Everest, Mount (China and Nepal); Mount Everest Expedition (1922); Mountaineering expeditions--Everest, Mount (China and Nepal)
What was very much brought home to us was the absolute necessity of
windproof material to keep out the tremendous cold of these winds.
Fortunately, I had a very efficient mackintosh which covered everything,
but even then I suffered very considerably from the cold. It simply blew
through and through wool, and riding without windproof clothing would
have been very painful. It was also very fortunate for us that the
weather was really fine and the sun shone all day. I think we should
have been in a very bad way indeed if the blizzard had occurred on the
second day out from Phari, and not on the first.
However, by night we were all comfortably settled down, although the
whole of our advance stores did not arrive until after ten o’clock at
night again. Unfortunately, three of our porters who had stayed behind
with the slowest of the bullocks lost their way after dark. They stayed
out the whole night without bedding or covering, and in the morning
continued to the nunnery of Tatsang, which was about 4 or 5 miles
further down the valley and rather off our direct route. We here heard
of them and retrieved them. These men had not yet been issued with their
full clothes, and how they managed to sit out the night clothed as they
were and without any damage of any kind passes one’s comprehension. So
low was the temperature that night that the quickly flowing stream
outside our camp was frozen solid.
We halted the next day, as the transport was overdone, and the following
day (April 11) made another long, but very interesting, march direct to
Khamba Dzong, leaving the monastery of Tatsang on our right and crossing
high plains on which were grazing large herds of kyang and gazelle. The
mounted men had great fun trying to round up and get as close as
possible to the herds of kyang; they were trusting up to a point, but
never let us go close enough to get a good snap photograph of them.
Finally, the road led from the high plateau down to Khamba Dzong,
through what to several of us immediately became astonishingly familiar
country; for the whole surroundings of the Khamba Dzong Valley reminds
one very much of the scenery on the North-west frontier of India. But
what a difference in climate!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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