After prayers they gather outside and I present them with a thangka (from Kathmandu). It’s accepted by the abbot, a big, amiable man with a very dirty, cherry-red duvet jacket over his robes. The monks gather round and study it with great interest.
By evening the wind has dropped as forecast. I sit in the room I share with Basil and make my notes as Everest, now completely clear of the cloud, turns pink in the dying sunlight. Apart from the very top, Everest is not one single, symmetrical shape like a Kilimanjaro or a Machhapuchhre, its outline being composed of a series of huge blocks.
Suddenly my view is obscured by two women banging on the window, staring in at me and holding their hands out. They’re some of the saddest people I’ve seen and for a moment I feel a sense of frustration that the monastery can do so little for them.
Getting in and out of my sleeping bag are the most uncomfortable moments of the day. The cold snaps at my heels and yet dressing and undressing cannot be hurried at this altitude.
Day Sixty Two : Rongbuk to Everest Base Camp
Last night I slept. Indeed, I slept so long and so deeply that Basil thought I might be dead.
What a difference it makes to everything. The sky looks bluer, the food tastes better, the yak butter tea is like nectar and the prospect of a trek beyond Everest Base Camp and up towards the Rongbuk Glacier is the only thing I want to do with the rest of my life.
It takes us 20 minutes to drive the eight miles from Rongbuk to Base Camp, passing on the way the remains of the old monastery.
Some of the walls still stand, but it’s little more than a skeleton, barely distinguishable from the rubble-covered slopes on which it stands. Above these desiccated ruins a flock of blue sheep are nosing some nourishment out of the rocks.
Everest Base Camp is nowhere near as romantic as it sounds. Part of it is protected by a 100-foot-high moraine, a wall of stone and shale, carried down and dumped by the glacier that has gouged out the valley. A stream trickles through but any standing water is frozen solid. In high season, between June and August, this area and the rock-strewn valley floor beyond are packed with mountaineers and trekkers. This year there were 32 separate expeditions.
Now, in early November, the camp is all but deserted though the legacy of the summer lies around: discarded brandy bottles, playing cards, batteries and bits of sodden, scrumpled clothing.
A couple of motorbikes are parked beside a caretaker’s tent, outside which a young man sits in the sun, having his hair cut by two ladies. Nearby, the yak herders with whom we shall be walking up to the glacier have set up two or three small tents of their own, while the yaks graze nearby, nibbling at the scatterings of wheat and dry grass laid out for them. One has made a small hole in the ice and is drinking from it. Their hair is mostly black, though some have white faces. All have the soft eyes of cows and the same sad, long-suffering look, as if resigned to whatever’s going to happen. Despite looking eminently embraceable, they don’t seem at all interested in my friendly advances, and I’m warned that they can turn very truculent.
I learn, too, that though yak is their generic name, it refers only to the male; a female is called a dri and a yak crossed with a cow is a dzo (this is a useful word to know when playing Scrabble, as my ever helpful Bradt guide points out). They are the preferred carriers at this height, stoical and persistent, sure-footed on the rocks. They thrive at altitude, protected from the cold by a thick saddle of insulating fat across their backs, and the big expeditions rely on them to transport heavy equipment up as high as 21,500 feet (6550 m). It’s on the lower slopes that the yaks suffer. Anything below 8000 feet (2440 m) can be very uncomfortable for them, as they tend to overheat.
Though the herders seem not the slightest bit sentimental about their furry charges, theirs is one of the most one-sidedly symbiotic relationships between man and beast. In return for some grass the yaks give their owners milk, cheese, butter, meat, fuel, building materials, clothes and transport.
I join the herders around a fire of brush wood and bamboo kindling, which they keep alive by tossing on the odd yak nugget and pumping hard with an ancient sheep’s bladder bellows. Sitting in a circle, eating cake made from tsampa, the barley flour and tea mix, they’re jolly company, naturally given to smiling and cracking jokes, most of which are at my expense.
Their clothes are made from skins and fur and look as if they have been part of their bodies since they were born. Their complexions, skin textures, their whole physiognomy is a reflection of the life they lead. Coloured by the wind and rain, stunted by the bitter cold, their features sculpted in a craggy resemblance to the weird and wonderful landscape around them, they’re elemental figures, created by and in the likeness of the mountains.
Maybe all this accounts for the ease of their manner. They know what to do here. They know what to expect and how to deal with it. They have slope cred.
This morning means having fun with foreigners, and being paid for it. First of all, it’s tea, invigoratingly salty, with a knob of yak butter thrown in, then it’s time to get out the chang, a fermented barley beer, for me to try. It’s poured out of a stained, dusty container, the sort of thing you might find at the back of the shed ten years after you put it there. Before drinking, Migmar shows me the important procedure of giving thanks. I must dip my third finger into the brew, and, flicking it each time, give thanks first to the mountain, second to the Buddha and third to the assembled company. It’s a pleasing taste, chang, like chilled ginger beer, with a hint of apples.
This is the start of one of those magical meals that may not win any gastronomic medals but are unique and unforgettable - a Sunday lunch 16,900 feet (5150 m) up in the heart of the Himalaya. The ingredients include perfect weather, cloudless blue sky, light breeze, generous sunshine, the comforting presence of the yaks and the cheeriness of their owners, the reassuring company of big black crows, and the presence, at our backs, of the highest mountain in the world.
The conquest of Everest in 1953 was one of the milestones of my childhood. I was ten at the time and, like every other Briton, bursting with national pride (we somehow dealt with fact that Everest had been conquered by a Tibetan and a New Zealander). What happened on the mountain behind me 50 years ago defined the heroic, and led to a fascination with exploration that I suppose has brought me here today, completing the circle.
Only later did I learn that Everest might have been conquered 29 years earlier, when George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared into a cloud close to the summit and were never seen again.
As the years went by, this heroic failure came to fascinate me more than Hillary and Tenzing’s success. The fact that Mallory and Irvine left from a base camp almost exactly where we are now and lost their lives on the face of the mountain I can see so clearly ahead of me makes this a very special place, somewhere that has been in my imagination for so long.
Lunch completed, the yaks are loaded up, the tents struck and we begin the walk up to the glacier.
The warmth of the sun and the gentle tinkle of yak bells makes up for the grimly lunar landscape of grey stones and boulders. The herders seem in no hurry, whistling every now and then to keep the yaks together and occasionally singing as we plod slowly upwards. As the afternoon wears on, and the snowdrifts become less avoidable, it becomes increasingly obvious that the requirements of filming are slowing us down and we shall not reach the glacier before the light goes. We’ve also lost Basil and John Pritchard, both of whom seemed fine at lunch but, unable to cope with the increased altitude, have had to turn back.