‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume?’
We laugh and shake hands. Qvigstad has sprouted a ginger beard since I last saw him. The beard combined with the thatch of ginger hair, the high forehead and the steely blue eyes, staring as if nothing will escape them, reminds me of someone. Who? Vincent van Gogh.
His companion is scruffy-looking and fair-haired. He is chewing on a straw. I have to ask him to repeat his name (it is Mikkelsen), after which he mumbles:
‘I talk very bad English. Sorry.’
Standing with his legs apart, he angles his feet outward a couple of times. Then he spits out the straw and crawls into the green tent.
Qvigstad has spent a year in America on a grant, he speaks excellent English, much faster than Arne, but then that may just be the way he always speaks.
‘Had a good journey?’ he asks. ‘Come by plane, did you? The benzin didn’t run out then?’
I shake my head, wondering at his use of the Norwegian word for fuel.
‘Anything’s possible in Norway. You never can tell. People don’t know the simplest things. For instance — do you know where the word benzin comes from?’
‘Benzin? …’
‘From Benz. Mercedes-Benz, don’t you know. Let’s get into the tent. Have some breakfast.’
The Livingstone quip is ancient, but I’ve never heard the one about benzin.
Their tent has an extra triangle of netting to close off the entrance. Once I am inside Qvigstad zips it up, after which Mikkelsen kills all the insects with a spray can.
Arne and Qvigstad begin chatting in Norwegian. Mikkelsen lights a primus stove in the middle of the tent and puts on a small pan of water to boil. There is nothing for me to do but listen to the mosquitoes and flies tapping against the canvas overhead. It sounds as if it’s raining. It takes ages for the water to boil. Mikkelsen stirs in the powdered milk, oats, sugar and raisins. My ears are filled with the hiss of the primus and the patter of insects. It is a fine tent, fairly new, with aluminium poles. All their gear seems to me to be first-rate.
Arne and Qvigstad unfold a map, while Mikkelsen stirs the porridge. I wish there was something I could do, but what? Qvigstad takes a curvometer out of a flat case, measures something on the map, confers with Arne, then taps the map with the back of the instrument to emphasise his point.
Should I wash and shave? Nobody else seems to have bothered, nor does the idea appeal to me either.
*
Three Norwegians walking abreast on the road, with me at their side. The heat is oppressive, not a cloud in the sky and yet the atmosphere is hazy.
I am not sure what we will be doing today apart from the final preparations for the expedition, such as buying food. There has been no more talk of hiring a horse.
A small general goods store.
A grey woman hands over eight loaves of brown bread, a dozen eggs in a carton, honey in tubes, margarine, tins, a cheese with an orange rind, Sunmaid raisins and three packets of coffee beans. No ground coffee available. Now what?
The woman has the answer: she goes to the back and returns with a coffee grinder, of a kind I have never seen before: it looks like a tin music box painted red.
I almost snatch the utensil from her hands.
‘Let me do the grinding!’
‘Fine! You do it.’
Outside, sitting on a large stone, I proceed to grind the coffee.
The mill is not very good. It’s as if the beans get crushed instead of ground, and it takes an inordinate number of turns of the handle to crush just a small quantity of beans. Fending off mosquitoes with one hand, I turn the handle with the other. I throw the crushed beans back into the mill, but that has no effect: they trickle down almost at once, as through a funnel.
Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen have now come to sit with me. We take turns with the mill, each of us whizzing the handle round until our arms get tired. It takes an hour and a half to grind all three packets of coffee beans.
With the provisions in a box of corrugated cardboard (how many kilos?), we make our way back to the tent. Mikkelsen boils some water in an aluminium kettle, to which he adds a spoonful of ground coffee. We eat bread with sardines and drink coffee, which tastes horribly bland. Sherpa Danu would not have served this to his sahibs.
‘Sherpa Danu,’ I say aloud, and I tell them what I read in the newspaper.
Qvigstad says:
‘It’s only the expeditions to Mount Everest you get to read about in the papers — never any others. People have no idea how many researchers are out there without it ever being reported in the press. They’re nameless, and though their expeditions may be less spectacular, that’s not to say they’re less dangerous.’
‘And no help from Sherpas,’ Arne says. ‘They have to carry all their own gear.’
In the late afternoon we set off along the lake until we come to the river, which we follow upstream until it is sufficiently narrow to cross by jumping from one stone to the next.
Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen are wearing knee-high rubber boots, I am the only one with ordinary leather hiking shoes. Just one wrong move and my feet will be sopping wet for the rest of the day.
Without bothering with a run-up, I manage to land on the first stone. Made it! Concentrating hard I leap onto the next, and then to the others, pausing on each stone to get my breath back; when landing I can’t help giving the occasional yelp as I struggle to keep my balance.
Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen don’t even jump, they just progress smoothly from one stone to the next as if the whole river didn’t exist. At last I am on the other side, with dry feet. A prodigious achievement by my standards, and my heart pounds in my throat. I catch up with the others at a trot. The road peters out into a footpath leading to the lake. The path comes to an end at a lakeside hut made of sods of turf. To the side of the hut lie two wooden sleds which look very much like small boats, and moored to a post driven into the bank is a long boat like a dugout with an outboard motor.
Qvigstad, Arne and Mikkelsen come to a halt. So do I. Qvigstad calls to someone inside the hut. A swarthy little man emerges on bandy legs, wearing a red-and-green check shirt, corduroy trousers and rubber boots. His nose is flat, his eyes slant and his black hair sticks up like a clothes brush. Laughing the shy laugh typical of Lapps, he shakes his head by way of greeting. From his belt dangles the awesome knife in its sheath with the curved tip. Qvigstad says something to him. He goes back into the hut and reappears with an empty rucksack. They confer. Arne, Qvigstad and Mikkelsen seat themselves on the ground. I follow suit. The man squats down, facing us. He unsheathes his awesome knife, slices a twig off a bush and sets about whittling the tip into a point. Mosquitoes crawl familiarly over his ill-shaven cheeks, his eyelids, his lips. He says something from time to time, and when he listens his jaw sags. The twig in his left hand dwindles steadily.
And so we remain for a good half hour. When finally we say goodbye, the empty rucksack is swinging from Qvigstad’s hand.
18
By seven, the green tent has been struck and packed up. All our possessions are now spread out in little piles around us.
Arne inspects the rucksack belonging to the swarthy little man.
‘It’s a small one,’ he says, ‘I wonder if that’s deliberate.’
‘Small rucksacks can take heavy loads,’ Qvigstad offers.
‘He says he is very, very strong,’ Mikkelsen says.
We divide all our gear over the five rucksacks. Into the strong man’s rucksack go the two tents, primus stove, theodolite, paraffin container and all the tinned food. We tie the eight loaves on top with a piece of string. We? In reality it is Arne and Qvigstad doing practically everything, leaving me idle. Each time I venture to help they beat me to it, or snatch away whatever I pick up.