by Wade Davis
The Amritsar Massacre left a scar across India that would never heal. Dyer’s only punishment was early retirement from the army. In many quarters of the Raj he was celebrated as a hero. English ladies took up collections to buy him a sword of honor. From supporters like Rudyard Kipling he received a gift of £26,000, a small fortune, to ease his way into his golden years. The agony and outrage united Indians in fury. In February 1921, even as the Everest Committee made plans for the mountain, the Duke of Connaught, the younger brother of Edward VII, declared that “the shadow of Amritsar has lengthened over the fair face of India.” It was the beginning of the end of the Raj, even if few recognized it at the time.
For Howard-Bury, who socialized with royalty and knew the Duke of Connaught personally, India in 1921 remained the Raj of his youth, a land of old Sikh soldiers bedecked in medals, glittering assemblies of princes and elephants, and dashing young English officers posing beside racks of dead Bengal tigers. He had seen too much carnage in France to condone Dyer’s actions at Amritsar, but he remained a dedicated imperialist with high Tory principles, convinced that British rule, firm and fair, was the best form of government for the subcontinent. In the House of Commons in 1923 he would speak out against Gandhi and insist that the Raj make no concessions to nationalist agitation. India, he maintained, was not ready for independence. The people did not understand democracy.
Like so many of his class, Howard-Bury loved the idea of India, the proud martial tradition of the Indian Army, the exotic features of its culture and traditions, the righteous sense of pride that came to all Englishmen with the spread of British civilization. But he had little time for those Indians who had actually achieved what the English aspired to offer, who had attended Harrow and Eton, Oxford and Cambridge, and returned home quite prepared to lead a free nation. Sir Francis Younghusband spoke for many when he wrote, “The best Indians … and those who have the highest and best qualities, are the soldiers and servants who can perhaps neither read nor write, but who have lived their lives within the honest atmosphere of Englishmen and Englishwomen. The worst are the so-called highly educated Indians who get a smattering of algebra and John Stuart Mill.” This attitude, as much as the atrocity at Amritsar, drove Indian politicians and intellectuals and British social reformers to distraction.
Mallory had disliked Howard-Bury from the start, describing him in a letter to Ruth as a “queer customer … too much the landlord with not only Tory prejudices but a very highly developed sense of hate and contempt for other people other than his own.” This last statement seems unfair, but in photographs the contrast between the two men is evident: Howard-Bury erect in his houndstooth jacket and tweed breeches, with his tie and gold watch chain, his felt hat perched at a rakish angle; Mallory impish, hands in mittens, a scarf casually dangling from his neck, legs pulled up to his chest almost like a child.
It could not have helped that Mallory had traveled to Ireland and was clearly sympathetic to the Republican cause; as far as Howard-Bury was concerned, the Sinn Fein had unleashed a terrorist war. For him the issue was intensely personal. Only ten months before, in September 1920, his mother’s gamekeeper’s cottage had been destroyed by arson, as had the bridge and the gates at her estate at Charleville. Within a year her own house at Brookfield would be torched. The crisis had caused Howard-Bury to accept the Everest post with some reluctance and trepidation. The fate of Ireland and his mother’s well-being haunted Howard-Bury his entire sojourn in Tibet, and it was one reason he was so concerned about the timely delivery of the mail. He opened each letter from home less than certain that there would be a home to return to.
THE TRACK OUT of Rebu led for several miles through a valley flanked on both sides by great limestone and sandstone cliffs, and then gradually rose to the summit of the Doya La, a 17,000-foot pass that marked the boundary between two very different worlds. Just a quarter mile below the pass Howard-Bury picked up a first sign, a stretch of granite soil that supported an extraordinary growth of alpine flowers: blue poppies in great abundance, pink, yellow, and white saxifrages, purple gentians, and a dozen species that were completely new to him. North of the Doya La the land was dry, harsh, and barren save for the irrigated fields of mustard and barley. Beyond the pass the air was moist, and the entire landscape was swathed by the blanket of the monsoon, the damp clouds driven up the Arun River and its tributaries from beyond the Himalaya to the south. As Howard-Bury and Heron dropped away from the heights, they passed through junipers and willows, and entire forests of pink and white rhododendrons, meadows of dozens of wildflowers, clematis and currants, monkshood and blue anemones, wild roses and spiraeas.
If the landscape was welcoming, the people were not. None had ever seen a European. Having ridden twenty-six miles with no sign of Kharta, Howard-Bury and Heron needed information about the route, yet in every village the Tibetans scattered in fear as they approached. In the end the travelers gave chase and captured a man, who under some duress guided the party to Chulungphu, where they halted for the night. Only with reluctance did the locals emerge out of hiding to erect tents and provide fuel, as per the standing orders of the dzongpen. Howard-Bury and Heron slept that night in a field of scented yellow primulas and awoke to mist and a pattering of rain. It was the first precipitation of the year and the villagers, delighted by this auspicious turn of events, now begged the Europeans, for the sake of the crops, not to leave.
In the soft and mild air of morning, they pushed on down the valley, with each passing mile bringing richer fields and more fertile land, hillsides covered with junipers and willows, ancient terraces ablaze with yellow mustard, villages and country estates surrounded by groves of giant poplars. In due course they came to a large river, which Howard-Bury knew to be the upper reaches of the Arun, known in Tibet as the Phung Chu, which they had followed a month before on their exploratory approach to Shegar Dzong and Tingri. Only once it dropped into Nepal, passing through a deep, thunderous gorge flanked by great cliffs and towering peaks, was the river formally known as the Arun.
It was even here a formidable barrier. There was a rope bridge eighteen miles upstream, Howard-Bury learned, but it would be useless in high water. So the party continued south, following the main track of the river for three miles, until coming upon a wild glacial stream also quite impossible to ford. It flowed out of a valley that reached away to the west, the direction of Everest, though the mountain could not be seen. The local people professed to know nothing of the stream’s source or of the lands that rose so dramatically to snow summits that fused with the clouds and sky. Heading up this valley, the travelers presently came to Kharta Shika, the hamlet that was home to the local governor.
Kharta, they discovered, was not a place but a district, a series of villages and religious retreats and monasteries clustered around the confluence of the Kharta Chu and the Phung Chu, in a temperate valley heavily influenced by the weather systems that swept up the Arun from Nepal. The governor welcomed them cordially with gifts of sweetmeats and ceremonial scarves, and invited them to camp in his garden, a beautiful copse of willows and wild rosebushes set off from the courtyard of his home, sheltered from the wind and dominated by an ancient poplar larger than any specimen Howard-Bury had ever encountered. A stream crossed the garden and in the shadow of the poplar was a painted prayer wheel eight feet high, which, driven by the water, turned in constant motion. To one side was a fine Chinese tent, their shelter for the night. It turned out, however, to be more beautiful than functional. The rains that heralded the full coming of the monsoon broke that evening, and they spent the night huddled in their mackintoshes as a fine mist sprayed through the roof and the sloping walls, soaking everything. But again the coincidence of their arrival on the eve of the first really heavy rains of the season did not go unnoticed by the dzongpen and the villagers, and it made for a very promising start.
In the morning Howard-Bury, leaving Heron to rest, set out with Chheten Wangdi, his Tibetan translator, the dzongpen, and a wealth
y landowner named Hopaphema to search for an appropriate encampment for the expedition. They rode down toward the main valley, pausing to examine several houses before settling on one that stood alone on an old river terrace with fine views, a good supply of readily accessible water, and a lovely garden of poplars and willows where they could pitch their tents. The landlord agreed to let it for thirty trangka a month, a princely sum of three and a half pence a day. It was the first time anyone had attempted to rent a property in the valley and, as Howard-Bury mused, there were no real estate agents present to drive up the price.
After a lunch of macaroni and minced meat, tea, milk, and beer, the men headed back to Kharta, where the rains that day had never stopped. In the clearing light of evening Howard-Bury took a walk through the ruins of an old fort close to their camp, and came upon a dell of willows and scarlet roses where the ground was carpeted by primulas and giant poplars grew thirty feet in circumference. He felt renewed by the beauty of the place. It was fine country and would serve as an excellent base even as their explorations took them back up onto the ice and rock. He still did not know what lay at the head of the Kharta Chu, but he had learned that there was a parallel valley to the south, the Kama, accessible by three distinct routes, high passes crossed only infrequently by herdsmen, pilgrims, and the odd trader heading south across the Himalaya into Nepal. At the head of one of these valleys, Howard-Bury surmised, would be found the opening to Everest, the eastern flank of the North Col, and the route to the summit.
WHAT HOWARD-BURY did not know was that in crossing into the Kama Valley, the British would be entering one of the most beautiful and sacred places in Tibet, Khenbalung, the Hidden Valley of Artemesia, one of the beyuls, or spiritual refugia, created in mystic time by Padma Sambhava, Guru Rinpoche. Tibetans saw the valley as one vast cosmic mandala, the points of which were defined by sacred peaks, the homes of mountain deities, with the centrifugal heartland itself being a single Buddha energy field of such beneficence that merely to be there on the land was to know and embrace ever deeper levels of compassion, wisdom, and loving-kindness. The waters of Khenbalung were said to cure all maladies, be they of the mind, body, or spirit. Women who drank from the Kama Chu or any of the hundreds of snowmelt streams of the valley became instantly more beautiful, certain to give birth to an unbroken line of descendants. Men became as strong as the mythical warriors of the ancient Tibetan kings, as swift and skillful as the most brilliant of birds. To meditate for one year in Khenbalung brought greater merit than what might be secured by a thousand years of prayer in any other land.
The appropriate time to take refuge in Khenbalung, the location of its four sacred portals, and the rituals to be performed before crossing these thresholds of the divine were set out with precision in the terma, the concealed treasure document, the original guidebook deposited in both physical and mystical space by Guru Rinpoche. These heavenly lands were only for the faithful to find in times of danger and crisis. For sincere seekers they were places of peace and fertility, an ocean of positive energy, eternal youth, religious virtue, insight, and wisdom. For the advanced practitioner, Khenbalung was itself ultimate reality, a valley where spiritually awakened beings could slip silently and effortlessly into an aura of intense mystical ecstasy.
The beauty and benevolence of the beyuls was in a sense the perfect coefficient for the depravity, despair, and horror certain to have been suffered by all those who reached the mystical doorways. For it was written in the treasures that only when all civilization lay as shattered stones, when monks renounced their vows and wandered about like feral dogs, when people ate human flesh without shame, when wars drove men mad with depravity and blood ran like rivers throughout the world, would it be time for the virtuous to seek refuge in the hidden lands.
Once inside the sensory space of the hidden valley, in the full radiance of the Buddha field, the pilgrim, according to the guidebook, was certain to encounter endless magical possibilities, plants that knew no seasons and cured all diseases, fruits and flowers scented with the essence of the Buddha, sweat from his skin, and more animals than can be imagined, snow lions and foxes, bears, leopards, apes, jackals, black birds with red-and-yellow beaks floating in space. Clouds and mist darkened the dawn and from the sky resounded the roar of dragons. There was a poisonous burning lake and in the midst of white mountains a crystal palace, home of the secret protector of all hidden treasures, Chekyong Sura, a radiant deity with three bloodshot eyes.
For Tibetans it was inconceivable to enter Khenbalung without taking appropriate ritual precautions. Each traveler wore around the neck a small silver amulet containing written religious texts to be held close to the heart to ward off demons and empower the spirit. Each walked with a prayer wheel spinning in constant motion, a silver or copper vessel inscribed with the six-syllable mantra Om mane padme hum. Inside the wheel were rolls of paper printed with sutras and spiritual invocations designed to absorb and radiate Buddha energy. With every rotation both the supplicant and the land itself became charged with religious potential. In climbing to any pass, pilgrims carried small stones as offerings to the guardians of the mountains, and at the major divides they paused to string prayer flags printed with mantras, images of the Windhorse, in the colors of the five elements, yellow representing the earth, green for water, red for fire, white for the air, and blue for space, or ether. With each flutter of breeze, the prayers carried to the universe. As pilgrims crossed the heights, they shouted Kiki so so lha so lha, “May the gods be victorious,” for each mountain pass recalls the triumph of Guru Rinpoche, when he tamed the resident deities and quelled the malignant forces of the land.
Still demons remain, and among the most terrible are those that dwell within mountain peaks. These are gods of fire and fury, pitiless in their wrath, merciless in their violence. They are the source of the poisonous mists that blind travelers. They launch thunderbolts, loose avalanches; they find gratification in tormenting human beings with hail, rocks, and freezing rain. These terrible and monstrous demons are only among the spiritual hazards awaiting the insincere. Every feature of the landscape is the abode of vital life forces, powerful spiritual entities that dwell everywhere, in caves, lakes, a glacial flow, a juniper leaf, a songbird, or a blade of grass. As pilgrims move through the sacred landscape, they engage in a constant reciprocal flow of spiritual energy, giving fully of themselves, sensing, hearing, seeing with both eyes and mind, speaking through prayers, taking from the land small symbolic gifts even as they leave in exchange something of themselves. When they circle a sacred site, circumambulating a chorten or shrine, perhaps in ritual prostration, it is with the purpose of focusing this energy, building a spiritual charge of empowerment about themselves and the place, like a coil of latent potential.
From the Tibetan perspective, to go into the mountains blind, knowing nothing of proper ritual protocols, living in complete ignorance of anything but what lies on the surface of perception, was an act of total folly. To enter the hidden lands of Khenbelung without adequate spiritual protection, as the British were destined to do, would seem a sign of madness.
Howard-Bury, naturally, knew nothing of this. He had with some sympathy and interest watched his porters make these curious gestures, particularly when crossing high passes. He had been touched by the sincerity of their spiritual intent. He had allowed them to pause at will on the trail to make offerings, to purify a space with juniper fire and smoke. But ultimately these rituals remained for him quaint and mysterious customs, without obvious meaning or significance. All he knew was that the Kama Chu lay beyond the height of land that flanked the Kharta Valley to the south and that somewhere near its source might be found the opening to Everest they had been seeking for these many long weeks. The spiritual potency of the valley, its capacity for grace or for harm, was the last thing on his mind.
ON THE MORNING of July 9 Howard-Bury and Heron, after a final breakfast of milk, turnip greens, and minced meat hosted by their new friend Hopaphema, began the l
ong trek back to Tingri. They rode down the Kharta Chu and then, rather than returning west and over the Doya La, they followed the true right bank of the Phung Chu upstream for some ten miles, passing rich fields of barley, peas, and mustard that gradually gave way to an increasingly barren landscape. The river swept close to the mountains and the trail rose up the face of steep cliffs, dangerous with falling rocks, before crossing a series of broad stony terraces to reach the small hamlet of Dak, where they paused to change transport. Beyond Dak the Phung Chu took a dramatic turn to the east, disappearing into a formidable gorge. Abandoning the main river, the party climbed high into a lateral valley coming in from the west. This proved to be the lower reaches of the Dzakar Chu, a river ultimately born in the rock and ice of Rongbuk, where for much of its initial flow it is known as the Rongbuk Chu. Howard-Bury’s plan was to follow the Dzakar Chu upstream for some forty miles, completing a great circle of exploration, and then strike out to the northwest for Tingri, thus adding several hundred square miles of new terrain to the reconnaissance.
They camped that first night at Lumeh, in the garden of a fine country home dominated by enormous poplars, which the villagers claimed had been planted some five hundred years before; one measured an astonishing forty feet in circumference at the base. Beyond the garden wheat grew alongside barley, though the elevation was 12,800 feet, and the fields were alive with hares and magpies. The rain that evening fell again in torrents, as it now did every night, and by morning fresh snow lay thick on the ridges down to an elevation of 16,000 feet, an ominous development that did little to assuage Howard-Bury’s concerns about time and the changing of the seasons. The following day’s march carried them up the Dzakar Chu, with much of the route requiring them to follow the actual bed of the river, which was hemmed in by cliffs, in flood, and dangerous. Occasionally the valley opened up and gravel bars and beaches thick with tamarisks and buckthorns allowed a brief respite from the wet and cold. But mostly they slogged upstream, fighting the current. Heron wanted to stop after fifteen miles, as the porters from Kharta were played out, but Howard-Bury insisted on pushing on another seven miles to Pulme, where in the rain and darkness they were delighted to find tents pitched and villagers waiting their arrival with hot food and frothy vats of chang, the local beer made from barley.