Victor Saunders's Weblog: 14 April 2006. Puja at Base camp.

We had Adventure Consultants team Puja today. This is a Buddhist prayer ceremony to ask the gods to look kindly on our attempt to clamber all over the holy mountain. Pujas take several hours to pass.

We do not need a building here; for a prayer hall we have the whole Khumbu valley. It was a bright cold morning. The Pujas go on for hours and are great opportunities to meditate and clear the mind for the climbing days to come. I thought;

- It all depends on scale. Sitting behind our prayer flag (and there are a great many others here on wave-crests of the Khumbu Glacier)and surveying the landscape, the panorama is magnificent. It has been so every morning since we arrived at base camp. Looking down the valley southwards is the lowest point in the ring of mountains that surround us. Once huge and dominating the view from Namche; Kangtega and Thamserku now are now surprisingly small triangles damming the distant horizon. To their right the broad inviting north face of Taboche and the elegant north face of Cholatse lead to the various peaks of Lobuche. Right again and high above Gorak Shep the towering massive Pumori dominates our western Horizon; it somehow recalls the classic pyramid shape of K2 from here. We will know we have reached Camp 3 when we can look down on it. Right again is Lingtren, from whose glacial plateau ice bergs calve off at irregular intervals all day and through out the night. Their rumbling thunder and the sudden crack of the glacier under our tents, alarming at first, will become as comforting as nursery tunes by the time we leave. After Lingtren comes Khumbutse under whose southern flanks the twenty or so base camps are scattered like a handful of smarties. Now comes our next project; the Khumbu Icefall. This is flanked by the west shoulders of Everest and Nuptse. More about this amazing feature in the next blog. Strangely, apart from a tiny section of the Lhotse wall, we can see nothing much higher than 7000m. The view is still overpowering.

Reduce the scale a bit closer; the sun glints off the ranks of penitentes marching down to Lobuche where they will
finally melt under the deep surface moraine. Although it looks like the moraines and surface-waves on the glacier are formed by pressure, in fact and counter intuitively, nearly all the features are the result of differential melting. The base camp village stretches out for over half a kilometer almost as far as the wreck of the Russian MI-17 adjacent to the new helipad; located there with either a sense of irony or as a grim warning to other pilots.

Pull in the lens once more, back to our dry stone chorten and its umbrella of prayer flags. Our team; guides, members and sherpas sit on foam mattresses and plastic chairs as a local lama conducts the Puja. Whisps of incense, Juniper twigs, rhythmic drumming and nasal droning are carried away in the icy wind. The flags flutter like sails in gale. The sherpa lama who conducts the ceremony is wearing an incongruous scarlet trilby with a matching scarlet carnation in the hat band. A family of choughs circles the enticing food offerings. They are eying up the cakes of Tsampa resembling pointy mountains, packets of biscuits, sweets, cans of drinks. I overhear the following conversation from behind me as I try to focus on the ceremony; “What is the point of the all the snacks and food?”
“For the gods, it is a kind of sacrifice.” “Will the gods be pleased there is 30% extra in that packet of biscuits?”
Sometimes meditation can be so hard. I guess that must be the Buddhist way.

Next week, the Ice Fall and the other things.

Comments

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Posted by: Azhar Chougle | April 16, 2006 03:47 PM

Victor, great to read these blogs and all our best wishes for the up and coming adventures on Everest
John
(you guided myself and Adam in 2004 on Mont Blanc for a week)

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