Unaltered states

摘要

CONSIDERING her life, as she most liked to, from the sprawling stone stables of Trefan Morys in north Wales among trees, owls and waters, Jan Morris divided it into three parts. For the first 35 years she had been James Morris, a soldier and an intrepid reporter. For a decade after that, as she took the hormone pills that gradually lightened and rejuvenated her, she was an androgynous creature, untethered and strange. Then, from 1972 and the procedure in Casablanca that permanently altered her body, she was herself. James, however, had not gone anywhere. He was still about: the little lad with his precious telescope already trained on the blue mountains of Wales, the Christ Church choirboy piping in his white and scarlet, the intelligence officer rattling in jeeps through the deserts of Arabia, the craver for fire, salt and laughter as a writer for the Manchester Guardian. He was a handsome man, tall, lean and sinewy, exulting as young men could in the full, controlled power of his body. In 1953, when he was working for the Times, he accompanied Sir Edmund Hillary's Everest expedition (though he had never climbed a mountain before) and brought back the world scoop that the peak had been conquered. That slithering, bounding descent to the telegraph office, forcing his way down a glacier as if sparks flew from him, and the sending of the message in "skulldug" code to London in time for the queen's coronation, was the best memory of his life, and hers.