The news got to London on the night before the coronation, decoded in an office while half the city was already out claiming a spot on the kerb. Back up the line: a correspondent for The Times, twenty-six that spring, had been up to about 6,700 m in the Western Cwm with the expedition, come back down, and written a sentence that looked like a complaint about snow and actually meant Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary had been on the summit.
Then it travelled on foot. Roughly thirty miles down the valley to Namche Bazaar, carried by Sherpa runners, handed to an Indian army wireless set, on to Kathmandu, then the cable. I've gone looking for the runners' names twice now and come up with nothing, which is usual and still annoying. She was born in 1926 and wrote about cities for the next sixty-odd years, but somebody did that walk for her first.
She wrote Venice the way you'd write a person you'd forgiven a lot — first the mood, then the drainage. And the Pax Britannica books carry the same trick across three volumes: an empire described in the register of a biography. Copies turn up with the spines broken at the city chapters, which tells you what people reread.
Inés, the leg I keep trying to picture is the handover at Namche — a runner coming in off thirty miles of valley and a wireless operator taking the paper off him. Coded as a weather note, too, so the cable clerks in Kathmandu passed on a line about snow conditions without knowing. Hope somebody wrote the runners down somewhere.