Free The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel by Justin Go Page B

flip through accounts of wars and climbs and expeditions. I learn of trenches and parapets and fire steps, of couloirs and moraines, of cwms and bergschrunds.
    On Saturday I ride the Northern Line to the British Library’s newspaper collection at Colindale. All morning I flip through tall red-bound volumes of musty newsprint, reviewing the press coverage of the expedition to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Then I wheel through the endless microfilm collection, scanning carefully through June 1924. The same material appears again and again: headlines about the expedition’s failure; vague accounts of Ashley’s death; grainy reproductions of a snapshot taken at Everest base camp; the impersonal eulogy from the king. Only one article interests me, a small column of print that appeared seven weeks after Ashley’s death.
    EVEREST VICTIM
    STORY OF A GRAND LAMA’S WARNING
    (FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT)
    KALIMPONG, N. BENGAL
    The death of Mr. Walsingham during his attempt to reach the summit of Mount Everest is stated here to have been foretold by the Abbot of Rongbuk, a High Lama with the physical deformity of immensely large ears, and who is regarded throughout the country as possessing second sight.
    It is stated that he warned the porters when they left Rongbuk, near the expedition’s base camp, that should they again attempt the ascent of Mount Everest disaster would follow.
    He stated that the Spirit of the Mountain had up to that time been merciful, but should his solitude be again disturbed he would surely wreak his vengeance on the disturbers of his eternal peace.
    Whether this statement had any effect on the morale of the coolies is not known, but it is a fact that after this warning cases occurred of porters making excuses to avoid going higher on the mountain.
    I try to find more about the abbot of Rongbuk, but he doesn’t appear in any other articles. So the next day I visit the British Film Institute on the South Bank to watch the official cinematic record of the Mount Everest expedition, directed by a man named J. B. L. Noel. I sit in front of a screen and pull headphones over my ears. The film begins with an unsteady placard, white letters flickering on the scratched black negative.
    A story of adventurous explorers in a far-off land and their endeavour to reach the top of the world.
    The clouds part to reveal a boundless range of mountains, the great peak hovering above them all. Then a telephoto image of the pyramidal summit, vignetted like a view through a telescope, the plume of wind and snow streaming past.
    The film is silent, so I remove my headset. The second placard appears.
    There is nowhere here any trace of life or man. It is a glimpse into a world that knows him not. Grand, solemn, unutterably lonely, the Rongbuk Glacier of Mount Everest reveals itself.
    Pinnacles of ice appear, then the knife ridges of the mountain, the vapor pouring over windswept cornices from Nepal into Tibet. Tibetan villagers in soiled robes gawk at the camera from rough door frames. Sherpa porters walk past, freshly clad in windproof smocks and snow goggles. Finally the British, always shown from a distance: trekking in dense Sikkim jungles in short pants, swinging walking sticks; hiking in pairs on the bleak windswept Tibetan plain, among trains of laden yaks. Two climbers sit in the sun under pith helmets, their sketchbooks on their laps, squinting out portraits of villagers. A group of men takebreakfast seated upon crates in the open air, behind them a dozen monks spinning prayer wheels in the wind. No one looks at the monks.
    Into the heart of the pure blue ice, rare, cold, beautiful, lonely – into a fairyland of ice.
    The glacier is pictured: a ponderous river of ice sailing down the mountainside. The party walks into a valley of ice, winding through a maze of frozen pinnacles, dwarfed by them, craning their necks to spy the summits. The British run mittened hands along crystal blue seracs, questioning their age