If paradise is the stuff of the conventional promise, all sweetmeats and complaisant houris, then I certainly have never experienced it. But a nirvana of a different kind I did transiently enter half a century ago, when I was on my way back to Kathmandu from Mount Everest, where I had been writing for the Times of London about the first climbers ever to make it to the top.

I was traveling with a Sherpa companion, who had been with me throughout the expedition and had become a friend. His name was Sonam. We had come off the mountain fast, and when we got down into the foothills, I began to feel very ill and weak—the reverse of altitude sickness, I suppose. The monsoon had broken upon us, and the endless rain did not help, but Sonam had a remedy. "Come with me to my home village," he said, "and we will make you better."

	Was it two nights I spent there? Was it two years? Time lost meaning for me in Chaunrikharka

The village, Chaunrikharka, was only a few miles off our route. At the time I only knew the place by its sound, because I had never seen the name on a map, or read any reference to it. In 1953 I doubt if any European had ever set foot there, and to this day it remains in my mind hardly more than a mellifluous suggestion, with a name that sounds lovely but is the very devil to spell.

Like most Sherpa villages in those days, it was just a cluster of small huts surrounded by potato fields and gardens, with nothing in the way of a focus, no school or public temple—nothing to make a hard fact of it, as against a blurred recollection. We got there at dusk, and to me it all seemed just a misty sort of somewhere. A great snow peak rose somewhere above the village. A tumbling river rushed somewhere below. Sonam's family house was somewhere in the middle, and he led me to an upstairs room somewhere in the shambled wooden structure, unrolled my sleeping bag for me somewhere on the floor and introduced me to my one experience of paradise—somewhere or other in the Nepal Himalayas.

The long room was very dark, and at one end of it was the Sonam family shrine. A dozen small images of the Buddha stood there in an alcove, attended by flickering butter candles; as I remember, there was no other furniture. Everything was woody, smoky, creaky and inexact. Outside the rain fell steadily, and I soon slipped into what I suppose was a feverishly debilitated sleep.

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