A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  These excursions had only one motive behind them; Smyth explored and climbed for shikar, for the thrill of stalking or tracking down the rarer species of Himalayan wildlife; the long-haired mountains goats – tahr, serow and goral – and the shy musk-deer that lived in the forests and crags below the snowline, as well as the more elusive game of the northern slopes and the Tibetan uplands – the snow leopard, Tibetan wild yak and gazelle, the burrhel and its larger cousin the nyen, or Ovis Ammon, that stood four feet high at the shoulder and whose abnormally acute senses and habit of keeping to open ground made it almost impossible to stalk.

  Smyth shared this passion for shikar with another Indian Army officer, Lieutenant John Speke, and on at least two occasions in the 1850s they hunted together in Western Tibet. In one of Smyth’s few surviving letters, sent to the Royal Geographical Society in 1856, he writes that he and Speke ‘travelled for months together in Chinese Tartary to the North of the Himalyah mountains from the Mansarovar Lake to Askardo (Little Tibet).’ Apparently preoccupied with bagging trophies, neither Speke nor Smyth thought it worth their while to provide any further details of their travels.

  Officers in the Indian Army were at that time entitled to three years’ furlough during their first term of twenty years’ service. In 1854 Smyth and his fellow-shikari decided to take their home leave together, although John Speke got no nearer home than Aden. Here he met another Indian Army officer named Richard Burton and announced that ‘being tired of life he had come to be killed in Africa.’ So off Speke and Burton went to Somaliland, taking the first steps that would eventually bring them to the source of another river of legend, the Nile.

  Edmund Smyth’s leave was also well spent. In the summer of 1854 he joined his two brothers – both of them clergymen, as were more than half the founding members of the Alpine Club – in a climbing holiday in the Alps. Mountaineering as a sport was then barely in its infancy but Edmund Smyth was already an experienced climber; the famous alpinist Edward Whymper was later to write of him that ‘the natives used to say that he could climb where birds could not fly, which is the oriental equivalent of “Monsieur has the agility of a chamois”.’ That summer the three brothers put up a number of first ascents, including the first assault on Monte Rosa – which Edmund celebrated by leaving his shirt flying from a pole on the summit of the Ostspitze.

  In the following year Edmund Smyth volunteered for the Crimea, where he was joined by Speke and Burton, both freshly scarred by the spear-wounds that had ended their first attempt to penetrate the African interior. All three officers were attached to a body of Turkish irregular cavalry known as the Bashi Bazouks. It was a period of bitter frustration for all the Indian Army officers present. Despite the fact that they were really the only seasoned group of officers that the British Army could call upon, prejudice against ‘Nigger Army’ officers, as they were widely known, prevented them from playing any useful part in the war. As the campaign dragged on Smyth and Speke spent much of their time drawing up plans for an ambitious shooting expedition that would take them over the Caucasus and round the Caspian Sea. But at the same time Richard Burton was preparing to make a second attempt on the Nile – and it was Smyth’s intended companion that he chose to take with him on that second, fateful journey.

  Three years later Smyth again missed his chance when invited by John Speke, the now famous discoverer of the source of the Nile, to join him on his third African expedition – only to be abruptly dropped for an officer from Speke’s old regiment, James Grant. Speke evidently had a very high regard for Smyth, whom he describes in a letter to the Royal Geographical Society as ‘a chap who won’t go to the devil, full of pluck and straight-head foremost … a man of precisely my habits, and one entirely after my own heart.’ But perhaps he was too much a man after Speke’s heart for his ultimate comfort. ‘Smyth is feverishly inclined,’ was all Speke had to say by way of explanation, ‘I won’t have him with me … I am as hard as bricks.’ What Smyth had to say about Speke is not recorded.

  Meanwhile in India the sepoy mutiny that had flared up outside Calcutta in May 1857 had spread up the Gangetic plain to other regiments of the Bengal Army. All that summer the fate of the British in India hung in the balance, needing only the smallest shift in numbers from one side to the other to tip the scale. Smyth’s regiment, the 13th BNI, was then stationed in Lucknow, where the Nawab of Oude had only recently been deposed by the British for alleged misgovernment. The majority of the sepoys there went over to the rebels but three hundred men of the 13th BNI chose to remain faithful to their salt. They paid a high price for their loyalty, for during the eighty-seven days of the siege a third of their number were killed and a third wounded. But without them the small garrison at Lucknow could not have held out – and if Lucknow had fallen a second army of mutineers would have been freed to march on Delhi and drive the British out of India.

  By the time Edmund Smyth got back to India the fighting was all but over. His regiment had been disbanded and the future of the Bengal Army was itself in doubt. During this uncertain and unhappy period Smyth was again able to escape to the mountains of Kumaon and Garhwal, climbing summer after summer in regions hitherto unvisited by Europeans. It is known that he liked to travel fast and light – very much in present-day alpine style – using a small two-man tent that he shared with his servant, but his mountaineering activities are largely unrecorded. Among his few known achievements was the reopening of a long disused pass between Niti and Badrinath, at the head of the famous ‘Valley of Flowers’ that British mountaineers were to rediscover sixty years later.

  Another keen shikari who hunted over the same ground at this time was the Hon. Robert Drummond, a younger son of the Eighth Viscount Strathallan and a member of the Indian Civil Service. He, too, did things with a certain style; on his first Tibetan journey Drummond was said to have launched an ‘India-rubber’ boat on Manasarovar, ‘to the great indignation of Hindus and Thibetans alike’ – an act of sacrilege that resulted in the local Dzongpon (district governor) losing his head.

  Neither Smyth nor Drummond ever publicly acknowledged having made such journeys – and with good reason: both were government servants who entered Tibet in direct defiance of a government ban, and who had nothing to show for it but antlers and skins. The records of the Indian Government for this period show only that one application by Edmund Smyth, to lead an expedition to Lhasa, was considered and rejected. For Robert Drummond the position was complicated by the fact that his elder brother happened to be the Lieutenant-Governor of the newly-formed North-Western Provinces.

  It was not the first time that Drummond had proved to be a source of embarrassment to his brother. At the time of the outbreak of the Mutiny he had been acting as Magistrate and Collector at Agra, and it was at his insistence that the European population in that station had withdrawn to the fort there, leaving their homes to be looted and fired by the rebels. This firm action undoubtedly saved lives, but the manner in which he had performed his duties was greatly resented and shortly after the relief of Agra Drummond was transferred to Bundelkund, an arid plains district south of Patna that offered few attractions.

  In 1861 Edmund Smyth was appointed to the newly-created post of Inspector of the Kumaon Circle Public Instruction Department, with instructions to set up Indian vernacular schools throughout the hills. It was not a demanding job and the prospects for advancement were nil but it offered marvellous opportunities for further mountaineering and shikar – as evidenced by the brief but lively guest appearances that Smyth makes in two sporting memoirs of the period. He features prominently as ‘that well-known old Indian sportsman’ in Major-General Donald McIntyre’s Hindu Koh; Wanderings and Wild Sports on and beyond the Himalayas (published in 1889) and rather more dramatically in Forests of Upper India, the memoirs of a retired forest officer named Thomas Webber.

  It was Webber’s sporting reminiscences – written in his old age and published nearly forty years after the event took place – that revealed
Smyth and Drummond to have been the first Europeans to reach at least one of the major sources of the Brahmaputra. Not altogether surprisingly, when the book was shown to the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin – newly returned from Tibet and claiming the discovery of the source of the Brahmaputra as his own – he dismissed it as worthless. He showed Webber’s story to be riddled with inconsistencies, while the map that accompanied it was patently absurd. Yet the fact remains that a journey did take place, one that led four British sportsmen to the headwaters of the Brahmaputra four decades before Sven Hedin got there.

  In the summer of 1864, at a prearranged rendezvous with Drummond and two other younger men, Smyth met the future author of Forests of Upper India, then a very junior forest officer, and a friend of his named Henry Hodgson. They had made their way into the hills independently – which points to this being a private and unauthorized expedition – and only joined up as a party at a village close to the Lipu Lekh pass. Webber informs us in his narrative that Smyth had come there a year earlier, intending to make for Lhasa, but had been turned back by armed Tibetans from Taklakar. Now the party was able to make quite a show with all its sporting rifles and shotguns as it crossed into Tibet, and when an ill-mounted troop of Tibetan horsemen charged upon them the sahibs, according to Webber, ‘simply stood still and roared with laughter’. This reaction so unnerved the Tibetans that they retired in confusion.

  As they passed Taklakar they were met by a second group of armed Tibetans, who ‘threw themselves in front of us in a compact body, shouting with shrill, strange voices and making signs as if frantic. Some lay on the ground before us, imploring us to stop and drawing their hands rapidly across their necks’. This time it was the British who were put out, for it was plain that the unfortunate Tibetans had been ordered to stop them by non-violent means and risked losing their heads if they failed to do so. A conference was arranged, and over a bottle of Scotch Drummond and the Dzongpon of Taklakar came to an arrangement that allowed both sides to keep face. The Dzongpon would report back to Lhasa that after a great fight the foreign invaders had been diverted towards Nepal and, for their part, the sportsmen agreed to keep well away from the Manasarovar region and return to Taklakar within three weeks.

  No doubt the Dzongpon thought he had got the best of the bargain, since the agreement barred the travellers from heading north up the Purang valley and so out onto the Tibetan plateau. He must therefore have watched the foreigners moving downriver and towards Nepalese territory with great satisfaction. What he did not know was that Smyth’s Bhotia guides had told him of a high pass to the east of the Gurla Mandhata mountain massif known as the Dakeo or ‘wall of death’. It was said to be an extremely difficult route but one that would bring them out onto the Tibetan plateau east of Manasarovar, to a region of ‘extensive jungles, frequented by few natives and famous as the haunt of the rarest of all animals, the bos grunniens or wild yak’.

  Webber records that they went down the Karnali river for some eighteen miles and then marched north-east along one of its feeders, skirting the southern slopes of Gurla Mandhata. A second day’s march took them to the entrance of the pass and then on the third day they crossed the Dakeo pass itself – ‘a ghat or passage between high walls of black basaltic rock, a veritable gate of death’ – where by measuring the temperature at which water boiled they determined their altitude to be close on 20,000 feet. ‘The scene was most weird,’ Webber recalls in his book. ‘The view of the peaks and glaciers when the cloud occasionally lifted was stupendous and bewildering. Goggles, of course, had to be worn, but some of the carriers who had neglected to tie on their crepe bandages were howling with pain, half blind.’ With their yaks ploughing a path through the snow ahead of them the hunters struggled over the pass and made camp:

  We had now come out on the watershed of the Brahmaputra, having crossed the range which lies to the north of the Himalayas. Descending rapidly to the northward, we found wide valleys and grassy flats opening out, and all the streams trending towards the east.

  It was Hedin’s contention that Webber’s party never crossed this second range and that it would have been impossible for them to have reached the watershed of the Brahmaputra within three days of leaving Taklakar. Sven Hedin devotes six pages of his monumental Southern Tibet (published in eight enormous volumes in 1917) to demolishing Webber’s story point by point: ‘There are no dates, no distances, no directions, no co-ordinates, no camps, so the reader is completely lost.’ He concludes: ‘If Webber has proved anything it is that he has never been at the source of that river [the Brahmaputra]. The fact is, as I have proved above, that Webber never had the faintest idea where the source or sources was situated.’

  Webber’s map made him an easy target for Hedin’s ridicule. He identifies the sources of the Sutlej as ‘Sources of the Indus’ and the sources of the Karnali as ‘Sources of the Ganges’. How seriously, Hedin asks, can we take a man who can make such grotesque errors? He suggests that we should regard Webber’s story as a romance or a ‘phantom picture from the time of the Jesuits’. A less committed reader might feel that since Webber’s story and sketch map were put together from memory nearly forty years after the event they deserve to be read with caution rather than scepticism. If Webber talks of three days to reach the Dakeo pass when in all likelihood it needed five or six it seems more reasonable to interpret this as a failure of memory rather than an attempt to construct a romance.

  Webber tells us that the four sahibs hunted in pairs, the two older men – Smyth and Drummond – moving ahead and further afield while he and Hodgson stayed closer to their camp. However, on one occasion the younger men crossed ‘another lofty divide’ and found themselves looking down on the holy lake: ‘Far beneath us, some miles away, lay the most brilliantly beautiful blue sea, the celebrated Manasarovar Lake, as it proved, which we had promised not to approach.’

  From their vantage point Webber and Hodgson sat and munched biscuits, listened to the familiar sounds of skylarks and, ‘as a record of our tramp’, sketched the view:

  The foreground was flat, rolling hills and ridges sloping gradually towards the lake, all bare and tinted in most crude colours – reds and pink and orange – while hundreds of miles to the north and west in the violet distance there stretched range after range of low, jagged hills, all alike and succeeding one another in endless succession. Conspicuous, and towering above them all, was the snowcapped summit of the sacred Kailas.

  Hedin was not impressed by this description of the view. ‘From the neighbourhood of none of the southern sources [of the Brahmaputra] can the lake be seen,’ he declares. ‘It is invisible from the whole region of the uppermost Tsangpo.’ But Webber was not then at the southern sources but the western ones, where the streams were ‘trending towards the east … into a great river which ran towards Lhasa’. Satellite photographs of the Brahmaputra sources show this area as a clearly defined rectangle of open ground, about twenty miles by ten and dotted by lakes, lying between two mountain ranges. The watershed between the Sutlej and Tsangpo-Brahmaputra lies more or less at the centre of this rectangle, at a distance of about thirty miles from Manasarovar. There is no clearly marked ridge here separating the two catchment areas, as Sven Hedin himself noted when he crossed the watershed in July 1907, only a series of hills. If the shikaris had indeed crossed the Dakeo pass into the eastern half of that rectangle then Webber and Hodgson had only to climb one of those hills – or the range that formed the northern edge of the rectangle – to be able to see Manasarovar spread out before them and Kailas in the distance.

  On the day after their sighting of lake Manasarovar Webber and Hodgson ‘marched a long way eastward along the northern slopes of the Gurla range, following the valley of the Brahmaputra’. On the way they observed ‘a very fine peak called Limi belonging to this range, where some great glaciers exist at the head of the valleys which debouch into the river flowing towards the east’. Coming the other way forty-three years later, Sven Hedin also observed an outstand
ing peak, which he named Chemayungdung Pu, whose ‘very extensive glacier’ fed the western tributary of the Tsangpo known as the Chemayungdung Chhu.

  Webber and Hodgson continued to a point where their valley ‘opened into wide plains, sloping gradually to the river Tsampu [Tsangpo]’. From here they could see a great distance down the main valley of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, even distinguishing in the clear, rarefied air livestock and tents on the camping-grounds of Tuksum, fifty miles downriver. Webber noted that here, too, were the ‘sources of the great Brahmaputra, originating from the glaciers of Gurla’.

  Hedin finds this sequence of events absurd, chiefly because he chooses to interpret Webber’s references to ‘Gurla’ and ‘Gurla range’ not as Webber himself defines it – as ‘the range running eastwards of Gurla Mandhata’ – but as the Gurla Mandhata mountain itself. Since its main peak is over forty miles away from the most westerly of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra feeders he deduces that Webber and Hodgson would have had to march some seventy miles in one day to cover the ground that they said they did. But the truth is that from their eyrie on the watershed Webber and Hodgson would have had to march no more than thirty miles before coming to a point where Tsangpo valley lay spread out before them.

  Thanks to satellite photography we can now plot a more realistic course for Webber and his fellow-shikaris than that ascribed to them by Sven Hedin. There is in fact a high and difficult pass, the Takhu (Dakeo?) or Tabsi La, that cuts through Webber’s Gurla Mandhata ‘range’ just west of the Chemayungdung massif, and if this is where the hunting party crossed into Tibet then they would have emerged onto one of the glaciers that feed the streams flowing into the Chemayungdung Chhu. Webber and Hodgson could then have had their view of Kailas from a high point on the Tsangpo-Sutlej watershed and afterwards marched down the broad, open Chemayungdung valley, observing that the river had its source in the glaciers at the foot of the 22,230-foot Chemayungdung Pu – which they knew as Limi. They then spent a week in this area ‘hunting all the valleys for miles for yak,’ while the two older men went after Hodgsonian antelope and Ovis Ammon. All the evidence in Webber’s book, supported by a brief outline of the trip from General McIntyre, suggests that Smyth, Drummond, Webber and Hodgson have a good claim to the European title of discoverers not only of the longest, highest and most western source of the Brahmaputra but also its traditional source – for the Tibetans place the head of their Tamchok-Khambab at the glaciers of the Chemayungdung mountain.