It’s very much a participation game and the porters come alive, greeting every move with raucous shouts, jeers, groans and laughter. I’ve rarely seen so many people having such a good time for so long. It’s quite depressing really, and brings on a prolonged bout of coughing.
We eat early, sitting on wool-covered benches round a rectangular table that is usually heated from beneath by a kerosene stove, but it isn’t working tonight. Freshly made Gurung bread, thick, yet light and filling, then anodyne vegetable noodle soup and fried rice. The staple diet of the mountains is dal baht, lentils and rice, but our cooks seem unwilling to offer us this and instead try manfully to provide us with what they think Westerners want.
The night is cold. I take Nurofen and hope that it will help me sleep. It knocks me out for two-hour periods, tames the coughing but provides little relief from an increasingly angry, sore throat. One word repeats itself in my disordered dreams. Descend! Descend! Descend!
Day Fifty Two : Derali to Machhapuchhre Base Camp
At breakfast Wongchu asks me how I am. I give him quite a detailed progress report on cold, cough, sandpaper-like throat and general collapse of system.
He ponders this in a Harley Street sort of way, before narrowing his eyes like Sherlock Holmes confronted with a new and unexpected clue.
‘You have beer last night?’
I try to cast my mind back.
‘A little.’
Wongchu nods gravely.
‘No beer.’
The sun is still out of reach, setting fire to the crests of the mountains, but still a long way from delivering us from this bitter morning chill. We fall to reminiscing about the good old days in the heart of the Sahara desert.
The porters, so ebulliently happy yesterday afternoon, are quiet and subdued. They crouch, huddled together for warmth, waiting to be called out, helped on with their baskets and sent on their way. They’re Tamang people from Loswa district close to Kathmandu, all of them slight and wiry, as if honed down to the lowest body weight for the work they have to do. They will be paid $8 for each day on the mountain.
Though we have only about 1000 feet (300 m) to climb today, the path rises and falls in a frustrating switchback.
I’ve given up saying ‘Namaste’ to everyone who passes, but I’m momentarily cheered when I plod up to the top of yet another stone staircase and come level with two middle-aged American ladies. I see a look of recognition on one of their faces and hear a gasp of excitement as I pass.
‘Oh, my God!’
I nod appreciatively, straighten my back and move on.
‘It’s Eric Idle!’
This precipitates serious psychological collapse. A half-hour later, exhausted by the pain of swallowing and the increasing effort required to pull in oxygen at this height, I finally yield my backpack to Wongchu. He takes it with a quiet smile, as if accepting the surrender of a garrison after a long siege.
Shedding the weight doesn’t make things any better. Whereas I was out in front with the leaders yesterday, I can only watch the gap between us widen as they disappear ahead and leave me leaning on my climbing pole, heaving for breath, Nawang and Wongchu standing solicitously by.
Stagger into Machhapuchhre Base Camp around lunchtime. It’s a much more open, jollier place than last night’s guesthouse, full of infuriatingly happy campers sitting outside their tents, spraying each other with a water hose, hanging clothes on washing lines and generally having the time of their lives.
Even the majestic scenery - shapely Fish Tail and chunky Annapurna - fails to lift my spirits. I feel completely busted. The merest movement, to take food, to peel off a coat, to unpack an overnight bag, requires major physical effort. After a cup of garlic soup I decide there is nothing to do but take to my bed. Because of my condition, I’m upgraded from tent to room. It’s standard mountain lodge accommodation, a stone-walled cell, eight foot by ten foot, with a flagged floor that traps the cold and damp like a cheese store, and a wooden bed frame on which is a thin mattress and a pillow. There is not much else to do but turn my back on one of the finest mountain panoramas in the world and climb, fully dressed, into my sleeping bag until whatever it is passes.
‘You eat,’ orders Wongchu when I surface a few hours later. ‘Need food. ‘
No-one else says anything. I think I must frighten the crew a bit. They’ve never seen me quite like this: glum and unresponsive.
Force down some garlic soup, enlivened with shards of spring onion and green pepper. My neck and forehead are feverishly hot, and once I’ve finished, all I want to do is to go back to bed. Wongchu and Nawang deal with me most tenderly. Despite all my protestations, they prepare a bowl of steaming inhalant and insist I use it. Nawang gets fresh hot water from the cooks and helps me bathe my feet. Then they guide me into my sleeping bag, with Wongchu applying massage as I go. I feel rather as if I’m being laid out, and I must say at this moment the Grim Reaper would not be an unwelcome visitor.
Wongchu wants one of the Sherpas to come and sit with me through the night, but I dissuade him, and, watched over by an inanimate but impressive array of tablets, tissues, ointments, creams and sprays, I close my eyes and wait.
Day Fifty Three : to Annapurna Base Camp
I wake up, wrenched from sleep by some chest-wracking cough, and am seized by near panic. Everything is pitch black, silent and cold as ice. I have no sensation of where I am. Perhaps Nawang and Wongchu have found me a flotation tank. I scrabble around for my head-torch, sending a bottle of pills clattering across the hard stone floor. For a few minutes I simply lie there, staring up at a circle of slatted, paint-peeling board above me and waiting for my heart to slow down.
All sorts of things go through my mind. The one thing I can’t dismiss is that I might have to think the unthinkable. That, for the first time in any of my journeys, I may have to face the possibility of failure. I’m 60, after all, and there has to be a point at which the body puts its foot down, as it were.
For a depressing hour or so I can’t escape this profound feeling of being defeated, physically and mentally, by the Himalaya.
When I next wake, though there is absolutely no physical sign of time passing, I know, even before I search for my torch, that I’ve been out for a while. And in that time some sea change has taken place. I’m no longer hot and feverish, and the sense of survival seems stronger than the sense of doom.
With some effort I pull myself up and take sips of hot water from the thermos Nawang insisted I keep beside me. It’s four o’clock in the morning and as sure as I was three hours ago that I wouldn’t make it, I know now that there can be no question of turning back.
This morning, I feel I’m emerging from hibernation. Last night was winter and this is spring.
I leave the camp, with Nawang and Wongchu, climbing due west. The snowfields of the Annapurna Himal lie dead ahead, shining and brilliant in the rising sun. It’s an adventurous morning’s filming too, off the main track and clambering very slowly through the thick grass, with the camera catching our silhouettes against the hard glare of the mountains.
Nawang stays beside me all the way, making sure I take regular slugs of water. Wongchu, who, reassuringly, seems to think I no longer need his personal supervision, walks ahead, looking like Geronimo and pausing occasionally to chat to some descending female trekker, preferably Swiss or Austrian. These encounters really seem to cheer him up, as well as making up for my dawdling.