Keeper Of The Mountains (32 page)

Another team approaching Shringi Himal, a 7187-metre mountain northeast of Manaslu and not far south of the Tibetan border, was turned back by a group of Buddhist monks who said they could not continue up the Shringi River because the gods living on Shringi's west side would bring violence to them if they did. Despite considerable discussion, the monks wouldn't back down, so the team changed their objective and went to a different side of the mountain, one the monks didn't object to. After some time and effort, they abandoned their climb only to find that local villagers had stolen about $5,000 worth of belongings from their advance base camp.

Along with the rise in crime, Elizabeth continued to be concerned about the growing number of permits issued for expeditions.
Especially in the spring season, when the weather was supposedly a bit more favourable, the numbers kept increasing. According to her, the Nepalese authorities briefly tried to limit the number of permits, but they received resistance from trekking agents and Sherpas who made their living from expeditions. Ama Dablam was a typical example. As Elizabeth explained, it was a beautiful mountain and not difficult, so everyone wanted to climb it. As a result, there were often too many expeditions on the peak at the same time, causing long waits on certain parts of the ridge. There was also overcrowding at the camps; people were sometimes forced to skip camps and go up the mountain too quickly, which caused physiological problems and accidents.

There were a lot of complaints to the ministry from teams return­ing from the mountain, but “it goes in one ear and right out the other,” Elizabeth said. Foreign exchange was a highly prized commodity in Nepal, and mountaineering was an important foreign exchange earner.

Then the inconceivable happened. At 4:00 in the morning on June 2, 2001, Elizabeth received a telephone call from Lady Hillary in Auckland asking her if it was true that the royal family had been massacred. New Zealand reporters had called Sir Edmund for comments. Elizabeth immediately called the Reuters correspondent in Kathmandu, who confirmed the news. An army source had informed him just hours before.

On the evening of June 1, at the regular royal family dinner gathering at the palace, Crown Prince Dipendra took up his personal weaponry and proceeded to slaughter his parents, two siblings, two aunts, two uncles, a cousin and finally himself. The house of Shah was finished. In one fell swoop, a dynasty that had ruled Nepal for 10 generations was almost entirely wiped out.

Pandemonium broke out as news of the massacre spread like wildfire throughout Kathmandu and the world. Meanwhile, what remained of the royal family was in a state of shock and upheaval. The problem was that the crown prince, successor to the throne, did not die immediately of his self-inflicted wounds. Would tradition require them to crown a known murderer? In the end, they did just that, and an unconscious Dipendra was declared king, while the former king's brother, Gyanendra, was appointed regent until the new King Dipendra could carry out his duties. Dipendra died two days later and
Gyanendra became king. The people of Nepal had had three kings in four days.

In those four days, no explanation for the massacre was forthcoming from the palace. Like the rest of Kathmandu, Elizabeth wondered why they didn't immediately issue a statement to stop the rampant speculation and fear-mongering that swept the city. But when she realized what they had faced with the delayed death of Dipendra, she understood their hesitation. In the meantime, massive conspiracy theories floated about: the Maoists, Gyanendra or the queen mother was behind it. Elizabeth was convinced that the official version – that it had been Dipendra – was the truth.

As the story emerged, it became known that the prince had developed a serious drug and alcohol dependency and was angry with his family because they had used every argument they could muster, including talk of revoking his right of succession, if he persisted in marrying the woman he had chosen. This unstable man had also accumulated an arsenal of weapons that included an
M
16 assault rifle capable of firing up to a thousand rounds a minute, a 9 mm submachine gun with 900-rounds-per-minute capacity, a single-barrel shotgun and a 9 mm pistol. The public was shocked to learn that the palace had allowed such a situation to develop: an unstable prince with unlimited access to drugs, booze and weapons and a seemingly unresolvable conflict with his family over the woman he loved. Escaping the slaughter was Queen Mother Ratna, the woman chosen by Crown Prince Mahendra against his father's wishes 50 years earlier. She had been in another part of the palace when the bullets flew.

There was considerable instability in Nepal following the massacre, some of which was caused by the palace's delay in telling the truth. Political leaders hoping to gain some headway fuelled the conspiracy theories, as did the Maoists, who hoped to further their own cause. In Kathmandu a curfew was imposed from 3:30 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. Outside Elizabeth's door, demonstrators taunted and threw stones at police, burned tires and effigies in the road and demanded an investigation. The funeral procession carrying the bodies to the royal cremation site at Aryaghat was lined with demonstrators shouting, throwing stones and condemning Birendra's murder. These demonstrations confirmed the affection the population had for Birendra and the queen. Elizabeth found this confusing, because just 10 years
earlier huge crowds had protested against the royal couple, calling the king a thief and the queen a whore.

Once again, the citizens of Kathmandu were witness to a royal cremation at Pashupatinath Aryaghat, the site reserved for royals. Only this time it wasn't just the king. It was the king, queen, princesses and princes, all aflame at once. Nepalis who gathered on the far side of the Bagmati River watched a complete dynasty go up in smoke.

On June 4, 53-year-old King Gyanendra was crowned, for the second time in his life. In 1950, Gyanendra, then four, had been crowned after King Tribhuvan fled Nepal for India and left him behind. The last of the Rana prime ministers had crowned the child, but there was no international recognition of this boy king. Now crowned king of Nepal for the second time, Gyanendra named his wife, Komal, queen. She had been seriously injured in the bloodbath, with a bullet missing her heart by millimetres. The citizens of Kathmandu were exhausted. In one week they had witnessed ten funerals.

By autumn the numbers of climbers coming to Nepal had diminished drastically. Elizabeth attributed this to several factors: the massacre, fear of terrorism in Nepal, fear of aviation safety following the September 11 tragedy in the United States, and downturns in the economies of Western Europe, North America and Japan. In Nepal the Maoists and the security forces had agreed on a ceasefire, but the Maoists broke it in November and a number of villages across the country – even in a remote part of the Kathmandu valley – experienced violence. The death toll continued to rise. The king declared a state of emergency, allowing the Royal Nepal Army to be unleashed on the Maoists. Two platoons of soldiers were flown by helicopter to Namche Bazaar, and the army was active around the country trying to flush out the Maoist fighters. Elizabeth acknowledged that it was no longer safe to travel about the country.

But the climbers who were still in the country needed to travel through the valleys to get to their peaks, and Elizabeth heard many frightening stories about Maoist attacks. In some cases, it was impossible to determine whether the bandits were Maoists or just Nepalis posing as rebels, but climbing teams were regularly stopped by armed men demanding money and cameras. Near the village of Tashigaon on the way to Makalu, a six-member Spanish team led by Edurne Pasaban encountered a group of men and boys armed with rifles,
pistols and grenades. The team was relieved of about 5,000 rupees and several cameras. A Swiss team in the same area was stopped by Nepalis carrying rifles but not wearing Maoist uniforms, who demanded 10,000 rupees and one camera. In the Solukhumbu district, two days of incidents at Lukla Airport damaged the control tower, and a bank was robbed. The number of trekkers dropped, business was down and Elizabeth's Tiger Tops earnings suffered as a result.

Elizabeth had frequent reminders from her nephew, Michael, that she could, at any time, return to the United States and live with him and his family. In light of the deteriorating situation in Nepal, she appreciated the offer, but she declined. She tried to assuage his fears by telling him that Kathmandu itself had a noticeable presence of security forces: armed soldiers and police were on patrol and manning checkpoints. She added the reassuring news that “only a few small bombs” had caused damage and they were not in central areas. She felt secure going out in her Volkswagen Beetle with her driver, and she stayed home at night.

The climb that captured Elizabeth's attention in the spring of 2002 was by Jean-Christophe Lafaille and the equally talented Basque climber Alberto Iñurrategi. They succeeded in a traverse of Annapurna
I
's long summit ridge, starting from Glacier Dome in the east and crossing to Roc Noir and Annapurna's three summits – each more than 8000 metres – and then back again. They did it with no bottled oxygen or Sherpa support. They spent five exhausting days at high altitude, negotiating avalanche-prone slopes, technical climbing, steep rock, cold bivouacs and the ever-debilitating thin air.

Lafaille met with Elizabeth after this expedition and noticed that she was careful to preserve all the most important pieces of information for historical purposes and for future climbers. She diligently probed for information on camps, oxygen, fixed ropes, distances and times. They pored over photographs and agonized over the details. Lafaille, knowing the significance of this climb within the context of the history of Himalayan climbing, was happy to accommodate her. He wanted the story to be correct. They talked at length about changes in the style of climbing in the Himalaya and about the style Lafaille and Iñurrategi had employed.

She also saved him a lot of money by mediating in some bureau­cratic wrangling. The Nepalese authorities wanted the expedition to
pay multiple fees because of the number of subpeaks on the summit ridge, but she talked them out of it and the fee was limited to one summit. He believed they became friends through this post-climb meeting, though he admitted, “She stayed ‘Miss Hawley' for me and not ‘Elizabeth.' ”

Another climber undeterred by the turmoil in Nepal was the Russian Valeri Babanov, who was making a solo attempt on a pillar on the South Face of Nuptse. He would have to climb about 2500 metres, much of it highly technical, with huge snow mushrooms to overcome at the top. He reached 6300 metres four weeks after his arrival, but then ran out of fixed rope, time and energy. He told her he hoped to return the following year to finish it. The famous South Tyrolean climber Hans Kammerlander, who had climbed seven 8000-metre peaks with Messner, was on a route nearby and told Elizabeth that he too wanted to return, perhaps to combine forces with Babanov. But Babanov wasn't interested. Although Babanov's climb was an impressive effort, Elizabeth pointed out that it wasn't alpine-style climbing, which was generally defined as climbing a route in a single continuous push without external help, without pre-placed fixed rope, camps or caches of supplies and without reconnoitering the route.

In her seasonal mountaineering report, Elizabeth didn't express an opinion on either climb, simply stating the facts. She refrained from evaluating which climb was more important, because she didn't think it was her place to do so. She continued to call herself a mountaineering chronicler, not an historian, explaining the difference as: “A historian is someone who goes beyond the facts and looks at the context, and then comments on that context.” She stuck with the formula that worked for her, and kept to the facts in her interviews, believing they spoke volumes. She thought the reader should decide which climbs had greater significance.

Not everyone agreed. Christian Beckwith, former editor of the
American Alpine Journal
, reflected that as he tried to move the
AAJ
from a journal of record to a journal of significance, he found Elizabeth moving in the opposite direction: “She has chosen to be a record keeper of record rather than significance.” In his view, her reports were written for a wide audience and although she interviewed Babanov, she reported on Kammerlander because of his star power. Elizabeth defended herself, stating that her reports for fall
2002, spring 2003 and fall 2003 recorded Babanov's climbs as well as Kammerlander's. It was on the third attempt that Babanov and Vladimir Suviga had succeeded. Her report on their climb comprised a comparatively extensive eight paragraphs, providing detailed commentary on the difficult and technical climb as described to her by Babanov. Comments from other climbers were included: according to Tomaž Humar, for example, “The future of climbing belongs to the new Russian teams around Valeri Babanov.” But she pointed out that admiration for Babanov was not universal. At least one unnamed American climber remarked disparagingly that Babanov used bolts on his climb. Elizabeth didn't comment either way.

But journalists continued to find fault. British journalist Lindsay Griffin corroborated Beckwith's opinion that Babanov's climb on Nuptse was the most significant climb of the season, and Elizabeth's report didn't acknowledge this. He added that there had been other occasions where she missed important climbs because they were overshadowed by ascents on a bigger peak or by a better-known person. Others agreed that there were many fine climbs in the Himalaya during her tenure that did not register on her radar. They argued that she focused too much on well-known routes, well-known peaks and well-known people.

Robin Houston disagreed, maintaining that Elizabeth had always been fair and objective in her reporting, not aggrandizing famous climbers more than unknown climbers, not focusing on an expedition just because of the height of the mountain, and not stooping to the level of gossip. Elizabeth was completely unaware that such discussions and evaluations of her work were taking place.