A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  On the following day Sven Hedin at last caught sight of the blue waters of the lake itself. It was a moment as much charged with emotion for him as it had been for the Japanese monk seven years earlier, and he responded by bursting into tears. During the next few weeks he often found himself in a similar emotional state, and not without reason. His presence by the lake was the consummation of years of single-minded devotion to his cause, a devotion that was really no different in its self-discipline and self-denial from that of the most dedicated Buddhist monk or Hindu sanyasi. No European had ever approached Kailas-Manasarovar with a better understanding of its religious significance and no human being had ever gained such knowledge about its geography as he now possessed. It was indeed a time of triumph; the apotheosis of Superman, victorious against all the odds.

  When he reached the lake Hedin reassembled his cockleshell and went for a row in the moonlight. Unaware of Robert Drummond’s voyage in his ‘India-rubber’ boat half a century earlier, he revelled in the belief that his was the first vessel ever to float on these waters. The next day – ‘distinguished by three stars in the record of my life’ – he again launched his boat and was nearly drowned by a fierce squall that drove him across the lake. He beached the boat near Gossul Gompa, the monastery past which Moorcroft had tramped almost a century earlier, and spent the night with the monks. Early next morning Hedin walked out onto the terraced roof of the monastery, where a profound ecstasy came over him:

  The Holy Lake, which yesterday had done everything to drown us, was now smooth as a mirror. The air was slightly hazy. One could not see whether the eastern shore was mountains or sky, the lake and sky had the same values. Objects swam before my eyes. The whole temple swayed under me and I felt as if hurled into infinite space. But beneath lay the Holy Lake, along the shores of which innumerable pilgrims had walked themselves weary to secure peace for their souls. The Manasarovar – the hub of the wheel which is a symbol of life! I could have stayed there for years.

  In the event, Hedin spent a month beside the lake, taking several more trips on its waters to sound its depths and coming to the conclusion that there was an outflow from Manasarovar into Rakas Tal, even if it now only took place at rare and increasingly infrequent intervals.

  The channel between the two lakes, the Ganga Chhu, shows up well on Landsat satellite photographs although this is partly due to salt deposits laid down along its bed. The connection between Rakas Tal and the Sutlej, which Hedin visited next, is not so easily discernible. Hedin’s inspection confirmed what Henry Strachey had found in 1846 and Ryder’s expedition in 1904 – that there was no longer any visible outflow from the lake, only the old channel that had once linked it to the Sutlej. Ryder’s party had ridden several miles down this old bed without finding any signs of water seeping down it. Hedin covered almost the same ground but came to a different conclusion: ‘When one comes to parts of the bed which are lower than the lake’s present surface one finds several springs breaking through it, which grow in volume as one goes down the course, and could not come from any other source than the Rakas-Tal.’ This, together with the evidence that the water of Rakas Tal was still ‘as sweet as those of any spring’, was enough to convince Hedin that he was justified in placing the genetic source of the Sutlej at the foot of the Ganglung glacier – which he regarded as his personal discovery.

  Next there was the holy mountain, which Hedin rather unromantically likened to a tetrahedron set on a prism. With four Buddhists from his retinue Hedin set out to make his parikarama. It was somewhat devalued because, like Kawaguchi, he rode most of the way but nevertheless he professed to be deeply moved by the experience and the new insight it gave him into the religious life of the Tibetans and the faith that brought them so far:

  From the highlands of Kham in the remotest east, from Naktsang and Amdo, from the unknown Bongba, which we have heard of only in vague reports, from the black tents which stand like the spots of a leopard scattered among the dreary valleys of Tibet, from Ladakh in the mountains of the far west, and from the Himalayan lands in the south, thousands of pilgrims come here annually, to pace slowly and in deep meditation the 28 miles round the navel of the earth, the mountain of salvation. I saw the silent procession, the faithful bands, youths and maidens, strong men with wife and child, grey old men, ragged fellows who lived like parasites on the charity of other pilgrims, scoundrels who had to do penance for a crime, robbers who had plundered peaceful travellers, chiefs, officials, herdsmen and nomads; a varied train of shady humanity on the thorny road, which after interminable ages ends in the deep peace of Nirvana. August and serene Siva looks down from his paradise, and Hlabsen from his jewelled palace, on the innumerable human beings below who circle, like asteroids in the sun, round the foot of the mountain.

  At the halfway point of the circuit Hedin was delighted to learn from the monks of Diripu Gompa that the source of the Indus lay a mere three days’ journey away to the north. Hurriedly completing his parikarama, he divided his caravan into two and sent the main party westwards down the Tasam highroad to Gartok, together with its Tibetan escort. With five men and six horses he then made his way back along the first stages of the Kailas circuit and two nights later they were camped beside the ‘insignificant stream’ of the Indus, about twenty miles above the farthest point reached by the ‘Third Pundit’, Kalian Singh Rawat, in 1867. Here Hedin made friends with a group of shepherds and persuaded one of them to guide him to the place they knew as the Senge-Khambab.

  Hedin’s guide, a young man called Pema Tense, led them eastwards along a broad and generally flat valley. As in the case of the Brahmaputra – though on a smaller scale – the headwaters of the Indus were drawn from three main sources. Hedin and his guide waded across the first of these on the morning of 10 September. This was the Lungdep Chhu, flowing down from the mountains of the Kailas range. Hedin calculated its volume of flow to be no more than three cubic metres a second, but this was still two thirds of the total volume of the Indus as measured at that point. This made the Lungdep Chhu by far the largest of the three affluents, so that if Sven Hedin had applied the same criterion as that by which he had determined the Kubi-Tsangpo as the pre-eminent source of the Brahmaputra then he ought to have settled on this branch as the main source of the Indus. Instead, he chose to accept the view of his nomad guide that the real source lay a few miles further to the east.

  They continued in this direction for another four miles, when they came to the second affluent, the Munjam Chhu, flowing down from the east. Beyond it there was only a ‘very insignificant brook’ named the Bokar Chhu, with a flow of no more than a third of a cubic metre. This was the last of the three affluents, and following it towards the north-east for about a mile they came at last to the Senge-Khambab itself, made up of several small springs running out from under a terrace of white, porous limestone. Set out on the terrace were three small cairns and a little niche containing votive offerings of clay, and piled around the niche were hundreds of mani-stones incised with prayers and sacred symbols. On one such stone was an image of the Buddha, which Hedin pocketed as a souvenir.

  Hedin himself had no doubts about his discovery – and, indeed, so far as the siting of the source of the Indus is concerned, Hedin’s choice has never seriously been questioned. No other Westerner ever came near this particular cul-de-sac before Hedin’s time and none has ever been there since. Yet the inconsistency remains: in the case of the Brahmaputra Hedin selected the Kubi-Tsangpo on the basis of its greater volume and ignored the traditional source; in the case of the Indus he did the opposite, rejecting the largest feeder in favour of the traditional source. From the point of view of legend and Indo-Tibetan cosmography both Hedin’s choices were the wrong ones; had he reversed the order the head of the Brahmaputra, the Tamchok-Khambab, would have been brought that much closer to lake Manasarovar on our maps and the source of the Indus, the Senge-Khambab, would be sited within ten miles of the northern face of Kailas.

  Hedin’s claims w
ere first set out in a long article that followed his private letter to Keltie. It was, Keltie acknowledged, ‘a most gorgeous production’ and he was anxious to publish it. The problem was that along with the article came a letter from Hedin’s sister in Stockholm asking for a large fee for its publication. It was not the Society’s custom to pay its contributors any sort of fee and when Keltie wrote to Miss Hedin along these lines he received a reply that was, in his opinion, ‘simply abusive’. To make matters worse, Keltie soon began receiving reports that the ‘cream’ of the geographical intelligence that Hedin had given him in confidence and which he had not therefore included in the most recent number of the Geographical Journal was being published in newspapers in India and Germany.

  In February 1908 John Scott Keltie wrote Hedin a testy letter of complaint (which the latter did not receive until seven months later, when he arrived in Simla). He stated that the RGS could not afford Hedin’s asking price, and that the article might, he now thought, be more suitable for a popular magazine or a newspaper. But Keltie’s letter also touched on something that was quite as much a source of irritation as Hedin’s clumsy attempts to make what he could from his story: ‘We are very much annoyed at the attitude of our government towards Tibet … agreeing to keep everybody out of the country. As you say, it has been a fortunate thing for you, that you have had Tibet all to yourself.’ It was the first indication that Hedin’s activities – and his evident success – had aroused deep resentment in England.

  10

  Sven Hedin: Conqueror and Nazi

  The greatest mistake that Sven Hedin ever made was his decision in November 1907 to make yet another great sweep through Tibet. The delay of more than a year between sending news of his discoveries to Keltie from Tibet and arriving in London to substantiate them was to prove fatal to his reputation. There was much wisdom in Keltie’s remark: ‘It might have been wiser for you to have kept nearly everything to yourself until you actually arrived here, and burst upon England all at once in the Queen’s Hall.’

  Hedin never gave any plausible explanation as to why, after crossing from Gartok into Ladakh and paying off all the members of his caravan crew, he suddenly headed back into Tibet. Yet back he went, driven by some compulsion to submit himself to further hardship, to complete a final circuit of the unknown tracts of Western Tibet. ‘I simply had to go there,’ he wrote. ‘It was unthinkable that I should return home without carrying out my plans or reaching my goal.’ He was convinced, too, that if he did not go back, ‘one fine day another explorer would come and rob me of this triumph. And this thought I could not endure.’ What this goal and the expected triumph were – other than the mapping of more of those blanks on the map that he so often referred to in his correspondence – Hedin never revealed. It seems more than likely that the Swedish explorer’s real goal (never publicly expressed because never achieved) again lay east of Shigatse, if not among the golden portals of Lhasa itself then on down the great river whose upper reaches he had now charted but whose lower course would not be determined by Bailey and Morshead for another six years.

  Hedin also knew that his time was running out. He had been plagued with eye trouble for over a decade and was already all but blind in one eye. Soon it would be impossible for him to continue his mapping unaided and he would be forced to retire from the field. Another punishing two thousand miles through the wastelands could only produce further revelations, reinforce those already made and ensure that Hedin’s worst fear – that he might be judged unworthy by the geographical world – was unfounded. And, indeed, Hedin was to claim that his final journey was ‘still richer in discoveries’ when in August 1908 he finally crossed the Shipki La into British territory and, looking back across the canyons of the Sutlej valley towards the great Tibetan plateau, took his leave of ‘the best years of my life and the finest chapter’. Here he was met and photographed by a Moravian missionary, surrounded by his Tibetan and Ladakhi retainers and his dogs, and striking a curiously defiant pose for the camera.

  This last journey was very much in the Hedin tradition. After bidding farewell to his first caravan team in Ladakh he immediately hired a fresh crew and told them that they were bound for Kashgar and Chinese Turkestan. They set off with only one month’s supply of grain and fodder for their pack animals, enough only to last them to Kashgar, but were then led eastwards off the road on another of Hedin’s terrible winter journeys through the blizzards of the Chang Tang. Once more there was the calculated gamble that they would be able to replace the losses among their animals – which came off – and the attempt to beat the Tibetan defence system – which failed. Again there was the protracted withdrawal towards British territory, which on this occasion took Hedin back into the Kailas region and then down the Sutlej valley, past the ruins of Tsaparang and the lost kingdom of Gugé where Antonio de Andrade and his brave Jesuits had laboured fruitlessly three centuries earlier.

  As always, Hedin had shared every discomfort with his men, holding back few of the sahib’s privileges for himself. Yet he was always alone, saving his real affections for the succession of dogs that he took with him. ‘It was always more difficult to say goodbye to the dogs than to the men,’ he once declared. On this last expedition his favourite was Brown Puppy, a stray found in the bazaar at Srinagar and the only animal to survive Hedin’s earlier journey. When Brown Puppy failed to reappear after a sandstorm Hedin missed him terribly: ‘How often did it not seem to me as I lay awake at night, that the tent-cloth was raised and that my old travelling-companion crawled in and lay down in the corner? But always it was the wind that deceived me.’ For some days afterwards he suffered the persistent delusion that the dog was at his heels: ‘I felt the presence of an invisible dog which followed me into my tent, and among the Tibetans, and always whined and pleaded for help, and I was worried that I could give no help or consolation to my lost, wandering friend.’

  From the geographical point of view the journey’s main achievement was the further demarcation of the great mountain barrier north of the Tsangpo, which Hedin was now calling the Trans-Himalayan range, but it hardly justified Hedin’s claim, put in a letter to Keltie from Viceregal Lodge, Simla, that as a result of this last circuit nobody could now fail to appreciate that ‘these discoveries are certainly the finest and most important that were still left on earth.’ Hedin was staying as a guest of Lord and Lady Minto, who had received him ‘like a conqueror’ and had been the guests of honour at an intimate gathering at which Hedin had given his first lecture on his travels. He was in the highest of spirits and rounded off his letter to Keltie with a triumphant flourish: ‘Now goodbye, old Keltie, I must be off to Kitchener, with whom I am dining tonight quite alone.’

  But old Keltie was no longer so warmly disposed towards his Swedish correspondent. Hedin had agreed to read his first paper at a meeting of the RGS early in the new year but he seemed to be in no particular hurry to return to Europe. In December Keltie wrote to him in Moscow: a curt and transparently unfriendly letter in which he made it clear that Hedin’s claims were going to be contested:

  You will of course in writing your paper state as precisely as possible what you claim to have done in the great trans-Himalayan range. Certain people here are inclined to be a little critical about your claim to have discovered the range … Also to state exactly what you mean when you say that you have discovered the sources of the Brahmaputra and the Sutlej and the Indus.

  I thought it well to give you a hint about these little details, which I am sure you will put in such a way as will leave no room for doubt as to what you really claim.

  By now Hedin had already begun to receive rather more than hints of the hostile reception that was awaiting him. On his slow journey back to Sweden by way of Japan and the trans-Siberian railway he saw himself described in Japanese newspapers as a Russian spy, in Chinese papers as a Japanese spy and in Russian papers as an English spy. He read that a consortium of English businessmen had paid him handsomely to find gold in Tibet, that it
was only through the intervention of Frank Younghusband that he had been able to enter Shigatse, that his discoveries merely confirmed those made by an earlier traveller, a certain Mr Henry Savage Landor. Finally, when he reached Stockholm in mid-January 1909 – after an absence of nearly three and a half years – he was shown press reports of an article in the Royal Geographical Society’s Journal that was said to reduce his discoveries to a minimum.

  In fact, the original article, written by the young English mountaineer Tom Longstaff, was no more than a short letter which cast doubts on only one of Hedin’s claims – his discovery of the Trans-Himalayan range – but coming hard on the heels of John Scott Keltie’s letter and the attacks in the press it had a devastating effect on Hedin’s already bruised ego. His first letter to Keltie after his homecoming was full of the most bitter recriminations: