Coronation Everest Read online

  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.

  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-p
acked 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 h
owled 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?’