Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (11 page)

Pugh had spent a good part of the war looking after the health of soldiers in the Iraqi desert and in the Lebanese mountains. He had written army leaflets on hygiene. He worked in a hospital camp in Tehran, coping with a raging epidemic of lice-borne typhus. The dangers of drinking water from shallow, dirty wells, eating meals “covered in flies,” and sleeping in flea- and lice-infested village houses were all too obvious to him. One day, as they passed a village that had recently suffered an epidemic of plague, Pugh noticed the villagers “putting the corpses in the river.” Such were the dangers of drinking unboiled water from streams and wells that Pugh felt impelled to try to improve the situation. It was obvious that lack of hygiene would lead to illness, weakening the climbers and undermining their chances on Cho Oyu.

On the first day of the trek, when the climbers could not buy any tea at a village, he had tried to persuade them not to drink dirty water: “Argument as to whether water from shallow drinking well drinkable. Heat untrue and some drank it [the water] in spite of obvious dirt.”
¹³

Five days into the trek, having made little impression on the climbers or the doctor, Pugh urged Shipton to intervene. But Shipton, with his Himalayan experience, would not accept that Pugh’s understanding of hygiene was superior to his own. Pugh noted:

Discussion today about need for measures against flies and water contamination. I argue that . . . we should cover the milk and sugar and look after our own mugs and boil the water. This should reduce [the] risk by 50 percent. S[hipton] think[s] only by 10 percent, therefore not worthwhile bothering about flies, but water should be boiled. On the whole there is gross ignorance and neglect of simple principles of hygiene . . . We shall see over the next few days.
¹⁴

And, just as he feared, most of the team soon developed stomach upsets and throat infections. Pugh himself caught tropical sprue, an intestinal infection. It became a chronic malaise which he did not manage to throw off until long after he returned home.

If Pugh had read Dr. Raymond Greene’s account of the trek to Everest in 1933, he would have known that neglect of hygiene, and reluctance to listen to the advice of the doctor, were the norm for British Everest expeditions. Greene battled, often unsuccessfully, to persuade his fellow climbers not to camp in local villages, “surrounded by the accumulated filth of an oriental [bazar],” or in a spot where the water supply was “polluted by . . . unsanitary buildings on the hill above.”
¹⁵
The popular Dr. Greene shrank from confrontation and limited himself to mild remonstrations: “Sickened by the sight of such ineptitude I stated firmly, but kindly, my complete refusal of all responsibility, kindly because Hugh [Ruttledge, expedition leader in 1933] already had enough to bother him.”
¹⁶

Pugh, however, was more forthright, and complained constantly to anyone who would listen. Naturally, this began to grate on the team, and the view began to form that Pugh was a “difficult” character; a view that only grew with each new clash.

Disputes aside, Pugh was enjoying the trek. He was as susceptible as the most romantic of the climbers to the dramatic beauty of the mountain landscapes, and he shared the awe and reverence that such beauty can inspire. On the evening of April 6, he wrote: “Last night it was very beautiful. Hills rising steeply all round softly illuminated in varying shades by 3/4 moon overhead, sound of rushing stream, dying campfires, fireflies, inevitably lead to talk of religion . . .”
¹⁷

He derived huge pleasure from the physical sensations of trekking, the excitement of climbing over a pass and seeing the view on the other side, the delight of sitting in the umbrella shade of a banyan tree eating a meal when very hungry. He loved the “delicious bathes,” the magnolia trees blooming in forests “heavy with scent.” He listened to the crickets and the nightingales, and was always on the lookout for unfamiliar animals, birds, and plants, such as “a kind of rose the leaves of which close immediately when you touch them.” His words reveal an irrepressible excitement at each new experience, and above all an immense curiosity about everything around him.

At one moment he was riveted by the sight of a woman “with the largest goitre I have ever seen. Her neck was as wide as her face. Goitres are common at all ages in these valleys, but I have not seen a child with one.”
¹⁸
At another he was feeling thrilled at his first view of the high Himalayas.
¹⁹
Constantly fascinated by the local people, he described their living conditions and farming methods in great detail in his diary.

At the village of Chisapani he thought the local cooking techniques were “far more efficient than our own,” and drew a diagram of the contraption the people were using for heating up water, the first of a series of annotated sketches of local tools and devices that impressed him. A few days later it was children who captured his attention: “I began to play at ball with them, and was surprised to find they had no idea how to catch a ball. After about an hour, however, they were getting the idea quite well, particularly a small boy of about eight who put out his tongue at each attempt.”
²⁰

Pugh did not identify with the members of Shipton’s team. He treated them not so much as comrades, but as objects of observation, like everything else. He did not even tell them he was a climber, although he had as much experience as most of them, if not more. He knew his knowledge of climbing was vital to his work, yet he allowed the team to think that he was a complete novice.

Shipton’s failure to stress that there was important research to be done meant that the climbers did not make themselves available to Pugh as often as he wanted. Recognizing the need to avoid antagonizing them, Pugh turned his enquiring mind to the Sherpas and the porters.

The Sherpa people, who originally migrated from Tibet and settled in the high Solu-Khumbu district of Nepal, did the high-altitude load-carrying for climbing expeditions. They also did the cooking, looked after the climbers, and helped to recruit and manage the porters. The gangs of porters were Nepalese. They were recruited from villages along the way, usually only worked for certain stages of the trek, and did not go above base camps. The porters carried 80- or 90-pound loads, as well as their own sleeping mats, blankets, and food, weighing another 20 pounds. Several carried loads as heavy as themselves; five strong men hefted 120 pounds each. Pugh noticed that some of the older porters “did not seem very fit.” There had been some hard bargaining, and he thought they might have undertaken the job “from economic pressure.” “There are three children carrying loads,” he also noted. “Must get ages and weights.”
²¹

The porters supported their loads on headbands across their foreheads, which, Pugh realized, channeled the weight down through the spine toward the pelvis so it did not fall mainly on the shoulders. When he measured how fast the porters climbed, he found that, while the “most able” men “climbed extremely fast,” their average climbing rate was a moderate 1,600 feet per hour, because they rested every few minutes, propping their wicker baskets on sticks to ease the weight on the headbands. In one place the cavalcade had to ford a twisting river more than twenty times. Pugh had difficulty staying upright in the water and found it “amazing how surefooted” the porters were, even with their heavy loads.
²²

In their camps at night, he watched the Sherpa Sirdar, who “sits under his umbrella and directs operations.” The sirdar and his assistant had airbeds to sleep on, whereas the ordinary porters, “in groups of 2–6,” slept on “clothes spread out on the ground” around “a dozen small campfires . . . Some have cotton cloaks, others sleep almost naked.” Pugh worried that their skimpy clothing and the increasing cold of the nights were adding to their fatigue.

When, one day, the porters resisted pressure to extend a long march to reach the next watering place, Pugh noted that they had already climbed 2,000 feet, which, “for men with loads of 80–120lbs working at an altitude of 9,400ft (2,865m), is almost a full day.”
²³
The porters agreed to continue, but arrived at the evening campsite long after the unencumbered climbers. Pugh wrote: “We were in serious danger today of over-reaching the porters and having to spend the night without our sleeping bags.” A couple of days later he observed: “Porters getting increasingly slow. Probably cumulative fatigue. First day 3000ft up, 4000ft down and about 8 miles at 10,000ft was too much for them.”
²⁴

Shipton and his climbers were heirs to a British tradition that viewed low-altitude porters as beasts of burden, carrying the maximum load for the minimum price. Their welfare was not a matter of great concern.
²⁵
There was greater respect for the Sherpas, but they too were viewed by many as inferior beings. In the eyes of John Hunt, the soon-to-be-appointed leader of the 1953 Everest expedition, the Sherpa was “a faithful follower, who brings [the European climber] his tea in the morning, lays out his sleeping bags at night, helps to carry his personal belongings, and generally spoils his sahib.” He added: “This Hindu word [sahib], denoting superior status, was used between us on the expedition, to distinguish between members of the party and their Sherpas.”
²⁶

When Pugh made his recommendations for the 1953 expedition he argued that the Sherpas should be given the same quality of clothing and equipment as the climbers, and should also be provided with the same high-altitude oxygen sets. He warned of the adverse effect upon morale of their being allocated inferior equipment.
²⁷

On April 15, after just over two weeks of trekking, Shipton’s team arrived at the gorge of the Dudh Khosi River. The scenery had become “increasingly wild and rugged, the river a roaring milky green torrent, the heads of the valleys dominated by snow peaks.”
²⁸

The next day they made the steep climb up to Namche Bazar. The constant roar of the river grew fainter as they arrived at the Sherpa capital, a cluster of some sixty stone houses with wooden roofs, built in semicircular rows up the hillside. The Swiss had left for Everest only the day before, and their fears about competition with the British for porters and food had been well founded. Many of the local Sherpas had waited for Shipton rather than joining the less-well-known Swiss team. Furthermore, the Swiss couldn’t get eggs, whereas Shipton’s team had two eggs a day each throughout the trek.

Prudent about hygiene, the Swiss had chosen to camp “in tents outside the village” rather than sleep in Sherpa houses and expose themselves to the lice, fleas, smoky atmosphere, and endemic local infections. Shipton’s climbers moved insouciantly into a Sherpa house. Before long the DDT powder Pugh had bought in Delhi was in great demand. Soon he noticed with amusement that they had moved out:

The potato patch outside the house now has four tents pitched on it. Climbers unable to tolerate lice and fleas any longer. Many have upper respiratory infections . . . factors probably responsible are mica dust raised by wind, smoke in Sherpa dwellings, and close contact with Sherpas among whom running noses, purulent sputum are prevalent, and who spit indiscriminately.
²⁹

Pugh later met two scientists from the Swiss expedition who told him that they had consistently avoided staying in native houses and suffered from none of the throat infections that plagued the British team.

It was in Namche Bazar, at 11,286 feet, that Pugh first began to notice the impact of the altitude—headaches, fatigue, irritability. Gathering blood samples suddenly seemed exhausting to him. The climbers who had previously been quite equable were tetchy with him. “Whereas until now I have not heard a harsh word spoken,” he complained, “after arrival here [have] heard outbursts of irritability from R[ay] C[olledge], C[am] S[ecord], G[reg], self included.”
³⁰
The words
self included
referred to an “outburst of irritability” on Pugh’s part for which he would pay a heavy price. His mistake was to criticize the wife of the most popular climber in the team apart from Shipton—Tom Bourdillon.

Having worked with his father on the closed-circuit oxygen sets, Tom Bourdillon was one of the few climbers genuinely interested in Pugh’s research. At the same time he was a terrific climber who commanded universal respect and affection from his fellow climbers. He was probably the only man on the expedition who had the charisma and motivation to persuade the skeptical men to cooperate with Pugh.

Bourdillon was newly married. The previous year, he had gone on Shipton’s reconnaissance shortly after his wedding. This year his wife, Jennifer, had decided to come with him to Nepal.
³¹
They had trekked from Kathmandu, catching up with Shipton’s team just before Namche Bazar. Jennifer was intending to travel around Nepal while her husband was on the mountain. Even so, the climbers were not keen to have a woman in the vicinity of their expedition, and Pugh apparently shared their disapproval. When he found that the tent he had brought along specifically for his experiments was taken without his permission and given to Bourdillon and his wife, he lost his temper. Already irritable from the altitude, all the frustrations of the march channeled themselves into his treatment of this young woman.
³²
He retrieved his tent after only one night, but not before telling Jennifer bluntly that she was a fool. She should never have come to Nepal, and would get ill and become a burden to the expedition.

Sensitive and considerate, Jennifer Bourdillon was already acutely aware that she must avoid causing any disruption to the expedition. She found Pugh’s harsh words hurtful. At age twenty-three, and totally inexperienced, she was intending to travel alone with a Sherpa to parts of Nepal never before visited by Europeans, with no expedition doctor to look after her if she fell ill. In the event, her trip passed without mishap, although she did catch typhus while trekking back to Kathmandu with her husband afterward, and was lucky to survive. Nonetheless, Pugh’s blunt behavior offended Bourdillon, and risked depriving Pugh of his only effective ally on the expedition.