Death Zone Read online

  Only two crops are hardy enough to survive this inhospitable terrain: barley and millet. Along with the milk and meat of the yak, they have become the staple for all human life on the Tibetan plateau, and without them no permanent habitation would be possible. I watched an elderly man scattering barley seed from a leather sack, his throwing arm moving to and fro in an elegant arc, shooting the tiny white seeds into the air like water droplets from a sprinkler. His actions seemed those of a supreme optimist … or of a madman. But he had seen the same fields sprout and grow every summer season of his life, so why should this year be any different?

  It occurred to me then that when we next passed through the village, on our way back to Nepal when the expedition was over, these dry, dust-shrouded fields would be a blaze of green life. That made our own precarious venture seem a very long one indeed.

  We packed up the camp on 9 April and set off in convoy, east across the plateau on the next stage of our journey through Tibet. The dirt road stuck faithfully to the valley floor for the first two hours, passing villages every five or ten kilometres. That morning, it was not just the fieldworkers who were busy at their labours; roadworking gangs were also hard at work. Every hundred metres along the road, a pile of gravel had been carefully placed on the verge. These piles stretched all the way back to Zangmu, so a major refurbishment was obviously under way. The road gangs task was to fill the many potholes and corrugations that peppered the track. This they did with the most basic of tools – a spade and rake. They wore face masks against the dust, and thick woollen coats against the cold but it was still the bleakest of jobs – not helped probably by the sight of wealthy foreigners like us racing past in our nice warm Toyotas.

  By late morning the road left the river and began an abrupt climb up towards the Lalung La pass, one of the highest roadcrossings in Tibet at 5,300 metres. The final few hundred metres made for dramatic driving, with the Toyota lurching along a heavily-rutted track flanked on both sides by a metre of wind-hardened snow. The col itself was festooned with prayer flags tied to the telegraph poles like bunting at a jolly country fair. We stopped at the pass to take photographs and to admire views of both Xixapangma and Cho Oyu – two 8,000-metre giants which effortlessly dominated the horizon. Al had climbed them both and he pointed out the routes to us as we shivered in the freezing wind. He made it sound very easy, condensing what had been months of struggle into a few paraphrased highlights, so that both peaks seemed little more than weekend jaunts.

  Just after the col we passed a traveller on foot, an Indian or Nepalese holy man wrapped in a brown blanket, with bare legs and no protection on his head.

  ‘Pilgrim,’ our liaison officer told us, ‘maybe going to Lhasa. Maybe tomorrow dead. Many of them die.’

  The pilgrim carried no food or water, yet made no gesture to try and stop us. Our driver raced past, leaving him in a cloud of dust. I was astonished that anyone could survive such cold with so little protection, and how he endured the nights was beyond my imagination. Maybe, as the liaison officer warned, he would be dead before his pilgrimage was complete.

  Descending to the plateau once more, the road began to follow a new river, this time flowing east. The valley opened out into a wider plain, dotted by the ruins of ancient caravanserai and forts. This was greener, lusher land than the valley we had stayed in, and herds of goats – sometimes many hundreds – were grazing on new shoots.

  Suddenly, rounding a corner, we came upon our first view of Everest. Our convoy pulled to a halt and for several minutes there was no sound other than the clicking of cameras and the ever-present rush of the wind.

  Even though it was more than eighty kilometres away, Everest felt close enough to be touched. The fine details of the North Face, more perfectly triangular than I had imagined, were easily visible to the naked eye even at this long distance. Now I could understand why to the Tibetans Everest was ‘Chomolungma’, the goddess mother of the earth, long before western surveyors determined its status scientifically as the highest summit in the world.

  Seen from the Tibetan plateau, Everest’s greatness does not need theodolites for confirmation, it is, indisputably, head and shoulders above everything else on earth with a grandeur, a presence, that far outweighs that of other Himalayan giants.

  I had seen the summit of Everest before, from Namche Bazar in Nepal, but that view was nothing compared to the vision now revealed to us. From the south, Everest is shy and elusive. I had seen just a glimpse of its very peak, the last 10% of the South-West Face. Crowded as it is, by Nuptse and Lhotse, you have to climb right into the western cwm, above base camp, before the South-West Face is truly revealed. Even from Kala Pattar, the famous Everest viewpoint for trekkers, only a frustrating portion of the mountain is visible.

  From the north, Everest does not hide behind any veil, it reveals itself in all its glory with no preamble or guile. It just sits there alone, proud and magnificent, a pyramid of rock, sculpted by the most powerful forces on earth over millions of years. No other peak encroaches on it: none would dare. It effortlessly fills what seems to be half of the horizon. Seen from where we stood, there was no room for any doubt at all: this was the ultimate mountain.

  Today, as on most days, the famous ‘plume’ was trailing impressively from the North-East Ridge. Simon estimated it was about thirty miles long. This white mane of Everest is evidence of the ferocious winds which scour the higher reaches of the mountain, a visible manifestation of the invisible jet stream which runs from west to east across southern Tibet. When these winds hit Everest at anything up to 150 kilometres an hour, ice crystals are clawed from the rock and spirited into the air where they fly, held horizontally in the grip of the air flow, until they fall to earth far to the east.

  The plume has a compelling, hypnotic quality, like the Northern Lights, or ocean waves breaking on a shore. Once you start watching it, it becomes hard to tear the eyes away, so seductively does it shift and reshape with the passing of time. Seen from the plateau, the plume is silent, but, like watching someone scream behind soundproof glass, the mind has no trouble in imagining the sound that must be accompanying it.

  Awestruck, we climbed back into the Toyotas, each wrapped up in his own thoughts. Brian, Al, Barney and Simon had seen this view of Everest before; they, undoubtedly, were already under its spell – that was why they had come back. The rest of us were experiencing new emotions. The mountain, which during the run-up to the expedition had existed only in our dreams, was now a tangible and frighteningly real presence. The North Face had looked utterly forbidding and steep, even at this great distance. For the first time, the hard realisation hit me that one or more of us, could die on those slopes in the coming months. It all went very quiet inside the vehicle as we drove onward along the bumpy track.

  By mid-afternoon we reached the town of Tingri, home to a sizeable army camp and several basic eating houses which cater for conscripts and passing tourists. We ate a filling mutton stew in a smoke-filled lodge and washed it down with cups of bitter Tibetan tea. On the walls, flashy posters advertised Sektor Italian watches and Gore-tex alpine clothing brands – goods which mean as much to the average Tibetan as spacesuits and bulletproof vests do to the average westerner.

  Tingri is built on the edge of a swamp, with several shallow lakes surrounding it. Al had stayed here many times and he demonstrated how in certain places the ground behaved like jelly when it was jumped upon. We spent an entertaining few minutes jumping up and down in our heavy mountain boots, feeling the earth wobble beneath our feet, and causing some watching children to crease up with laughter.

  Leaving Tingri, we passed through a military checkpoint and arrived at Shekar Dzong, our nightstop, by 5 in the afternoon. The town itself is uninspiring but behind it sits one of the most wondrous monasteries in Tibet. Built many centuries ago, this marvel of construction sits on a knife-edge ridge, regally overlooking the surrounding plains. At its height, the monastery was home to hundreds of monks. In 1950, during the Chines
e occupation of Tibet, it became a seat of resistance and the scene of fierce fighting. Finally, the Chinese sent in Mig jets and the monastery was bombed into submission. Today it is still in ruins, a poignant monument to the savagery of that event and the many hundreds of other acts of destruction that were characteristic of the Chinese invasion.

  Our ‘hotel’ in Shekar was chosen by the liaison officers and it immediately made us wish we were back in the tents. The hallway was so cold that a dripping samovar had created stalagmites of ice on the concrete floor. The rooms were like prison cells, with sagging metal beds and a single hairy blanket. The communal toilets had evidently never been cleaned since the days of Mao. We gathered in the restaurant to pick at some food with the Sherpas. It was a meal which not even Brian’s jokes could lift.

  The biggest joke of all – somehow the Chinese always seem to have the last laugh – was that this travesty of a ‘hotel’ was costing us sixty US dollars a head for the night, the official, Beijing-set rate for foreigners. Rip-offs are always annoying, doubly so when they are official ones.

  We put the 16mm film gear together the next morning and filmed the expedition convoy leaving Shekar on the final stage of the journey to base camp. The Chinese drivers, perhaps not surprisingly, got very irritated by my requests for them to stop and start as we leapfrogged ahead several times to shoot a selection of travelling shots, but we got the sequence we needed, and finished as the vehicles crossed the Pang La pass, 5,750 metres, our clearest view yet of Everest.

  On the southern side of the Pang La, the track descended and deteriorated sharply, the large potholes giving us a bumpy ride. Reaching the valley floor, we turned west for the first time since leaving Kathmandu, taking the stony trail that leads to the Rongbuk monastery and base camp. Here, the villages were richer and better-built than the others we had seen, with elegant painted houses, and well-fed horses in the fields. The valleysides, by contrast, were rocky and almost devoid of vegetation except for one or two splashes of vivid green where a hamlet lay tucked with a few precious fields and one or two hardy trees.

  Although Everest was now obscured by intervening hills, the milky-coloured river we now followed was fed by its snows. Here it is known as the Rongbuk, draining the northern slopes of Everest and Makalu and flowing in a great loop across the Tibetan plateau before cutting boldly in a series of deep gorges through the Himalayas at Tsanga to enter Nepal as the Arun. In the south of Nepal it is joined by the Sun Khosi, and then flows on across the Indian plains to merge with the Ganges at Katihar.

  The mystery of how the Arun performed its miraculous crossing of the Himalayan watershed was one which perplexed early geographers. The problem was solved in 1937 by L.R. Wager, a geographer and explorer who mounted an expedition into the then unknown gorges of the Arun. His conclusion was that the river had formed long before the Himalayas began to rise, and that it had maintained its course by cutting progressively deeper gorges as the mountains uplifted. Wager published his theory of antecedal drainage in the Geographical Journal of June 1937, establishing beyond doubt that the Arun river predated the greatest mountains on earth.

  With winter barely over, the Rongbuk river was little more than a stream, fed by a trickle of silt-laden melt water from Everest’s glaciers. Within a few months, with the rising temperatures of summer, the river would change character completely, becoming a raging torrent of melt water. We passed the remains of numerous destroyed bridges – testimony to the power of this seasonal flood.

  Crossing the river on an impressive newly built bridge, we continued west on the southern bank, passing teams of strong-looking yaks on their way to base camp. Laden with fodder and the supplies of their herders, the yaks are driven up each spring to coincide with the arrival of the pre-monsoon expeditions. They have plodded along the same trail for centuries, bringing supplies to the monastery which has existed at the foot of the Rongbuk glacier for at least four hundred years.

  The track gradually turned south, rounding the valley spur until we were looking right down the Rongbuk glacier, with the North Face of Everest looming massively ahead. Fresh snow had fallen on the face in the hours since we had last seen it from the Pang La, and many of the dark areas of rock were now a dirty white colour. Once more we stopped the vehicle and assembled the film equipment, shooting half a roll before clouds blew in and obscured the view.

  Much to the frustration of our drivers, who were by now jumping up and down with impatience, we filmed again at the Rongbuk monastery, interviewing Brian in front of one of the gold-capped stupas. He was in pensive mood, and talked openly about his fears for the months ahead:

  Sometimes I feel full of confidence, and then I just die with fear. It’s such an awesome mountain. I’ll have to take it one step at a time … one day at a time. And if she’ll allow us, we’ll make it to the top. But by God it’s not going to be easy.

  Finally, with a freezing wind at our tail, we drove the last axle-twisting twenty minutes along the glacial moraine, and arrived at base camp, 5,500 metres, with just enough daylight left to clear platforms and pitch our tents. As we struggled with the canvas, the cloud momentarily cleared on Everest, revealing the summit bathed in fiery red light. It was 11 April, nine days since we had left Kathmandu, twelve days since leaving the UK. The travelling was over; now the expedition could begin.

  *

  As a child I had often wondered what a ‘base camp’ really was; like a ‘snowhole’ or a ‘bivouac’, it sounded exciting – but what was it exactly? The best mental picture I could achieve was a collection of pretty alpine-style huts filled with jolly climbers enjoying mugs of steaming cocoa. Lit by roaring hurricane lamps and warmed by an open fire, it was a reassuringly cosy place, a world apart from the blizzards which raged outside.

  A short visit to base camp on the northern side of Everest would have quickly put me right, and shattered a few childhood fantasies. A more hostile, less heartening, spot would be hard to imagine outside of the polar regions. Arriving expeditions scatter themselves far and wide across the glacial valley, seeking out shallow dips and hollows which they imagine will protect them from the wind. They are wrong. The wind of Tibet is inescapable … it is part of the fabric of the place, like the stones, and the dust. And the smell of stale yak shit.

  This was no fleeting visit. Our camp here would be home for the next ten weeks, a place to return to each time we came back from the higher camps on the mountain. The process of acclimatisation is a slow one and it is usual for even experienced teams to spend at least six or eight weeks letting their bodies adjust to the paucity of oxygen prior to a summit attempt.

  Every tiny feature of the Rongbuk valley conspires to make life more difficult. The ground is frozen, and cannot be penetrated by even the sturdiest tent peg. The rivers are frozen too, or where they run they are filled with silt and cannot be drunk. Sleeping bags, put out to air, are picked up by the wind and whipped away. Washed clothes freeze as stiff as boards. The air is dry, adding to the draining effects of altitude. Throats become sore. Lips become cracked. Fingers split and get infected. Minds start to wander, thinking of home … thinking of anything but the terrifying mountain which sits above the valley.

  I was excited to be at Everest base camp, but I can’t say I liked it.

  The old hands, Barney and Al, built substantial stone walls around their tents to prevent the wind from destroying them. Others, lazier like Kees and myself, made a half-hearted attempt to copy them and had to rebuild our tent several times after bad storms.

  Base camp is an easy place to get very depressed, as several members of our team were to find out in the coming months. ‘Glacier lassitude’ – the disease so brilliantly introduced to the world in the book, The Ascent of Rum Doodle, is pervasive and all-consuming once it has you in its grasp.

  One team member whom I thought unlikely to become a victim of depression was Brian; he had been here before and had his own ways of dealing with it.

  ‘Take care here, Matt,’ he advis
ed, ‘or you’ll go fucking crazy. Just get your tent as comfortable as you can and make sure you read plenty of books.’

  I took his advice. In the first five days at base camp I read the eight-hundred-page Scramble for Africa; a biography of Sherpa Tenzing, a biography of Paul Getty, Trainspotting; two Patrick O’Brian novels; Our Man in Havana; and Paul Theroux’s Jungle Lovers. Kees was less prolific, or perhaps a more diligent reader. In the same period he read fewer than one hundred pages of the German war epic, The House of Krupp, lingering over each page like a connoisseur relishing a fine cigar.

  A new fear began to grip me, almost as powerful as the fear of what could befall us on the mountain: the fear of running out of reading material.

  Simon chose a prominent site for our camp, not far from the place chosen by the British expedition of 1922. Nearby was the small moraine hillock picked by the Chinese as the location for the TMA base … an ugly stone-built construction with an overflowing toilet block nearby. In this cheerless place, unsmiling liaison officers ticked off the days, resentful of this ‘hardship’ posting, and entertained only by a fuzzy television set fed by a satellite dish which would not look out of place at Jodrell Bank.

  We were one of the early arrivals, beaten only by the Norwegians and the Japanese. On each of the four days it took us to establish our camp, the rumble of trucks announced newcomers. Soon there were German, Catalan, Slovenian and Indian expeditions scattered around the glacier. Some, like the Catalan expedition, consisted of just five or six team members with very little Sherpa support. Others, like the Indians, had more than forty members, and substantial Sherpa teams.

  In total, more than 180 climbers (only a handful of which were women) would be attempting the North Face of Everest during this pre-monsoon season; a sign of the growing popularity of the northern side, and a dramatic increase from the early 1980s when getting permission from the Chinese at all was extremely difficult.