Free Coronation Everest by Jan Morris Page A

Base Camp, Everest, was a lovely spot. It was too dead and aloof for beauty, rather as ifsome dread disease had passed this way, killing everything in sight, to be followed by some giant instrument of hygiene; so that the place seemed first to have been effectively murdered, and then sterilized. Directly above the camp was the icefall of Everest, a tangled mass of ice, twisting round to the south to form our Khumbu Glacier. The head of the valley was paved partly with ice lakes and pinnacles, partly with piles of the dull moraine on which the camps had been placed. All around, forming the head of the valley, stood a magnificent cirque of snow peaks; the best of them being Pumori, a serene and handsome mountain, given its name by Mallory.
    High above our heads stood the most romantic of these marvels, the Lho La. This narrow col, between the bulk of Everest and the peak of Lingtren, was the frontier. Beyond it was Tibet. Its lip was lined with a thick overhanging layer of snow, looking as if a footfall might precipitate it into the valley: nobody had ever dared to cross it. Bullock reached it from the other side, in 1921, and photographed the then unknown southern side of Everest. (In the same year Mallory peered at this place from another, neighbouring col; marvelled at the mountains of Nepal; and wrote happily in his diary: ‘It is a big world!’ Now nearly all the mysteries have gone, and there is scarcely an unknown country left to peer at.)
    Camping at this place was rather like living among the mountains of the moon. The glacier stretched away to the south like a smear on a lunar map, and the stars seemed closer and clearer, and there was a sense of unreality about the adventure, now that the mountain was, so to speak, in camp with us. When the moon itself came up, jealous of its reputation, it glowed huge and brilliant among the peaks, glinting on all the battlementsof ice that complicated the glacier floor. In the morning the sun was generally hot; in the afternoon the snow began to fall; at night the temperature was well below zero. Often there was a rumbling and tearing noise above us, and there on the mountain-side would be a cloud of snow, ice and crumbled rock, marking the progress of an avalanche.
    We were many miles, and several thousand feet, above normally inhabited country; but there were a few indigenous creatures at Base Camp. The famous high-altitude spider, loftiest of insects, certainly lived among the rocks. Choughs flew over us, or pecked their way among the crumbs and potato peel of the camp. Once a flight of storks passed overhead into Tibet (‘Going to fetch salt,’ explained the Sherpas sagely). Scuttling among the boulders of the moraine one could even sometimes catch a glimpse of a tailless Tibetan rat, an endearing brown creature rather like a hamster, with a sniffing nose and whiskers. Otherwise we were all human – the thirteen members of the expedition, the thirty or so high-altitude porters, a few peripatetic wives and children, and my own little band of followers. Odd people looked in from time to time, and there was a regular service of men bringing firewood to replenish the huge pile of sticks and branches that dominated (in its moments of repletion) the entire camp.
    This would be my headquarters, to be identified by the newspaper dateline: ‘Base Camp, Everest.’ I pitched my tent a little apart from the others, for I did not want to seem importunate, and in it I rigged up my radio receiver, with its tall tripod aerial outside. It looked splendidly functional, and I found it handy for listening to Radio Ceylon, the most powerful transmitter in that part ofAsia. My books, papers and typewriter were piled about my bed, and underneath it, protruding rather uncomfortably through the canvas, were my containers of money.
    Hunt had said that I must be self-sufficient, and I prepared to eat my own yak-meat in solitary grandeur; but somehow the scheme fell through, and tossing my tins into