– Dawa Tensing’s Hat –

‘The snow was as deep as a man’s hips that year,’ says Dawa Tensing and stands up to give an idea of how they had had to break trail every day. Gesticulating with his hands, he bends the upper half of his body forward and takes a few steps as if he is pushing masses of snow away from his feet. His movements run down like clockwork. He knows what it means to climb at 8,000 metres without oxygen, to prepare a trail and to hump heavy loads. He has seen it all. He was there in 1924 when Norton attempted to climb Everest without oxygen.

At that time he had been one of the high-level porters. He was born sometime in the last century; he doesn’t know how old he is. Today he lives in the Solo Khumbu. Everest and Ama Dablam are visible over the gable of his house.

The ankle-deep spring snow hurts my eyes as I come down out of the two-storey mud house into Dawa Tensing’s small back yard. That is all he has left now. His fields in Khumjung, where he grew up, he has given to his children. He lives here close to the Thyangboche Monastery so that he can pray, look out at Everest and remember the old days. It hasn’t always been easy, his life, but it has been exciting. And as he stands talking before me with his hands, his feet and above all his twinkling eyes behind their narrow slits, the images tumble back. He has accompanied more than thirty expeditions and been several times to Everest. In 1953 he was there, under John Hunt, when the South Col route was first climbed. His face looks as if it has been chiselled from granite. He has a single tooth in his upper jaw which fits neatly into a gap in the lower. His white beard is sparse and his grey hair drawn into a knot. He wears colourful Sherpa dress, woven shoes, and as an extra – who knows from what expedition – a pair of ladies trousers.

A great number of letters and pictures are piled around his house, but they are unimportant to him. In his mind the expeditions have all merged together and he does not distinguish any particular year and any expedition leader. But he does remember individual instances and elaborates in minute detail – standing up and going step-by-step through his garden – what it is like to be at 8,000 metres or more. I could tell at once that this is a deeply-ingrained experience. He says we shall have to force ourselves to eat up there.

‘Yes, at altitude it is important to eat even if you don’t feel like it – and above all, to drink. But there’s no water and you mustn’t suck snow.’

Tsampa is what we should eat, he tells me, and for drink, tea – lots and lots of tea.

‘What was it like on the North side, the Tibetan side that time?’

‘Mallory and Irvine didn’t come back.’

‘Why, do you think?’

‘They kept climbing up in deep snow and didn’t come down again.’ Pause. ‘The wind will have got them, the wind.’

I want to know if he thinks they reached the summit or not. He shrugs his shoulders. To Dawa Tensing it is not so important whether they got up or not. They disappeared, that was the important thing.

‘It will have been the wind that got them,’ he repeats.

I ask him hesitantly what he thinks of our chances of climbing Everest without oxygen, whether indeed it is possible or not.

‘Yes, it must be possible. I have often been to the highest camps without it, and I have spent weeks on the South Col. All the other Sherpas and Sahibs were in bad shape after a few days up there, they were sick – couldn’t go any further – came down very shaky.’

The big prayer wheel in his smoky living room is turned