Coronation Everest (2 page)

2

Theory

The chief problem was not how to secure the news, but how to relay it back to London. Everest was one of the less accessible of the great mountains, partly because fairly harsh physical barriers blocked most routes to it, chiefly because of the political peculiarities of its situation. It lay exactly on the frontier between two countries of secretive tradition. To the north was Tibet, shrouded alike in Buddhist mysticism and Communist suspicion, and in 1953 more firmly closed to westerners than ever; to the south Nepal, a medieval kingdom, slowly opening like a warmed bud to permit the entrance of foreign ideas and values. Bang on the line that divided these two theatrical states lay Everest, and the frontier (according to the map) crossed its very summit, more than 29,000 feet above the sea.

Since the war the way to Everest had necessarily lain through Nepal, whose rulers were generally obliging and whose myriads of poor labourers welcomed the work of porterage. You could conveniently fly into Katmandu from India (any good travel agent would book you a ticket there) and in that strange city you could engage your porters and buy many of the smaller necessities of mountain life. There was a British Embassy, and an Indian Embassy, and there were some Americans, and a cable office which sent its messages to India by radio for onward transmission to
Europe. Once you left Katmandu, though, the temptations of civilization were nearly all behind you. No road led to Everest. Outside the valley of Katmandu there were no wheeled vehicles in Nepal, and only a meagre series of rough tracks crossed the hilly hinterland, connecting the golden capital with Tibet, Sikkim and the north.

To get anywhere inside Nepal you must walk, for even ponies were scarce, and many of the tracks were too narrow, precipitous and forbidding for easy horsemanship. Patient porters carried your bags for you, and clasping your pills to your bosom you must trudge your way through the hills, dazzled by the alpine flowers, inspired by the distant white snow peaks, slightly befuddled by the local liquor, feeling like some antique Mandarin, excessively influential, journeying through the Chinese uplands for a parley with Marco Polo.

By these stately means it took ten days or more to travel from Katmandu to Everest. The track crossed the grain of the country, as the geographers say, as if it had deliberately chosen to intersect contours rather than follow them. Sometimes it descended into impenetrable gorges; sometimes it crossed high mountain ranges; and although it was a pleasant journey, enlivened by all kinds of unusual interests, it was not the kind of route you would wish to follow too often in a hurry.

This was to be the supply route of the expedition, and the way its members marched to the mountain. More to my point, all this rugged, primitive country, hard and wheelless, lay between the mountain and the nearest cable office. The foreign correspondent is never happy if he is far from a telephone or a cable-head, and it was daunting to envisage this 200 miles of intervening country without the saving grace of a single post office.

How the gap could be bridged was therefore my first preoccupation, for the news had to travel not only safely, but swiftly too. Radio was the obvious answer, but though the Nepalese authorities were both helpful and sympathetic, they were understandably chary of allowing powerful radio transmitters to be operated so near their northern frontiers. All kinds of other methods were proposed. Some people suggested carrier pigeons, others beacon fires. Some said that since the Buddhist priests of the Everest region had remarkable telepathic powers, they might be willing simply to
think
the news away. There was a scheme to float news dispatches in cellophane containers down a river that happens to flow from the Everest area into India; where some unfortunate helper, it was proposed, would stand poised upon the bank, like a destitute angler, waiting for a package to appear.

None of these proposals seemed altogether satisfactory, though the beacon fires certainly had a genuine Elizabethan allure; and in the end it seemed that despite all the miracles of modern science, my dispatches would have to be sent back to Katmandu by runner. This at least was a well-tried method. Earlier Everest expeditions had always employed such men, and Hunt would have a number of them to take his own messages and convey the mail. I would probably need to recruit another small corps of my own. If the runners were well paid and kindly treated, they would probably see to it (I thought) that dispatches were in the cable office on the tenth or eleventh day after leaving the mountain.

So the plan was arranged. I was to go to Everest with a rear-guard party, led by Major J. O. M. Roberts, which would follow the expedition proper with supplies of
oxygen. Another correspondent of
The Times
, Arthur Hutchinson, would be stationed in Katmandu to receive messages, interpret and supplement them where necessary, and shepherd them through the cable-head. There was, however, always the possibility that other newspapers would send men out to Nepal too, to intercept or steal our messages and grasp what news they could. Just how ruthless they would be, nobody knew. Would they lurk behind boulders with clubs, waiting to pounce upon our runners? Or would they merely bribe the cable office to divulge or delay our messages?

It seemed foolish to take risks. It was not so much that other papers should not have the news as well as
The Times;
more serious was the possibility that they would succeed in publishing it
before The Times
(and the many foreign newspapers associated with it) – that we would be scooped on our own story. So some alternative routes were arranged. From Everest another rough track ran to the south across the Indian frontier, through the appalling jungle country of the Terai, to a small town called Jogbani, where there was a cable office. There an agent would be stationed, so that if the Katmandu route seemed insecure, runners could go southwards instead. There was even a third alternative. When the Swiss were on Everest in the preceding year, they sent their message to Europe through the Medium of a Jesuit priest living at Patna, a large Indian city in the province of Bihar, which runners could reach by taking a narrow-gauge railway from the frontier. We would again try to enlist the help, we decided, of this adaptable priest.

But supposing the runners were actually intercepted
en route
, or the cable office at Katmandu proved easily bribable? It would obviously be impracticable to encode
the whole of long descriptive messages from the mountain, even if they recorded some particular stage in the course of the attempt. But there was no reason why we should not devise code words to disguise personal names, certain key events, places on the mountainside, and altitudes. So a code card was produced, printed on waterproofed cardboard in the touching faith that we would be constantly pulling it from the pockets of our windproofs in the teeth of monstrous gales and stinging blizzards. I am no cipherer, and I was chiefly concerned, in evolving this simple system, in giving a deadpan or enigmatic air to things; and indeed it is marvellous how poker-faced the language can be if you give thought to it. The alternative code words for John Hunt, for example, were ‘Kettle’ and ‘Stringbag’. Wilfrid Noyce, another climber, was ‘Radiator’ or ‘Windowsill’. ‘Three thousand feet’ came out as ‘Waistcoat Crossword Amsterdam’, and the mountain’s sublime summit, home of myths and deities, was christened ‘Golliwog’. There were snags to such a code. Once enciphered, a message was nonsense, thus making it apparent that something significant was being concealed; and it might be necessary to be especially nice to the cable authorities to induce them to transmit such a stream of gibberish.

I would send these messages back to Katmandu in padlocked canvas bags, or perhaps in the stitched fabric envelopes provided to contain the expedition’s exposed films. Once there, Hutchinson would see that the news was sent on expeditely to London. It all sounded splendid old-fashioned journalism, in the true cleft-stick tradition; and packing a new ribbon for my typewriter, and collecting my corduroy trousers from the cleaners, I flew gaily off one morning to India.

3

Preparation

A narrow gorge in the mountains was the gate to Katmandu, and through this forbidding portal the aeroplane from India must pass. Eddies and swirls of air bumped the machine about, and on either side the high mountain crags rose high above us. This was a true frontier. Behind lay India, a familiar and friendly place, where you could buy the
Illustrated London News:
in front was Nepal, until a few years before one of the least known of all the countries of the earth, and in 1953 still haunted by lingering wraiths of mystery. I had done my necessary business in India – collected a tent in Delhi, called on our Jesuit priest at Patna, bought some pots and pans and carbon paper. In Katmandu my adventure would begin.

There is always something fascinating about a great city secluded among mountains, and Katmandu, seen from the air for the first time, glittering in the hard sunshine, with the glorious peaks of the high Himalaya standing behind it, was a splendid and genuinely exotic sight. The wide valley that surrounded it was dazzlingly green, with vivid patches of yellow and red marking the cultivation of some especially improbable vegetable. Wooded foothills ran towards the capital from the high mountains, and a river of crystal blue wandered through the flat country and bisected the city. Against this heavenly
background stood Katmandu, a complex of temples and towers and palaces, with a distinct sense of lunacy about it.

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 between 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.