Read Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain Online
Authors: Harriet Tuckey
When the news came through that “Ed has abandoned the top camp site and is looking for a new one,” Pugh determined to go up on his own and watch the hut being built. But as soon as he was high enough up the valley to get a view of the top of the glacier, he saw that “the hut had already been erected.” He was furious that Hillary had changed the position without consulting him. To make matters worse, again without consulting Pugh, Hillary then ordered Jim Milledge—one of Pugh’s young recruits—to take charge of fitting out the interior of the hut.
These were only two of many slights Pugh felt he suffered in the first two weeks. He and several others had contracted serious stomach upsets, which Pugh blamed on the “disgusting hygiene” Hillary was permitting in camp. When he pointed out that the cooking was being done in filthy surroundings with water from a dirty well, Hillary—echoing Shipton’s reaction on Cho Oyu—snubbed him, and his suggestions for improvements were “met with disapproval.”
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Hillary also refused to plan the rations in the orderly way Pugh considered vital.
Pugh had spent weeks in London packing his complicated scientific equipment according to a meticulous system. Now, he complained, Hillary “has muddled up all my equipment in Kathmandu . . . destroying all the careful work which has gone into classifying it.” Hillary had ordered Milledge and Nevison to repack the equipment into Sherpa loads, rather than asking Gill, who understood the system.
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Then it emerged that the two delicate gas analyzers—Pugh’s most vital instruments—had been accidentally smashed on the march to Mingbo.
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Without them the physiology could not begin.
As tensions mounted, the atmosphere became “very sticky,” particularly at mealtimes. “I have been repeatedly snubbed before the rest of the party,” Pugh complained bitterly in his notes. “It seems I am not to be consulted in any way.”
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Eventually, things came to a head. After many hours alone in his tent, drafting and redrafting what he wanted to say, Pugh squared up and told Hillary all his complaints—the plastic fuel containers, the food supplies, the clothing, the failure to consult him, the disgusting hygiene, the radio, the helicopter, and, worst of all, Hillary’s refusal to acknowledge him as the scientific leader. Hillary must agree—in writing, Pugh insisted—that Pugh would have full control of the expedition in Hillary’s absence, including the movement of men, work program, money, and news. If he refused, Pugh would pack up and take his scientists home. Warming to his subject, he then went further. Betraying one of the less-appealing aspects of his fiery temperament, he indulged in some wounding remarks about Hillary’s leadership qualities.
His criticisms hit home hard enough to merit a place in Hillary’s autobiography of 1975, where the New Zealander described the force of Pugh’s attack: “Pugh approached me, opened his notebook, and reeled off a long and detailed list of my various weaknesses and inadequacies. My incompetence as a leader was beyond belief, but what could you expect from someone without a suitable background and education . . . it was a frightening declaration—like God summing up on judgement day.”
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Hillary added, “This was a most devastating criticism and I had been largely unaware of my transgressions.”
Whether or not he was hurt by Pugh’s tirade, Hillary refused to discuss it. Pugh’s diary records only the briefest of composed but blunt responses to his litany of complaints: “Hillary listened patiently, and then told me I could go.” Faced with an impasse, Pugh sidestepped by demanding that Hillary give him a “written release” from all his obligations to the expedition. But Hillary refused, saying: “Oh, I’m not such a mug as that.”
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Pugh continued to press for a written release. They repaired to the quarters of Marlin Perkins and Desmond Doig—a walled shelter with a polythene tarpaulin roof and animal skins on the floor over a base of fir branches. There, hidden from view, diplomatic negotiations took place, conducted mainly by Perkins, with assistance from Doig. Both clearly sympathized with Pugh. The outcome was that Hillary agreed to all of Pugh’s demands and, most importantly, promised to acknowledge explicitly that Pugh was in sole charge of the scientific program and would be acting leader of the expedition in his absence.
Hillary later admitted with disarming frankness: “When I examined the situation conscientiously I realised that Griff had some basis for his dissatisfaction. He had been closely involved in the designing of the Silver Hut but because he hadn’t been up on the glacier with us I had not thought to consult him on its final location or its erection . . . I determined to give more consideration to his wishes and feelings.”
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The negotiations in the tent were not altogether one-sided. Hillary refused to allow the base camp to be moved unless Pugh lent him the 800 rupees he needed to make up the deposit of 8,000 rupees which the villagers of Khumjung had demanded for the loan of their Yeti scalp.
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According to Pugh’s diary, the villagers’ other condition was that Hillary should build them a school.
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Within hours of their confrontation, Pugh and Hillary had apparently recovered a perfectly amicable relationship, trekking up the valley together companionably to discuss the layout of the new base camp at 15,200 feet, at the summer village of Mingbo, two and a half hours’ walk above Changmatang. It was “a jewel of a place set in a hollow in the giant moraine round Ama Dablam,” Pugh reported in his diary.
The village consisted of a few stone huts and about an acre of level pasture, divided by stone walls into small hay fields and protective enclosures. The expedition rented three of the huts, which were normally only used in the monsoon season, when the villagers from lower down the valley brought up their yaks to graze in the high pastures. Pugh wrote home that “relations with Ed [are on a] pretty good footing again.”
Before Hillary left Mingbo, he publicly handed over the leadership to Pugh, and Pugh walked out to Thyangboche with him to say a final good-bye. Later, Hillary sent Pugh a friendly letter from Kathmandu reporting that he had had a positive meeting with a contact of Pugh’s about the radio permit, and that he had arranged for the first helicopter visit. Arrangements had also been made for replacement gas analyzers to be brought out from England by two of Pugh’s winter scientists, John West and Michael Ward, who were expected to arrive in mid-December. A gift of a bottle of whiskey accompanied the letter, and Hillary promised to send more in due course.
Now that he was in charge at last, the pall of anxiety lifted from Pugh’s shoulders, and his natural optimism, love of his work, and pleasure in living outdoors in the mountains reasserted themselves. His letters and diary entries, no longer full of complaints, became infused with irrepressible delight in the way his project was taking shape, and in his “wonderfully beautiful” surroundings. He took daily two-hour walks, seeking out paths through the aromatic dwarf rhododendron scrub near Changmatang, finding “hidden valleys” with grassy pastures and birch woods with “long greenish-grey strands of lichen hanging from the branches”—“like an Arthur Rackham illustration from
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
” He saw black musk deer, Thar goats, foxes, and many varieties of birds. There were splendid views of Everest and of the formidable Ama Dablam, a spectacular pointed peak overlooking the Mingbo Valley, which was shaped, Pugh wrote, “a little like the top part of the Matterhorn.”
On November 25, Pugh moved into his new base camp with rented huts at tiny Mingbo Village. He treated Doey to an enthusiastic description of how climber Wally Romanes—recruited by Hillary partly because he was a skilled carpenter—had converted the huts into a kitchen, a store, and a mess, adding plastic sheeting to the flat stone and juniper-bough roofs, stopping up the chinks in the walls with mud, “brightening the inner walls with a pale grey wash,” and, in one of them, installing a fireplace with a chimney made of petrol cans. The laboratory and most of the living quarters were accommodated in tents.
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Romanes erected the laboratory tent—a yellow, twelve-man arctic dome tent—on top of a 2-foot stone wall, “so that there is plenty of headroom inside,” and fitted it out with “two excellent work benches.”
True to his axiom about the need for comfort at altitude, Pugh had brought along a special “caravan tent” for himself. This had separate compartments for living and sleeping, and he decorated it with hangings on the walls, a sheepskin rug on the floor, and a square of leopard skin, edged with red cloth, draped over the chair. At night the tent was lit with a propane lamp, and a charcoal brazier glowed cozily in the center of the floor, but it nearly gave Pugh carbon monoxide poisoning and had to be abandoned.
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Above Mingbo, an “energetic two- to three-hour pull” over rocky, stony ground took the climber up to the lower of the two high-altitude huts, known as the “Green Hut,” on account of its green walls. Designed by Hillary and built by Wally Romanes, mostly with local materials, this wood-and-canvas structure stood in a stony trough next to a small lake. It was just below the snout of the Mingbo Glacier at 17,300 feet, and was mainly used as a transit camp on the way to and from the Silver Hut.
From the Green Hut it took the climbers another two and a half hours to wind their way up through the glacier icefall and climb the wide, sloping snowfield leading up to the Silver Hut. Curved and shiny in the bright mountain light, the Silver Hut was in a beautiful position on a crest at the edge of the snowfield, next to the exquisite fan-like cirque of steep fluted slopes which closed the head of the valley. Standing on jacks, it was firmly anchored down to its snowy knoll with wire guy ropes attached to ice-filled sacks countersunk 6 feet into the ground. Once Pugh had recovered from not being consulted about the site, he conceded it was in an excellent position.
After Hillary’s departure, Pugh was left in the company of Jim Milledge, Wally Romanes, Mike Gill, Barry Bishop (a climber, photographer, and glaciologist employed by
National Geographic
), and Tom Nevison, the American physiologist recruited by Hillary—whom the others suspected of being sent by the Americans to spy on the Chinese.
Pugh’s remaining three scientists, Michael Ward, John West, and Sukhamay Lahiri, arrived three weeks later on December 17, bearing the precious replacement gas analyzers. The winter team was completed by Captain Motwani, a doctor from the Indian army, which was concerned about the effects of altitude on their troops in Himalayan border posts. By this time most of the first group had already gone up to the Silver Hut, leaving Pugh at Mingbo, overseeing arrangements.
The Silver Hut was more comfortable than base camp. The entrance was sheltered by a porch, with interior and exterior doors to block out the wind and snow. Inside there were eight bunk beds fitted along the walls near the entrance, with the dining table extending down the center between them. The top bunks were set high enough to allow people to sit on the bottom bunks at the table in daytime. Each bunk was fitted with a comfortable foam mattress and an electric light so team members could read at night. The laboratory was at the far end, lit by a large window. Pugh had helped to design a special kerosene heater that would avoid any danger of carbon monoxide poisoning, and had searched out the best possible equipment to generate and store electricity—a wind generator erected on a 16-foot pole, plus a set of alkaline batteries.
The first time the whole team got together was on Christmas Day at the Silver Hut, which had been decked out with crimson and silver streamers. They spent the morning skiing on the snowfield and then returned to the hut for an elaborate Christmas lunch of mushroom soup, freeze-dried shrimp, roast lamb, fried yak, Christmas pudding, fresh oranges, and cherry brandy.
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Pugh produced Hillary’s bottle of whiskey and presented the team with “a bulky green bag of mail.” They did not know that he had mislaid a second bag which only turned up six weeks later. After lunch they toasted absent friends and sang songs. Pugh, who had limited tolerance for group jollity, left for the Green Hut long before it was over, having called an expedition meeting for the following morning at ten o’clock. There was to be no slacking on Boxing Day.
After Christmas the new arrivals returned with Pugh to base camp and spent three more weeks acclimatizing and finishing off the first phases of their research, before finally going up to live at the Silver Hut in mid-January. Pugh and Lahiri, who were both having difficulty adjusting to the altitude, did not join them until early February.
During the first weeks of the winter the temperature outside the hut was hardly ever colder than 5° Fahrenheit, and during the day the sun shone almost continuously. Even when clouds swelled and filled the Mingbo Valley in the afternoons, the sky high up usually remained clear. After the turn of the year it became steadily colder: Temperatures went down as low as –16°F, winds averaged 25 mph, and every month there would be a few days of stormy weather, with winds rising to 40 mph, gusting up to 75 mph, when the hut would rock like a train. One night, when Milledge and Gill were alone, the wind blew so hard they thought the guy ropes would rip loose and the hut would plunge down the glacier. The next day, they added extra guy ropes on all sides.
When Pugh and Lahiri finally went up to the hut, Pugh dug his own personal ice cave outside which he ventilated with a glass tube stuck through the roof. The cave remained at a constant temperature near freezing point, which he found more comfortable than the temperature inside the hut. He worked and skied happily with the team, but in the evenings he retired to his ice cave, leaving the others to their postprandial jollity and their games of bridge. They sensed that he preferred to keep himself slightly aloof but did not hold this against him. “I couldn’t reiterate too strongly how happy a group we were in the Silver Hut through that winter,” Mike Gill commented, and his view was enthusiastically endorsed by every scientist in Pugh’s team.