Keeper Of The Mountains (13 page)

Elizabeth left her new housemate to spend Christmas in the United States with her family. She returned to Nepal to find that her relationship with Micky Weatherall was winding down, much to her disappointment, for he was choosing to spend more of his time with the British ambassador's secretary. Over the past two years, they had developed an easy pattern of spending time together, sharing thoughts, problems, feelings and good times. They continued to see each other because they were in the same social circle, but they no longer attended parties together.

To further complicate her personal life, Elizabeth had the awkward task of declining an offer of marriage from a pleasant American highways engineer, for whom she had no strong personal feelings. And a
short time later, she was surprised to be the object of considerable affection from the foreign secretary, Major General Padma Bahadur Khatri, whom she described as “sweet, quite bright and amazingly well read.” She went on to tell her mother, “He's a terribly nice person, who has the one major drawback of possessing a wife.” Despite the wife, they did see a lot of each other.

Another friend whose company she enjoyed was General Surendra Bahadur Shah. He had a good command of English and they delighted in banter: puns, double entendres and generally joking around at the endless banquets and cocktail parties. He had a silly saying that she can still recite 40 years later:

What a man can do, a cat can't do,
What a cat can do, a man can't do,
But here is a man from Kathmandu.

Elizabeth's lively, and complicated, personal life did not go unnoticed in Kathmandu, where rumours circulated swiftly. One was that she was going to marry Weatherall as a cover-up for an affair she was having with his closest friend, General Mrigendra. It wasn't true. But it made for good conversation at the parties.

An important expedition was now occupying her time as a reporter: the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition led by Norman Dyhrenfurth, including climbers Jim Whittaker, Barry Bishop, Lute Jerstad, Willi Unsoeld, Colonel Jimmy Roberts and Tom Hornbein. Before they headed off to Everest, Elizabeth met Bishop and Unsoeld and learned of their ambitious plans for a complete traverse of the mountain.

During the expedition, daily press briefings were based on regular reports coming in from base camp. But Elizabeth was privy to additional information when she gained access to ham radio communications from Everest base camp through a friend of hers, Bill Gresham, who was the military attaché at the U.S. embassy. Through these radio transmissions, she obtained interesting bits of information to file at the telegraph office. Reuters used these bits, and at a press briefing the next day, the other reporters protested her “special treatment.” She then had to admit she had listened to the ham operator, pointing out that “the airwaves are free.” But in fact they weren't. The other reporters didn't have the access that she had, and she took considerable
criticism for that and was discouraged from going into the embassy entirely.

Luckily, her friend loaned her an extra ham radio, which she promptly set up in her bedroom, continuing to listen. Progress on the mountain went smoothly as far as her work was concerned, until the first summit was achieved. Then all hell broke loose. She learned that the American team had not only climbed the summit but later also made the first ascent of a new route and the first traverse of the peak. This was now a really significant and newsworthy climb. Elizabeth knew the other reporters would call the Americans for current information, but she wanted the scoop. So she had her assistant call the American office and tie up the phone line so nobody else could get through. At the same time, she called the telegraph office on an outside line and filed the story. It gave her just a few minutes' advantage, but it worked. Elizabeth's Reuters dispatch was the first message out to the world, and it was her story that Pierre Salinger showed to President Kennedy to break the news. As a result, she was in good standing with Reuters but extremely unpopular with her colleagues in Kathmandu. Soon after,
Time
and
Life
offered her work covering the story in depth.

Elizabeth considers this the most important climb of the 1960s. It was also one of the first expeditions for which she kept massive and detailed notes. It was not only the first American ascent of Everest, but also the first attempt to traverse the mountain. Their strategy was to tackle the mountain from the normal route to ensure that someone reached the top, and then two members, Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld, split off to make an attempt on the West Ridge. Nobody had seriously looked at it before, so this was a true pioneering effort. It wasn't without its serious moments – they were running out of time and supplies and they were nearly blown off the ridge – but they made the complete traverse, descending the normal route without fixed lines. The original plan of having the two teams climbing different routes to meet at the summit didn't work out, because the West Ridge team was slower. On May 1, Jim Whittaker and Nawang Gombu summited. Then, on May 22, the second southside team, consisting of Lute Jerstad and Barry Bishop, reached the summit, waited a bit before beginning their descent and were soon overtaken by darkness. This unplanned bivouac gave them a chance to flash their
flashlights and shout to the others coming over from the West Ridge. Finally, the two teams joined for an uncomfortable bivouac in which Willi Unsoeld and Barry Bishop suffered severe frostbite to their feet.

Willi was living in Kathmandu at the time, working as deputy director of the newly established Peace Corps in Nepal. Elizabeth knew him quite well and was friendly with his family. She recalls visiting their house after the Everest climb: “I remember he was lying on his bed. He would play with his toe – one of his little toes – as though it were a loose tooth, just like a child would play with a loose tooth, until finally it came off.” The unexpected bivouac high on Everest eventually cost him nine toes to frostbite.

Shortly after the expedition's success, Elizabeth threw a cocktail party, with Unsoeld enthroned on a bed as the guest of honour. Other important guests included Prince Basundhara, ex-minister Rishikesh Shaha and General Mrigendra. Unsoeld was interesting, well educated, articulate and passionate about mountaineering and his work in the Peace Corps. He could well express the mystique of climbing. In a letter to her mother, Elizabeth contrasted his style with Ed Hillary's, whom she affectionately described as “the ex-beekeeper who doesn't appear to be the least introspective and has quite a hard time with anything more complicated than straight narrative.”

Willi Unsoeld would eventually die in the mountains while guid­ing a group on Mount Rainier in the United Sates. His daughter, Nanda Devi, also died climbing, on an expedition to the mountain after which she was named. Elizabeth was fond of Willi and describes him as a “very memorable person in my life.”

After the expedition members had all gone home and the press conferences had ended, Elizabeth reflected on the excitement of her Reuters scoop and on the personalities she had encountered, writing to her mother on June 21, “The mountains hereabouts are infested with men mad enough to want to slog to the tops. I sometimes wish they'd all stay home with their wives and kiddies.”

For her 40th birthday, in November 1963, Elizabeth threw a cocktail party. As with all the evening parties in Kathmandu at the time, dress was formal and she appeared in a long gown. Her guest list was impressive: Ranas, royalty, diplomats, political figures, painters, climbers and all the “characters” of Kathmandu. Among them was Micky Weatherall – and his new wife. In three short years, Elizabeth
had emerged as an integral part of Kathmandu: she had interesting work, she met fascinating people and she had enough money to live comfortably. She had no intention of leaving.

He would rant and she would go on with her work. It seemed to work for both of them.

I
n the early spring of 1964, Elizabeth's routine was interrupted by a two-week adventure when she covered King Mahendra's tour of western Nepal for
Time
and
Life
. They flew to the town of Nepalganj, then jeeped to the nearby jungle. From their camp they helicoptered northward into the wild, rugged hills, where they hunted. Perched high on an elephant, Elizabeth watched while the king indulged himself by killing three tigers and two deer. Their hunting technique was unusual. They would first erect a white cloth fence around a large area that tigers were known to frequent. Then beaters would enter the ring and make enough noise to scare the tiger out into the open. The white cloth created a psychological barrier to the tiger so it was essentially trapped, easy prey for the hunters. Although this method was usually effective, Elizabeth also saw what could happen when a tiger was shot but only wounded. The tiger would become half-crazy from the wound, crashing through the white barrier followed by dozens of army personnel “gallumping” off on their elephants to finish it off.

In the evenings, the king sat for hours while long lines of humble petitioners presented themselves to tell him their needs. A program of song and dance performed by local people would follow. Although Elizabeth realized that travelling in the wilds of Nepal with the king was a unique experience, she was glad to return to the comforts of her apartment and wash off the fatigue and dust. It wasn't only Elizabeth who found the journey rugged; the king's frenetic schedule was wearing on him too. But ignoring his doctor's warnings (his father had died of a heart attack at a young age and Mahendra seemed to have inherited his frailty), he insisted on pursuing his favourite sport.

An expedition of the true adventuring kind came to Elizabeth's attention when a British group led by Dennis Gray came to town. A
fter weeks of trekking, hacking trails through wild country, fixing ropes and discovering ever more valleys hidden between them and their peak, the team, which included Don Whillans, finally reached the slopes of the 7134-metre Gaurishankar. But horrific ice conditions and avalanches defeated their goal of a first ascent. It was Elizabeth's first meeting with Don Whillans, someone who would come through Kathmandu again in the ensuing years. He was already famous for his combination of gruffness, great skill and cruel wit. She was amused by him and would sit with him as he smoked cigars and told humorous tales. She told him she thought he was too fat to be a climber, and she was amazed that he added to his calorie intake by drinking enormous quantities of beer in Kathmandu. He explained to her that he'd lose the extra pounds on the expedition, which he did. Questioned about a persistent rumour that she and Whillans were romantically involved, she howls, “I can't believe that!” She goes on to say that if he was smitten with her, it was not mutual. And so fell the first of the Elizabeth Hawley “lover of famous climbers” myths.

Because of the delicate relations between Nepal and Chinese-occupied Tibet, climbing was banned in Nepal from 1965 to 1969. China regarded all climbers along the border region as spies, and some of them were. Elizabeth thought Sayre's foray into Tibet in 1962 factored into Nepal's declaring a halt to all mountaineering. In 1955 a Welsh expedition led by Sydney Wignall went into the far northwestern corner of Nepal and was arrested in Tibet. Forty years later Wignall wrote a book,
Spy on the Roof of the World
, about his daring deeds for Indian intelligence. And in 1963 a Japanese expedition went into the same area and was also caught. Then, in the mid-1960s, a Scottish missionary ventured across the border to film the brave rebellion of Tibetans in the Kham region against the repressive Chinese and returned to the west with his images. During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese grew even more paranoid about the border; because of Nepal's close proximity to China and sensitivity to China's wishes, Nepal closed its border with Tibet.

It was during this time that a new kind of tourism began to emerge in Kathmandu. As early as 1963, British defence attaché Colonel Jimmy Roberts began to hatch a plan to create a means of employment in Nepal that would enable him to remain there after he retired from
the army. He had fond memories of the old days in Kashmir, when agents organized hunting trips with camping gear, porters, guides and equipment, so he decided to try it on a commercial basis. He gathered the necessary gear, placed an ad in
Holiday
magazine and the world of trekking was born. Mountain Travel was Nepal's first trekking company and likely the first trekking company in the world.

In his first Mountain Travel newsletter, produced in 1965, Roberts described himself to prospective clients: “With nearly thirty years' experience of Himalayan exploration and travel, ten years' residence in or on the border of Nepal and a more or less intimate knowledge of large tracts of the mountains, I can claim to be fairly well qualified to undertake this task.” In a supplement to the newsletter, dated March 1965, he included his price list for the Everest Trek: $500 per person for a 30-day trek. After many requests, he organized and accompanied a small trekking party comprising three American women.

Roberts had a colourful history that prepared him well for this new venture. He was born in India of a doctor in the Indian army. Asia was his home. He too became an army man, spending his first career with the British Gurkhas and finishing as a military attaché. He told Elizabeth ghastly stories of his time in the jungles of Burma with the Gurkhas. It was clear the experience had been harrowing. He went on countless expeditions into the mountains, sending back a certain amount of military intelligence: information about the sentiments of the local people, the border situation, what Nepalis thought about their government, and the general feel of things. When that career wound up, he found himself at loose ends, drinking too much whisky and growing depressed. Then he came up with the idea of a trekking industry and virtually saved his own life. It was during this time that he and Elizabeth became friends.