and chewing everything in sight. She couldn't think of anything better to name him, so finally settled on Tigger
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She had also been tasked with finding the Hillarys a house in Kathmandu, which she did by mid-January. When Sir Edmund, his wife, Louise, and their daughter Belinda arrived, Elizabeth threw a fabulous welcoming party. One of her goals was to ensure that the country's powerful and elite were aware of the important work Hillary was doing in Nepal, and to that end she stacked the party with notables such as Prince Basundhara, the chairman of the newly formed Nepal Mountaineering Association, the American ambassador and others. The big event of the season, though, was the king's coronation, which took place on February 24, 1975. The city dressed itself up for the who's who of the world's leaders arriving for the event: Prince Charles of England, the crown prince and crown princess of Japan, the husband of the queen of Denmark, the president of Sri Lanka, the crown prince of Laos and many others. The city was aglow with decorative lights and coloured lanterns. The round of official parties and receptions and black-tie dinners was endless, and Elizabeth was in the thick of it. She watched the colourful, elephant-back procession and the king's speech to the public, where he spoke about his country's needs and aspirations. It was very festive and she felt a little let down when it was over.

Shortly after, she received the sad news that her father had finally succumbed to the wear and tear of a number of illnesses. Although he had been ill for years, the end came quite quickly. Elizabeth was concerned about her mother and her ability to cope with the logistical and legal matters she was now faced with. Elizabeth offered to come over to help, but her mother managed it on her own, efficiently and competently. She urged her mother to come to Nepal for an extended visit, and to this suggestion Florelle said yes, she would come later in the year.

N
o sooner had her father died than Elizabeth became a major player in yet another tragedy, this one closer to home. Hillary was in the Solu region building the Phaphlu hospital, and his wife and daughter were in Kathmandu, so he decided to charter a Royal Nepal Airlines flight to bring them and their dog to Phaphlu. The New Zealand pilot, Peter Shand, had met them the night before at the British embassy and was thrilled to have them as his passengers. But his fatal mistake the next morning was that in his haste to get going he failed to do a walk around the plane – wiggling the flaps, turning the propeller, jiggling the rudder and checking everything as pilots of small planes do. They piled in and took off in a southerly direction. He immediately had trouble negotiating a turn to the east, so he attempted to return to the airfield. He managed the turn to the north but was unable to finish the turn to land the plane. At the north end of the runway was a steep drop-off to the river, and it was into that great hole that the plane crashed. The pilot had failed to remove the wedge from one or both ailerons, and the plane's ability to fly was tragically compromised.

At 7:30 a.m., Elizabeth's helper, Kumar, was at the airport and Elizabeth was at home asleep. The phone rang.

“Memshab, we have accident.”

“What happened, Kumar?”

“We have bad accident – plane crash.”

Impatient, she demanded that someone else come to the phone to verify – but it was true, the plane had crashed and everyone had been killed. She rushed to the airport and came upon an American helicopter pilot who was about to take his mother out sightseeing. Elizabeth knew him and implored him to take her to Phaphlu where Hillary was working. She returned home, changed her clothes, wrote and filed the story for Reuters and flew to Phaphlu. She landed at the Phaphlu airfield, and Hillary later told her that when he saw the helicopter fly in and her get off, he knew something terrible had happened. She told him the news and his first response was, “Oh shit, how will I tell the parents?”

His in-laws had been helping him with the building project, so he had to get on with the sad task – immediately. A few days later, Louise and Belinda were cremated on the banks of the Bagmati River in the untouchables area because, of course, they were not caste people.

Hillary's other children, daughter Sarah and son Peter, were
summoned to Nepal and they now huddled together trying to grasp the significance of what had happened, to contemplate a future without two members of their family. Initially they went back to Hillary's rented house, but he soon retreated to Elizabeth's place. He couldn't sleep. Every night they ate at Elizabeth's apartment or another friend's house. Everyone wanted to feed them and look after them, but what they really needed was privacy and a good friend. After some days in Kathmandu, they returned to Phaphlu as a family group, trying to find some peace in the mountains, in their work and through each other.

Years later, Elizabeth sadly recalled that watching her friend struggle with such a monumental loss was the most difficult week of her life. She was swamped with arrangements regarding the tragedy. She arranged for last-minute flight changes for family members, tried to get reimbursements for flights not used, negotiated the termination of the rental contract for their house and answered numerous letters of condolence on his behalf. She did her best to protect them from all the people who wanted to be around them, including the press.

Though Hillary busied himself with construction projects, they kept in close touch and he was deeply grateful for her help. In a letter written shortly after the accident, he said, “I can't claim that all is light and joy here but life goes steadily on and we have many happy moments amongst our family group.… We hear few Sherpa laughs, I fear, and I find the nights rather long but I have been assured that time cures all that sort of thing. Thanks for your terrific help – it's something I won't easily forget. I am very much in your debt.”

After a couple of weeks, Hillary and his children were back in Kathmandu staying with Elizabeth before heading to the United States and New Zealand. She found him to be somewhat improved, although suffering from lack of sleep and depression. She was worried about him going back to his home in New Zealand. Her worries were justified, as he wrote to her shortly after: “Everything could almost be normal if the house didn't seem so empty without Louise and Belinda … and if I didn't have this unworthy ambition to be dead. No doubt I will become all jolly again in due course but it does seem to be taking a little time.”

It was apparent to Elizabeth that some of the Hillary spirit had been broken; whether it was temporary or permanent she wasn't sure.
He referred to it as a loss of the “Hillary dynamo,” although he wondered if it had ever existed other than in the minds of the press. His health was poor and he was impatient with situations he would have coped with easily in the past.

One such incident involved his sister, who, while helping him build the hospital at Phaphlu, was nearly killed by soldiers using live ammunition while engaged in military exercises. A small bomb landed near her, nearly blowing her off a high trestle. Metal shrapnel flew overhead, barely missing a number of Sherpas and patients awaiting treatment. Hillary lost his patience and rushed to censure the soldiers, but immediately felt bad that he had lost his temper. He wrote to Elizabeth: “Tell me, Liz – should one be calm when one's sister is nearly blown up? Clearly I would never have made it in the diplomatic world.” He underestimated himself on that point, as time would tell.

By 1984 Hillary had been invited by the New Zealand government to become high commissioner to India and Nepal. It was a great honour, but Elizabeth wondered how he would handle both this and his Himalayan Trust responsibilities, speculating that more of them would fall her way. He accepted the post and was duly installed in Delhi as high commissioner, a title that was the equivalent in rank to ambassador.

In May 1975 Elizabeth met Junko Tabei, the Japanese climber who had just become the first woman to climb Everest. It was an all-women expedition except for the Sherpas. Because of the male Sherpas, there was speculation that Tabei was “pulled and pushed” by the men to get to the summit, but Elizabeth didn't buy it. She could see that Tabei was a strong climber and a determined lady. “She had her eye on Everest and she went out and climbed it.”