Contact! by Jan Morris Page A

Tenzing was a Sherpa who had become well known as a porter with British mountaineering expeditions in the 1930s. He had always been a man of lively tastes, and by the time I met him in Kathmandu, when he was elderly, much respected and semi-retired, his appearance was wonderfully distinctive. On his head he wore a brown balaclava helmet with a peak, like the hats the Red Army used to wear. His grey sports shirt had polished major’s crowns upon its epaulettes. Over woollen long johns he wore a voluminous pair of blue shorts, and on his feet were elderly trainers. A confused variety of beads, tokens and Tibetan charms dangled around his neck and a bracelet hung upon his wrist. In one hand he flourished an ice axe, in the other a fly whisk. It was not for nothing that Sen Tenzing, in the old days of gentlemanly climbing, had been affectionately christenedby his British employers ‘The Foreign Sportsman’.
    Mr Beebe
    Virginia City, the most famous old mining town of Nevada, has been kept boisterously alive by gambling, and by the presence there of Mr Lucius Beebe. Mr Beebe owns and edits a revived newspaper of the Gold Rush days, the Territorial Enterprise , and he lives grandly in a small Victorian mansion, keeping Rolls-Royces and St Bernards. Almost before we had settled in at our hotel he was aware of our presence by bush telegraph, and before long he was showing us the town, wearing a hat with a flat crown and very broad brim, a shirt with a wide and handsome check, an elegant pinstriped suit and a waistcoat embellished with a gold watch-chain. Mr Beebe is a fine sight at any time, but is at his best when he strides into a gambling house with his St Bernard at his heels, pausing for a moment beside a roulette wheel to throw a handful of silver dollars on the table with a satisfying clang, shrugging his shoulders with cheerful nonchalance when he loses the whole lot, bending an ear to a tattered prospector from the hills who has some slight financial worry, raising a negligent hand of greeting to an acquaintance here and there, listening patiently to the report of activities of a man who plans to get even with him for something he published in the paper last week, ushering his guest into the dimness of the bar with a truly Bostonian courtesy before hitching his ample frame on to a bar stool and ordering an enormously large whisky. During our stay in the town Mr Beebe lent us one of his Rolls-Royces, for our convenience.
    Battle hardened
    â€˜Lucky you got me,’ Chicago taxi drivers nearly always seemed to say, if you wanted to visit the tough black neighbourhoods. ‘Not many guys would take you. I tell you, I was a Marine for four years, I fought in eight major battles, eight major battles, and believe me if any of these blacks get in my way I’ll just run ’em down, just like that. Lock your door now. Like I say, it’s lucky you found me. Not many guys would come out this way.’
    Celebrating with Breughel
    If ever you attend a rustic wedding in the Orange Free State you will realize how close the Afrikaner can be to the world of the old Dutch masters. The reception is held in the church hall, and the room is packed, and hot with robust gaiety. At the top table sit the bride and groom, flushed and rotund, she in an ornate white headdress, he intolerably corseted in black. Here are the bride’s parents, wrinkled and sharp of face, and here also the two small bridesmaids, their plump country figures wrapped in pink and blue, posed self-consciously beside a potted palm. Big black servants scurry about with cold drinks and sweetmeats. ‘It’s all done to plan,’ says your host complacently. ‘All the tables are numbered, you see, so that everyone knows just where to sit–no confusion, you see, no pushing or shoving, everyone can have a good time.’ And everyone does. Now and then somebody makes a speech, generally disregarded, and the bride and bridegroom sometimes