Coronation Everest (9 page)

The call over, the cheerful good nights sent winging up and down the mountain, and it is almost time for sleep. Everest keeps early hours; by seven o’clock the lights are dimmed and the camp is quiet, except for an occasional unaccountable spatter of conversation from the Sherpas. Now and then there is an enormous rumble, like a train crossing Hungerford Bridge, or the warning antique roar of the old elevated railway in Manhattan, as an avalanche breaks and falls somewhere on the mountain ramparts. The climber disregards it; and swallowing a couple of yellow sleeping pills (for altitude often makes sleep difficult) he buries himself determinedly in his bag, muffled in thick clothing like a mummy among the ice.

Towards the end of dinners given in honour of the Everest party, months later and continents away, when the port was being passed, the ladies were absent, and the old gentlemen with their handsome white moustaches were beginning to warm up, somebody would generally remark that there was one question he had always wanted to ask about the expedition. He had always wondered, now – up there in the snows-it must be devilish cold – jolly difficult to move about, eh? – what happened in the night, now, supposing you – well, you know, supposing you were in that tent now, right up there, and – well, er, Nature called, so to speak? Tell me, now, what d’you do then? There was a copy-book answer to this query. The expedition was provided with small yellow plastic bottles, for this very purpose. But I was an outsider, and had no such bottle, and as the old gentlemen waited for their reply, I used to remember with a shudder those long hours of indecision and rising discomfort, the vagaries of procrastination and resolution, the self-reproach and reluctant preparation, the failing and resummoning of resolve, the twisting and turning out of the sleeping-bag, the fumbling with the tent flap, and then at last the plunge outside into the sub-zero, in the middle of the night on Everest, with the moon harsh and icy, and the deep snow piling up against the tent! (How excellent was the brandy, how suffused the glow, of those long celebration evenings in London and New York!)

The second half of the icefall was rather worse than the first; and during the first wearying climb up its shaky platforms and avenues I had time to wonder why people wanted to climb mountains; though indeed my companions on that rope, the towering Band, the graceful Westmacott, looked as if they had no motives at all, but
simply moved on to the mountain mechanically, like thoroughbreds led to a ring, and were doing (in the words of a forgotten song) what comes naturally. ‘Because it’s there’ has a fine ring of finality about it, and spoken with a hint of sublime mysticism, as if there are bottomless pits of meaning yawning beneath the phrase, is calculated to hush the most importunate of lecture audiences; though I have often wondered if Leigh-Mallory, as human as the next man, did not spit it out in a moment of impatience, after being asked the same question thirty-three times in the same evening. Hillary’s answer is almost as successful. ‘I climb for the fun of it.’ Nobody can complain of that. The simple sportsman can accept it at its face value; the moralist can rejoice at an honest man; the sycophant can tremble at the manly simplicity of it; the mystic-mountaineer can ponder the query ‘What is Fun?’ (between his indignant ruminations on the Ascent rather than the Conquest of his favourite mountain, it being a matter of faith with him, as I remember, that you must never be beastly to the thing).

Everyone, of course, does these things for a different reason, but I composed a formula as we climbed that might be applicable to most mountaineers. I believe their reason for climbing is partly pride (because they do not care to admit weakness); partly ambition (because a warm caress of glory surrounds the successful mountaineer, even if he only stands, alone and unhonoured, on some minor and ill-respected summit); partly aestheticism (because their sport takes them to such beautiful places); partly mysticism (because they wallow sensuously in a spiritual challenge); and partly masochism (because they actually enjoy the discomforts they undergo, crevasses, avalanches, cold, loneliness, squalor, fatigue and all). Of these component
motives it was the last that I found most convincing as we struggled up the mountain.

The snow fell again that afternoon as we slowly progressed through the maze, swirling and blowing about us and blurring the track we followed. We crossed a few more bridges and poles, slithered down a few more ice-slopes, swung up a few more ropes, squeezed through a few more crevices, and climbed up a rope ladder, respectably fitted with wooden rungs, like something at a boy scout camp. ‘Presented by the Yorkshire Ramblers’ Association,’ Band shouted at me through the wind with an explanatory gesture, thus giving our venture an unexpected week-end touch. As the last glimmers of the sun disappeared and the gloom of evening arrived, we stumbled into Camp III: a couple of shapeless tents looking at us through the blizzard, a lonely wireless aerial, a pile of boxes half-hidden in the snow, an occasional sound of voices emerging murmurously from the darkness. I went into a thoroughly disused tent and, sweeping aside the miscellaneous junk inside it, lumbered into my sleeping-bag.

There was an especial satisfaction for me in resting that night at Camp III, Everest, at the top of the icefall. I was prepared to admit that journalists had written dispatches before from the altitude of Base Camp – 18,000 feet; but I felt almost certain that no one had employed quite so lofty a dateline as this. But despite a certain elation, somewhere discernible at the back of my mind, I was never able to put much heart into my dispatches from such high places. It was not only that my head was generally aching, my limbs exhausted, and my fingers very cold; the altitude also has a dulling effect on the brain, blunting enthusiasms and antipathies, removing mental extremes, clothing experience in a grey and clogging uniformity. Judgement
of distance and danger is warped, as everyone knows; but so are aesthetic values and standards of enjoyment and distaste. The great mountaineer, at the utmost limit of human endurance, unaccountably misjudges the safety of a corniche, like ‘a sick man climbing in a dream’; the journalist, at his own level on the mountain, surrounded by the aura of great adventure, in the light of a golden Himalayan moon, can find nothing very memorable to write about.

As I dozed in my bag that evening, hall-dreaming of tailless rats and scrambled eggs, in an agreeably muzzy coma, the flap of the tent was thrust aside and there appeared the enormous beaming face of Hillary, beneath an attractive striped linen helmet, rather like those worn by the Foreign Legion, kindly sewn for him by his fiancée.

‘There’s a nasty bit just down here on that last crevasse,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘I’m going down to cut a few more steps in it. What about coming and belaying me? D’you feel like it?’

His tone of voice was, I thought, distinctly
nonne
, or whichever interrogative it was they used in Latin to expect the answer ‘yes’; and anyway I was too vain to explain that I was prostrate with exhaustion. So, heaving a long inaudible sigh, struggling out of my sleeping-bag, twisting and rolling to get my boots out, catching my feet in the flap, searching for my snow-goggles, I crept miserably out into the snow and followed him. I am glad, now, that he dragged me out that night; for I remember the incident as characteristic of Hillary, and illustrative of his supreme quality as a mountaineer. It was a horrid night, the snow driving and stinging, no moon, only the faint glow of reflected snow and the great shadow of Everest looming above us. I stood at the lip of the crevasse, the rope
belayed around my ice-axe, while Hillary scrambled expertly down its face. There he worked in the half-light, huge and cheerful, his movement not so much graceful as unshakeably assured, his energy almost demonic. He had a tremendous bursting, elemental, infectious, glorious vitality about him, like some bright, burly diesel express pounding across America; but beneath the good fellowship and the energy there was a subtle underlying seriousness; he reminded me often of a musician in the hours before a concert, when the nagging signs of nervous tension are beginning to enter his conversation, and you feel that his pleasantries are only a kindly façade. Hillary was as much a virtuoso as any Menuhin, and as deeply and constantly embroiled in his art; I first detected this strain of greatness in him that evening below Camp III, as the ice-chips flew through the darkness, his striped hat bobbed in the chasm, and I stood shivering and grumbling, all messed up with ropes, crampons and ice-axes, at the top.

We awoke next morning to find the snow still swirling about us; but before we started the return journey we climbed a little higher to the entrance of the Western Cwm. I had seen this trench in the mountain-side from my eminence on Pumori, and wanted a taste of its atmosphere before writing my dispatch. We laboured up through the snow, crossing two deep crevasses, until we stood at the entrance to the valley; but alas, the air was thick with driven snow, forming a shifting, blinding veil. I could just make out the high rock ramparts on either side, and far in the distance I thought I could see the enormous form of Lhotse, at the head of the valley. But then if I had tried hard enough I could have seen anything that morning, for the snow-shielded Cwm was so redolent with mystery, its
recesses felt so romantic, my head was so strangely befuddled by the height, and it seemed to me so infinitely improbable that I should be standing there on Everest in the snow. We sat down and drank some lemonade, and presently began our journey down the mountain.

I was almost the Everest expedition in microcosm; for my modest adventures paralleled the greater enterprises of the climbers, and I timed my own journeys up the mountain to coincide with the different stages of the attempt. Thus, when I was making my first climb to the head of the icefall, Hunt’s reconnaissance parties were pushing ahead to the head of the Cwm and on to the vast slab of the Lhotse Face that rose above it. Similarly, soon after I returned to Base Camp to get my dispatches away and see to the organization of my runners, Hunt withdrew all the climbers from the mountain for a briefing on the plan of assault. This was a council of war before the attack on the summit. The groundwork had been done; quantities of stores had been taken up into the Cwm; the first examination had been made of the Lhotse Face; the time had come for a decision on the plan of final assault, and on the composition of the assault parties. Men would be made famous by this conference, and legends given birth. It was May 7, a significant date in the story of Everest.

Before the conference Hunt talked things over with Hillary and Evans, who had been made deputy leader of the expedition. He invited me to listen to this, and accordingly I tucked myself away in a corner as they hammered out the plan. It was a lovely sunny morning, and we basked there on the scree as we talked. When I heard that Evans and Tom Bourdillon, Hillary and Tenzing were to be the four men most likely to stand upon the summit, my
first reaction was to wonder how their lives might be altered by the chance; whether, one day, Hillary’s name would be as well known as Mallory’s; and whether, indeed, (a supremely selfish thought) they would all come back safely to tell me the news, or whether I should start thinking about obituary notices.

(Goodness, that was a thought! Had we anything in the morgue on the members of the expedition? What about portrait pictures? I must get a photograph of every member, so that if anyone disappeared irrevocably down a crevasse we could provide a reasonable obituary. Let me see, now, what code words did we have for catastrophes? ‘Killed’, ‘Injured’ and ‘Ill’ I knew we had arranged; it might be worth thinking up a few more, for the choice of perils was wide, and if someone was, for example, sucked permanently away by some unexpected subsidence of the ice, it might well be worth reporting.)

‘There we are then,’ said Hunt, smiling encouragingly at me, for he thought I had been working out rates of oxygen flow, ‘we’ll gather all the chaps in the dome tent in half an hour and tell them the plan. How about you, James, do you know all about it now?’

‘Everything, thank you, John,’ I replied, wondering if half a column would be enough for him.

But nobody was killed or maimed on Everest, and for this record Hunt himself was responsible. His planning was impeccable. He was no Gordon, for he was more tolerant than that fanatic commander; and fortunately no mysticism tempered the composition of his Assault Load Tables. Nothing could be more cut and dried than the plan he now unfolded in the big dome tent. The sun had withdrawn by the time of the conference, and the snow was falling again. The wind alternately pushed and
sucked at the canvas of the tent, and when from time to time some Sherpa entered, the doors shook and flapped like dervishes.

Almost everybody was gathered inside the tent, Tenzing stiff and upright on a packing-case near the door, the rest of us lounging on sleeping-bags, propped up against tent-poles, or sitting on the floor. Old newspapers were scattered all over the place, most of them tattered air mail editions of
The Times
. As Hunt began his talk I watched the faces of my companions. Most of them were resolutely abstract or casual: Tenzing sat there inscrutably, graceful and attentive, like a demi-god on parade before Zeus. Three of us, at least, were relatively relaxed – Griffith Pugh, the physiologist, Tom Stobart, the movie-photographer, and myself: for we would certainly be in no assault party or crucial operation high on the mountain. For the rest, there was a distinct sense of excitement, and a sudden snapping of the tension when the two assault teams were named. First Evans and Bourdillon, then Hillary and Tenzing. I thought I saw the slightest flicker of satisfaction cross Tenzing’s face, though in fact (we learnt later) he considered a Sherpa should have been in both parties; Hillary looked as if he had just been picked for the First XI, and was thinking about oiling his bat; Evans and Bourdillon reminded me of two unusually intelligent members of a board of directors, considering how to increase sales to Antigua. In a few moments, the plan was settled. Lowe, Westmacott and Band would be responsible for cutting a way up the Lhotse Face. The movement to the South Col would be led by Noyce and by Charles Wylie, the gentlest and most English of them all. Hunt and Gregory would form a support party, to carry supplies up to 28,000 feet, if possible. Evans and Bourdillon would launch the first
assault, using the new and little-tried closed-circuit oxygen, Hillary and Tenzing would follow if they failed, using the familiar open-circuit sets. Michael Ward, the doctor, was to act as reserve.