Chapter 59 postscript

Kill Ashley.The storm in Warsingham has nothing to do with the monsoon.That was a low-pressure disturbance that formed three weeks ago over the emerald waters of the Eastern Mediterranean. The storm traveled a long distance before hitting the expedition.It sailed east across the dry plateaus of northern Arabia; it crossed Afghanistan, brewing on the snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush and the passes of the Silk Road.It bypasses the tall K2 peak on the border of China and the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and continues southeast through the glacial fields of the Karakoram Mountains. Towards the end of May, the disturbance swept eastward toward the boundless Himalayas, drifting past the now-known Annapurna, Ama Dablam, and Makalu.None of these mountains have been climbed, not even by Europeans at all.The storm brought heavy snowfall and howling blizzards across the western Himalayas.On June 7, 1924, the storm's full force reached the northeast face of Mount Everest, in the self-proclaimed independent kingdom of Tibet.Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world.

On the same day, three hundred and eighty-five miles south from Mount Everest, at the Aripole Observatory in Calcutta, the resident meteorologist S. n.Dr. Senn went outside with a pencil and journal to record the afternoon temperature readings.The time is three fifty-four.The air was stuffy. Senn walked across the grass behind the observatory, dabbing the sweat from his neck and forehead with a linen handkerchief, looking skyward.The eastern sky has a few strands of fibrous cirrus clouds; the rest is clear blue. Senn's thoughts returned to the Asian monsoon.Every day, he would send a telegram to provide new information to the Everest Expedition, predicting the possible arrival date of the monsoon.It's difficult.For example, he had to consider the complex interactions between the Himalayas and African and equatorial air masses; the patterns of retrogression of those cyclones around the Bay of Bengal; and the paths of western disturbances through the subcontinent.One of those waves of spoilers should hit Everest soon.Senn studied the matter while eating lunch at his desk, and spread out all the morning weather telegrams in front of him. These were the data just transmitted from the ground and upper-air weather stations throughout the Himalayas.

June fourteenth.Senn murmured: Not sooner. Senn walked over to the Stevenson shuttered box that held the thermometer, a lacquered pine box with shuttered walls.He opened the padlock and squinted at the four thermometers inside, counting the tiny shifts between the black scales.It's ninety-one point two degrees Fahrenheit. At the Everest Expedition Base Camp at the bottom of the Rongbuk Glacier at an altitude of 18,190 feet, Dr. Hingston received the weather forecast at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, which was his daily routine.Hinston was the expedition's medical officer, but also a naturalist devoted to observing climate change.

Hingston keeps a pair of high and low thermometers on a wooden food storage box under the curtain of his tent, both in a Moroccan leather storage box.He watched the fluctuating readings in the glass cylinder of the top thermometer as the strong wind blew the tent curtain and slapped him on the back.Earlier, the filament of this thermometer reached thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit, but the mercury part fell to eleven degrees Fahrenheit.Hingston neatly recorded the numbers on the green-lined paper of the weather log. Then he held the cold kata thermometer under his arm for a few minutes.He went outside, staggering across the dirt and gravel, watching the red liquid drop in the wind and paying attention to the second hand on his pocket watch.Finally, Hingston placed a dark fur on a large rock, and let the black bulb thermometer hang above it.He pressed the toe of his boot to the fur and waited for the mercury to rise.

Hingston surveyed his surroundings.The boulders near him had been eroded by the wind for centuries, marred and streaked on the windward side, smooth and smooth on the leeward side.It made him think of coral.Hingston was amazed by this: the variety of environments that shape living and inanimate things, and how many adaptations mammals, insects and birds have evolved to survive in this hostile world. You can see it everywhere.Birds and sparrows hide between stones or village walls, and also visit the warm nests of pikas in the ground to protect their delicate feathers from strong winds; choughs stand with their heads facing the wind , in order to stabilize the body, have time to peck at the scarce grass.Butterflies in the Himalayas live in the most remote and barren areas, reaching up to 17,000 feet: these silk butterflies are not really suited to such high altitudes, but they lower their wings in the wind and know to wait for the wind to calm down to fly.Hingston even saw a beetle that played dead (Pseudabris beetles).The beetle, blown off the green stems of vetch or irises by strong winds, lays curled up on the ground as if dead, and springs up again when the weather improves.

Hibernation is important here.When the expedition arrived on the Tibetan Plateau in April, it was a lifeless gray as far as the eye could see.But this place is just sleeping.It's a tiny universe, bracing itself for more extreme weather, and Hinston proved it to his climbers, picking up rocks and turning the soil so they could see curled caterpillars; sleepy ant colonies ; a spider hiding inside a hollow snail shell.Nature's design is flawless, and its perfection can be seen everywhere. He held the thermometer up in front of his face, squinting at the scale. Thirteen point three degrees Fahrenheit.

Hingston felt cold.He wants to ask Kami to make tea quickly. In the 3rd Battalion, four thousand vertical feet above Singston's position, Colonel Norton lay in a padded duck down sleeping bag, preparing the contents of the telegram to be delivered to the Times of London.There was a strong wind outside.The colonel looked suddenly at his watch. It's four o'clock.he growled. It's freezing cold.Somawell yelled from the tent next door.Isn't that enough? Not enough for South Kensington. Somawell responded with a cough.He crouched by the flapping tent door, watching the two thermometers.He looked first at the reddish-silver liquid on the thermometer underneath, then flipped the case over to reset the reading.The metal pointer inside the glass went straight down.

The temperature recorded in Somaville was minus seven degrees Fahrenheit.He estimated the wind speed at 50 miles an hour, which on the Beaufort scale would be a Category 9 gale.He was guessing.Somawell knew that the winds at sea were almost incomparable with the winds in the mountains, just as the low temperatures in the Arctic were not half as cold as those on Mount Everest, where a human body lacking oxygen could hardly warm itself. Somerwell looked up at the mountains above.Cumulus fractus clouds coiled around the upper half of the pinnacle's summit, covering everything in white.Walsingham and Price were somewhere in those clouds.Somerwell figured that the temperature in the upper camp would drop at least to minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit at night, which is fifty degrees below freezing, and that's not counting the strong winds.

A few hours later, Hugh.Price trudged down the north ridge of Mount Everest, looking for the Sixth Battalion in the fading light and falling snow.This is the highest altitude campsite ever built by man, at 26,800 feet.Price, with blurry vision and mild snow blindness, couldn't see the tent until he was very close, and it looked like a sagging green blob on the uneven rock.Price undid the straps and dived in, gasping for breath.There is snow everywhere.The walls of the tent screamed in the wind. Price took off his boots, and with difficulty closed the door curtain.It was dark now, and it took him ten minutes to tie the straps, groping in the dark with numb fingers.He knocked the ice off one of the sleeping bags and squeezed his legs into it.Snow and ice covered Price's underwear and the lining of his sleeping bag; if his body warmed up, the ice would melt and soak him.Ashley's sleeping bag was beside him, also frozen.Price wondered if Ashley could really make it to the top.Seems unlikely in a snowstorm like this.

Price sat up and rummaged in the dark for matches.He had to light the lamps and burn magnesium flares to help Ashley find the tent.He touched a jug of coffee with milk.a compass.An empty water bottle.He gasped, then slipped back into his sleeping bag.He is too cold.He needed to eat something to regain his strength, but he was not hungry, only very thirsty.There was no water here, and he had no strength to melt the snow with the stove.Price thought of the time he was going to have to pass, of the agony of being unable to sleep and phantoms, of the nightmares of being thirsty, cold, and tired.He wondered if he could make it through.The second sleeping bag is right next to it.

When Ashley came back, he thought, I'll return the sleeping bag to him. Price twisted his body, let his sleeping bag get into Ashley's sleeping bag, and then fell into a dream. According to the diary of the abbot of the Lama of Rongbuk Monastery, in the third month of the 15th year of the Raojung Wood Rat, a group of thirteen European men came here, bringing a hundred porters and three hundred pack animals. beast.Men make great gifts for Lamas.They wanted him to bless their expedition, to gain fame and honor by climbing the tallest mountain in the world.The lama warned the climbers that his country was very cold and that only noble and pious people could survive in this harsh environment.Yet the Europeans persevered for weeks on their strange mission, setting up seven successive camps towards the summit.They used nails, chains, and metal plates to challenge Mount Everest, but failed.Europeans returned to the temple, hoping to hold a funeral for a comrade who had died on the mountain.The lama presided over the ceremony with great sincerity, knowing that the dead European had suffered unspeakable hardships and had achieved nothing. 1. The transliteration of rab︱byung is a Tibetan calendar originating from India.Taking sixty years as a cycle, the first year of each cycle is called a circle.This method of chronology began in AD 1027. For the sake of convenience in memory and calculation, the Chinese celestial stems and earthly branches, yin and yang, five elements and twelve zodiac signs are also added.Therefore, 1924 became the 15th year of the wood rat. Ashley.Walsingham's body was never found.No one knows whether he died from a fall or from staying on the mountain until dark.There are hundreds of corpses on Mount Everest, which cannot be transported down due to the height.Walsingham has not reached record-breaking heights, nor has he traveled where humans have yet to go.His name is recorded only in the thickened history of human exploration, and only as a small note.Later these were rarely read and never admired. It will be decades before humans reach the summit of Mount Everest.Those people were completely different from the climbers in 1924.They will reach the summit by another route on a sunny morning.They will know the names of those who came before, but not the world that has gone, and they will not carry champagne in magnums, anthologies of poetry or prose, hand-sewn socks and sweaters, from Picardy and Ypres Rags preserved in the trenches of theThose who finally reach Mount Everest will become more familiar with the mountain than their predecessors, and this situation will continue from generation to generation, until the mountain becomes less and less mysterious, and finally becomes a legend at sunset. A green flash, then disappears completely. (End of the book)