Free Coronation Everest by Jan Morris

the year, at about 17,000 feet, and by the time we arrived there we were a bedraggled company. The woollen cloaks of the Sherpas were soggy, and the coiled hair of their women clammy. Snow covered the packs upon their backs, and seeped through the bright embroidered wool of their Tibetan boots.
    In such circumstances Lake Camp was a bleak and unwelcoming place. A couple of small tents were pitched above the lake, and from them there emerged to greet us thehuge smiling figures of the New Zealanders, eccentrically dressed. Otherwise there was nothing except a few low walls of loose stone, behind which previous travellers had lit their fires. This was far above the line of habitation, and all was hard and lifeless. The snow had developed into a blizzard, driven fiercely across the glacier valley by a vicious wind. It was all very unpleasant.
    The Sherpas, though, took it in their stride. Dumping their loads behind the rocks, they dispersed among crags and boulders; and in a few moments, from unlikely chasms and hidden holes, there came the twinkling of camp fires and the smell of roasting potatoes. The women bustled as energetically as the men, their smiles as broad as ever, their voices just as raucous. When night came I stole out of my tent, huddling my windproof clothes about me, and walked silently about the camp, feeling like Henry V; there the Sherpas lay, bundled in their cloaks, curled up like husky dogs behind heaps of stones or boulders, sleeping peacefully as the snow piled up upon their bodies.
    When we awoke next day the sun was brilliant again, and there was a new hazard to face. The glare of the sun upon fresh snow is dangerous, for the dazzle can temporarily blind a person, and be extremely painful. The sahibs of the party had their sun-glasses and goggles, and so did the climbing Sherpas; but the poor rank-and-file, engaged simply to carry baggage to Base Camp, had no such protection. Already, before the march began, they were feeling the glare, and asking us for glasses. I distributed the spare goggles I had, and the climbers shared out their supplies; but there was nothing like enough for this army of 200 men and women. We improvised. Some of the Sherpas bound odd bits of coloured cellophane around their eyes. Some used pieces of cloth. Some shieldedtheir eyes with newspaper. Some masked themselves with pieces of cardboard, leaving only pinholes for the eyes. Some simply bound their own pigtails around their faces, their eyes peeping through the strands. So, looking distinctly queer, we proceeded a little shakily up the glacier; and before very long a gentle film of cloud obscured some of the dazzle.
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    It seemed an eternity up that track, but at last we saw in the extreme distance a gathering of tents. A big pyramid tent in the centre was surrounded by smaller ones, and a little structure of stone had been roofed with canvas sheets to form a kitchen. The tents stood on a moraine hillock in the shadow of the Nuptse spur, so that you could see them from a long way down the valley. As we drew nearer we noticed a small figure in a blue anorak in a gully to the right of it, and heard over the stillness of the ice an occasional snatch of conversation. But we were not there yet. The top of the glacier is thickly littered with ice formations, beautiful and sharp of edge, so that one was always having to make detours, or scramble down into unsuspected depressions. I could see those confounded tents for half an hour before at last I reached the final obstacle, a narrow slippery passage through an ice-block, and after a brisk and self-possessed walk across the moraine collapsed into a tent. It was merely the altitude that had exhausted me. The glacier was not difficult, and in later weeks, when I was better acclimatized, I used to romp up it like a clumsy chamois. But this was the first time, practically direct from Victoria Air Terminal, and I much enjoyed the mug of steaming tea they brought me.
    I would not say that