A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (24 page)

‘Captain Foulenough?’

‘Why don’t you write to Beachcomber?’

We pursued this fantasy happily for some time.

‘Have you approached the Everest Foundation? They are there to assist small parties such as ours.’

‘Not quite like yours, I should have thought,’ said Hyde-Clarke.

WHEN HUGH ARRIVED
from New York ten days later I went to meet him at London Airport. Sitting in those sheds on the north side which still, twelve years after the war, gave the incoming traveller the feeling that he was entering a beleaguered fortress, I wondered what surprises he had in store for me.

His first words after we had greeted one another were to ask if there was any news about the third man.

‘Not a thing.’

‘That’s bad,’ he said.

‘It’s not so disastrous. After all, you have done some climbing. I’ll soon pick it up. We’ll just have to be careful.’

He looked pale. I put it down to the journey. Then he said: ‘You know I’ve never done any
real
climbing.’

It took me some time to assimilate this.

‘But all that stuff about the mountain. You and Dreesen …’

‘Well, that was more or less a reconnaissance.’

‘But all this gear. How did you know what to order?’

‘I’ve been doing a lot of reading.’

‘But you said you had porters.’

‘Not porters – drivers. It’s not like the Himalayas. There aren’t any “tigers” in Afghanistan. No one knows anything about mountaineering.’

There was a long silence as we drove down the Great West Road.

‘Perhaps we should postpone it for a year,’ he said.

‘Ha-ha. I’ve just given up my job!’

Hugh stuck out his jaw. Normally a determined-looking man, the effect was almost overwhelming.

‘There’s nothing for it,’ he said. ‘We must have some lessons.’

Wanda and I were leaving England for Istanbul on I June. Hugh and I had just four days to learn about climbing.

The following night after some brisk telephoning we left for Wales to learn about climbing, in the brand new station wagon Hugh had ordered by post from South America.

We had removed all the furniture from the drawing-room to make room for the equipment and stores. Our three-piece suite was standing in the garden under a tarpaulin. The drawing-room looked like the quartermaster’s store of some clandestine force. It was obvious that Hugh was deeply impressed.

‘How long have you been living like this?’

‘Ever since we can remember. It’s not all here yet. There’s still the food.’

‘What food?’ He looked quite alarmed.

‘Six cases of Army ration, compo, in fibre boxes. From the SAS. It’s arriving tomorrow.’

‘We can always leave it in England. I don’t know about you but food doesn’t interest me. We can always live off the country.’

I remembered von Dückelmann, that hardy Austrian forester without an ounce of spare flesh on him, who had lost twelve pounds in a fortnight in Nuristan.

‘Whatever else we leave behind it won’t be the food.’

‘Well, I suppose we can always give it away.’ He sounded almost shocked, as if for the first time he had detected in me a grave moral defect. It was an historic moment.

With unconcealed joy my wife watched us load some of the mountaineering equipment into the machine.

‘We’d better not take all of it,’ said Hugh. ‘They might wonder why we’ve got so much stuff if we don’t know how to use it.’

Over the last weeks the same thought had occurred to me constantly.

‘What about the tent?’

The tent had arrived that morning. It had been described to me by the makers as being suitable for what they called ‘the final assault’. With its sewn-in ground-sheet, special flaps so that it could be weighed down with boulders, it convinced me, more than any other single item of equipment, that we were going, as the books have it, ‘high’. It had been specially constructed for the curious climatic conditions we were likely to encounter in the Hindu Kush.

‘I shouldn’t take
that
, if I were you,’ said my wife with sinister emphasis. ‘The children tried to put it up in the garden after lunch. Whoever made it forgot to make holes for the poles.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure. You know it’s got those poles shaped like a V, that you slip into a sort of pocket in the material. Well, they haven’t made any pockets, so you can’t put it up.’

‘It’s lucky you found out. We should have looked pretty silly on Mir Samir.’

‘You’re going to look pretty silly at any rate. I shouldn’t be surprised if they’ve done the same thing to your sleeping-bags.’

‘Have you telephoned the makers?’

‘That’s no use. If you send it back to them, you’ll never see it again. I’ve sent for the woman who makes my dresses. She’s coming tomorrow morning.’

It was nearly midnight when we left London. Our destination was an inn situated in the wilds of Caernarvonshire. Hugh had telephoned the proprietor and explained to him the peculiar state of ignorance in which we found ourselves. It was useless to dissemble: Hugh had told him everything. He was not only an experienced mountaineer, but was also the head of the mountain rescue service. It is to his eternal credit that he agreed to help us rather than tell us, as a more conventional man might have done, that his rooms were all booked.

We arrived at six o’clock the following morning, having driven all night, but already a spiral of smoke was issuing from a chimney at the back of the premises.

The first thing that confronted us when we entered the hotel was a door on the left. On it was written
EVEREST ROOM.
Inside it was a facsimile of an Alpine hut, done out in pine wood, with massive benches round the walls. On every side was evidence of the presence of the great ones of the mountain world. Their belongings in the shape of ropes, rucksacks, favourite jackets and boots were everywhere, ready for the off. It was not a museum. It was more like the Royal Enclosure. Sir John and Sir Edmund might appear at any moment. They were probably on the premises.

‘Whatever else we do I don’t think we shall spend much time in the
Everest Room,’
said Hugh, as we reverently closed the door. ‘For the first time I’m beginning to feel that we really do know damn all.’

‘EXACTLY.’

At this moment we were confronted by a remarkably healthy-looking girl.

‘Most people have had breakfast but it’s still going on,’ she said.

The only other occupant of the breakfast room was a compact man of about forty-five. He was wearing a magnificent sweater that was the product of peasant industry. He was obviously a climber. With an hysterical attempt at humour, like soldiers before an attack, we tried to turn him into a figure of fun, speaking in whispers. This proved difficult, as he wasn’t at all comic, just plainly competent.

‘He looks desperately healthy.’ (His face was the colour of old furniture.)

‘Everyone looks healthy here, except us.’

‘I don’t think it’s real tan.’

‘Perhaps he’s making a film about mountain rescue.’

‘How very appropriate.’

‘Perhaps he’ll let us stand-in, as corpses.’

After breakfast the proprietor introduced us to the mystery man. We immediately felt ashamed of ourselves.

‘This is Dr Richardson,’ he said. ‘He’s very kindly agreed to take you out and teach you the rudiments of climbing.’

‘Have you ever done any?’ asked the Doctor.

It seemed no time to bring up my scrambles in the Dolomites, nor even Hugh’s adventures at the base of Mir Samir.

‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘neither of us knows the first thing about it.’

We had arrived at six; by nine o’clock we were back in the station wagon, this time bound for the north face of the mountain called Tryfan.

‘Stop here,’ said the Doctor. Hugh parked the car by a milestone that read ‘Bangor X Miles’. Rearing up above the road was a formidable-looking chunk of rock, the
Milestone Buttress
.

‘That’s what you’re going to climb,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s got practically everything you need at this stage.’

It seemed impossible. In a daze we followed him over a rough wall and into the bracken. A flock of mountain sheep watched us go, making noises that sounded suspiciously like laughter.

That evening, having done a lot of climbing, much of it rather alarming, and after a large, old-fashioned tea at the inn with crumpets and boiled eggs, we were taken off to the
Eckenstein Boulder
. Oscar Eckenstein was a renowned climber at the end of the nineteenth century, whose principal claim to fame was that he had been the first man in this or any other country to study the technique of holds and balance on rock. He had spent his formative years crawling over the boulder that now bore his name. Although it was quite small, about the size of a delivery van, his boulder was said to embody all the fundamental problems that are such a joy to mountaineers and were proving such a nightmare to us.

For this treat we were allowed to wear gym shoes.

Full of boiled egg and crumpet, we clung upside down to the boulder like bluebottles, while the Doctor shouted encouragement to us from a safe distance. Occasionally one of us would fall off and land with a painful thump on the back of his head.

‘YOU MUST NOT FALL OFF.
Imagine that there is a thousand-foot drop under you.’

‘I am imagining it but I still can’t stay on.’

Back at the inn we had hot baths, several pints of beer, an enormous dinner and immediately sank into a coma. For more than forty hours we had had hardly any sleep. ‘Good training,’ was Hugh’s last muffled comment.

By this time the waitresses at the inn had become interested in this artificial forcing process. All three of them were experienced climbers who had taken the job in the first place in order to be able to combine business with pleasure. Now they continued our climbing education.

They worked in shifts, morning and afternoon, so that we were climbing all the time. We had never encountered anything quite like them before. At breakfast on the last day, Judith, a splendid girl with auburn hair, told us her father had been on Everest in 1933.

As we were leaving for London, Judith gave me a little pamphlet costing sixpence. It showed, with the aid of pictures, the right and wrong ways of climbing a mountain.

‘We haven’t been able to teach you anything about snow and ice,’ she said, ‘but this shows you how to do it. If you find anything on the journey out with snow on it, I should climb it if you get the chance.

‘I wish we were coming with you,’ she added, ‘to keep you out of trouble.’

‘So do we,’ we said, and we really meant it. Everyone turned out to say goodbye. It was very heart-warming.

‘You know that elderly gentleman who lent you a pair of climbing boots,’ Hugh said, as we drove through the evening sunshine towards Capel Curig.

‘You mean Mr Bartrum?’

‘Did you know he’s a member of the Alpine Club? He’s written a letter about us to the Everest Foundation. He showed it to me.’

I asked him what it said.

‘He wrote, “I have formed a high opinion of the character and determination of Carless and Newby and suggest that they should be given a grant towards the cost of their expedition to the Hindu Kush.”’

Wanda and I drove to Istanbul in Hugh’s Land Rover; and together the three of us drove on to Tehran where Wanda left us to go back to Trieste where she had left our children with her mother. On 5 July we arrived in Kabul having driven 5000 miles. The roads east of Istanbul were fearful then. It had taken a month. Our journey was about to begin.

There is no space for all our subsequent vicissitudes but we failed to climb the mountain although we got within 800 feet of the summit. We could easily have said we got to the top. There were no witnesses. In an insane moment of honesty we subsequently sent a telegram to
The Times
from Kabul telling them of our failure and they printed it!

We found Judith’s little book a great help on the glacier while cutting our first steps.

Then, with our three Tajik drivers and their three horses we crossed the 16,000 feet Chamar Pass into Nuristan where we met our first Nuristanis.

We were a hundred yards from an
aylaq
, a bothy, when there was a shout and we saw our first Nuristanis.

They came pouring out of the bothy and raced over the grass towards us at a tremendous pace, dozens of them. It seemed impossible that such a small building could have contained so many men. As they came bounding up they gave an extraordinary impression of being out of the past. They were all extraordinary because they were all different, no two alike. They were tall and short, light-skinned and dark-skinned, brown-eyed and grey-eyed; some, with long straight noses, might have passed for Serbs or Croats; others, with flashing eyes, hooked noses and black hair, might have been Jews. There were men like gypsies with a lock of hair brought forward in ringlets on either side of the forehead. There were men with great bushy beards and moustaches that made them look like Arctic explorers. There were others like early Mormons with a fuzz of beard round their faces but without moustaches. Some of the tallest (well over six feet), broken-nosed, clean-shaven giants, were like guardsmen in a painting by Kennington. Those who were hatless had cropped hair and the younger ones, especially those with rudimentary beards, looked as strange and dated as the existentialists of St Germain des Prés; while those whose beards were still in embryo were as contemporary as the clients of a
Café Espresso
and would have been accepted as such without question almost anywhere in the Western World.