A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  As to my future plans and projects of travel I can’t give you the details now but I will wright [sic] you from the way. I will keep it secret for many causes, specially for the Russians. I think the[y] are afraid I have become to[o] much of an Englishman.

  But I can tell you that if my scheme will be carried out it will be one of the most extraordinary journeys ever made on the globe. I hav[e] the plan ready when in the heart of Asia, and I will have to carry it out – or never return.

  PS What about Landor?

  9

  Sven Hedin: Hero and Martyr

  Happy is the boy who discovers the bent of his lifework during childhood. At the age of twelve my goal was fairly clear. My closest friends were Fenimore Cooper and Jules Verne, Livingstone and Stanley, Franklin, Payer and Nordenskiöld, particularly the long line of heroes and martyrs of Arctic exploration.

  Sven Hedin, My Life as An Explorer

  Swedish by birth, part-German by extraction, Sven Anders Hedin was born in Stockholm in 1865, the eldest son of the city architect, Ludwig von Hedin. From his behaviour in later years one might be forgiven for assuming that Hedin was born and raised in conditions of extreme social or emotional deprivation, but nothing could be further from the truth. Hedin grew up in the security and comfort of a large bourgeois household dominated first by his mother and in later years by his elder sister. These were the two women in his life and between them they provided Hedin with all that he required to sustain him between his extended bouts of exploration. Hedin himself declared that he proposed marriage twice during his lifetime – in his youth and in middle age – and was twice rejected, but without a doubt it was to the women of his own family that he turned in moments of despair and crisis. These moments came often in Hedin’s life, brought on by two irreconcilable elements in his character: his single-minded ruthlessness in the pursuit of his goals and his craving for recognition and approbation, a wish to be seen as one of the ‘heroes and martyrs’ whose exploits had filled his boyhood dreams.

  This fatal contradiction in his character – a tragic flaw in the classical mould that sets him apart from all his rivals in the field of Asian exploration – was already evident when at the age of fifteen Sven Hedin witnessed the return to Stockholm of one of his heroes, the Swedish explorer Baron Nordenskiöld. ‘All my life I shall remember that day,’ Hedin records, ‘it decided my career. From the quays, streets, windows, and roofs, enthusiastic cheers roared like thunder. And I thought, “I, too, would like to return home that way”.’

  From that moment on Hedin began systematically to prepare himself to become a professional explorer. He trained his body to withstand the lower extremes of temperature with a regime of cold baths, open windows and naked plunges into snowdrifts; he taught himself to draw and to map; he studied a variety of potentially useful languages that included Russian, Tartar and Persian; finally, he went to Berlin to become a student of the German geographer and South-East Asian explorer Baron von Richthofen. This German phase of his apprenticeship, when he lived with a German family and enjoyed the carefree life of a student, made a lasting impression on him.

  Hedin’s first opportunity to put his training to the test came when he was twenty-one and working as a tutor to the son of an engineer employed by the Nobel family on the Russian oilfields at Baku. When his term of service was over he took a steamer across to the southern shores of the Caspian Sea and from there rode south for a thousand miles across Persia to the Gulf. He then travelled by steamer up the Tigris to Baghdad and made a second journey across Persia that eventually brought him back to Baku.

  His tour took him less than three months but it established Hedin’s reputation in Sweden and Germany as a bold and enterprising traveller. More importantly, it showed Sven Hedin that his future as an explorer lay not in the polar regions but in the desert wastes of Asia. Within a few years he was back in Persia as the official interpreter for a Swedish delegation, a visit highlighted by a grisly act of daring that shocked his colleagues but was perfectly in character. A Swedish craniologist had asked him to be on the lookout for some Parsee skulls that he could add to his collection – and Hedin obliged by robbing a Parsee ‘tower of silence’, one of the amphitheatre-like towers with high walls in which orthodox Parsees leave their dead to be picked over by vultures and carrion-crows. Mounting his raid on a midsummer afternoon when the heat had driven most people off the streets, Hedin climbed over the wall of the tower with the help of a long ladder, and with a saddlebag full of watermelons over his shoulder. He selected three adult male specimens from the many corpses laid out in various stages of putrefaction, wrenched off their heads, shook out the brains and put the empty skulls in his bag under the watermelons. Afterwards he buried his trophies in the earth for a month and then boiled them in milk until they were ‘white as ivory’. It was perhaps as much an act of bravado as anything else but it could well have led to Hedin’s own head being removed from his shoulders. It showed for the first time his capacity for ruthless action, in which neither his own nor anybody else’s feelings could be allowed to stand in the way.

  Once the Swedish mission’s visit was over Hedin was free to travel again. This time he went eastward, following the ancient Silk Route, James Elroy Flecker’s Golden Road that led through Meshed, Bokhara and Samarkand into the heart of Central Asia, to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan (Sinkiang). Here, camped in an orchard outside the city walls, he met another young traveller who had plans to go far, Captain Francis Younghusband. Hedin seemed to Younghusband to be ‘of the true stamp for exploration – physically robust, genial, even-tempered, cool and persevering.’

  It was now midwinter, a season which most travellers in Central Asia preferred to sit out in some safe refuge. But for Hedin the horrors of a journey over the Tien Shan mountains and across the Russian steppes in winter conditions presented a challenge, another chance to put the self-mortification of his adolescent years to the test. ‘A jolly journey,’ was how he described it. ‘A wild and whizzing expedition on horseback, by sleigh and carriage through all of Western Asia.’

  With this second Asian journey behind him Sven Hedin considered himself fully qualified, in his own words, to ‘conquer all Asia, from west to east.’ The years of preparation were over and from now on he would be content only ‘to tread paths where no European had set foot.’ The next journey would last for three years and seven months, during which Hedin would ride or walk the equivalent of more than half the world’s circumference.

  It began in Tashkent in January 1894 and it led Hedin back to Chinese Turkestan. The first task he set himself was to explore and map part of the Kun Lun mountains, the barrier lying between Chinese Turkestan and Tibet. A year later he turned his attentions to the Takla Makan, the great sand desert that extended for a thousand miles east of Kashgar. The same perversity that had driven him to explore mountain ranges in winter now drove him to make a desert crossing in early summer, regardless of the dangers. ‘I did not hesitate for a moment,’ he wrote later. ‘I would not retrace a single step of my trail. I was swept away by the irresistible desiderium incogniti, which breaks down all obstacles and refuses to recognize the impossible.’

  Hedin never allowed himself to regret his decision to go forward into the Takla Makan, just as he never abandoned his Nietzschean view of exploration as the affirmation of Superman in the form of a ‘struggle against the impossible’, but the horrors of that journey across the dunes stayed with him for many years. Even by the standards of Superman it had come as close to being impossible as any journey could be.

  He had set out with eight Bactrian camels and four camel-drivers from Kashgar, knowing only that at some unknown distance ahead a river bed lay across their intended route – which might contain a few pools of water left over from the winter. But as the days passed the dunes only grew higher and the progress of their camels slower. Their water ran out and one after another the camels faltered and died. Two of the camel-drivers drank camel’s urine and became delirious. Hedin ab
andoned them, together with all the baggage, continuing with the two stronger Kashgaris and the five remaining camels. When these were either dead or dying he and the one Kashgari still able to walk went on by themselves, with Hedin dressed in his best suit, ‘for if I was to die and be buried by the sandstorms of the eternal desert, I would at least be robed in a clean, new shroud.’

  For two days and nights Hedin and the Kashgari walked on over the dunes, trying to escape the burning afternoon sun by resting through the heat of the day, buried up to their noses in the sand. On the afternoon of the second day they saw their first tamarisk bush, the first hint that the desert sea had a farther shore. Then they came to some isolated poplars but were too weak to dig for water at their roots. At dawn on the third day they saw a dark green line on the horizon that marked the riverbed, but before they reached it the last Kashgari collapsed. Hedin went on alone and as night approached he reached the riverbed – and found it dry. He continued walking across:

  The bed still remained as dry as before. It was not far to the shore where I must lie down and die. My life hung on a hair. Suddenly, I started and stopped short. A water-bird, a wild duck or goose, rose on whirring wings, and I heard a splash. The next moment I stood on the edge of a pool, seventy feet long and fifteen feet wide! In the silent night I thanked God for my miraculous deliverance.

  It was a measure of the man that when he was eventually rescued Sven Hedin began immediately to lay plans for a second – and wholly successful – crossing of the Takla Makan. But he took the lessons of the disaster to heart and never again courted danger without first establishing the odds. On one point only would he never compromise; once begun the journey had always to be accomplished, by one means or another and regardless of the cost in terms of men or pack animals. Success and the endeavour always came first, and nothing could be allowed to stand in its way.

  This ruthlessness was tempered, to some extent, by Hedin’s sentimentality. He refused to shoot any animal himself, preferring to employ a professional shikari instead, and it always upset him when a favourite riding pony or camel died under him, as many did. His attitude towards his men was really no different. While he regretted their deaths or their sufferings and felt them deeply he never considered himself to be in any way responsible. This seeming callousness disgusted his critics but for Hedin there was no contradiction in his behaviour. The men with him were almost always natives of Chinese Turkestan and Ladakh, professional travellers and caravan-men who accepted that the world was a hostile place and life a struggle against the odds. Fatalism was a necessary part of their philosophy and they could follow Hedin’s orders to march into the unknown without needing to fathom the strange faith that required his restless, apparently pointless travelling from one empty quarter to another. And Hedin himself commanded their faith like a good general, sharing everything with them, good or bad, so that they in turn supported him with dog-like loyalty and devotion – in several instances, even unto death.

  After another year spent exploring the Tarim basin along the northern boundary of the Takla Makan – and in the process discovering two ancient cities that had lain abandoned in the desert for nearly two millennia – Hedin made his way eastwards into China. In May 1897 he returned to Stockholm by way of Mongolia and the Trans-Siberian railway. To his chagrin there was no hero’s welcome awaiting him – ‘no trace of the triumphal procession that I had dreamed of as a boy.’ The triumph had gone instead to Nansen, who had returned to Stockholm only a fortnight earlier after crossing the Arctic Sea in his ship the Fram. There was only Hedin’s family waiting for him at the quayside.

  But if the Swedish people were slow to recognize Sven Hedin’s achievements the geographical world was not. Awards, medals and honorary memberships were lavished upon him from all over Europe. Most gratifying of all was the award of the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal, and honorary fellowship of the most prestigious and exclusive geographical body in the world. There were dinners in London with the Prince of Wales and Henry Stanley, the African explorer. In Stockholm he was toasted by his patron, King Oscar. Without a doubt, Sven Hedin had arrived.

  A year later Hedin, funded jointly by the King and Emanuel Nobel, was on his way back to Central Asia, with a plan that he had been nursing for three years. It had been with him ever since the aftermath of his death-march across the Takla Makan, when he had dreamed night after night of crossing Tibet. He told Keltie at the RGS that his reason for keeping his plans secret was to forestall any Russian rivals, but what Hedin most feared was that the Tibetans might somehow get to hear that the foreigner who had for so long prowled about their northern walls was now about to force an entry. In the previous half-century more than a dozen Westerners had tried to enter Tibet from the north, but always news of their approach had run ahead of them and all had been apprehended or deflected well short of their goal. Russians (Ruborobovsky, Prjevalsky and Kosloff), Frenchmen (de Rhins, Bonvalet and Grenard), Americans (Crosby, Rockhill and Littledale) and Englishmen (Deasy, Carey, Wellby and Bower) – all had dreamed of reaching Lhasa, and all had been frustrated. But Hedin believed that he had the edge over them: by a triumph of will a Swede would succeed where others had failed.

  The dash to Lhasa was to be the culmination of many months of painstaking work – sketching, notetaking, measuring, sounding, mapping by theodolite and compass. First, there was a slow journey by boat down the Tarim, the sluggish river that drains eastwards into the saltmarshes of Lop Nor. After that, more than a year was spent in a series of extended loops and countermarches across thousands of square miles of no-man’s-land between the Gobi desert and the Tibetan plateau. And then, at last, the attempt on Lhasa – begun in late July 1901, just a month after Ekai Kawaguchi had returned to Darjeeling.

  Hedin’s plan was based on the false assumption that by going flat-out on horseback he could move faster than news could spread. What he had not reckoned with was the quite amazing efficiency of the Tibetan relay system. He and two Mongol companions slipped away from their main encampment on the edge of the Tibetan table-land and rode hard towards the south. Hedin was dressed as a Buryat lama from Siberia, his skin darkened by a mixture of fat, soot and brown pigment and with his moustache and hair shaved off. He could not, however, alter his stature. Not a tall man by European standards, he nevertheless sat head and shoulders above his fellow-riders and as they passed their first Tibetan encampment at a fast and bone-rattling trot Sven Hedin heard a bystander call out that he was a peling (European).

  Five days of hard riding brought them to within a few days’ march of Lhasa, but as they drew on towards Tengri Nor, the lake first put on the map by Pundit Kishen Singh Rawat in 1871, a troop of Tibetan militia rode up and began to skirmish in front of them. Hedin and his companions had no choice but to make camp, and as night fell they saw one campfire after another light up the darkness around them. Hedin knew then that his plan had failed – and the defeat was made more galling by the realization that he was in exactly the same predicament as that in which Henry Savage Landor had found himself three years earlier.

  Hedin accepted his failure with rather better grace than did the gentleman-traveller. He remained in camp until the local Dzongpon appeared, and discussed the situation with him amicably over several cups of tea. Then he allowed himself and his two companions to be escorted without fuss back to the border. A few weeks later he tried again, making a second dash south by another route, but was again trapped by the Tibetan intelligence system. This time the two governors of the northern province came to meet him and after some hard bargaining they agreed to a valuable concession: instead of being sent north once more to the northern border, Sven Hedin was allowed to take a short cut that led him through Western Tibet to Ladakh. Four months later he was dining in Government House, Calcutta, with Lord Curzon, and by June 1902 he was back in Stockholm, proclaiming new discoveries but inwardly sick with shame and disappointment.

  Again the Swedish nation let him down and, as he felt him
self becoming increasingly isolated in his own country, so Hedin began to look elsewhere for the moral support that he so badly needed – to people who would recognize his worth. He found the support he was looking for in England and the Royal Geographical Society. This was partly Lord Curzon’s doing. Hedin’s travels were drawing him increasingly into what the Viceroy regarded as a British sphere of interest, and despite Hedin’s protestations that he travelled ‘only in the service of geography’, there were many besides Curzon who felt that the Swede’s links with Tsarist Russia were too strong for India’s comfort. A determined effort to woo him over to the British camp was mounted; at Curzon’s prompting, the RGS presented him with a second gold medal, the Victoria Medal. Hedin was highly gratified, and responded with a wholehearted acceptance of British good faith. He had never read or heard a word of jealousy from England, he declared, in direct contrast to the criticism he had been forced to suffer in Sweden: ‘The higher one reaches the less friends remain at home; not in the RGS, where I have more real friends than anywhere else.’

  Chief among these friends was John Scott Keltie – ‘my dear oncle Keltie’ – who for nearly twenty-five years as the Society’s Secretary avid Editor of its Geographical Journal acted as confidant and father-confessor not only to Hedin but to scores of lonely explorers and geographers scattered round the globe. When ultimately Keltie had to make it clear to Hedin that his loyalties lay elsewhere the Swedish explorer felt deeply wounded and betrayed.

  But all that lay in the future. In the spring of 1903 Hedin still basked in the full approbation of the British geographical establishment. He considered Lord Curzon to be ‘one of the two greatest scholars living on Asiatic questions’ (who was the other, one wonders?) and described his time spent in the Viceroy’s company as ‘the most charming and glorious days of my life. It was grand, it was splendid in every way.’ With characteristic vigour he set about mastering the English language – and British imperial literature. His future, he confessed to Keltie, was now ‘as bright as the sun’. Although he had had enough of Asia for the time being he knew that in a year or two the urge to return would be too strong to resist: ‘It will begin again and I will long for the music of the camel bells. “If you’ve ’eard the East a-calling You won’t never ’eard no’t else”.’