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Chapter One

Keep a careful watch for the missing party -- they may be anywhere on route. Watch out for tracks leading away from the route. Mark the route taken and leave evidence of passing with flags, cairns etc. and notes left in obvious locations indicating your intentions and time of passage. The lost party might miss you by hours or even minutes, or pass by in poor visibility.

From a government manual for Antarctic operations

Captain Scott was an absentee, officially buried at sea. In the lore he's still hauling, following the calling, and that's how he remains, famously. He's still out there, and that was something Peter Scott always knew for sure. Captain Scott never got to see how his baby son turned out, and he turned out fine, Sir Peter, by all accounts a decent and kindly gent. Captain Robert Scott never knew a conversation with the boy or the man, and his son had to make do with the history books and the legend and what the family told him and what everybody else had to say about him. Later there were terrible things said about "the Captain," as his men had called him, and worse when the son was an old man, twice as old as his father when the Captain lay down in his sleeping bag for the last time.

A year after, a search party found his father in his sleeping bag and later some of them talked to Peter Scott. Some of them visited the family home when he was still small, and he picked up a few new things about his father with the visits and the talks, but he'd read the party's story by the time any of them really talked about it.

The party that found him a year after, they found him with two others only, and not the five that had gone to the South Pole, because two had already died. The first one was buried deep south, on the glacier, and the other one not buried by his fellows, because he'd walked out just a few days south of where everything finally stopped, and the three remaining had no enthusiasm for anything but a quick look around, no great sense of purpose in doing anything but leaving their man wherever he'd taken himself to be buried by the drift that buried everything that lay down, and so just the three found side by side in the tent that had to be dug out of the drift.

The men in the party went in one by one before the tent was collapsed over the dead, and the living said their prayers as the drift pasted the tent and turned it white again. It goes that none of them ever said out loud how Scott and the others looked at the end of it, and at least one man later lost his mind from the burden of seeing it: the color of the freeze dried faces, the matchstick mummified arms, the long unfelt agonies of scurvy and starvation and fear and flesh frozen, and frozen rotting inside and out, and all that had twisted their spines and their features for a long time, and that's how they'd remained.

There was no "they looked so peaceful," there was no bringing them home, no flag wrapped coffin for the Captain. He's still out there. That's why they call him "Scott of the Antarctic," surely. Because he's still out there.

It's less well remembered as folklore that the Captain's rival Roald Amundsen also died in his adventure clothes, that he was still out there, at the opposite end of the world from Scott's remains, under the ice in the Arctic, probably still sitting in the plane that went down at a point vaguely known while searching for a missing explorer who was eventually rescued by other people, disappearing June eighteen, nineteen twenty-eight. He was fifty-six years old. It was a marvelous story that lingered more as a fabled postscript because it was at odds with the core of his legend, his place in things, in part because many people believed Amundsen would find his way home, because he always made it home from the worst places with such predictability that he had ceased to amaze.

He knew it. His place in things was already fixed in their minds. He'd had his time. The polite applause of his later years had clanged in his ears, in tune with the haunted depression that put Amundsen out of sorts with himself and with his fickle countrymen. There were no great journeys left to him, not as he saw it, and none in the public eye. As his story went, there was nothing left, save dying and rolling into the open grave of the history books, where the greater part of his story had already been told. There was the wave of grief when he vanished, the speeches, the talk that he'd be back. But dust drops. For a while Amundsen was known as the White Eagle of Norway, at home, here and there, not said in every household, these days hardly known at all.

This was Amundsen the Norwegian, who got his four men to the South Pole and home again with none of them losing their feet or their minds or even much weight; the first to reach the southern point of the world's turning, a month and two days before Scott and his men made their wretched visit. He was the one. For Amundsen, an absentee complete who knew no great engagement with the regular life, there was no other life.

The house he built in the forest was fitted to look like the inside of a ship so he could dream he was going somewhere else. And so it was with his love life, discovered in middle age and kept as a mysterious adventure, to be taken occasionally as a private pilgrimage into little known country. Apart from a stretch where he talked of marrying a woman who was already married to someone else, the mysterious adventures were taken on the restorative trampoline of affectionate whoring. Perhaps it didn't happen that often because he was always in the deep debt that worried him between expeditions and sometimes worried him when he was out there, probably the only thing from the regular life that hung on him when he was out there.

Roald Amundsen was also known as the Captain to his men: the first man to navigate the fabled Northwest Passage, most likely the first man to see the North Pole (from an airship), the first man to the South Pole, who vanished heroically when there was already too much to remember him by, one of the greats, with no mythic slogan to remember him by.

Amundsen took dogs to the deepest south, touching there December fifteen, nineteen eleven. Scott and his men walked to the bottom of the world, all tied to the one big sled, finding disappointment and taking second place on January seventeen, nineteen twelve.

Third place wasn't bagged for another forty-six years, until the southern summer of nineteen fifty-eight, taken by a man driving a farm tractor, my father, Ed Hillary, "Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest," as he was most often named in the newspapers.

It was probably at school, when I studied him as part of our national history, when I learned that Dad's trip to the South Pole had been pretty controversial at the time.

Ed Hillary was never meant to go to the South Pole. Rather, he was under orders not to go there. He was meant to play a support role only, out of the limelight, no trophy. But from the start he planned for it, stocking his tractors with enough food and fuel to take him all the way, Ed and his four men, the team he always called "the Old Firm." They didn't know they were going for it, the Old Firm. He didn't tell them until they were seven hundred miles out. As he later wrote, "I had my own agenda."

It is one of his great stories.

Ed Hillary's push for the Pole rattled international politics and made headlines, because it played out as a willful duel between Hillary and a British Antarctic veteran of the old school, Dr. Vivian Fuchs. They were part of the same expedition, an epic science project known as the British Trans-Antarctic Expedition of fifty-seven to fifty-eight.

It was the first crossing of the emptiest continent. In fact, it was the expedition's science work drilling into the ice for samples every thirty miles and doing seismic shots that confirmed that Antarctica was indeed a continent. And not an ice covered archipelago.

Fuchs was the overall leader of the trip. Fuchs was the one. Fuchs was going all the way, from the western (or Atlantic) side to the eastern (or Pacific) side, with a team of big Sno-Cats, touching the Pole on his way through, thereby bagging not just the first crossing but also the first overland haul to the Pole in a motor vehicle.

This was the British finally making their mark in Antarctica with something more than corpses. They were still sulking over Scott's defeat at the Pole by the bloody Norwegians.

Well, it wasn't going to happen again, what?

Ed Hillary would be of great use, and he would keep his place, somewhere way off to the side. Leading the antipodean arm of the enterprise, Hillary was given the vital job of laying a trail of fuel depots from the eastern side, with a caravan of Massey Ferguson farm tractors, the kind built for plowing potatoes, modified for the deep sub zero.

By the time the Old Firm had laid all the depots, they were five hundred miles from the Pole, seven hundred miles from the roped down huts they called home on McMurdo Sound. On the day after Christmas nineteen fifty-seven, Ed Hillary issued a press release that went around the world: "Am hellbent for the Pole, God willing and crevasses permitting."

It caused quite a row, especially in the British press. They felt they were again being robbed of glory in the Antarctic. Dad knew the press would go wild with it, and I doubt it really bothered him. He'd long decided he wouldn't worry about the newspapers. He made his own decisions. He did things his way, and too jolly bad if it got up people's noses. That's my father for you. He uses the word "jolly."

They plowed on for several days, making good progress. Soon after, as the Old Firm were easing their tractors through crevassed country that nearly swallowed them whole on occasion, as they were edging south, Ed Hillary got an urgent message from Dr. Fuchs, who politely affirmed his order against proceeding, argued the point by listing various problems he'd been having with his vehicles, gave Hillary a few new things to keep busy with (clearing a crevasse field, laying another fuel depot just in case), declared his sympathy, said he knew it would be a "great disappointment," and no doubt hoped that would be the end of it.

For Hillary to stay camped on a howling spot of no historical or exploratory importance until Fuchs needed them was all a bit much. From a practical point of view, Hillary didn't like it: staying too long on the one spot, in the leeching cold, asking to be swallowed alive. The Americans hadn't long built their bunker base at the South Pole, with beds and hot food and an airstrip for an easier ride home. That was a better place to be. The Pole. It was...there. And he'd planned for it. So the Old Firm pushed on across the howling Polar Plateau toward the Pole.

It ended this way: after laying in more fuel than Fuchs ever needed, Ed Hillary's team stopped for the night within sight of a row of flags near the small U.S. base at the South Pole. It was January three, nineteen fifty-eight, and Peter Mulgrew sent a brief message back to Scott Base on the coast before crawling into his sleeping bag.

"Rhubarb." Then he switched off the set.

The next morning they arrived at the South Pole, on January four, the third to reach the place overland. After posing for photographs and shaking many hands, Hillary and the Old Firm were taken underground, into the American base, to warm up and eat and rest before flying back to base.

Two weeks and some later, Hillary flew back to the Pole to watch Vivian Fuchs pull in, January twenty. After offering his heartiest congratulations, Hillary flew back to Scott Base and rejoined Fuchs's party once they got to Depot 700. Perhaps Fuchs wanted to keep Hillary close, within an arm's length. So it turned: Sir Edmund rode back to McMurdo Sound from Depot 700 in the back of Vivian Fuchs' Sno-Cat, where there was no window, just a dark hole, left back there like a hunting dog.

Whenever the way ahead grew dangerous and uncertain, whenever they hit the long and deep cracks in the ice that could swallow tractors deep -- had swallowed them -- Ed Hillary was let out to wield his sextant and fix their position, or to walk in front like a hunting dog, to find the good way through and to home where they stood and smiled for the cameras, kept it polite. Soon after, Dr. Fuchs was knighted by his queen, and he made it into the encyclopedias as Sir Vivian.

So it all ended well. Everybody had their moment. Anyway, I didn't know about the commotion in the press at the time, or for some years later.

I had just turned two years old when Dad went down to the ice, and I was talking well as a three year old when I saw him again. I remember missing him. He was already famous when he drove to the South Pole, already one of the greats by the time I was born, my father, the last of the golden age. I didn't know what any of that meant, and I'm not sure either of us knows what to make of it now, but I believe that even then I was aware that people treated my father as something special. It's one of the things that I can always remember being there: people turning up at the door for an autograph and to have their photographs taken with him, and they always had the same look of awe on their faces that suggested they had just discovered the pyramids at Giza.

They certainly carried on like those tourists at the pyramids who suddenly believe they're archeologists and that they alone will unveil the secrets of the crypt.

"So, Sir Edmund...what was it like at the top of Mount Everest?"

They all wanted to hear him personally tell how it was on the top of the world, and at the bottom of the world and elsewhere if they'd kept up with his travels.

"So, Sir Edmund...I heard that you're going in search of the yeti."

It's been said that the Captain wanted the public love, that he would have enjoyed it. My father found it was like wearing a Santa Claus suit all the time. All the time.

With half his soul itching for adventure and the other half lit up by the regular life (the wife and the kids), with his social minglings long cursed with stiff shyness and the burden of good manners (much of the time), with a gift for understatement that sucked the life out of fanciful words like "excitement" and "danger," Ed Hillary wore the mantle of history book hero in the same way soap stars compliantly perform at shopping malls: with the understanding that walking flesh makes a poor substitute for the pictures people carry in their heads, that what people were looking for, when seeking an audience with an elevated soul, was a human unicorn. "So, Sir Edmund..."

The "Sir Edmund" business only made the scene feel more fraudulent. As the campfire story goes: Hillary got the news that he was to be knighted while walking downvalley from Everest Base Camp to Kathmandu, having just climbed the mountain on May twenty-nine, nineteen fifty-three.

When a runner brought him the letter addressed to "Sir Edmund," he groaned and joked he'd have to buy a new pair of overalls. He was a beekeeper, from New Zealand, considered then and probably now as the boondocks of the Western world. Everybody called him Ed. He never thought he looked like a knight, because knights then were generally Establishment sorts who smoked cigars and sat on company boards. Now many of them are fading rock stars.

If Ed Hillary looked like a knight of the realm, it was the old fashioned wild variety who traveled in a rough and ready fashion and clobbered anybody who besmirched his honor. For that's how he was.

This was Ed Hillary who walked barefoot to school as a small boy, in the boondocks south of Auckland. He wore shiny shoes later, with a blazer and tie, when he was sent up too early to the prestigious Auckland Grammar School, at eleven years of age, because the local school thought he was a genius.

He wasn't a genius. He was bright, but he was shy and too awkward to mix in with his classmates, who were two years older than he was. He struggled. The train ride to school was long, something like two hours. His days started in the dark; they ended in the dark. It was lonely as hell. But he had a lot of time to think and to read books and daydream, so he got lost in those things, which made it a happier time for him.

This was Ed who started out small and skinny, suddenly shooting up with puberty proper, gangly but filled out with muscles enough and a good reaching arm, clipping the ears of those who had bullied him, and there were train windows broken in the fights with the rowdy and the impudent on the long hauls home in the evenings before settling down for the familiar pleasures of staring out the window and thinking dreamy thoughts.

It stayed with Ed Hillary a long time, the old-fashioned thing of grabbing the people who soiled his honor or mood, his hard and fast sense of right and wrong, grabbing them by the collar and giving them a little righteous what-for, the righteous path dug long before in front of him by his mother, Gertrude, who considered book learning a state of grace unto itself, and Percival, his father, who believed in hard labor and holding to one's principles as something beyond discussion, no matter the cost.

It was his father the hard man who abandoned journalism on principle, with some drama, to keep bees and for whom Ed and his brother, Rex, had worked hard and for no pay as children and then later as men. It was his father who had softened in the evenings when they were small and had taken Ed, Rex, and sister June on his knee to tell them of a little man who lived in a tree stump at the bottom of the garden. The little man wasn't home very much, because he traveled the world and had adventures and did good things, and his name was Jimmy Job, named after Job, the Old Testament plaything of God and the devil who lost everything and kept his chin up regardless.

Dad did the same with his children (my younger sisters, Sarah and Belinda, and me) when we were small, taking us on his knee and telling us more about Jimmy Job than he ever said about Mount Everest. Whenever we asked him, "Who got up first? You or Tenzing?" he always said, "We got up together."

This was in the marvelous years, after he came home from the South Pole, when it was easier to slide into his awkward embrace.

Most adventurers, many of the greats, in their black and white photographs, in or out of their adventure clothes, don't look particularly heroic. In his canvas parka, the Captain looked like a schoolteacher dressed for a rainy day in the cheap seats at the football. At home, in his waistcoat and with his thinning hair slicked back, Scott looked like a butler. For a long time, to his children and his friends and the newspaper people, Ed Hillary looked the part of the history book hero: very tall and very strong, rough handsome with a long jaw and long cramped teeth, the happy cut lines of a rodeo rider.

He used to whistle cowboy songs. I used to look at him, from the vinyl bench in the back of the car I'd look at him, with his hair cut very short at the sides and the back, and on top he had these curls that fell over his big brow, and I could see he had this strength and confidence that I felt could never be challenged. But he's still out there, my father, in some ways as much a ghost as Roald Amundsen or the Captain, frozen not under the drift or in chilled waters, but in grief.

If you are interested in scars I can show you some very interesting ones but I would rather talk about grasshoppers.

Ernest Hemingway, "A Way You'll Never Be"

In the hill countries of India and Nepal, up where there were no tractors, and where the bottom of the world was beyond imaginings save those spawned from fear of the spirits that surely lived there, "the great Sir Hillary" was held as some kind of god and the shaping of folklore a competitive business.

Given that stories about gods and ordinary men were told with a great flexibility and invention, as works in progress, very few pieces of news were accepted as fact. From the start, the story of the great Sir Hillary's drive to the South Pole was passed on as a fairytale. No one ever believed it was true. But it was a great story.

The Sherpa people, claiming Hillary as a thread in their own mythology, especially embraced and embellished the adventure in their fireside raves until there were many versions of it, with monsters and beasts and much suffering, thereby making it true and not true and better than true.

It was among the Sherpa people that Ed Hillary found meaning in his own folkloric hero, Jimmy Job, the stump-dwelling adventurer who did good things in distant places. Soon after the polar trip, Ed Hillary started building schools and hospitals and airfields for the Sherpa people, because they asked him to do it. There was plenty to tell about those days.

From an early project: Ed Hillary and his team had no heavy machinery to flatten the sloping airstrip he and his team had dug out at Lukla, a village at nine thousand feet in the lower Khumbu (now the most popular dropoff point to the Everest region for trekkers and climbers). Instead of bulldozers, he used booze; enlisting a hundred sturdy locals, firing them up with plenty chung (the local home-brewed lubricant), lining them up in one long line, asking them to link arms and dance the stomping dance of fireside habit, for some hours, back and forth across the lumpy field.

Years later, in nineteen seventy-five, Ed Hillary was at another airfield that he had built south of the Everest area, at a village called Paphlu, where a new hospital was also being constructed, when he learned that his wife, Louise, and his daughter Belinda, sixteen years old, the lights of the family, the facilitators of all affection and social ease, had been killed in a plane that had crashed into a paddy field shortly after taking off from Kathmandu's airport. They had been coming to meet him, to spend some time in the hills with him. He flew down to see them lying in rags under smoke, and that was the end of the marvelous times.

It is undeniably the case that it was the end of Ed Hillary as we'd known him. With the death of my mother and little sister, he just disappeared. They'd lit the way for him. My mother had lit him up inside, and he'd become a much more jovial, confident and probably more outgoing person, at least in his own circle. It all went out like a light. I couldn't believe it, seeing him emptied out like that, just turned to a husk.

Oh, he still went to the hills. I went with him. Two years on, we went up the Ganges in these jetboats, and when we came into the Punjab, the hills were covered, for miles, with little red and orange dots. They were turbans. Hundreds of thousands of people chanting his name, and bidding that he live forever.

We went up the hills, and he nearly died with the altitude, and I remember sitting outside his tent, just weeping. He couldn't take the altitude anymore. He'd nearly died on three or four trips with the altitude, stumbling and slurring his words, unable to see properly or walk. And that's how he was in the tent, and all I could do was cry. It was too much. We wrapped him up in a sleeping bag and got him down to some sloping ledges where the following morning a helicopter took him out, but the scare didn't shake him out of his shadows.

We later went to the North Pole together, with Neil Armstrong the moon man, in little ski planes. It was a great trip, but he was still out there. He kept busy with the schools and hospitals, the dinners with presidents. That's the Hillary thing: we like to keep busy, and he did. He became an old man, but I never heard him whistle cowboy songs again. He didn't come back.

"What's going to happen, Dad?"

"I dunno."

It was only much later that Ed Hillary took any refuge in being one of the greats -- when he was an old man and tired after many years dodging darkness and forsaking his dreams for a sleep where there were no pictures. Presiding in state as the living legend was something done easily enough, even in his fickle weariness with the whole business, and on occasion it was enough to bring the rest of him out for a while.

There was an afternoon when he said, "I'm ancient now," at eighty-two, and he'd been sitting at the kitchen table signing a tall pile of photographs, "the picture that went around the world," of his climbing partner Tenzing Norgay Sherpa standing on the summit and waving his flags. Tenzing didn't know how to use a camera and Hillary didn't feel it was a good time for lessons. There is no photo of Ed Hillary at the top. (There are no photos of Neil Armstrong on the moon, either. Buzz Aldrin, the man who thought he'd be the first to step down the ladder and say some mythic words, left his camera behind with the craters.)

Ed Hillary put down his pen and quietly said "Right!" when Peter Hillary knocked on the door with two friends in tow and reminded him that they'd made a time to talk and have a cup of tea. He nodded and, half looking at his company, got out of his chair and went into the sitting room and sat with his back to the beautiful day on the harbor. This was when the South Pole trip was just another story that he could pick up in pieces and wave around in a tired and automatic fashion at first, and then came long moments when it was like a Christmas light sputtering to life and the wild man in the old photographs flashed across the face of the old man sitting in an armchair with a cup of tea in his lap.

A few steps away from where Ed Hillary was talking, on the wall of his study, there is a photograph of the Old Firm standing at the South Pole, Ed to the left of the four other men (Murray Ellis, Jim Bates, Peter Mulgrew, Derek Wright), all standing in a loose line at the South Pole in their goggles and heavy polar suits and boots, and they're all smiling and Ed looks almost naughty in his happiness, all of them cocky as rock stars, and a little in love with each other by way of shared experience.

They'd all been good mates on that trip. They had their moments, but they didn't fall apart as a team. I wish I could say the same about my trip south, taken forty years later, in ninety-eight. It became a controversial affair too, when it was all over, and for a while that's all the trip was about: one man's tantrum, really.

It wasn't the controversy that still gives the creeps to those who participated, because the three of us are still stuck in that traveling nuthouse, when we think of it, and deeper.

I know that it was the loneliest trip of my life. I know that the burning emptiness sucked on my mind and my emotions. Just pulled them out like cotton stuffing. That's the kind of place it is.

I know that the atmosphere in that tent with my companions became stranger and stranger, until it became nasty, alienating. We needed to be mates, like the Old Firm, and look after one another to get through that place in reasonable shape. But there is no happy photo of the three of us on my study wall.

Actually, there are photos of the three of them at the South Pole, and they are smiling with the cross-eyed bliss of people fresh from wreckage, of fishermen pulled from a sinking boat in rough seas, on the verge of tears and violence and collapse.

We went out to complete Captain Scott's journey, to the South Pole and back on foot, eighteen hundred miles, hauling everything we needed behind us, over a hundred days we figured. If we'd done the trip in the Captain's day, there would have been another tent out there with three people lying in it.

Maybe. Maybe not. One of the more disturbing things I thought about: the road to the Pole was a perfect place to commit homicide; one's body would never be found.

It made macabre contemplation, and I was able to flesh it out in my mind as a whodunit in the way I imagined a police inspector would reconstruct the crime. But it was unsettling, this sort of thinking, given the edgy emptiness in our little red tent, the volcanic gases.

By the time I started to feel that I couldn't completely rely on my companions -- that I didn't feel particularly safe with them -- I was already talking to the dead. More often than not, they were the only thing to see down there, all the dead friends from the hills, the only real company to be had, the dead friends in all their colors.

Fred, on Everest. Tripped and fell. I was there at the time.

Craig. Everest. Tripped and fell. There at the time.

Ken. Ama Dablam. Terrible head wound, most likely dead when we cut the rope.

Jeff. K2. In his sleeping bag. Yes, there too.

Bill. Makalu. Swept off and buried. We had to keep sounding upbeat in case he could hear us talking as we were poking the rubble for him.

Mark. Makalu. Tripped and fell. That's what the tracks said, yes.

Mike. Everest, a few years after one of our own attempts. Fell asleep while sitting down up high. Didn't wake up.

Rob. Everest. We climbed it together, for the first time together, five years before he died near the South Summit. Most famous for calling his pregnant wife from where he lay down. He told her not to worry too much.

Gary. Dead three years after we climbed Everest together with Rob. Dhaulagiri.

Peter. One of the Old Firm. Like an uncle to me. Plane crash, Antarctica.

My mother.

My sister.

The Captain.

Oh, and sometimes the wind made these gusting whimpers off a ski pole or a tent guy rope that made me think of Bruce's mother. I didn't actually see her or walk with her down there on the ice. But they made me think of Bruce's mother, on those occasions when she'd ask, "What happened up there? Was he trying to help the others?"

By the time these things came to mind, the dead friends on the march, tension in the tent, I'd already started carrying the stove and the bivvy sack, making sure I always had them in my sled. I wasn't going to be left for dead. And that's how things were on our trip, after about two weeks out.

When I talked to Dad about some of these...issues, he said, "Well, that's the way it goes sometimes."

Excerpted from In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge by Peter Hillary, John E. Elder
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

The Old Route
The Rope
The Hillary Step
Mother's Locket
Acknowledgments
References
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

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In the Ghost Country : A Lifetime Spent on the Edge

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