A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  Nemesis finally came in an unguarded moment when Savage Landor briefly laid down his rifle. He was immediately rushed by several men and after an epic brawl that lasted twenty minutes and involved thirty men he and his two servants were overcome and tied up.

  Henry Savage Landor remained bound and a prisoner of the Tibetans for the next twenty-five days, during which time he and Chanden Singh were starved, beaten, tortured, shot at and then finally put through a mock execution. He put his eventual release down to the fact that the provincial governor who was presiding over these various activities – all graphically illustrated in Savage Landor’s book – noticed that his fingers were partially webbed, which was said to be a most auspicious sign. A more likely explanation is that having given Mr Savage Landor a severe going-over the authorities decided to leave it at that. He and his two men were put on yaks, still with their hands bound, and taken under escort to the fortress at Taklakar. It was during this uncomfortable return journey that Savage Landor drew his sketch map in blood, which in one feature at least – the detail in his drawing of the several lakes at the head of the Chemayungdung Chhu – confirms that he certainly visited the Tsangpo’s most westerly tributary.

  At Taklakar the prisoners were met by Dr Harkua Wilson, together with a leading Bhotia trader from Garbyang, who had heard rumours that Savage Landor had been executed and had hurried over the border to find out what had happened. At first the missionary was unable to recognize the gentleman-traveller, unshaven, unkempt, his clothes in tatters and covered in wounds. ‘He was in a very low condition,’ wrote the doctor in his deposition:

  I examined his injuries and found that his forehead had the skin off and was covered in scabs. His cheeks and nose were in the same state. His hands, fingers and wrists were swollen and wounded. On his spine at the waist he had an open sore and his seat was covered with marks of wounds caused by spikes. His feet were swollen and so were his ankles. The flesh about the latter was much hurt and contused, showing marks of cords having been tightly bound round them.

  Despite his wounds Savage Landor insisted on Dr Wilson tying him up exactly as the Tibetans had done and photographing the result for posterity. He topped this some days later by having himself photographed half-naked at 16,300 feet with Chanden Singh emptying a pitcher of water over his shoulders: ‘I reproduce it to show that even in my reduced condition I was able to stand an unusual degree of cold.’ The incident carries the hallmark of vintage Münchhausen: ‘The water immediately froze on my shoulders, with the result that in a second I had icicles hanging on each side of my neck and a shawl of ice over my shoulders.’ The uncharitable might add that the photograph reveals that Savage was rather less ‘reduced’ than he had claimed.

  Savage Landor’s adventures created a minor sensation in England – though not in India, where he found British officials entirely lacking in sympathy – and did wonders for the circulation of Alfred Harmsworth’s newspaper. Landor sailed for Europe with Chanden Singh, stopped off in Italy to be received by the King and Queen and then proceeded to London. Here Chanden Singh became a great favourite with the British press and was briefly arrested after catching a pickpocket on Victoria station and kicking him into a coma. However, London life did not entirely agree with him. He grew morose, got drunk, attacked Savage Landor’s cook and finally went for his master with a knife and had to be soundly thrashed. Eventually, Savage Landor sent him home, together with a pension and a double-barrelled shotgun.

  Savage Landor’s stirring account of his Tibetan adventures, In the Forbidden Land, was rushed through the printers and became an immediate bestseller, doing much to reinforce Western preconceptions of the Tibetans as a benighted and savage people. For the next two years its author toured Europe and America, thrilling capacity audiences with detailed and well-illustrated recitals of his tortures. Then – to the horror of the UP government – he suddenly turned up once more in Kumaon, with the declared intention of reentering Tibet.

  This time officials from both sides of the border worked together to ensure that Henry Savage Landor stayed out of the country. He had to make do, instead, with some suitably dramatic exploits in neighbouring Nepal, of which the high point was a daring night climb with straw boater, walking shoes and malacca cane that took him to the summit of a mountain 23,000 feet high – an altitude hitherto unapproached by any mountaineer. A magnificent feat, indeed, but too esoteric ever to find its way into the pages of the Alpine Journal. It was of particular interest to a young mountaineer named Tom Longstaff, who in 1907 reached the 23,350-foot summit of Trisul, then – and for the next twenty-three years – the highest mountain ever climbed. Six years after Savage Landor’s Tibetan adventure Tom Longstaff was on his way to attempt an assault on Gurla Mandhata when he decided to make a short detour through Western Nepal. Taking with him three of the Bhotias from Garbyang who had accompanied the gentleman-traveller on his epic ascent, Longstaff followed Savage Landor’s route into Nepal. His guides led him to a pile of stones on a mountain ridge, which Longstaff reckoned to be at an altitude of about 16,500 feet. This was Savage Landor’s 23,000-foot summit, they assured him; the sahib with the straw hat had gone no higher.

  His Nepalese adventure by no means marked the end of Henry Savage Landor’s travels. From the Himalayas he rushed off to China, where he was just in time to take part in the general looting of Peking that followed the collapse of the Boxer rebellion. Later he was to embark on an ambitious ride from Russia to Baluchistan, sail round the Western Pacific islands, and make safaris through darkest Africa and the Amazon jungles. After the First World War he became a vociferous supporter of Signor Mussolini and his fascisti in Italy. Appropriately enough, he called his memoirs Everywhere; he was the epitome of John Earle’s Jacobean character, the ‘affectate traveller, who hath seen all and perceived nothing’.

  While Henry Savage Landor had been beating his curious path across Western Tibet the Japanese monk, Ekai Kawaguchi, had been travelling by steamer to Calcutta and thence by various ways and means to Darjeeling. Here he spent a year and a half studying Tibetan under a remarkable teacher named Sarat Chandra Das, the last of the great explorer Pundits. It was on this Bengali Tibetologist that Rudyard Kipling based the character of his babu-spy in Kim, Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, MA, alias R.17. It is nice to think that while Kawaguchi sat at the feet of Sarat Chandra Das as his chela (disciple) in Darjeeling, halfway across the world, on the Sussex coast at Rottingdean, Kipling was shaping the character of another chela, the young Kimball O’Hara. He too would soon be travelling ‘far and far into the North’, to play the Great Game for Colonel Creighton-Sahib and the British Raj, and to help his old Tibetan lama in his search for his mystic River, hidden somewhere in the hills. Perhaps one of the happier by-products of Savage Landor’s adventure was that it stimulated public interest in Tibet. The publication of his book in 1898 was followed within a year or two by a flurry of publications with Tibetan or Himalayan themes – one of which was Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, published in 1900.

  Kawaguchi’s search began in January 1899 at Buddh-Gaya, on the plains of Bihar. Here he spent a night in meditation beside the ‘undying’ banyan tree under whose branches Gautama Buddha first attained enlightenment twenty-five centuries ago. Then he went north by train to the Nepalese border, where by strange coincidence he met the one man in Nepal to whom he carried a letter of introduction, the Tibetan abbot of the monastery of Bodnath, the Chini Lama. Passing himself off as a Chinese monk on pilgrimage from Lhasa, Kawaguchi accompanied the Chini Lama to Kathmandu valley and spent a month as his guest, living under the shadow of the great stupa of Bodnath, where the all-seeing eyes of the Compassionate One look out across the valley to the four points of the compass.

  Although Kawaguchi’s final objective was the Sera monastery outside Lhasa he had long hoped to make a pilgrimage to the holy mountain and lake that he had read of in Chinese religious texts. With help from the Chini Lama in the form of a pony and a guide as far as the Nepalese border, he
travelled up the gloomy Gandaki gorge to Lo Manthang, the kingdom of Mustang, that juts into Tibet like an isolated tooth. Here he said goodbye to his escort and his pony and went on alone, carrying all that he owned in a large bundle strapped to his back. He made his way to the capital of the kingdom, Tsarang, where he was welcomed as a learned lama and immediately installed in the palace chapel.

  For reasons that he never made clear, Kawaguchi lingered here in Mustang for a full year, studying Buddhist texts and occasionally being drawn into furious arguments with his host, a Mongolian priest whose tantric lamaism Kawaguchi regarded as ‘Lewd and detestable’. He found his surroundings in Tsarang enchanting, even though his Japanese sense of cleanliness and propriety was often deeply offended. The days he spent in Tsarang, Kawaguchi wrote later, were the days of his tutelage in the art of living amidst filth and filthy habits:

  In Tibet people wash themselves occasionally but in Tsarang they almost never do. I only twice saw a person wash himself, the washing even then being confined to the face and neck. I have no courage to dwell here on their many other doings, which are altogether beyond imagination for those who have not seen them done. The natives hereabouts are merely creatures of animal instincts. True, they engage in agricultural work to some extent during the summer months, but at the other seasons they think of nothing but eating, drinking and sleeping, their minds being otherwise filled with thoughts pertaining to sensual love.

  This uncomplicated though by no means easy life gradually began to wear down the monk’s defences, and it was not until the start of the new year that Kawaguchi forced himself to take stock of his situation:

  I gradually perceived that traps were being set for me, so that I might be tied down to Tsarang for life. The arch-spirit in this conspiracy was my instructor, who brought all his ingenuity to bear upon assisting the youngest of my host’s daughters to make a captive of my heart and person. Fortunately, my faith proved stronger than temptations. Had I yielded then, Tsarang would have had today one more dirt-covered and grease-shining priest among its apathetic inhabitants.

  In March 1900 Kawaguchi finally dragged himself away from this perilous Shangri-La and crossed into Tibet. He avoided the popular trade-route that led directly to the border and instead chose a less frequented passage further to the west that took him high over the barren, rolling hills north of the Dhaulagiri range. In this open country he observed a profusion of wildlife, from Tibetan antelope and wild yak to snow leopards and wolves – as well as large numbers of bones lying scattered about. Some of these were undoubtedly human, but were never complete: ‘The curious thing was that the skull and the leg-bones were missing from every one of the skeletons that I came across.’ Only later did Kawaguchi learn to his disgust that these missing bones would have been put to good use either as ritual vessels or as drums and trumpets in tantric lamaist ceremonies.

  Walking alone across the Pindu La, forty miles due west of the Kore La that leads from Mustang to Tibet, Kawaguchi entered his Promised Land. It was an emotional moment, which he acknowledged in Japanese style by composing a short poem.

  His progress westwards up the Tsangpo valley was in marked contrast to Landor’s journey eastwards three years earlier. Of course, the Japanese had considerable advantages; his appearance and physique allowed him to blend more naturally into his surroundings and his priestly calling made him practically inviolate. He also presented no threat to anybody and in consequence even the poorest nomads treated him with the greatest kindness, while the richer ones went out of their way to offer him the hospitality of their tents or their firesides or the use of a pack animal. One wealthy herdowner went so far as to present Kawaguchi with a pair of sheep to carry his belongings, which were later to save his life by keeping him warm during an all-night blizzard.

  Kawaguchi’s one great drawback was his hopeless sense of direction. Most of this first period of his travels he spent alone, walking from one campsite to another, and he frequently strayed off course. After being guided over what he calls ‘the upper course of the Brahmaputra’ and pointed in the direction of the path that led over the western watershed, he lost his way completely and wandered in and out of the mountains for several days until he found himself near the head of a stream that flowed towards the west. Here Kawaguchi met some nomads who told him that this was the river Ganga and that it flowed into lake Manasarovar. The stream came from a range of high snow peaks to the southeast and following it back in that direction for about four miles Kawaguchi arrived at a clear, bubbling pool of water called Chumik Ganga, the Spring of the Ganga.

  ‘We drank deep of the sacred water,’ he relates, ‘then we continued our climb and arrived at another spring, which was welling up in a most picturesque way from under an immense slab of white marble.’ This second spring was apparently called the Chumik Thonga Ranchung, the Spring of Joy, and it too was said to be a prime source of the Ganga. Undeterred by any need for geographical accuracy, the Japanese monk was quite happy to regard it as such.

  Soon afterwards Ekai Kawaguchi caught his first sight of the holy mountain:

  It inspired me with the profoundest feelings of pure reverence, and I looked up to it as a natural mandala, the mansion of a Buddha and Bodhisattvas. Filled with soul-stirring thoughts and fancies I addressed myself to this sacred pillar of nature, confessed my sins, and performed to it the obeisance of one hundred and eight bows.

  Only two days later his joy was complete was he finally came in sight of the clear, placid waters of Manasarovar – ‘a huge octagon in shape, with marvellously symmetrical indentations’. It, too, appeared to him as a natural mandala, the ideal image upon which to concentrate his meditations:

  The hunger and thirst, the perils of dashing stream and freezing blizzard, the pain of writhing under heavy burdens, the anxiety of wandering over trackless wilds, the exhaustion and the lacerations, all the troubles and sufferings I had just come through, seemed like dust, which was washed away and purified by the spiritual waters of the lake; and thus I attained to the spiritual plane of Non-Ego, together with this scenery showing Its-Own-Reality.

  As a good pilgrim should, Ekai Kawaguchi went on to make complete circuits of both lake and mountain. His parikarama of Manasarovar took him over the isthmus between the two lakes, where he noticed a ravine with what appeared to be a communicating channel from the one to the other. It was quite dry, however, and when he made inquiries he learned that it now filled only after exceptionally heavy rains:

  Hence arises the Tibetan legend that every fifteen years or so Lakgal [Rakas Tal], the bridegroom, goes to visit Manasarovara, the bride. This will account for the statements of the guidebooks to Kang Tisé and Mount Kailasa that the relations between the two lakes are those of husband and wife.

  Joining a party of Tibetan pilgrims, the Japanese monk walked over the pastures above the lakes until he came to the first of the Kailas temples, Nyandi Gompa, where to his intense disgust he found the images of Buddha and Naro-Bonchung, the unsuccessful defender of the Bon religion against Milarepa, sharing the same altar:

  I already knew the strange history of the founder of this Tibetan sect, and so, when I noticed the two images worshipped side by side, a sensation of nausea came over me. It was really a blasphemy against Buddha, for Lobon [Naro-Bonchung] was in practice a devil in the disguise of a priest, and behaved as if he had been born for the very purpose of corrupting and preventing the spread of the holy doctrines of Buddha.

  From the abbot of Nyandi Gompa, Kawaguchi learned that there were three paths of pilgrimage round the holy mountain. All pilgrims started on the lowest and widest of the three circuits and only after they had completed twenty-one parikaramas were they judged to have attained sufficient merit to attempt the middle circuit, which ran high across the four faces of the mountain itself. Few survived this middle path, let alone the higher one, which was attainable only by those who had achieved an advanced state of Buddhahood – or its Hindu equivalent.

  Although well aware
that it reduced the merit of the act, Kawaguchi made his circuit on a borrowed yak, lent to him by the abbot of one of the four surrounding monasteries. But even mounted he found the Kailas parikarama a far from easy act of penance. The crossing of the 18,600-foot Dolma La, in particular, which brought the traveller back over the Kailas range and was the highest point on the lower circuit, gave Kawaguchi a severe bout of altitude sickness.

  It was now September and Kawaguchi was anxious to get to Lhasa before the winter set in, so without further delay he began to retrace his footsteps towards the east. But he was never a fast mover and it took another six months before he reached the Tibetan capital, two years and three months after setting out from Darjeeling.

  Kawaguchi had hardly settled down to his study of the ancient Sanskrit texts in Sera monastery – as he had so long before vowed to do – before his false identity as a Chinese monk was challenged. Helped by a sympathetic lama from the monastery – who afterwards paid for his act of kindness with his life – Kawaguchi was able to make a hurried exit from Lhasa and in June 1901 turned up once more on the verandah of Sarat Chandra Das’s bungalow in Darjeeling.

  As the Japanese monk leaves the Tibetan plateau so Savage Landor’s ‘Swedish traveller’ takes his place; it is now Sven Hedin’s turn to set out in disguise for Lhasa. Two years earlier, in March 1899 – as Ekai Kawaguchi was beginning his journey on a borrowed pony westwards from Kathmandu – Sven Hedin had written from Stockholm to John Scott Keltie, Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society: