Keeper Of The Mountains (24 page)

Florelle was carried up the stairs of Elizabeth's apartment in a wheelchair, and within the first week she had a stroke. Her leg collapsed and she never walked again. She moved into the spare bedroom in Elizabeth's apartment and had four women looking after her round the clock. One was a Tibetan nurse; the second was a young, strong Sherpa woman who could easily handle the 94-pound Florelle; the third was a Rai nurse and the fourth was a high-caste Chhetri woman. Their care for Florelle was loving and complete. For Elizabeth, this was a precious time when she and her mother could spend many hours together.

Florelle, still mentally sharp, would get up in the morning, eat breakfast with Elizabeth, then read the papers, magazines and books and take frequent naps during the day. She had brought her favourite books with her, some of which were murder mysteries. She left the flat only once, because she hated the terrifying trip up and down the steep stairs in a wheelchair. Since Florelle couldn't get out and about, the world came to her. A hairdresser arrived on a regular basis, as did a doctor and dental hygienist. Elizabeth and Florelle ate dinner at 5:30 p.m. each evening, but before dinner they would sit and have a relaxing cocktail. Elizabeth usually had a beer or whisky, but Florelle was faithful to a particular combination: Canadian Club with unsweetened apple juice. She enjoyed that drink every night until three days before she died.

One morning in November of 1989, Elizabeth went into Florelle's
bedroom to say good morning. Florelle announced she wouldn't be getting up for breakfast that morning and could someone please bring it to her in bed. She never got up again. Shortly before she died she pleaded, “Elizabeth, please let me go.” Two nights later she had a stroke in the middle of the night. She died at age 95.

For the first time in her life, Elizabeth didn't know what to do. Ang Rita, who worked downstairs in the Himalayan Trust office, remembered the morning he came upstairs to learn that Florelle had died. He asked Elizabeth what she wanted to do about the cremation and, uncharacteristically, she didn't have an answer. After two days she told him her mother had wanted to be cremated, so she asked if he would help her. Ang Rita and the other Himalayan Trust Sherpas were like brothers, helping her make the necessary arrangements for Florelle's final, fiery end. Elizabeth arranged for the body to be kept in the American embassy's freezer. It was then transferred into a simple wooden coffin and transported to the cremation ground in the Himalayan Trust's small pickup truck, with Elizabeth at the wheel. They organized Buddhist lamas, prayer flags of five different colours, musicians and offerings for the gods. Ang Rita was one of many Sherpas who had benefited from Elizabeth's care and attention through the Himalayan Trust, and he remembered her concerns for him when he first came to Kathmandu as a student. He was glad he could help her in this time of sorrow.

The cremation took place along the banks of the Bagmati River in the untouchables section. Traditionally, the eldest son would light the funeral pyre. But there was no eldest son; there was only Elizabeth. So when the time came, surrounded by her friends on a cold, wet day as the lamas chanted their traditional prayers, she stepped forward and lit the pyre on which her mother's coffin was placed. It was the most difficult thing she had ever done.

Just days before she died, Florelle had written in a shaky hand a birthday greeting to her daughter: “Happy Birthday dear Elizabeth, I am so grateful for the good care and interesting life you provide for me.” Florelle had often told Elizabeth that it had been the right decision to come to Kathmandu, and Elizabeth agreed.

A month later Elizabeth carried her mother's ashes back to the United States in a beautiful antique bronze urn about twelve inches high. Lee and Will picked her up at the airport, where they found
her in a more emotional state than they had ever witnessed. They opened a bottle of Jack Daniels and settled in. Elizabeth talked and wept and talked some more – about how difficult life had been and how important a role model her mother had been. She expressed how important it had been for her, after all those years of separation, to be able to bring her mother to Nepal and care for her. She was honest about her regrets and the sorrows in her life. The loss of her mother, even though it was expected, was even more difficult for her than the premature death of her brother years before.

Almost the entire family assembled in Dorset, Vermont. They stayed in an inn next to the cemetery, which sloped steeply downward with a view of the mountains beyond. Florelle's ashes were buried in the same plot as her husband and son John. Elizabeth's cousin, Lee, sang Bach's “Come Sweet Death,” others read or told stories about Florelle, and Elizabeth read from a letter she had written shortly after Florelle died, describing her mother's last days. And so ended an important chapter in Elizabeth's life.

In June of 1990 Elizabeth received an unusual offer from New Zealand. They wanted her to be their honorary consul in Nepal – honorary because she wasn't a New Zealand citizen. The position intrigued her and it was clearly an honour. It also paid. She said yes. Her work fell into two categories: helping Nepalese citizens get to New Zealand for study or for pleasure, and helping New Zealand citizens do what they wanted to do in Nepal. This sometimes meant arranging permits or visas, but more often meant getting them out of whatever jam they'd gotten themselves into. Occasionally, it meant arranging for a body to be returned to New Zealand. Those were the jobs she dreaded.

The greatest volume of work came from Nepalis wanting to go to New Zealand. Elizabeth didn't issue visas in her office, however, as they were handled in New Delhi. But that didn't stop people from coming to see her or calling her in droves. Her Reuters replacement, Gopal Sharma, watched her in action many times when some unsuspecting person would wander into her office looking for information about a visa for New Zealand. If they were at all confused about what they wanted, she would pounce on them, demanding, “What exactly do you want?” “What is it that you need?” “What is it that you are here for?” When they finally collected themselves enough to tell her, she
would calm down, walk them through the process and send them on their way. Despite her brusque manner, she was sympathetic. “There are hundreds of thousands of people who want to go to New Zealand to study, or to disappear into the woodwork,” she says. “So the New Zealand authorities watch carefully to ensure that each person has real intentions of coming back.”

She had three cases of New Zealanders dying. One was on the north side of Everest in Tibet. Fortunately for Elizabeth, her Kiwi friend and mountain guide Russell Brice was there. Although he was forced to dispose of the body on the mountain, he brought the deceased's belongings back to Elizabeth – including his passport. It was these objects that Elizabeth forwarded to the New Zealand embassy in New Delhi, who located a relative in Australia to whom to send them.

In the second case, a Kiwi had fallen fell to his death while climbing a modest mountain roped together with his teammates, all of whom perished. Elizabeth arranged for his body and belongings to be returned to his grieving family.

The third death was a young woman, age 23, who had just qualified as a doctor and who had come to Nepal to do volunteer work at a hospital at Pokhara. When she finished her work stint, she went on a trek, but on the way back to Pokhara the bus stopped for a bathroom break and she suddenly collapsed. Her two friends commandeered a taxi to transport her to the Pokhara hospital and they did what they could to keep her alive on the way, but she was dead on arrival. Upon their return to Kathmandu, they contacted Elizabeth. With the help of an Austrian man who ran both a trekking agency and an undertaking company, she managed to wade through the multitude of international regulations and return the woman's body to New Zealand.

Less gruesome, but more irritating, was the story of Kiwi Tony Paroli, who found himself in Nepal without a valid visa. Paroli's problem was that his visa was six or seven months out of date, and when he went to the authorities to finally renew it, they said, “Certainly, but we will have to charge you double the fee.” He became angry and refused to pay, so they said, “Well then, come with us.” To his surprise, they took him to a jail cell, from which he promptly called Elizabeth. There was nothing she could do at that moment and, unluckily for him, it was late Friday afternoon of a three-day weekend, so nothing
could be done until Tuesday. She went to see him on Saturday morning for a little chat – it was no mean trick getting through all that barbed wire to visit him, and she ripped her clothes in the process.

By the next week, Paroli was ready to pay. Of course, he didn't have enough cash with him, but he did have an
ATM
card. The problem was that his maximum disbursement was only $250 a day – and he needed $8,000 for his expensive new visa, his unpaid hotel bill and travel costs out of Nepal! This was going to be a long, slow process. Elizabeth brought him to her office, where he phoned his father in New Zealand, asking for help. His father had some money, but not enough. He agreed to $6,000, and in due course Paroli went to Western Union to pick it up. After paying for his inflated visa, he was eventually released in Elizabeth's custody. But the authorities made it clear he needed to leave the country, and it was now her job to get him on a plane. She booked a seat for him and delivered him directly to his hotel in Thamel, and he swore he would come to her place the next day. Much to her surprise, he did. What a relief when she finally delivered him to the airport and saw him through immigration and safely onto the plane – out of Nepal. Imagine her surprise when he called her up again a couple of years later. This time he was in Pokhara – without any visa at all!

Visas were not something to treat lightly in Nepal. Two young New Zealand women came to Nepal with legal visas, but when they needed to renew them, they entrusted them to their travel agent. They got the visas back, but, to their dismay, discovered the visa stickers, arranged for them by the travel agent, were counterfeit; the first time they presented them for inspection they were promptly slapped in jail. There were four jails in Kathmandu, and these women ended up in Dilli Bazaar jail – a truly dreadful place. Elizabeth visited them and brought them food, but their luck soared when their New Zealand member of parliament charged into Kathmandu. He met with the prime minister's office, emphasized the women's innocence and managed to free them in about three days.

Not all of Elizabeth's consulate clients were innocents, however. One man travelling on a New Zealand passport on his way to Singapore was stopped at the airport when they found he was carrying six kilos of liquid hashish. He too ended up in the Dilli Bazaar jail. Elizabeth attended his court appearance, translated to her by Kumar, and wasn't
surprised when he was sentenced to two years in the central jail. At this point, the New Zealand government wanted his passport back, so Elizabeth, now familiar with the jail scene, went to retrieve it and discovered that the man had two passports. Officials in Wellington became curiouser and curiouser about these two passports and eventually sent them back with the news that they were both well-executed counterfeits. They implored her to “please stop that man!” Alas, he had just been released from jail. Elizabeth raced to the Interpol office in her Volkswagen Bug and explained the situation. They leapt into action and sped to the airport, where the man was caught just before boarding an international flight. The police slammed him back in jail. Elizabeth went to visit him and asked where he had obtained the passports. He explained he'd bought them in Singapore for $500 each. His routine was to take drugs out of Nepal and bring back cheap electronic goods. In fact, he was Polish. His real name was Krawetz Matlak. She was elated: he wasn't from New Zealand after all! She called up the Polish authorities and said, “Here, take this man off my hands!”

So this was the life of an honorary consul? Elizabeth wondered if perhaps it was less complicated dealing with climbers.

He wasn't in his room more than 30 minutes when the phone rang; it was Elizabeth Hawley, congratulating him and setting up a meeting.

“A
New Star Shines in the Himalayan Climbing World” was the title of Elizabeth's spring report for 1990. The star was Tomo Česen, who came through on his promise to climb the route that many had been eyeing and trying – the South Face of Lhotse. Climbing alone, with no well-stocked camps and no bottled oxygen, Tomo Česen stunned the mountaineering world with a daring solo ascent of this formidable face.

Messner had taken a good look at the face and determined back in 1977 that, if it was possible, it would be a problem for the 21st century. He took another look in 1989 and was prepared to fix 5000 metres of rope to get up the route, convinced that three fixed camps would be required to climb it. And of course, the Polish legend Jerzy Kukuczka had died that same year, high on the impressive face. Neither Messner nor Kukuczka could have imagined the boldness of Česen's climb, alone and in the amazing time of 45 hours and 20 minutes from bottom to top. In fact the entire expedition was a whirlwind. Česen was at his base camp for only 14 days, acclimatizing and watching the face to determine the best line of ascent to avoid rockfall and avalanches.

According to Česen's report to Elizabeth, he headed up from base camp just after lunch on April 22 with a sleeping bag, extra gloves, a bivouac sack, some socks, goggles, 100 metres of 6 mm rope, eight rock pitons and ten ice screws, three kilograms of food and three Thermos bottles of liquid. He had two ice axes, crampons, a helmet, a headlamp, a walkie-talkie and a camera. Česen was meticulous in his report to Elizabeth: he told her exactly what time he started, where he climbed, when and where he stopped for his bivouacs, how many hours he slept, the weather and his strategy. He described in detail the difficult section of 50 to 70 metres of vertical rock covered in
unconsolidated snow near the top and the long, exhausting summit ridge covered in deep snow. He explained how he had reached the summit at 2:20 p.m. in strong winds. By 7:00 a.m. the next day, he was back at the base of the mountain. He told Elizabeth that he felt good, although mentally exhausted, particularly from the descent. Physical exhaustion did not hit him until a day later. He concluded he was “satisfied with his achievement.”