Читать книгу Kingdoms Of Experience - Andrew Greig - Страница 6

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