ROLE OF SHERPAS ON EVEREST

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27071, 20 June 1953, Page 9

ROLE OF SHERPAS ON EVEREST

Key Men In Successive Expeditions CHARACTER FLAVOURS EACH ENTERPRISE tßy arrangement with "The Times"—Copyright) tThe following article was written, before the successful Brt tish assault .Many remarkable Englishmen have pitted their souls against Everest; and in its high places “some have Chanced win P g C of U Truth.” he gr ° Und ’ one white silver feather from the

Eut though the presence of men of mystical vision has surrounded some of these harsh adventures with a spFritml aura, the key figure in each successive Everest expedition the man whose character most thoroughly flavours eadi enterprise, is one whose only instincts are worldly and who regards

For many years men of the Sherpa race, who come from the district of Khumbu, in north-eastern Nepal, have earned their living in part or in full by working as porters and sirdars for foreign expeditions in many parts of the Himalayas. The climbers of these expeditions rely upon their Sherpas for most of the mundane necessaries of life in the hills—for the erection of tents and the cooking of food, the mending of clothes and the carrying of goods and messages. On Everest and the other great mountains of the range. Sherpa duties include the carriage of stores to high altitudes. In return for these varied services Sherpa porters are normally paid the equivalent of 3s 6d a day plus their food. The Sherpas, a hardy hill race of Tibetan stock, are tough, intelligent, friendly, and brave. There are innumerable stories of their courage and loyalty on expeditions, their indomitable good humour in adversity. But a man can best be judged at home, and it is only in the last three years—since Mr Oscar Houston’s party visited Khumbu in 1950—that foreigners have had the opportunity to see the Sherpa in his home country. Many of the Sherpas who work with European expeditions are men who have settled in Darjeeling, a principal base for expeditions. who have long adapted themselves to the European and his ways, and who may wear European clothes. “One of Nature’s Gentlemen” Such-a man is Tensing Bhotia, who is sirdar of the present expedition (his sixth Everest attempt). Tensing is a man of some education, is currently wearing well-cut Swiss climbing clothes and reindeer fur boots, and is obviously and indisputably one of Nature’s gentlemen. He, has an inborn ease and elegance that would cause, a flutter in many a London drawingroom. In spite of his international fame, and although before the final assault he had climber higher than any of the sahibs of the expedition. he throughout retained his modesty and was as willing to help in the menial tasks of camp life as to share the fiercest dangers of Everest’s summit.

But it would be unwise indeed to judge the Sherpa race altogether by the example of Tensing and his splendid kind. The chief characteristic that is likely to strike an observer meeting the Sherpa on his home ground, away from the influence of Europeans and the call of the high mountains to duty and fidelity, is his rock-like insensibility. This is no doubt the result partly of his hard hand-to-mouth existence. partly of the isolated position of his homeland on the mountain frontiers of Tibet. Most Shernas live in villages on or above the 10,000 ft mark, and they earn their living by trading over the lofty pass of the Nangpa La into Tibet. They breed yaks, moving their homes from season to season, up and down the mountain valleys, according to the demands of grazing and crops. They are mountaineers by birth and calling, hard ened by the rigours of upland living; and for most of their lives they have seen no foreigners—an occasional Indian, perhaps. certainly travellers from the plains of Nepal, but nobody with a white skin. Their shuttered and anachronistic way of life has given the Sherpas a sturdy independence; it has also per-

haps fostered a certain grotesque heartiness that seems especially assertive, no doubt because of an innate sense of self-protection, when there are Europeans in the offing. This characteristic is almost exemplified in the appearance of the average Sherpa villager. He is not a big man—sft 6in or so is probably the normal height—but he is broad and weathered-looking, rather like a Toby jug. His face is brown, but no more than a sunburnt Neapolitan’s,, and is of a slightly Mongolian cast. Devout Buddhists He wears a kind of shirt over breeches and high, embroidered Tibetan boots of wool and leather. His overcoat is of thick brown wool, and he often wears it slung around his middle like a bath towel. Round, his neck he probably carries an amulet stuffed with -written prayers—most Sherpas are devout Buddhists—and on his head he may have a round Tibetan hat, gold-coloured cloth for the crown, fur for the peak. At his back falls a long black pigtail, perhaps artificially lengthened with hairs from a yak’s tail. All in all, his appearance is Quaint yet functional, and somehow notably expressive of ruggedness, the broadest of humour, and rough beer. For chang (beer) and rakhsi (rice spirit) are undoubtedly the chief everyday pleasures of the Sherpas of| Khumbu. On the march in the val-< leys there are frequent halts for chang, j which in these parts is a glutinous Bemi-iiq U id nk e alcoholic porridge. In the evening the rakhsi pot passes fast and frequent, and is inclined to make the Sherpa even more insensible than* Hsual to those personal delicacies that most sahibs try to uphold even in a, high-altitude tent. for example, is an abstract

*Pparently quite outside the Khumbu Sherpa’s conception of affairs. The Englishman sitting in his tent on a f&nalayan hillside, reading perhaps (as is customary) the “Oxford Book Greek Verse,” will often find himintimately hemmed in by a ring Sherpas, men and women, crones infants, not in the least reticent m their comments or self-conscious ® their detailed attentions. At the Present expedition’s rear base camp at Inyangboche recently this correspondent was only mildly surprised to his reading spectacles being tried for size and focus by an aged lama jrom the nearby monastery. A few days } at€ ' r he was forcibly joined inside his rent by three unprepossessing hillmen |®xious to hear, on the radio, Mr Brain playing the most gracenu of horn concertos; flattering, perRPSf even to that distinguished artist, jut destructive of the Mozartian atmosphere.

Women’s Bizarre Attraction »this matter of insensitiveness ®nerpa women, especially middle-aged th? 8 ’ can k e terrible. Like the men, women of Khumbu wear a cosrnr e designed for work, but not witharf ? bizarre attraction. Their skirts **s long and generally of a drab colbut over them they wear gailyloured aprons, and beneath can be the rough but cheerful flower em°t Tibetan boots. On their * bey sometimes wear the same an bats as their husbands; somea “jelly-bag” hat of the kind that in London (or was when expedition left England); somea pretty little folded square of vaguely Dutch appearance. Some thw sn wear small black patches on to foreheads, like beauty patches, ward away the headache. bahi 611 tbey ar e young, perhaps with JeB slung on their backs in oblong

I m X< ? <® nd entirely obliterated with ■ blankets), these women can have a touching fragility and diffidence. : Thirty years later, only too often, all . is lost. Harsh of voice and morals, like screech-owls, the Sherpa women I ea S ° ther thr °ugh the camp, ; till the mild heart rebels and shouts ' * m P r ®p a ti° ns - But they are as imperturbable as their men, and generally come back for more. Indeed, among themselves quietude and seclusion seem almost unknown, ine Sherpas live in well-constructed stone houses, decorated with unambitious wood carvings, and with oblong, wooden-framed windows. The ground is used as a storehouse. Upstairs, at the top of a dark and rickety staircase (mounted by the Sherpa disconcertingly fast and by the sahib embarrassingly slowly) is the principal room of the house. It is dimly lit, but pleasantly warm from an open fire of yak dung, the smoke of which can sometimes be seen from the outside emerging through cracks in the timber like steam from a Finnish bathhouse. Around the walls of this long room ar ® bowls of chang and water, eating and cooking implements, and various obscure instruments of hospitality; and sitting on the floor of it, or on low benches and carpets, there is more than likely to be a cdnsiderable number of people. Some may be family; some neighbours; some travellers, passing through; some friends; but all seem free to use the house as their own, and appear to handle the baby with equal facility. And in such company even the most exasperated of European visitors, madened by the persistence of Sherpa curiosity and obtrusiveness, cannot but a little to the glorious invulnerability of the race. The man he has been rudest to in the courtyard will be the first to offer him chang. The woman with the ghastliest voice of all win be roasting potatoes for him at the fire. Later, in the high mountains, he •will have cause again to bear with the boorishness of this unusual 3*k® re » alter a minimum of

quibbling, the porter from Khumbu will shoulder his load with a grin and stride manfully off into the heights, through snow or blizzard, tentless but undaunted; and the middle-aged harridan will hitch up her skirts (as our g'eat-grandmothers did on Mont lane), lift her 601 b burden (as our great-grandmothers decidedly did not), and follow him into the glaciers as swiftly and as resolutely. In the coldest and bleakest places the sahib will find a steaming cup of tea awaiting him or a plate of hot roast gotatoes with butter. Sometimes his herpa cook will have acquired and roasted a chicken, and sometimes he wJI have picked edible bracken in the valleys and will serve it as an unexpected second vegetable. This correspondent’s personal servant recently presented him with an elaborate dish . of stewed yak decoratively embedded i in a mound of mash potato. It was excellent.

Constant Demand for Services All these services and qualities, with determination and physical characteristics that enable the Sherpa to climb to extreme altitudes, mean that there is a constant demand for Sherpa porters to accompany Himalayan expeditions. This is especially true now that foreigners are no longer so rigidly excluded from Nepal. The Sherpas are aware of the strength of this demand, and their charges are higher than they used to be; because of growing contact with Europeans they are becoming rather more aware and jealous <• ’ their rights. The porters of this expedition, for instance, are economically coherent enough to have insisted that the equipment issued to them for the climb should remain their property afterwards, as has previously been the practice. Among climbers there is a natural and genuine desire to keep the Sherpas as happy as possible; and many English mouiitaineers have established personal friendships (rather of the squire-rCTainer category) with their Sherpa attendants. For though he can be brutally irritating, dirty and insensitive, coarsefibred and too fond of drink, the Sherpa has an element of rude and genial bigness about him, like an elephant or a railway engine, and an endearing capacity to endure all so long as he is reasonably paid. The sensitive sahib of Everest, Shelley in one hand, toothbrush in the other, is for ever in the position of saying: “For goodness sake stop that infernal—oh, er, thank you Sonam; what a delightful cup of tea.” —Copyright.