A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  After another day’s march they reached the last inhabited site on the river and Kalian Singh was warned that it would be madness to think of going further along the valley. He turned back, with great reluctance and knowing that only ‘three or four marches more’ would have brought him to his goal. From his local informants he learned that the Indus took its rise at the base of a snowpeak, where it was called the Senge-Khambab. The surrounding mountains had remained shrouded in mist and cloud throughout this period, making it impossible to get any bearings, but what was now certain was that the sources of the Indus would be found where legend had long placed them – close to the northern slopes of the holy mountain.

  All this valuable new information reached Captain Montgomerie shortly before he sailed for England on furlough, with the result that in March 1868 he was able to present to a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society the first public account of the work of the Pundits. He took some trouble to conceal their identities and origins, and it would be many years before the remarkable accuracy of Nain Singh’s work could be verified and recognized as such, but even so his achievements were widely applauded by European geographers. In the circumstances, the award of a gold watch by the RGS seems rather less than generous, but it was, after all, only a beginning.

  There was still plenty of exploration to be done, as Montgomerie was at pains to point out at the end of his address. The Ganga, Sutlej and Indus had been traced almost throughout the whole of their respective courses but one mystery remained to be resolved:

  This last exploration [by Nain Singh] tends to show that Wilcox was right in concluding that the great river which flows through the Lhasa territory is the upper course of the Brahmaputra, the largest river in India. Positive proof as to whether this river is or is not the upper course of the Brahmputra can only be afforded by tracing the river from Lhasa downwards. Every endeavour will be made to supply this missing link.

  7

  The ‘Missing Link’: the Exploration

  of the Tsangpo Gorge

  In unadministered frontier areas and Indian native states the authority of the British Raj was usually vested in the political agent or the political officer. His powers were limited, so his effectiveness as an administrator was largely dependent on the degree to which he could impose his will on peoples who were often actively engaged in resisting government attempts to curtail their independence. In consequence politicals tended to be strong-minded individuals who, because they often served for long periods in isolated corners, tended to become a little idiosyncratic – if not downright eccentric – in their ways.

  One such political who left his mark on the North-East Frontier was John Butler, who had special charge of the hill tribes from 1844 until his retirement in 1865. His son, also called John, followed him into political service on the Assam frontier and was later killed in an ambush in the Naga hills. The older Butler had a great reputation as an up-country character or what his fellow Anglo-Indians would call an ‘old Koi Hai’, being chiefly remembered for his habit of touring with two glass windows, which were inserted into the bamboo walls of the bashas and huts in which he put up for the night. It was largely on Butler’s advice that the government followed a policy of non-interference with the awkward and intractable peoples scattered along the edges of the Assam valley. This was perfectly satisfactory so long as the tribals kept to themselves, less so when they came down to raid the plains.

  The greatest mischief-makers were the Abors, those same aggressive defenders of their privacy who in the 1820s had stopped Bedford, Wilcox and Burlton from exploring the Dihong river. In 1858 they attacked a village within cannon-shot of the military headquarters at Dibrugarh, killing a number of villagers. A punitive force was at once sent after the raiders, only to be drawn deep into the Abor hills and ambushed. Retiring in disorder, the government forces were harried and repeatedly ambushed all the way back to Dibrugarh, with considerable loss of life. So cockahoop were the Abors after this episode that they sent a challenge down to the plains, calling upon the British to give them a return match.

  It was now decided to restore the prestige of the Raj by ‘inflicting such chastisement as will teach these savages to respect its power’. This second military expedition, complete with elephant-drawn howitzers, was as much of a fiasco as the first and ended with the loss of three of its officers. A third expedition in 1862 ended in a political victory for the Abors when it was agreed that they would keep to their tribal lands in return for government posa, the annual payment in cash or kind of a sum amounting to 3400 rupees. This Danegeld did little to stem the raiding and the depredations continued, presenting a constant threat to the new tea gardens that were fast taking over from the jungle scrub in the alluvial plain. A further element in this policy of appeasement was the prohibition of any kind of mapping or exploration into sensitive tribal areas, which meant that any attempt to close Montgomerie’s ‘missing link’ would have to be made from the Tibetan rather than the Indian side of the Himalayas.

  After his two Tibetan missions Nain Singh Rawat had taken over the role of instructor at Captain Montgomerie’s academy for aspiring Pundits, where his first and most brilliant pupil was his younger cousin, Kishen Singh Rawat. By then Mani Singh had been pensioned off but Nain Singh’s other cousin, the stalwart Kalian Singh who had so nearly reached the source of the Indus, was still active in the field. In 1868 he travelled through Western Tibet from Ladakh to Shigatse, crossing the ice-covered Brahmaputra in mid-December and making his way back through Nepal. Three years later it was twenty-one-year-old Kishen Singh’s turn. In July 1871 he led a party to Lhasa by way of the holy lake and was able to map 300 miles of unexplored country north of the capital before being set upon by bandits and robbed of everything but his surveying instruments. After a nightmare journey back to Lhasa, Kishen Singh successfully brought his party back to India.

  In the meantime Nain Singh Rawat had been attached to a British mission in Chinese Turkestan. When it pulled back to Ladakh in 1873 General Walker, the new Surveyor-General, suggested that here was an opportune moment to send ‘No. 1’ on a final mission. ‘He does not at all fancy having much more exploration,’ wrote the General, but he thought that Nain Singh could be prevailed upon to ‘make one grand push’ if he knew it was going to be his last.

  So, with a little arm-twisting and the offer of a generous pension that would be waiting for him when he came home, Nain Singh Rawat was induced to make his grand push, with orders to make for Lhasa along a more northerly route than had so far been attempted, and from there either to attach himself to a China-bound caravan or follow the course of the Tsangpo down to India. He set off from Leh in July 1874, taking with him three companions, one of whom was his personal servant, Chhumbel. This time they travelled as Ladakhi monks, with their belongings stowed in packs on the backs of a herd of sheep, moving at a grazing pace eastward for a thousand miles until they came to the lakeland region where Nain Singh’s younger cousin had been robbed in 1871. In view of the argument that was to rage thirty-five years later it is worth noting that it was on this second great traverse, not on his first, that Nain Singh saw and noted the existence of ‘a vast snowy range lying parallel to and north of the Brahmaputra river’.

  Skirting the lake of Tengri Nor the Pundit led his caravan to Lhasa, where to his consternation he almost immediately picked up a rumour of his impending arrival. He became even more alarmed when he ran into a Ladakhi trader of doubtful character who knew him to be in the employ of the Government of India. Fearing that he was about to be betrayed Nain Singh lost no time in getting out of the city. To throw any pursuers off his scent he marched eastwards along the Peking highway for two days and then abruptly left the road and took his party up into the mountains into the south. A few days later he and his companions found themselves looking down into the Tsangpo valley.

  They followed the river downstream for about thirty miles to the town of Tsetang. Here they left the Tsangpo and made their way south over
the Himalayan range. Once they had reached Assam Nain Singh enlisted the help of the local Assistant Commissioner and brought his party down to Calcutta in a river steamer. It was undoubtedly his own poor health that accounted for the Chief Pundit’s abrupt termination of the march down the Tsangpo: prolonged exposure to the harsh Tibetan climate had seriously damaged his eyesight, making it almost impossible for him to continue his surveying.

  Now ‘No. 1’ was at last allowed to retire, with a pension and a plains village granted to him as his jagir. In 1877, the year in which Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, he was made a Companion of the new Order of the Indian Empire (CIE) and awarded the Patron’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the highest honour that the geographical world could bestow.

  Rai Bahadur Nain Singh Rawat Milamwal lived on in comfortable retirement in the Johar valley for many years, finally dying of a heart attack while on a visit to his jagir in 1895. Besides his fellow-Pundits there were others in the Rawat clan who maintained the tradition of service either in the Survey of India or in the armed forces, right up to the present day. One of those who reached the summit of Everest during the successful Indian expedition of 1965 was Harish Chandra Rawat, a grandson of Kishen Singh Rawat.

  It was Kishen Singh, long regarded as Nain Singh’s natural successor as the leading Pundit, who took on the work that his elder cousin had been forced to abandon. In 1878 he was ordered rather bluntly by General Walker to proceed to Lhasa and to keep going until he reached Mongolia. Four and a half years passed before ‘A-K’ and his one surviving companion – the faithful Chhumbel, whom he had inherited from Nain Singh – reappeared in India. Penniless and dressed in rags, they amused themselves by wandering through Kishen Singh’s native village of Milam begging for alms. His friends and relatives there had long since given him up for dead, and when he eventually revealed his identity they refused to believe him. Even his wife failed to recognize him, and it was not until Kishen Singh had given the right answers to a series of questions that she agreed to let him enter his own house.

  Most of Kishen Singh’s efforts had been concentrated on the exploration of Northern Tibet, but he too had attempted to return to India by way of the Brahmaputra. He had taken an extraordinarily difficult route from China which cut across the headwaters of the Mekong, Salween and Irrawaddy and brought him to a point only just short of the Lohit branch of the Brahmaputra. After hearing fearful stories of the savagery of the Mishmis, whose lands he would have had to cross if he went any further, he decided to turn back. He had then made his way to Lhasa along the watershed between the Tsangpo and Irrawaddy river systems – and in so doing had established once and for all that the two rivers were well and truly separated.

  There now remained no more than 300 miles of unexplored country between the point where Nain Singh had left the Great River at Tsetang and the gap in the Abor hills out of which the Dihong emerged onto the Assam plains. It was known that Tsetang stood at nearly 10,000 feet above sea level and Pasighat a mere 500 feet – but how and where did the water from the one point reach the other? Did it squeeze through the Himalayan chain in a series of tight bends or drop in a succession of cataracts? Were there mighty gorges, or even one great waterfall to rival the Victoria Falls, still waiting to be discovered? The possibilities – and the speculation – were endless.

  In 1878 the challenge was taken up by Lieutenant Henry Harman of the Survey of India, who had already spent some time in Sadiya measuring the flow of the various Brahmaputra feeders before being transferred to survey work in the hills and mountains round Darjeeling. Described in Survey reports as ‘fertile in ideas’ and ‘enthusiastic to rashness’, Harman immediately set to work to learn Tibetan, employing as his munshi Sikkimese sirdar, a foreman of coolies from a road-building gang, named Nem Singh. This was not so that Harman could himself go to Tibet; the system of using surrogate explorers like the Pundits had now become too entrenched for this to be possible and, under General Walker, an element of exploitation had undoubtedly begun to show itself.

  Sirdar Nem Singh had none of the qualities that distinguished the Bhotia Pundits, and he lacked their familiarity with conditions inside Tibet; nevertheless, when he showed an interest in Harman’s work he was at once dispatched to the home of the retired Chief Pundit in Kumaon for a crash course on clandestine surveying. On his return to Darjeeling in October 1878 Nem Singh, now code-named ‘G-M-N’ (from NeM SinGh), was immediately put across the Tibetan border with orders to follow the Tsangpo downstream from Tsetang as far as he could go. Accompanying him as his servant and companion was one of the Sirdar’s coolies, an illiterate, brawny young man named Kinthup, the ‘Almighty One’.

  The two men followed the Tsangpo due east from Tsetang for about 120 miles (see map B). Then as it approached the final ‘upward’ curve of the eastern end of the Himalayan chain the river made a 45° shift in course and turned towards the northeast, continuing in this direction for another hundred miles, still flowing placidly through a wide valley. Gradually birch and oak forests took over from the familiar Tibetan scrub, villages and other signs of human occupation became fewer and the walls of the valley started to close in. Ahead of them there rose what seemed to be an unbroken wall of rock and snow, pushing out across the path of the river. Two magnificent peaks stood out above the rest; the breasts of the goddess Dorje Phangmo, Demchog’s consort, now known as Namche Barwa and Gyala Peri. At the foot of the first of these peaks the river turned northwards, dropping into a deep gorge and changing within the space of a few miles from a wide, smooth-flowing river into a roaring torrent of white water, with less than a hundred yards between its banks.

  Climbing up onto the terraces above the gorge the two men could see and hear how the river first doubled back on its tracks and swung westwards for a short distance before finding a passage that brought it back round to the east again, until finally it was seen to disappear not round but between the two mountain peaks – which formed, in fact, the portals of a gigantic cleft in the Himalayan wall.

  This was as far as Nem Singh and Kinthup went, to a small village named Gyala, which they estimated to be 8000 feet above sea level. But they made inquiries and learned that below Gyala the river entered a mighty gorge that led down to the country of Pemako, whose inhabitants spoke their own language and followed customs that were very different from those of the Tibetans. From Pemako the Tsangpo passed through another, wilder country before finally reaching the Indian plains.

  The two Sikkimese might have been pardoned for thinking that ‘G-M-N’’s report on their journey would be enthusiastically received in Darjeeling – but it was not. Henry Harman had expected too much from his amateur Pundit; when he found that Nem Singh had more or less made up his figures as he went along his reaction was to sack him and appoint a new Pundit to take his place. As it turned out, this, too, was a disastrous error of judgment.

  ‘G-M-N’’s replacement was a Mongolian lama, a temporary visitor to Darjeeling with no strong ties to guarantee his return. His lack of scientific training presented no particular handicap, however, since all Harman wanted him to do was to perform a comparatively simple task – but one that would provide incontrovertible proof that the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra were one. With Kinthup acting as his guide, the lama was to proceed to the point on the river at which the two Sikkimese had turned back. Here – while Harman and his men kept watch at the Assam end of the river – he was to cut five hundred logs to a prescribed length, drill a hole in each, insert a short metal tube and then throw the logs into the Tsangpo at the rate of fifty a day over a prearranged period.

  The scheme was an ingenious one, and would probably have worked but for the fact that the Mongolian lama was a complete rogue. Before they had even crossed into Tibet he had drunk and gambled away most of the Survey’s money, and Kinthup had been forced to use his own funds to buy the lama out of an entanglement with another man’s wife. After seven months of dawdling they finally reached Gyala in March 1881,
and even penetrated some distance into the great gorge, ending up at a small monastery called Pemakochung perched above the river. From here, according to the official version of his report, Kinthup saw the Tsangpo plunge over a 150-foot waterfall into a large pool.

  Why at this point the Mongolian lama and Kinthup did not sit down and prepare their logs remains a mystery. Perhaps it was because they had missed the agreed date for their launching and had assumed that Harman would have given up waiting. Whatever the reason, the Mongolian lama now decided it was time for him to return to his native land. His final gesture was to sell the luckless Kinthup into slavery.

  After seven months of servitude Kinthup managed to escape, but instead of heading back to Darjeeling as might have been expected, he elected, heroically, to complete the lama’s task. Finding it impossible to get any further into the Tsangpo gorge from the north he made a detour over the surrounding mountains until he came to what was clearly the southern end of the gorge. Here there was another monastery, which Kinthup had just entered when servants dispatched by his former slavemaster caught up with him. After a tussle the head abbot intervened and bought Kinthup for fifty rupees.

  Although still a slave Kinthup now found himself in happier circumstances, and after four months at the monastery he was given leave to make a short pilgrimage downriver. This gave him the opportunity to cut and prepare his 500 logs and hide them in a cave beside the river. Before they could be launched, however, he had first to inform the Survey of India of his plans, so after a two-month interval he asked for permission to go on a second pilgrimage, to Lhasa. Here he found a fellow-countryman from Sikkim to whom he dictated a letter to be delivered to Sirdar Nem Singh in Darjeeling. The letter – which Nem Singh was expected to translate into Enlish and pass on to Lieutenant Harman – was a masterpiece of restraint: