Jan Morris's final words: My ghostly encounter on Everest

The long saga of British mountaineering’s association with Mount Everest achieved a somewhat showy conclusion when Hillary and Tenzing, under the leadership of John Hunt, climbed to the summit in 1953.

Not merely had they reached, as the publicists loved to say, the Top of the World, and planted the British flag up there, but as it happened they had done it at the very juncture when Queen Elizabeth II had ascended the throne of the British Empire and Commonwealth. The news from Everest reached her on her Coronation Day, and travelled like wildfire through the London crowds at her investiture procession.

It was like showbiz in excelsis, with jingo thrown in, and as the only journalist embedded with John Hunt’s expedition I was indirectly responsible for it – I had reported the news to the London Times and thus to the world, and it had been an exciting sort of scoop.

Then as now, though, it was not the blare of trumpets that orchestrated that moment for me, but music altogether more celestial. For me the whole matter of Everest had its own ethereal beauty – the grandeur of its physical setting of course, so magnificently supreme out there, the strenuous beauty of alpinist efforts down the generations to master its challenge, and for one of my own temperament the very idea of it, beyond analysis, patriotism, scoop or publicity.

My experiences on the 1953 expedition were almost all straightforwardly delightful. No climber myself, I am the last living member of John Hunt’s team, and I have nothing but grateful memories of the experience. I liked everyone I met on that mountain, Sherpa or New Zealander, Englishman or Welshman, porter or physician, soldier or scientist.

But I also met Another, with a capital A. I met the Numen of the place.

Sometimes, during those long weeks on the mountain, at Base Camp or in the Western Cwm, I set myself free from my duties and wandered off into the surrounding white wilderness. I left my friends and colleagues all behind, and alone entered the grand Himalayan emptiness.

And out there one afternoon I saw in the distance another solitary figure, coming my way, moving silently and gracefully towards me until we were face to face in the snows. He did not speak, or apparently respond to my greeting, but just stood there gently smiling – a slim oriental figure, not exactly a Sherpa, but sinewy too and kindly confident. He did not speak, and I did not either, but we shook hands, and smiled, laughed a bit and went our separate ways. I can see him still in my mind’s eye, and remember the moment with a happy sense of inspiration.

When I looked back he was almost out of sight, moving easily, swiftly, confidently, and although I would never see him again, and sometimes wonder if I ever really saw him at all, the moment has left me, until this very morning, in retrospect, with the conviction that I had met that day the spirit of Everest itself – Chomolungma, which has inspired so many humans, from so many races and nations and generations, into moments of wonder and fulfilment.

Am I imagining the meaning of that encounter? Perhaps, but believe me, it is true in the fact, and even truer in its message, and in my mind I can hear its music, the music of a grand inspiration, to this grateful day.

The Folio Society’s ‘Everest: From Reconnaissance to Summit, 1921 to 1953’, featuring this preface from Jan Morris, compiled and edited by Peter Gillman with an introduction by Wade Davis, is available exclusively from foliosociety.com/everest.html