Kingdoms of Experience Read online

  For my mother, partners and travelling companions – semper tibi pendeat hamus.

  I thank the following for their assistance, advice and support during the writing of this book: Marsali Baxter, Ingrid von Essen, Peter and Eileen at the Clachaig Inn, Deborah Simmons, Isobel Wylie and above all the members of the 1985 Pilkington Everest Expedition.

  In memory of Malcolm Roy Duff, who made it happen.

  Author’s Note

  Author’s note: passages accredited to members of the Expedition are taken from their personal diaries or occasionally from transcribed conversation, as are thoughts and feelings ascribed to them.

  In this book, as in Summit Fever, I have followed the option of using the plural ‘their’ after a singular, impersonal subject e.g. ‘each’, ‘anyone’, ‘everyone’. To write ‘each of us has his own opinion’ would be both sexist and inaccurate, given the composition of the Expedition, while writing ‘his or her’ on every such occasion is laboured.

  CONTENTS

  A Note on the 1999 Edition

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Frontispiece maps

  1 The Ploy. August ’84 – 6th Nov ’84

  2 Putting it Together. 6th Nov – 5th March ’85

  3 My Old China. 6th – 9th March

  4 On the Loose in Lhasa. 10th – 16th March

  5 Through Tibet to Everest. 17th – 21st March

  6 Boy Racers & Old Farts. 22nd March – 4th April

  7 Going up. 5th – 21st April

  8 Attrition. 22nd April – 9th May

  9 Himalayan Thuggery. 10th – 18th May

  10 The Last Days. 19th May – 3rd June

  Epilogue

  Appendices

  Index

  A NOTE ON THE 1999 EDITION

  It was a curious experience re-reading for this new edition, like coming across a camp that has been buried under snow for many years. So many little details the memory abandons once an experience is over came fresh to the surface again. I’d forgotten that for an hour or two we’d watched a man who never was, moving steadily up the north-east ridge. I’d forgotten the sheer pain and drudgery of altitude, along with the shafts of clarity, exhilaration and euphoria. I’d forgotten the particular atmosphere of that expedition, an odd mix of personal isolation and the deep affection of company and shared endeavour.

  It reads now like a time of innocence. Our expedition had the great good fortune to enter Tibet during a brief window of comparative tolerance from the Chinese authorities. We saw it before both the crackdown and the growth of tourism. It seems incredible now that we spent a week in Lhasa and saw only one Western face. Equally incredible is that we had the north-east ridge to ourselves, and for two months shared the entire Tibet side of Everest only with the Basques’ expedition.

  The expedition was on some kind of historic cusp. It came just before the controversial growth of commercial Himalayan climbing where clients pay to be taken up big peaks. It came at the very end of the big scale assaults. Ours was an odd hybrid of the large, expensive, complex, sustained siege, and the Alpine Style solo dash. We had oxygen but used it only once; we had a vast payload but no Sherpas to help carry it; we had a film crew who filmed everything but our climbing.

  Summit Fever was an easier book to write, with a small, intimate cast and a wonderful natural climax of summitting after many setbacks. Kingdoms of Experience is both harder and far more typical of the big mountain expedition: attrition, tension, exhaustion, frustration. In that sense it is more truthful – certainly more typical! – to our normal lives than the storyline of triumph of disaster.

  In my memory lingers yet brutally cold nights on the hill, lungs soured with the bitter taste of altitude, watching the Sultans of Pain gear up for another pre-dawn start and wondering why we bother, why we are so separate. Also days of R & R at Base Camp, sitting in the sun singing the Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ while enjoying the miracles of fresh bread, cheese, companionship, and the knowledge we were not going to die that day.

  I hope some of that duality is in here. It was good to spend time again with those friends and companions, the living and the dead. We never fought so hard for breath, nor laughed so long.

  Andrew Greig

  Orkney 1999

  INTRODUCTION

  The majority of Himalayan expeditions do not get to their chosen summits. In a good many unsuccessful attempts – through luck and skill – no one dies. This does not make such expeditions a failure or a non-event. No serious Himalayan expedition – and in 1985 the Northeast Ridge of Everest was about as serious as it could get – is a non-event.

  This is a very human book. It is about a group of first-class climbers under pressure, where they are very much revealed as human beings, not heroes or super-stars. It brings out, as few books do, the sheer hard work and drudgery of siege-style Himalayan assaults. As in our own first attempt on the North-east Ridge in 1982, the team members did all the load carrying themselves, an exhausting process at 8000 metres. Under different conditions each of these would bring a Himalayan summit with it.

  Another feature of the book is the skilful use of diary entries, which gradually makes clear that on any trip there are as many expeditions as there are members of it. Through it we glimpse the different expedition each was having, the sense of solitude each climber bears, with moments of great closeness and solidarity. All in all, Kingdom of Experience is a deeply moving and evocative account of a compact siege-style expedition on one of the last great unclimbed ridges in the Himalaya.

  I found it a deeply engrossing read, a portrait from beginning to end of an ambitious, difficult and frustrating expedition. It also creates an all-round portrait of the spirit of the Himalayan climber, and as such stands as a celebration of my friends Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, who disappeared high on this very route in 1982, and of Mal Duff who died not long ago on the other side of Everest. All three had a deep love of the challenge of exploratory mountaineering, an understanding and acceptance of the risks involved, and they believed in living life to the full. At the same time they were prepared to risk that very life for the sake of the adventure that was so much part of their lives.

  This book helps us understand some of these seeming contradictions and at the same time is a lively and fascinating read.

  Chris Bonington

  February 1999

  PROLOGUE

  Sandy Allan, Advance Base Camp, Everest:

  ‘For some godforsaken reason we (I) front-point as good as some other people, for some reason I can jam my ice-axe in, torqued to the max, in cracks that other people have failed to, and so my body heaves exhausted over some rock or ice bulge and hence at First Ascent … And God or whatever – me, I’ll go for God – set the sun a-shining just before I got frostbite, or slowed down the winds just before we got hypothermia, or set the correct abseil position in the rock just when we needed it, or opened a little window so we could see the direction when we were totally lost. Some people call it luck, me – luck and unknown but most welcome INTERVENTION.’

  Here, we’re here, I’m here, hoping that my ability and the rest of the lads’ ability and the gods will see us OK. We’re gamblers, we’ve got no cash; we have lives, we love them, that’s the stake. The reward for me is to continue this life, on this planet, driving down the roads I know and walking through the doors of my friends’ houses … and in between that, Inshallah, a summit or two.’

  Mal Duff at 8000 metres on Everest’s North-east Ridge:

  ‘Tony crouched on a rock 40 yards away, a small spark of life where none should exist. The spindrift swirled and battered, whirling over the ridge, pluming up 200 feet before hurling itself upon us … Reaching the lee of the rock and contact
ing Tony, another human in this madness, becomes all-important. A shattering pain suddenly erupts in my lower chest – a muscle rip in my diaphragm, can’t inflate my lungs! A moment of panic subdued by years of training. No matter what, I must try, try to live, to descend or even to die but I must try … I must try because this is the big one, the master problem that perhaps I’ve been seeking for years, unwittingly …’

  The Ploy

  AUGUST ’84 – 6TH NOVEMBER ’84

  ‘The Mustagh Tower was over, the ropes had all been sold or coiled away. We were sitting in Mrs Davies’ while monsoon rain fell day by day …’

  The photograph is in front of me now: Mrs Davies’ hotel, Rawalpindi, mid-August 1984. Mal Duff and I are lounging in old cane chairs, smoking K2 cigarettes and laughing over some forgotten joke. We’re stripped to the waist but sweat still trickles from our arm-pits, for the air is torrid with the monsoon season. I notice with a shock how skinny we both are, how much weight we lost on the Mustagh Tower expedition.

  But that was all over, my first and only Himalayan trip, the one that prompted me to take up climbing less than a year before, after Mal’s impulsive suggestion that I come along to support-climb and write a book about it. It had been a deeply satisfying expedition: I’d carried a load to Camp 2, and after many set-backs the four lead climbers all made it to the top and safely back again. It was the second ascent by the West Ridge, the third ascent in all of the Mustagh Tower’s 7,230 metres.

  Now Mal and I were on our way home, thinking of bacon, beans and beer and the women we wanted to see again. We drank coffee, smoked and yarned while ineffectual fans whirred overhead, a flat-footed old servant hobbled by, and ghekkos clung miraculously to the wall as they stalked their supper. We were at peace, expecting nothing and looking for nothing.

  The renowned Polish climber Voytek joined us, his eyes pale blue and direct, his air one of casual but absolute self-possession as we exchange potted versions of our trips. Then a Norwegian from the ill-fated Trango Peak expedition sat down. Two of his friends had disappeared while abseiling down from the summit; they hadn’t been found and, barring miracles, they’d had it.

  There was nothing much we could say about that, so the conversation passed to high-altitude traverses. The Norwegian mentioned that he and his friends had an outside chance of pulling off one of the great ones – a traverse of Everest from North to South, from Tibet to Nepal. They had a permit for both sides of the mountain. But he added it was now unlikely that Norway had enough experienced climbers left to tackle both sides, and they would probably concentrate on the standard South Col route.

  Mal seemed distant, only making conversation. I thought he was probably bored, or thinking of home and Liz. Voytek and the Norwegian left; I went to buy more cigarettes. When I returned Mal rocked back in his chair then said with elaborate casualness, ‘How do you fancy raising twenty grand and coming to Everest, Andy?’

  A pulse beat in my neck, even though I knew he was joking. ‘Sure, why not?’ I replied, equally casual. ‘But I didn’t know you were interested in Everest.’

  ‘I’m very interested in the North-East Ridge, the Unclimbed Ridge. It’s the last big route left on Everest. Maybe we could pick up that Norwegian permit for the Tibetan side of the hill. Are you on?’

  At least Mal’s jokes are big ones. I lit a K2 cigarette, tipped back my chair and considered for a moment. A ghekko pounced, its jaws closed on its prey with an audible snap. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Shall I tell her now, Andy?’

  I lean on the bar in an Edinburgh pub and wonder where to begin after three alcohol-free Muslim months.

  ‘Tell me what?’ Liz Duff asks.

  ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter,’ Mal replies. I shake my head at his low cunning.

  ‘You might as well tell me now.’

  ‘Well, ah … We’re planning to go to Everest in the spring.’

  Liz lets go his arm for the first time since we landed in the UK. ‘Oh no you’re not,’ she says firmly.

  ‘I think I can get a permit for the North-East Ridge of Everest, but I’ll only go if you lads think it’s on and will come.’

  Jon Tinker and Sandy Allan look at each other. They’ve just returned to London after the Mustagh Tower trip and found a message in Jon’s parents’ kitchen saying ‘Phone Malcolm’. So they have, and this is what they get.

  ‘Duff, you’re … crazy!’ Sandy says. A chuckle from the other end of the line. ‘Jon and I will think about it and phone you back.’

  They do. ‘We’re coming, but neither of us have any money.’

  ‘That’s alright. On this size of trip we either get complete sponsorship or else we can’t go.’

  Sandy puts the phone down. When he’d seen the message some premonition had told him it would be Everest. But the ‘Unclimbed Ridge’ – ! – Jon shakes his head, laughs, ‘Duff is mountaineering’s answer to Malcolm MacLaren. Or Bonnie Prince Charlie …’

  A fantasy, yes. The North-East Ridge, China, Tibet … Malcolm is dreaming and scheming again as he puts down the pints, his right knee jumping restlessly, pulling on another cigarette. He’s a dietician’s nightmare: fuelled on constant coffee, sugar, lager, cigarettes and fast-foods, he has the nerve to be healthy. He is the most dangerous kind of dreamer – one who acts with absolute commitment as though his dreams were already fact, and thus sometimes makes them so. The Mustagh Tower had been a dream ever since as a teenager he’d read Tom Patey’s account of its classic first ascent; he’d planned it, froze and sweated and suffered and climbed till he finally stood on the top, one foot in Pakistan and the other in China. I have a very real chunk of summit rock in my desk drawer to remind me of the power of fantasy.

  Mal, Jon and Sandy: they were the core of this latest ploy. They’d shared the Mustagh Tower experience and on the back of that felt ready for something bigger. Maybe one of the great 8,000 metre peaks … But Everest! Perhaps it had come too early, but they couldn’t pass up on the chance. The three of them debated the feasibility and basic strategy of the expedition; their nominations of additional climbers reflected their very different natures, and were to determine the nature of the entire party.

  ‘There was smiling Sandy Allan, that amiable Hieland honey-bear …’ Sandy with the pale, washed-out blue eyes, often obscured by thin reddish-blond hair falling over his forehead. Strongly built, solid with shoulder and arm muscles built up from rough-necking on North Sea oil rigs, which financed his climbing, he seems to be bigger than he actually is. A casual bear, giving the impression of great strength and stamina held in reserve.

  He’d been brought up among the distilling glens of Scotland and as a child spent more and more time wandering among the Cairngorms, finding some kind of backdrop there for his restless thoughts. After doing one Scottish winter route, he’d briefly taken one of Mal’s Alpine climbing courses. ‘It was totally obvious that this youth could become a star,’ Mal said. ‘Immensely strong, persistent, the right sort of temperament, always in control – a natural.’

  Sandy found his natural expression in snow/ice climbing. At 25 he finally gave up his job as a trainee distillery manager for the hand-to-mouth existence of the dedicated climber. There followed the customary apprenticeship: Scotland, the Alps in summer, the Alps in winter, some notable ascents, then Nuptse West Ridge with Mal, then the Mustagh Tower.

  ‘Sandy just grins,’ Mal had said to me before Mustagh, ‘you’ll find him easy to get on with.’ Well, yes, but during the trip and in his diaries afterwards, I found a very different inner man behind that amiable exterior:

  Sandy … One look into Jhaved’s eyes and he knows what I want. One straight hit with my axe and I find a good ice placement. C’est la vie, Dominique would say. Don’t worry, Sandy, she’d say. They’ll never know you or what you’ve done.

  I fade away to wash by the stream. It’s good to wash the sweat of the hill away, and I watch the dirty soapy water. What right have I to pollute the water here? But it soon turns clear. What
right have we to hold opinions? Every right, I say to myself, and then I say if we have the right to opinions, do we have a right to put them to other people to try and change their views? Do we have a right to build a small dam in the stream to make a convenient washing place, it’s OK for us but by what RIGHT? And Jon says, every right. He’s an opinion holder …

  And climbing is not so important to me, it’s more the way I feel, the way I react, the language I speak and the words I scribe, the mess that I leave behind, the way that I eat my food … These suit my feelings.

  Smiling Sandy Allan indeed! I was astonished that Mal could have shared two expeditions with Sandy and know nothing of his inner nature. Yet the signs were there: his keeping a journal at all times, his inability to stay in one place for more than a few days, the way his glance focuses only briefly on the person he’s talking to. In all our Mustagh photos he is always slightly blurred as if just about to move away, eyes averted or obscured by his hand or his hair.

  ‘We had to have Jon Tinker, that abrasive Cockney Rasta-man …’ Jon was Sandy’s partner on the Mustagh Tower, but they are very different. He’s a blue-eyed, fair-haired, compact Anglo-Saxon; edgy, alert, intelligent, one of life’s stirrers. I picture him lounging back, exaggeratedly relaxed, hands stuffed in his pockets, obscure reggae dubs on his stereo, while he protests vigorously in his quasi-Cockney accent how lazy and uncompetitive he is. A master of giving stress, of sarcasm, of winding people up. We could never really understand why he tended to treat encounters as a form of verbal arm-wrestling, always looking for the upper hand – and at other times be disarmingly thoughtful, enthusiastic and open. When one has had enough of climbing talk, Jon is a good person for general conversation about music, books, politics, ideas. He is determined not to let climbing be his entire life, though it often seems to be. I came to like him a lot during and after the Mustagh trip. You can say this for Jon, he’s a little fire-cracker; you have to be wide awake when he’s around.