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
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
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
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