and Hornbein climbed Everest via the West Ridge and North Face in the 1963 American expedition.
6TH – 9TH MARCH
‘What’s that about?’ The future, I should think.’
Three hours gone, another nineteen before we arrive in Peking. The Expedition sleeps or slumps back blank-eyed. Jon and Chris have Thoroughly Modern Music on their headphones (New Order and Yellowman); Bob, as befits his age and temperament, listens to Dylan, thinking of his wife Anna and their new daughter. Andy Nisbet is white-faced and immobile, he travels very badly and this flight is a purgatory for him. He thinks of the two flights after this one, across China and on to Lhasa, then three days of journeying by truck, and groans inwardly. Nick and Sarah are talking quietly with each other, as they will for much of the trip. Others conscientiously sign their way through stacks of Expedition postcards for schoolkids.
Tony Brindle is missing his girlfriend Kathy to a degree he didn’t know possible. They’d informally become engaged shortly before his departure; he’s told only Liz about this to avoid teasing from the more cynically minded. I envy them their certainty, and the way Kathy had come to the airport with us to be with him till the last minute. I could use some of that certainty. For me the last three months have been an emotional soap-opera when everyone is in love with the wrong person, each wanting what we don’t have. Once in a while we’d look at each other and laugh at our painful absurdity.
How are we to live? I’m not going back to the mountains just for more climbing and new scenery. We’re all setting out with half-formulated questions to be resolved, even if it’s just ‘Can I go to 8,000 metres?’ Each one of us on this plane has our own inner expedition, the secret expedition with its twists and turns, moving like an underground river below the surface of events.
Mal hands round blow-up photos of the Pinnacles, taken from the North Ridge. The lads pore over the problems that are going to dominate our thoughts for the next three months. The Pinnacles look chilling to my unpractised eye: hard climbing at any altitude, an unprecedented level of difficulty at over 8,000 metres. Falling away steeply on the West side, and the sheer drop of the Kangshung face on the other – there’s no escape route off these Pinnacles till the far end of them when the North Col Ridge meets our one. ‘See that little notch on the First Pinn, that’s where Bonington turned back … Renshaw had his stroke a little higher … Looks like you turn the last Pinn on this side … See that tiny colour patch below the Second Pinnacle? It might be a bivvy tent … Or Pete and Joe …’ A short silence, no one wants to think too much about that, though it’s a mystery we all want solved.
‘Looks real horrorshow,’ Rick says quietly. No one disagrees.
Jon points out the base of the First Pinnacle. ‘You see that? That’s as far as I’m going. From then on you’re on your own.’
But I am thinking of a last hug from Kathleen before boarding the bus to Heathrow, the softness of her pink sweater under my hands while over her shoulder the full moon was setting in the blue-black sky behind the hotel. I am thinking of our last night together, the things we said, and the hollow talismanic stone she hung on a thong round my neck. It’ll stay there till I return. Then behind me Jon, who’d been up all night, his hair a devastated cornfield, enthuses ‘I’m thoroughly rat-holed – great!’
Peking in March has the aethetic charm and oriental mystery of a fifties tower block; it is as stimulating as a wet January afternoon in Fort William. Or so it seemed to us as our coach nosed its way through Peking’s 10 million rush hour cyclists. The city was utterly flat and utterly monochrome. Clouds of grey dust blew down the streets from endless building sites where hundreds of men and women laboured with picks and shovels and baskets. It seemed that the entire city was being rebuilt in grey concrete. The patient cyclists were swathed in dark, padded jackets, fur-lined hats, many wearing grey face-masks against the dust.
‘These are new workers’ apartments,’ our interpreter Jack announced, pointing out another ten-storey concrete block. ‘And this is the LARGEST GROCERY STORE IN BEIJING!’ We try to look suitably impressed as we trundle by what looks like a particularly shabby and dimly-lit post-war Woolworth’s.
Still, the Chinese arrangements had accorded with their reputation for efficiency. All our baggage was quickly retrieved at the airport, and we passed with almost indecent ease through the Diplomatic Channel of the Customs (two stages which can take several days at Delhi airport, many hours in Rawalpindi). Outside stood two coaches, one for us and one for our gear. We explained we’d only ordered one, but two was what we got and two is what we’d pay for. Which is also very Chinese. Rick, whose meticulous nature well suited him to being our money manager, noted it down as the first of our additional expenses. On the bus our interpreter introduced himself as Jack though he was in fact Yan – very slight, young, thin-faced with a long bony nose, bespectacled and given to blinking a lot; he did not look very Chinese and his English was easily the best we were to come across. In turn he introduced ‘Mr Luo, your Liaison Officer.’ A thick-set man with a broad Mongolian face, expressive mouth and a black crew-cut stood up and bowed. We chorused a ragged hello, feeling like Mystery Tour trippers introduced to our hosts. Which in a way we were. Jack and Luo would be with us right through the Expedition, as our troubleshooters and minders.
We arrived at the Bei Wei hotel, imposing with plate glass doors and plants and marble-floored lobby, though something in the Formica surfaces, carpets and black Bakelite telephones marked it out as 30 years behind the times. We picked up the room keys waiting for us and staggered upstairs with our blue barrels of personal gear.
‘Basically, this trip is throwing together 14 people who desperately want to climb a mountain, and seeing if they want to enough.’ That was Chris Watts’s assessment as we sat chatting in our room. He was still feeling obscurely guilty about coming on the trip while Sonja stayed behind, ‘though I know she’d do the same in my position. There’s a lot of thinking climbers on this trip,’ he continued. ‘That’s good and bad – you can expect to see a certain amount of tactical manoeuvring once we get on the mountain.’ I nodded. I’d seen the forces of individual ambition and joint effort play off against each other on the Mustagh Tower, and between the lines of practically every climbing book. A big expedition is a choir composed of soloists.
Mal had suggested we all made a point of rooming with someone different at each stop on our journey through China and Tibet, so that by the time our trucks arrived at Base Camp we might feel more like a team. Thanks to the Chinese having created a ‘road’ to Everest, there’d be no long walk-in on this trip; and the walk-in is normally the phase an expedition uses to become fully fit and cohesive as a group. ‘I see myself as the loner on this trip,’ Chris said, ‘I’ve climbed with no one on it, I’m not part of a pair.’ From remarks the others had already made, I was beginning to wonder who did not regard themselves as outsiders. ‘I suppose I associate myself with people like Bob and Allen, despite being younger. I like to see the sensible rewarded …’ And with this remark he fell asleep, slumped over the jacket to which he was sewing a Pilkington’s logo.
Peking looked less bleak the next day, probably because we were less grey with fatigue and jet-lag. People walked into the hotel with masks over their faces. In Britain this would be a cue to hit the floor, here it’s a precaution against biting wind and swirling dust. On the streets we started noticing the occasional flash of colour in younger people’s clothes; one or two girls had high heels, and the local wide-boys aspired to rolled-up jeans and wrap-around shades. Only the older people still wore the once-compulsory Mao tunic in dark blue, black or bottle-green. The many small stalls along the pavements, selling everything from Coke to combs to cabbages, were another sign of changing times in China.
