A Dispatch from the Mountain
By PETER FLEMING
IT is amusing (and not at all difficult) to speculate on what sort of a book this would have been if Everest had been climbed by the French or the Americans, instead of by the British. Though French civilisation is a good deal older. and American civilisation a good deal younger than ours, I suspect that both accounts would have been, in slightly different ways, more subjective and more " colourful " than Sir John Hunt's.* Both would have looked over their shoulders from time to time—back at the homes they had left, back at the dangers which dogged their heels. The French would have indulged in flights of fancy, often expressed in rhetorical ques- tions of the most unanswerable kind : A quoi pensait-elle, cette giante inviolie, en regardant l'approche si lente de cette chetive compagnie de twins? The Americans would have bothered about their bowels. Both would have been more nationalistic, more (to bracket them in one phrase) Tricolor-conscious. In their efforts to tell an immortal story worthily, both would have been more exclamatory, more dramatic, more intimate.
It would have been easy to excel Sir John Hunt in any of these respects. He led an expedition into immortality, and has sensible ideas about how to behave upon Olympus. I never take as seriously as perhaps a thoughtful citizen should, the people who talk about civilisation-as-we-know-it being destroyed overnight; but if it were so destroyed, and if in one
* The Ascent of Everest. By John Hunt. (Hodder & Stoughton. 25s.).
or two thousand years scholars from another planet had to.sort out the records of our achievements, The Ascent of Everest would need the minimum of footnotes. This is because it tells the truth in a convention (the question of style hardly arises in this context) which every age will recognise, and every age respect.
Although it may sound paradoxical, it is the " We-have- been-here-before " approach—to a story whose point is that nobody had been there before—from Which the narrative mainly derives that sense of perspective which is the most perdurable flesh in which to clothe the bones of a recent achievement. The British of course very nearly had been there before; and in 1952 the Swiss, borrowing from the bank of our experience and paying back their loan at a generous rate, had advanced the now ragged pennons of their highest camp-site nearer to the summit than any before them. " A possible analogy," writes Sir John Hunt, reviewing the previous assaults which were a necessary prelude to the success of his own expedition, " might be that of a relay race, in which each member of a team of runners hands the baton to the next at the end of his allotted span, until the race is finally run."
It is—just—a possible analogy, and Sir John never lets us forget how many times the baton had changed hands before he passed it into those of Hillary and Tenzing. But a race is not only run, it is won; as in most forms of human endeavour, someone or something is worsted.
The Everest Expedition of 1953 overcame a diversity of opposition; I will not here attempt to summarise—for I think most readers will have got a working knowledge of it from Other sources—Sir John's analysis of the enemy order of battle. But when due tribute has been paid—as in this narra- tive and its appendices it amply is—to pioneers and to advisers, to the firms which supplied the stationery, the scone-mix and the not altogether (judging from the excellent photographs) indispensable dry shavers—it still remains a fact that a hand- ful of men did something which has never been done before; that by doing so they reasserted a kind of prowess which modern men and modern children, though eager to honour, honour mainly in one form or another of fantasy : and that thereby they drew on themselves a temporarily almost limit- less acclaim.
It is because of all this, rather than because he is so generously mindful—where, so to speak, the snow lay dinted—of his predecessors, that I greatly respect Sir John's " we-have-been- here-before " approach to a story of hardship and danger and triumph. He does- not minimise the difficulties, nor the qualities of mind and body which were needed to overcome them; but his manner throughout the book suggests that climbing Everest is a perfectly normal and sensible thing for men of the British Empire to do if they have the chance. His narrative exhibits traces neither of the conventional awe in which mighty enterprises and surroundings of savage grandeur were apt to fill the Victorian adventurer, nor of any of the various forms of self-consciousness in which his modern counterpart is apt to take refuge. It belongs, rather, to the sound Edwardian tradition in which (for instance) Mr. Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote The Worst Journey in the World and in which the main object of the exercise is to give a faithful account of the things done and seen, the " human " side of the story being accorded the sort of treatment which it might receive in the more imaginative type of regimental history. The results are entirely congruous to the status of the expedi- tion and the scale of its achievement.
Save for the rapidity with which its publication has followed the events it describes, the book has many affinities with the official dispatch in which a commander reviews a campaign. When the war is over, evidence from enemy sources—from " the other side of the hill "—often • shows the opinions expressed or the information given in these documents to have been unsound. Sir John has no need to fear any such riposte from his silent adversary; and he and his companions can safely leave to the judgment of history this sober, scrupulous account of their doings. " We always," writes Sir John in a characteristic passage, looked upon the leader's job as merely one among the many responsibilities which we shared out between us "; but it is impossible to close this book without realising, despite his consistent self-effacement, that its author was the main architect of a notable victory.
The photographs are splendid and the maps are of the stan- dard that one would expect. It was perhaps a pity—since the book will reach a wide public unversed in mountaineering technique or in the configuration of Everest—that a simple diagram was not included, showing the relation to each other and to the main landmarks of the climb of the various camps; it would have made the intricate comings and goings between them, on which so much depended, a great deal easier to follow. But otherwise no praise can be too high for the lucidity with which Sir John has marshalled the accounts of interrelated operations into a coherent whole. • Although he is careful to follow the objective, dispassionate example set by his leader, Sir Edmund Hillary's chapter on the climax of the whole venture is the most vivid thing in the book. This was partly inevitable, for he has the easiest as well as the most exciting part of the story to tell; but perhaps it is also partly because story-telling comes easier to him than it does to Sir John. But the latter, too, can rise to an occasion when events give him a chance; it would be difficult, for instance, to better this description of a more than awkward moment : " And now began a struggle which none of us is likely to forget. If the wind had been strong on the spur, it was terrible down here. My oxygen had finished before descending to the col, and Charles Evans took off his set to leave him more free to. work. We were pathetically feeble, far too weak to compete against that fiendish gale. -For over an hour we fought and strove with it, playing a diabolical tug-of-war, trying to put up one single tent which can be put up in one or two minutes lower down. All the time the canvas was being snatched from our hands and we were being caught in a tangle of guy ropes. We staggered about, getting in each other's way and hopelessly inadequate to cope with the conditions. Tom kept his oxygen set on and at first could not understand the antics of Charles and myself as we rolled around like drunkards. Once I tripped over a boulder and lay on my face for five minutes or so . . (Tom) too fell down and also lay, more or less unconscious, on the ground." It is a spare, hardy kind of writing : just the thing, in my opinion for Everest—or for Olympus.,
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