enjoy life.That is what life means and what life is for.
—GEORGE MALLORY
ONE BEGINNINGS
It was hot. Yellow dust rose from beneath our feet, settling opaquely on sunglasses and thickening the sweat on our faces. The warmth of the valley floor at Panchkal was hard to reconcile with February and the ice-sheathed summits thirty miles to the north. The path climbed gently, past open-fronted bazaars and teashops, near the porch of a mud brick house where a woman squatted pounding a large round rock into a mortar filled with rice; beyond, it led through the shade of a corridor of trees, out into the sun again, then up alongside the dry earth of terraced fields awaiting the monsoon. Exertion purged our excesses of soft living and overeating, the first step in the hardening necessary for the weeks ahead, a need my feet were painfully aware of on this second day of our march toward Everest.
Willi Unsoeld and I were far behind the procession, having lingered to say goodbye to Jim Ullman. Panchkal, one day out of Kathmandu, was the end of Jim’s journey toward the mountain; the doctors, I among them, had so decreed. The risk to his health, his life, and thus to the prospects of the Expedition was too great. Turning back hadn’t been easy—his dream must now walk on without him—and as he wished us a good journey his smile quivered at the edges. There wasn’t much to be said, but Willi tried. I stood by awkwardly, impatient to be moving on, not wanting to prolong this farewell. I felt guilty that I was appreciating too little the opportunity to go on toward Everest, an opportunity for which Jim would gladly have sacrificed either leg.
We walked on side by side, following the myriad prints of bare feet in the dust. It was nearly three years since we had known such simple isolation. There was much to be said, once we overcame that feeling of strangeness, wondering how much the other had changed.
“You know, Willi, I’m not very excited about this whole affair. I’m not sure why I came along.”
“Me either,” he said, “but I’ve been too swamped to think about it. That’s one of the big things I’m looking forward to—just the chance to do some thinking.”
“Sometimes I wonder what I hope to get from this trip. For one thing, as far as my own needs go, I don’t see how it can touch Masherbrum. This affair is just too big, and people are more diverse. And too much publicity. Still, you don’t turn down Everest because of that. But if you and Emerson hadn’t come, I don’t think I would have considered it.”
“Guess that’s what swung it for me too.”
I reminded him of my wife’s reaction. Gene had known I would be going back even before I got home from Masherbrum. When she read that I wasn’t one of the ones who reached the summit she knew that I still had a question to answer about myself. Apparently she was right, but there was far more to the question than just reaching the top of a mountain. Otherwise why was Willi here? With George Bell, he had made the top of Masherbrum. He had passed the Himalayan test—or had he?
“Not really,” he said. “After all, Everest is the ultimate test—in altitude, anyway.”
“Well, the way I figure it,” I said, “it ought to be a lot easier than Masherbrum, at least by the Col. For one thing there’s not nearly the danger we had before, especially from avalanche.”
“True, but we’re going to hit a lot more wind and cold, and we’ll be high a lot longer.”
“Sure, but we’ll be using oxygen. Physiologically, Everest with oxygen should be easier than Masherbrum without. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.”
The trail leveled out at the crest of a hill, and aimed at a saddle in the ridge ahead. We started down, leaving the valley of Panchkal behind. A small stream joined us, tumbling temptingly beside the trail in a series of clear pools joined by miniature waterfalls. The melody was too sweet to resist, and we stopped. I sat on the grass, leaning luxuriously against a tree as the chill water anaesthetized the raw spots on my heels. Willi poked with a needle from his hat band at a blister engulfing his little toe.
“One thing that bothers me,” he said, “is that I’ve been working so darned hard lately I’m just about run down. I’m exhausted when I climb into bed at night. Maybe the Old Guide’s too far along for this sort of thing.”
One of many log bridges on the approach (Photo by Barry Corbet)
A boy and swing near Chaubas (Photo by Norman G. Dyhrenfurth)
Taking a break at Risingo: Gil Roberts, Jake Breitenbach, Dan Doody, Barry Corbet (Photo by James Lester)
Mani stones (Photo by Barry Corbet)
“Cut it out, old man,” I said. “All I hope is you’re washed up enough that I can keep up with you.”
After a while we pulled on our socks and boots, rose reluctantly, and started up the trail.
Willi resumed, “I guess I’m hunting for some answers too. Where do I go after the Peace Corps? Philosophy, foreign service, or what? That’s the big thing I hope this trip will clarify.”
“That’s asking a lot, Willi—a programme for your whole future. But at least you’ve got some idea of what you’re after. I wish I had such a bona fide excuse for being here.” I fell silent. Supposedly, my future was all plotted out, at least for the next few years. But something was bugging me. Why was I here? I seemed to be hunting for answers to questions I couldn’t even ask. What difference could Everest make even if I got to the top? What was up there to make me any wiser? Nothing but rocks and snow and sky.
There was a time, though, when doubts didn’t exist, when the why was unnecessary. Everest was unclimbed. Could it be? Could a man survive at 29,000 feet? That question was a part of me when, at fourteen, I climbed my first mountain in northern Colorado. It was a long gentle walk, rising through a grove of quivering aspen blanketing the crest of an old moraine. I saw the wind-flattened trees at timberline and finally climbed breathlessly over gentle tundra to the summit of Signal Mountain, and tasted the effort of the climb, the soaring freedom waiting at the top. It was a beginning.
Far from the mountains in the winter, I discovered the blurred photo of Everest in Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels. It was a miserable reproduction in which the jagged peaks rose white against a grotesquely blackened and scratched sky. Everest itself, sitting back from the front ones, didn’t even appear the highest, but it didn’t matter. It was; the legend said so. Dreams were the key to the picture, permitting a boy to enter it, to stand acrest the high windswept ridge, to climb toward the summit, now no longer far above. My fantasy revealed itself a bit in “Ambition,” a theme I wrote in 1946: “I greatly long to someday climb [‘Another split,’ exclaimed Margo Johnson, my English teacher] in the Himalayas. I dream of the day when I shall first gaze upon such peaks as Everest, the mysterious Amne Machen, K-2, Kangchenjunga, Nanga Parbat, which has taken so many lives, Nanda Devi, the not quite so high but equally entrancing Mustagh Tower.”
This was one of those uninhibited dreams that come free with growing up. I was sure that mine about Everest was not mine alone; the highest point on earth, unattainable, foreign to all experience, was there for many boys and grown men to aspire toward. Even as my love of the mountains grew, and the skill for travelling on them, my dream was buried beneath vocation, marriage, children—a raft of real responsibilities, so full of all the challenge and pleasure a man should ask for, that Everest no longer seemed so important.
Anyway it didn’t wait. On May 29, 1953, Tenzing and Hillary reached