Читать книгу Between the Sunset and the Sea: A View of 16 British Mountains - Simon Ingram - Страница 17

From a ceiling beam in the bar of the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel a row of walking boots hang by their laces like dangling feet from a line of gallows. Some are very old: the hobnail type, collapsed and discoloured, their soles stiff with age.

This place is part hotel, part museum, part tomb. The walls are panelled with dark wood, and many are hung heavy with mountaineering memorabilia. Facing you as you sit sipping a pint of dark beer in the lounge is a cabinet filled with yellow tanks the size of marrows, each emblazoned with a Union flag. To the first men who climbed Kangchenjunga – third-highest mountain in the world – in 1955, these prevented them succumbing to sickness in the thin air, filled with life-bearing oxygen to top up the deficit burgled by altitude. Behind you hangs a photograph of Mount Everest’s first ascenders Edmund Hillary and his friend Tenzing Norgay. Tenzing’s skin is crisped and blackened by sun and dirt, and both of them sit drinking lemonade from tin mugs. One of those mugs is displayed in a cabinet in the next room, alongside the white rope that tied the pair together on their ascent of the mountain and fragments of rock carried from the highest place on earth. Also present are the many signatures of mountaineers old and new who have made a solemn stop at the isolated hotel – crouched on the corner of the Pass of Llanberis in Snowdon’s north-east shadow – to be in the presence of the ghosts who made that remarkable journey to the highest point on the world.

Legend has it that when news of the successful ascent of 29 May finally reached the hotel at 1 a.m. on 2 June 1953, the owner announced that any guest not in the bar with a glass of champagne in their hand in ten minutes would be thrown out the following morning. It describes itself as a ‘mountaineers’ hotel … which is a haven from the relentless grind of modernity’. You can well believe it.

A line of pictures runs along the northern wall of the ‘smoke room’; a group, pictured in the same place year after year – outside the door, just there. A sudden lurch into colour in the mid-sixties is followed by increasingly modern clothes, shrinking hair and steadily diminishing numbers. They were all here, that first summit team; they trained on the mountains nearby for the expedition that would carve itself into mountaineering history like no other. And year after year, back they came. The tall, wild-looking one with the big grin; his name would be the one people would remember most, although it was the summit photograph of his partner – diminutive, smiling – that people would see, axe aloft, flags straightened by the jet stream, the harsh tones of snow and space, and him, bridging them with his iconic pose. It was a long way for Tenzing to come back to Snowdonia from Darjeeling. But he still came back when he could.

They’re all gone now, this climbing team. The last one, George Lowe, died in 2013. It’s over 60 years since those vital young mountaineers first gathered here at the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel, warming themselves from the savage air of the Snowdonian winter, to eat and be merry before tramping off to the frigid climbing huts where they slept.

Some would say the mountain they climbed has gone, too – or at the very least plundered beyond recognition. In 1953 Mount Everest was the Third Pole, the realm of elite, trusted, specially selected adventurers. Today it can be had for money. Base Camp is now a small town, people step over the dead and the dying as they climb for the summit on fixed ropes, children have climbed it, and all have witnessed its troubling mix of horror and glory. It’s perhaps understandable the Pen-y-Gwryd Hotel does its best to cling to the atmosphere of a seemingly more honourable time when such things remained an inconceivable dystopia. Then mountaineering was truly steps upwards into the unknown, and all you had or needed were those you were with, and the collective will to try.