Coronation Everest Read online

  In 1953 there was no road into Katmandu, and all the precarious motor vehicles tottering through its streets had been manhandled there on the backs of innumerable coolies; on the track that crossed the mountains from India it was never surprising to encounter a company of a hundred raggety porters carrying a monumental Rolls-Royce without any wheels. There was no railway line, either, the only method of ground communication being a rope railway which constantly heaved tinned food and spare carburettors over the hills from Bihar. The aeroplane came in once or twice a week, keeping its fingers crossed (for it is a difficult flight) and many visitors plodded over the pass from India on ponies. In general, though, despite the rapid unfolding of Nepalese policy, Katmandu still felt isolated, introspective and suspicious.

  Nepal was in a condition of gradual revolution. The great families which used to control the hereditary Prime Ministership (and thereby, as may be imagined, a fair number of other jobs too) had been humbled, and a sort of democratic society functioned intermittently, with many a splutter and spurt. There were political parties and newspapers and a lively radio station, and the British reading room was allowed to display even the most scurrilous of the Sunday theatre criticisms. Strange indeed were the people who moved through the dusty streets of Katmandu. Sometimes a Prime Minister rushed along in his big limousine, with his fierce attendant policemen; sometimes a gaunt holy man stalked through the crowd ominously. Tibetans in their queer clothes and long black hair squatted beside the road chatting; beggars intoned their stylized whimpering appeals; the occasional European climber bought his last requirements in the open-fronted (but scarcely open-hearted) shops of the big bazaar. It was at once colourful and squalid. Some of the people were handsome and well dressed, but most of them lived in unutterable poverty; and the whole strange medley was infused with an unhealthy sense of distrust.

  *

  I felt the impact of this trait very soon during my short stay in Katmandu. I had taken my bags from the airport to the Nepal Hotel, a defunct palace of incomparable discomfort then used as a rest-house for visitors. It was a huge structure, formerly the home of some grandee of consequence, and filled to overflowing with bric-a-brac – stuffed tigers locked in eternal combat, pictures of Nepalese noblemen in dramatic uniforms, mats bearing the emblazoned slogan ‘Welcome!’, embroidered mottoes such as ‘Bless This House’ or ‘East West, Home’s Best’, fading photographs of elephant hunts, banquets, obscure state occasions and kings. In the great courtyard strutted the chickens which later appeared in heart-rending regularity upon the dinner table. In the bar a jazz band played a confusing mixture of Nepalese and American music, the double-bass player being an elegant Nepalese lady in horn-rimmed spectacles; sometimes in the early morning the pianist, who used to play in ship’s orchestras on the run between England and India, would sneak into the room to practise his Chopin.

  Often one could hear through one’s bedroom window the cries of wild animals; an apologetic lion’s roar, the clucking of hidden birds. These noises came from a zoo in a charming but derelict garden directly opposite the hotel. I once visited this menagerie, and found it strangely fascinating. It had been the private property of a nobleman driven from the country by the onslaught of democracy, and it was maintained in a state of semi-coma by the city of Katmandu. Everything was a little overgrown and weedy. The lions were heavy with boredom. The tigers were moulting. The biggest python, tired of it all, had escaped. The pelican flapped grotesquely up and down the lawns with a half-hearted beating of its clipped wings. On one cage I saw a notice saying ‘Gibbon’; but inside there was only a solitary parrot, and as I approached I heard a furtive scurrying and sliding, and there vanished into the recesses of the cage a score of small brown rats, which had been clinging to the meshwork examining that unhappy bird. This melancholy place exactly fitted the temperament of the Nepal Hotel, which was, all in all, an unusual hostelry.

  Soon after my arrival, without unpacking my bags, I set off down the road to see the town. It was a long walk down a narrow street, between the high uncompromising walls of palaces (now and again, through wrought iron gates, you could glimpse the ornate façade of a pink château, transplanted in essence from the banks of the Loire but subjected in the process to some ghastly spiritual metamorphosis). It was hot and dusty, and the people I met on the street were mostly dirty and unsmiling. Presently I heard the roar of an engine behind me and a jeep pulled up in an insidious sort of way. It contained three important-looking gentlemen and a policeman.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Morris,’ said one of them a little coldly. ‘We have been looking after you since the hotel, it being our purpose to discover your whereabouts. This is His Highness the Maharajah of Rambledop’ (or some such name) ‘who is in Katmandu on a visit to one of his distinguished kinsmen. Have you by any chance seen the Maharajah’s suitcase – the brown one, with his princely crest on the lid?’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said I, ‘but I really don’t think I have.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the dignitary, and with a concerted bow in my direction, and an exchange of significant glances, the party drove off.

  Such were the fascinations of Katmandu that I easily dismissed this little incident from my mind. Instead I wandered enthralled through the little back streets, filled with primitive perfumes, alive with a drifting crowd of diverse citizens. In the shops the merchants lay torpid on their blankets. Officials strode along in gorgeous uniforms, bright with medal ribbons, and Indian ladies rustled past in lovely saris. Sometimes a Nepalese soldier clattered down the pavement in ammunition boots. On the green grass of the central parade ground a group of aristocrats were exercising their stocky horses, riding with an unorthodox grace. A young man with an eye-glass was examining the workmanship of an horrific figure of the Hindu god Kala Bhaibar, which sprawled (all arms and eyes) beside the main square.

  But from time to time, as I looked at these wonders, the jeep would draw up beside me disconcertingly.

  ‘Our kindest apologies,’ the spokesman would say, ‘but we have once again been examining your whereabouts. His Highness the Maharajah of Rambledop graciously wonders if you have knowledge of the whereabouts of his brown leather suitcase, suitably emblazoned? No, sir? You have no knowledge, sir? Kindly accept my warm apologies.’

  After a time, I confess, it began to tell on my nerves, particularly as Katmandu always had for me a slight sensation of creepiness. I visited the Buddhist shrine of Shambu-nath, shuddering as I passed through the settlement at its foot, for many of its inhabitants were albinos, looking at me eerily with pink eyes. At the top of the steep stairs of the shrine stood the tall stupa, surrounded by houses and monuments; scores of horrible hairy monkeys clambered over these structures and through the windows of the buildings; and the two large Oriental eyes which embellished the edifice seemed to stare at me with a decided air of accusation. Had I seen the Maharajah’s suitcase? Could I have made some terrible mistake?

  I dismissed the idea, and set back along the road to the hotel; but in a moment or two the jeep was with me again.

  ‘Our warmest apologies, but the Maharajah graciously wonders if he might be permitted to inspect the baggage in your room, sir, with your warm permission?’

  ‘Bother the beastly suitcase,’ said I, or something of the sort. ‘Yes, for goodness’ sake come and see for yourself!’ Chasing a respectable British subject around the back streets, I muttered as I climbed into the jeep, as if I haven’t got enough to think about already, it’s all this confounded nationalism, it just goes to show, etc. etc. etc.: until the key of my room was secured, there was a general catching of breaths and bracing of muscles, the door was flung theatrically open, and there in the middle of the floor stood a large brown suitcase, elaborately monogrammed.

  ‘My goodness,’ I said breathlessly, ‘I am sorry!’

  *

  For a moment this characteristic episode seemed to threaten my entire Everest assignment. The Maharajah opened his suitcase to show me, tucked away betwe
en a pair of pants and a toothpaste tube, a case of magnificent jewels which, he said convincingly, were most precious to him. It was obvious, he said, that the case had been in some way confused with my baggage at the airport; and since, as a marginal member of the Everest expedition, I had been immune to customs requirements, it had been hurried away into the city without examination. This seemed to me odd.

  ‘Now I must insist,’ said the Maharajah, a steely note entering his voice, ‘that you give me a signed explanation of the affair, kindly making it clear that you were (albeit unwillingly, my dear sir) responsible for bringing the case into the city.’

  It all sounded rather fishy, but when I stood my ground and insisted, with a quivering forefinger, that he remove his possessions at once out of my room, it was gently suggested to me that the Maharajah might well be in a position to prevent my going to the mountain. In a trice I had written a brief but unliterary account of the episode and handed it to him with expressions of everlasting goodwill; but over the years I have often remembered the Maharajah’s jewels, and wondered at the strange way in which they passed through the customs.

  A little nervous that something else of the sort might happen to me, I then set about completing my preparations for the march. Hutchinson was already in Katmandu, often secreted, during the hot hours of the day, in the innermost recesses of a blackened room, but already with a firm finger upon the pulse of the city. All our forebodings about the competition, he said, were coming true. Hunt and his climbers had left for Everest a week or so before, and were now half-way to the mountain; but they had been closely followed by an enterprising British correspondent, Ralph Izzard of the Daily Mail, who had boldly set off into the hills with a tattered tent and a scratch team of porters. He did not seem to be equipped for high altitudes, Hutchinson thought, but you never knew; he might well propose to hang about in the region of the mountain for the entire expedition. What was more, in Katmandu itself a news agency and a newspaper had each set up observation posts to pick up what they could of the news seeping back from the mountain. A room in the Government guest-house had a bold notice pinned to its door: ‘Keep Out: Monitoring in Progress’. This was the ad hoc office of a respectable Fleet Street newspaper which had reasonably assumed that the news from Everest would be coming back to Katmandu by wireless; with a powerful receiver it was planned to intercept such messages and also (it was whispered) to listen in to the cables being radioed down to India by the cable authorities. A big news agency had done the same thing. All kinds of odd journalists were arriving in Katmandu like converging scavengers, to pick up what they could, using their claws if need be. Who knew how far they would travel into the mountains? You can place a copyright on dispatches, but there is no copyright on news. If a reporter could describe the expedition’s departure from Katmandu, he might just as well describe its activities on the mountain (if he was determined enough to get there).

  But Hutchinson had one heartening piece of news. He had established happy relations with the British Embassy, which lived then in an ugly house in a glorious garden and was still known to all the Nepalese as ‘The Lines’, in memory of the days when a British Resident had a troop of Indian cavalry to protect him. The Resident had evolved, under the inexorable pressures of history, into an Ambassador, in the person of Mr. Christopher Summerhayes. Summerhayes was naturally doing all he could to help the Everest expedition, and he had promised Hutchinson that when a final message came from the mountain, announcing either success or failure, he would transmit it over his Foreign Office radio transmitter to London. This would, for that one message, obviate the delays and dangers of the cable office, and take the final news to London in a matter of moments. It was not a favour exclusively for The Times. If any other paper managed to secure the news first, the Ambassador would undoubtedly perform the same service for it, his motive being not to take sides in a newspaper war, but simply to get the news from Everest home to England as quickly as possible.

  *

  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.