Coronation Everest by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris [Jan Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571266029
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2010-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

I was almost the Everest expedition in microcosm; for my modest adventures paralleled the greater enterprises of the climbers, and I timed my own journeys up the mountain to coincide with the different stages of the attempt. Thus, when I was making my first climb to the head of the icefall, Hunt’s reconnaissance parties were pushing ahead to the head of the Cwm and on to the vast slab of the Lhotse Face that rose above it. Similarly, soon after I returned to Base Camp to get my dispatches away and see to the organization of my runners, Hunt withdrew all the climbers from the mountain for a briefing on the plan of assault. This was a council of war before the attack on the summit. The groundwork had been done; quantities of stores had been taken up into the Cwm; the first examination had been made of the Lhotse Face; the time had come for a decision on the plan of final assault, and on the composition of the assault parties. Men would be made famous by this conference, and legends given birth. It was May 7, a significant date in the story of Everest.

Before the conference Hunt talked things over with Hillary and Evans, who had been made deputy leader of the expedition. He invited me to listen to this, and accordingly I tucked myself away in a corner as they hammered out the plan. It was a lovely sunny morning, and we basked there on the scree as we talked. When I heard that Evans and Tom Bourdillon, Hillary and Tenzing were to be the four men most likely to stand upon the summit, my first reaction was to wonder how their lives might be altered by the chance; whether, one day, Hillary’s name would be as well known as Mallory’s; and whether, indeed, (a supremely selfish thought) they would all come back safely to tell me the news, or whether I should start thinking about obituary notices.

(Goodness, that was a thought! Had we anything in the morgue on the members of the expedition? What about portrait pictures? I must get a photograph of every member, so that if anyone disappeared irrevocably down a crevasse we could provide a reasonable obituary. Let me see, now, what code words did we have for catastrophes? ‘Killed’, ‘Injured’ and ‘Ill’ I knew we had arranged; it might be worth thinking up a few more, for the choice of perils was wide, and if someone was, for example, sucked permanently away by some unexpected subsidence of the ice, it might well be worth reporting.)

‘There we are then,’ said Hunt, smiling encouragingly at me, for he thought I had been working out rates of oxygen flow, ‘we’ll gather all the chaps in the dome tent in half an hour and tell them the plan. How about you, James, do you know all about it now?’

‘Everything, thank you, John,’ I replied, wondering if half a column would be enough for him.

But nobody was killed or maimed on Everest, and for this record Hunt himself was responsible.

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