A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  This new-found anglophilia was soon put to the test by Curzon’s military assault on Lhasa in the shape of the Younghusband Mission. That it survived at all was largely due to the skill with which the Viceroy, by a mixture of candour and flattery, deflected Hedin’s anger. He hinted in his letters that as yet undisclosed actions by the Russians had forced his hand and that as the ‘Guardian of India’ he could not afford to see Russian influence become paramount in Lhasa: ‘Had you asked me 2½ years ago whether I meant to send Younghusband in as I have I would have laughed out loud.’ This was nonsense, as Hedin knew very well, but he allowed himself to be at least partially won over to Curzon’s view; the fact was that Hedin was now himself beginning to be infected by doubts over Russia’s ultimate ambitions in Central Asia – doubts that would eventually develop into the violent anti-Russian sentiments that so warped his judgment in later years. Curzon urged him to be above petty politics, and to stick to exploring:

  You are a scientist before anything else – the man who more than any other has shown with what resources a great explorer ought to be equipped. I hope therefore in the interests of the world that you will perform one more big journey before you settle down. From this point of view I am almost ashamed of having destroyed the virginity of the bride to whom you aspired, viz. Lhasa.

  With the rape of the holy city by Younghusband and ‘thousands of Tommy Atkinses’ in August 1904, Sven Hedin appeared to lose all interest in reaching Lhasa: ‘The longing that had possessed me to penetrate the Holy City in disguise was completely gone.’ It was as if a great weight had been lifted from Hedin’s mind, and he began to draw up plans for what he was already describing as his final journey, one that would take him through all the great white patches on the map of Tibet marked ‘Unex plored’ and end with the triumphant exploration of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra gap. This time he could begin and end his travels in India, secure in the patronage of a powerful Viceroy who had declared himself proud to render Hedin every assistance.

  But India’s great pro-consul had overreached himself, both in his intervention in Tibet and in his attempts to contain his ambitious Commander-in-Chief, Lord Kitchener. In August 1905, as Hedin once more prepared to make his departure from Stockholm, he learned that his ‘strongest and best protection’ was lost to him: Curzon had tendered his resignation as Viceroy. It was, Hedin acknowledged, a heavy blow to his plans. Nevertheless, there was no going back.

  The last great journey was preceded by a six-month warm-up on camel-back through Asia Minor, Persia and Baluchistan. Hedin then made his way by train to Simla, where he was met at the station by his old rival, Frank Younghusband. He was taken to see the new Viceroy, Lord Minto, and learned from him that permission to enter Tibet from India had been refused. All the surveyors, assistants, armed escorts and passports so carefully arranged for him by Lord Curzon had been withdrawn: ‘I had survived revolutions, deserts and plague, but at the very threshold I met an obstruction more difficult to surmount than the Himalayas.’

  In fact, there was considerable sympathy for the Swedish explorer at Viceregal Lodge and a great deal of lobbying was done on his behalf, but to no avail. The home Government, in the person of the Secretary of State for India, Lord Morley, was resolved to keep Tibet isolated. Hedin took this second disappointment badly and blamed the British authorities indiscriminately; they were ‘worse than the Tibetans’, he declared. Later he was to taunt Keltie about the way in which this closing of the door on Tibet had ultimately worked to his advantage: ‘Your liberal government has been a great help to me. They could not do me harm once I was in Tibet, but they have been kind enough to hinder everybody else to enter, so I was left alone with my discoveries.’

  Now that direct entry to Tibet was out of the question Hedin put the word about that Tibet was no longer on his agenda. He announced, instead, that he would be returning to Chinese Turkestan and, with many expressions of regret, left Simla for Ladakh. This false trail fooled nobody who knew anything of Hedin’s record, least of all the authorities in Simla, who correctly deduced that as soon as Hedin had assembled his caravan in Leh he would head straight for Tibet. To forestall this move a message was sent to the British representative in Leh ordering him to stop Hedin from entering Tibet, by force if necessary. But, curiously, this message only got to Leh a week after Hedin’s departure; owing to the ‘negligence’ of a senior official in Kashmir it had been delayed. Hedin went to some lengths to conceal the identity of this anonymous friend but it was almost certainly the gallant Younghusband, already in disgrace for having exceeded his political brief in the Lhasa mission.

  *

  Sven Hedin crossed into Tibet on 25 August 1906. He was elated at having successfully outwitted the British authorities and in the highest spirits. He knew that this was to be his greatest, most triumphant journey, and the conviction stayed with him for the next fifteen months. ‘During the whole journey I have had a feeling of being passive,’ he wrote in a letter to Keltie, ‘of being simply the means in a stronger and mightier hand. I go on quietly surrounded by all sorts of dangers about which I know little or nothing and the invisible hand bears me and carries me through everything.’

  As always Hedin had chosen to travel without the company of a fellow-European but he had with him a ‘first-class caravan with first-class men’, led by a bashi, or caravan leader, of outstanding quality, recommended to him by Younghusband. Mohamed Isa, ‘tall and strong as a bear’, was of mixed Ladakhi-Yarkandi parentage and had probably seen more of Central Asia than any man alive. Isa had been with Younghusband when he and Hedin had first met in Kashgar in 1890 and had accompanied Younghusband to Lhasa as his caravan leader in 1903. A year later he had been with Ryder, Rawling and Bailey on their ride up the Tsangpo valley. But long before joining Younghusband Mohamed Isa had travelled with other sahibs in the Pamirs and Turkestan. Most notably, he had served Dalgliesh as caravan leader on his journeys through Central Asia before his murder on the Karakoram Pass in 1888 and had been with the French explorer Dutreuil de Rhins when he was murdered in Eastern Tibet in 1895. Equally at home among Buddhists or Moslems, he ran his caravan with an authority that tolerated no argument. In fact, from Hedin’s point of view, he was the ideal expedition sirdar. Hedin gives a vivid portrait of Mohamed Isa’s working style in his description of the crossing of the 19,000-foot pass that led out of British territory into Tibet:

  From time to time Mohamed Isa’s voice growls forth like thunder, shouting out ‘Khavass!’ and ‘Khabardar!’ [Take care] We see him standing up above at the last turn of the pass, and hear him distributing his orders from the centre of the circle now formed by the caravan. His sharp, practised eye takes in every horse; if a load threatens to slip down he calls up the nearest man; if there is any crowding, or a gap in the ranks he notices it immediately. With his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth he goes up quietly on foot over the Marsimik La.

  For the next six months Hedin’s whereabouts remained a mystery. Then in February 1907 he wrote jubilantly to Keltie; he was in Shigatse, midway down the Tsangpo valley and less than 150 miles from Lhasa, after a ‘very beautiful and happy journey’ that had taken him across the larger of the two great white patches on the map supplied by the Royal Geographical Society. Even by Hedin’s standards it had been a tough trip: during one eighty-day period they had seen no other human beings and elsewhere had met only a few bands of nomads, barely enough to allow them to replace their pack animals. Out of nearly a hundred mules and ponies only six had survived, yet Hedin could still regard this as cause for self-congratulation: ‘I have lost the whole precious caravan it is true but not a single man.’ And by crossing the Chang Tang at its wildest sector and in winter he had managed to evade the Tibetan warning system until he was deep inside the country.

  He was stopped by the same man who five years earlier had blocked his first attempt to reach Lhasa, the Dzongpon of Naktsang province. However, fortunately for Hedin the Dzongpon now spoke with less authority. The Dal
ai Lama, whom he recognized as the supreme power in the land, had fled to Mongolia at the time of the British invasion and much of his authority in the western part of Tibet had passed to a rival pontiff, the Tashi or Panchen Lama, whom Hedin knew to be on rather better terms with the British. The Swedish explorer therefore countered by asking to be allowed to send a message to the Tashi Lama at his monastery of Tashi Lunpo at Shigatse. To his great surprise the Dzongpon gave way and suggested that Hedin might as well go to Shigatse himself and talk to the Tashi Lama in person.

  Anxious to make what he could of this valuable concession, Hedin pushed on ahead of the main caravan and slipped through the gates of Tibet’s second city late at night without being challenged. The next morning there was an uproar throughout the city as the townspeople woke to find a foreigner camped in their midst. It was widely believed that he had fallen out of the sky during the night. Before very long a messenger arrived from the Tashi Lama with a token of welcome in the form of a kadakh, a ceremonial scarf of fine gauze, and an invitation to attend him at the start of the New Year festivities that were about to be celebrated at Tashi Lunpo monastery.

  Hedin remained in Shigatse for as long as he could. With the Tashi Lama’s support he was allowed to wander into every part of the monastery, one of the largest and most impressive in the whole of Tibet, housing some four thousand monks. He sketched, painted and photographed at will, and frequently joined the monks at their prayers and ceremonies. Their chanting made a deep impression on him. He found them ‘full of faith and longing, of mysticism and harmony … they lead the listener away to the land of dreams and hope.’

  Hedin’s seven weeks in Shigatse were a blissful interlude, made all the sweeter by the knowledge that his presence there was becoming a grave source of embarrassment and that a furious exchange of notes was taking place between Shigatse, Lhasa, Calcutta, Peking and London. Hedin bided his time: ‘I was hard pressed; the quarry of four governments. Yet I won out in the end.’ He knew that so long as he remained close to the Tashi Lama he could not be touched – but that as soon as he left the safety of Shigatse he would be bundled across the nearest pass into India. By staying put Hedin hoped that he could eventually force the distracted representatives from Lhasa who came to negotiate with him to give in and let him proceed on down the Tsangpo and its still unexplored link with the Brahmaputra. This was asking too much, and Hedin had finally to be content with a lesser concession: permission to return to Ladakh by way of the Tasam trade-route.

  Naturally, Sven Hedin had no intention of sticking to the highway as Ryder, Rawling and Bailey had done three years earlier, and as the Tibetans expected. Instead, he zigzagged his way westwards, criss-crossing the jumble of mountains that formed the northern wall of the Tsangpo valley, until in midsummer 1907 his caravan returned once more to the Tasam highway and began the slow ascent to the headwaters of the great river. Here beside the Tsangpo Mohamed Isa suffered a stroke and died within hours. His fellow-Moslems kept vigil in his tent through the night and next morning, wrapped in a white shroud, he was laid in a grave dug beside the river, his face turned towards Mecca. After the grave had been filled in, Hedin gave a short oration in Turki praising his ‘excellent, faithful’ bashi. He and his men returned to their tents and feasted on a newly-slaughtered sheep in honour of the dead Mohamed Isa. ‘Then came the realization of our loss,’ wrote Hedin. ‘We missed him bitterly.’ He appointed a new bashi and the expedition moved on.

  Four months after Mohamed Isa’s death Hedin wrote his sec ond letter from Tibet to Keltie. Sent from Gartok and marked ‘Private and Confidential’, it gave the first news of what Hedin described as ‘some of the most important and splendid discoveries that were left to be conquered on the earth’. Indeed, so important were these discoveries and so hard would it be to ‘beat this journey’ that Hedin wanted an entire issue of the Geographical Journal to be devoted to them. In brief, this issue would contain:

  a description of very great discoveries of the new enormous range, which I call Nin-tchen-tang-La, of the source of the Brahmaputra, of the genetic source of the Sutlej, and finally of the source of the Indus, which I discovered a couple of weeks ago. Then some descriptions of Manasarovar and Rakas-Tal and my navigation of those lakes, my pilgrimage round Mount Kaylas and journey N.E. from there.

  The enormous range that Hedin was claiming as his discovery stretched in an arc along the northern watershed of the Indus, through the Kailas range and on to the mountains north of Lhasa. From west to east it was spread over a distance of nearly a thousand miles and Hedin considered it quite as dominant a feature of Central Asia as the Himalayas to the south and the Kuen-Lun range to the north. What had hitherto been regarded as a comparatively flat table-land stretched out between these two mountain barriers had now to be seen as having its own central range.

  The source of the Brahmaputra had been visited on 13 July 1907. Hedin had always known that Nain Singh in 1865 and Captain Ryder’s expedition in 1904 had followed the tributary that led up close to the Maryum La and he chose to believe that they regarded this to be the main source, although Nain Singh, Ryder and Rawling had all acknowledged that it lay not at the Maryum tributary – the ‘Landor source’, as Henry Savage Landor would have had it – but rather (in Nain Singh’s words) in the ‘snowy ranges to the south-west’.

  There were three main affluents involved; one flowing from the north, one from the west and one from the south. Coming down from the north there was the Maryum Chhu, which joined the larger Chemayungdung Chhu from the west. Some six or seven miles downstream their combined waters were joined from the south by the third tributary, the Kubi-Tsangpo. Launching his collapsible-frame boat below the lower confluence Hedin worked out that the combined discharge of all three affluents came to 1554 cubic feet of water per second. He then had the boat pulled up past the mouth of the Kubi-Tsangpo and measured the combined discharge of the Chemayungdung and Maryum streams. This turned out to be no more than 353 cubic feet, which showed conclusively that the Kubi-Tsangpo was by far and away the most significant tributary – and the one most worth exploring.

  Hedin got hold of three Tibetan nomads who knew the Kubi-Tsangpo valley well and set off on a four-day reconnaissance, into ‘a world of gigantic peaks, black but covered with perpetual snow, pointed like wolves’ teeth, mighty glacier-tongues lying between them’. Under the highest of the surrounding peaks, the Kubi-Gangri, was the main glacier – and at its snout the largest of several glacial streams. After fixing the altitude at 15,958 feet, Hedin climbed onto a moraine to sketch and photograph the scene. ‘It was,’ he wrote later, ‘a proud feeling to stand at the three-headed source of the magnificent river that goes out in the ocean near Calcutta, Brahma’s son, famous in the ancient history of India.’

  Yet this was not to be the high point of his travels, for he was soon able to add a postscript: ‘perhaps it was still more wonderful to camp over a night at the little rock from which the Indus comes out at a little spring.’ This second source was reached two months later when on 10 September 1907 Hedin ‘had the joy,’ as he described it, ‘of being the first white man to penetrate to the sources of the Brahmaputra and the Indus, the two rivers famous from time immemorial, which, like a crab’s claws, encircle the Himalayas.’

  His journey from the one source to the other took Hedin across the valley of the Chemayungdung Chhu, country that he believed had never yet been visited by Europeans before. In fact it was the same broad valley up which Henry Savage Landor had been led on horseback a decade earlier and through which Edmund Smyth’s shikar party had hunted in 1864. Apparently satisfied with his discovery of the Brahmaputra’s main source, Hedin paid scant attention to this most western tributary. Instead of following it up with a local guide to its farthest point, as he had done with the Kubi-Tsangpo, Hedin simply forded the river and then made his way along the hills north of the Chemayungdung valley. In doing so he missed the traditional source of the Brahmaputra and its accompanying lakes – those same
lakes seen and drawn on his rough map by Henry Savage Landor. The largest of these, which is about two miles in diameter, is regarded by the Bhotias as the source of the Brahmaputra and is venerated accordingly as the Brahmakund, while the Tamchok-Khambab, the Horse-Mouth River itself, runs into the lake from the south. Its actual source is still a dozen miles away, sited under the Chemayungdung glaciers and marked by a small stone-walled hut surrounded by cairns. The area is renowned for its wild yak and has yet to be visited – at least officially – by Europeans.

  Ironically, one of the few details that Hedin did observe as he bypassed this area was a ‘deep-cut passage’ in the snow-range that fed the Chemayungdung Chhu. Only three or four days earlier his Tibetan guides had spoken of such a passage called the Tabsi La, ‘with a difficult and hardly ever used road leading across the high mountains to the valley of Map-Chhu [Karnali].’ It is difficult to believe that Hedin could have failed to make the connection between his ‘deep-cut passage’, the Tabsi La and (when he eventually came to learn of it) Webber’s ‘wall of death’.

  From the Chemayungdung Chhu, Hedin crossed the watershed into the Manasarovar basin. Directly to the south was a stream emerging from an ice-fall that he named the Ganglung glacier; it was the main feeder of the Tage Chhu, the largest of the rivulets that entered the holy lake and therefore what Hedin called the ‘genetic source’ of the Sutlej. ‘I loved this stream,’ Hedin acknowledged later, ‘for no white man had ever seen its source before me.’ As he and his men rode on down alongside the stream towards Manasarovar they passed the first of the two springs that Kawaguchi had been shown during his peregrinations seven years earlier. It came bubbling out from under a rock and was marked by a pole bedecked ‘like a scarecrow’ with prayer-flags and streamers. Kawaguchi had known it as the Spring of Joy and had believed it to be a prime source of the Ganga. Hedin learned its correct identification; it was the Lanchen-Khambab, the spring of the Elephant-Mouth, which – together with its companion spring lower down the hillside – made up the traditional source of the Sutlej.