The key to Younghusband’s character was that he was a mystic. The world was not meaningless, its beauty was conjoined to a real and intriguing existence beyond. This sense of the noumenal would later lead him to promote the notion of fundamental religious unity on the point of experience and establish the World Congress of Faiths. Standing at the foot of the Mustagh Pass and seeing K2, the second highest mountain in the world, he wrote, ‘This world was more wonderful far than I had ever known before. And I seemed to grow greater myself from the mere fact of having seen it. Having once seen that, how could I ever be little again?’
This is a precise account of the effect of high mountains on the sensitive. The experience is one that both humbles and enlarges the soul. A vast city can make a man feel small, a vast bookshop can dent a writer’s bigger ambitions, but the wilderness experience that Younghusband has – which is reportedly common in such remote places – is different. It is primarily one of connection. By being connected, perhaps through the initial experience of awe at the great sight, one feels uplifted, a part of this greatness which somehow flows into oneself too. This explains, partly, the addictive quality of such places: you feel more than fully human, almost superhuman, and yet without any sense of overweening arrogance that comes from mere worldly excellence or acts of recognised superiority.
As with almost all mountain ascents, they first trudged up the glacier. Younghusband had never seen one before; its size and depth, glimpsed through crevasses, astonished him. The ponies had an increasingly hard time of it. Their legs were bruised and cut by stumbling over the tumbled rocks carried by the glacier. On the third day, the ever resourceful Wali suggested the ponies be sent back. That night, approaching 5,800 metres, most of the men having a hard time breathing, Younghusband fell asleep, unsure whether they would be able to keep going. His beard and moustache froze to his face in the night. But the next morning, he and Wali, the slave Turgan, Drogpa and two other Baltis, headed ever upwards carrying everything they needed on their backs. After six more hours of strenuous climbing, through freshly fallen snow, every step requiring a moment or two of rest, they arrived at the crest of the pass. Younghusband took a few steps forward and his dreams were shattered – the route down was impossible. The glacier heading south, to the Indian Ocean, was utterly riven by icefalls and avalanches; it fell away, almost vertically it seemed. To a man who had never mountaineered in his life, it looked like a suicidal drop and nothing more. This was the dividing line between China and India, and it seemed to have defeated him.
But in a moment perhaps too little celebrated in the annals of exploration, it was his local guide who saved the day. Wali, without crampons, ice axe or any of the other gear deemed essential for modern mountain climbing, was undeterred. Using an ordinary wood-cutting axe (which works almost as well as an ice axe, though it is more cumbersome and rather riskier), he started cutting steps down the rapidly steepening ice slope. Younghusband was impressed and gained courage from his guide’s steadfast behaviour: ‘I freely confess that I myself could never have attempted the descent and that I – an Englishman – was afraid to go first.’
This was a key point in Younghusband’s life. He was now a real explorer – going where no other European had been. It was of inner importance because it signified any moment in an enterprise where you are about to give up, where all looks impossible, where a veritable wall is faced – and yet by inching ever forwards, chipping away to make steps, progress is made and the vast difficulties dissolve as if they had never existed.
They ‘roped up’ using whatever bits of rope they had extended with unwrapped turbans and bits of leather rein. It was, as the tough Swedish explorer Sven Hedin put it, ‘the most difficult and dangerous achievement in these mountains so far’.
Using the axe, Wali was able to chop steps that the others could use. It is amazing how hospitable a seemingly sheer snow or ice slope looks with a few good steps lopped out of it. It is like having your own personal ledge to traverse the edge of a gorge or other precipitous feature. Younghusband observed they stood ‘on a slope as steep as the roof of a house’. The roping together was a potential mixed blessing. If one fell, the others would need to react fast or be pulled to their doom. As it got steeper, Younghusband wrote that if one of them now slipped
the whole party would have been carried away and lunged into the abyss below. Outwardly I kept as cool and cheerful as I could but inwardly shuddered at each fresh step I took. The sun was now pouring down on the ice, and just melted the surface of the steps after they were hewn, so that by the time those of us who were a few paces behind Wali reached a step, the ice just covered over with water, and this made it still more slippery for our soft leather boots, which now had become almost slimy on the surface.
Younghusband was a natural mountaineer – he improvised cloth crampons by binding handkerchiefs around the smooth insteps of his leather boots – the dampened cloth was able to much better grip the ice.
As they reached a point of no return, Drogpa panicked and lost his nerve. He began a mad scramble across the ice. Younghusband admitted he ‘was in a state of cold horrible fear . . . but pretended to care a bit, and laughed it off, pour encourager les autres’
But worse lay ahead. Under a protecting overhang of rock (they were now being bombarded by falling rocks and ice melting away from the face in the heat of the sun, one of the commonest causes of accident in the high mountains) Younghusband assessed the situation. Retreat was unthinkable, perhaps impossible now the ice was melting. Further descent seemed equally difficult – a vertical drop lay beneath them. But there were three protruding rocks at intervals showing out through the sheer sheet of ice below. Younghusband, very rapidly coming to terms with the mechanics of climbing, realised they could lower themselves from rock to rock using their improvised rope which had to be further lengthened by the Baltis unwinding their lengthy cummerbunds and tying them into the main length. The lightest Balti was lowered with the axe. He cut steps as he went. The others were able to use both the steps and the rope as a handhold for their descent. But then came the eternal problem of climbing: how does the last man come down without leaving the rope behind? With just a touch of imperial order about it, Turgan the slave was deputed to come last, sans rope. Slipping the last few feet he made it.
The next protruding rock was reached in the same laborious manner, and the next, Turgan again bringing up the rear: ‘he reached our rock of refuge in safety . . . and finally reached a part where the slope was less steep’.
They had been descending for six hours; ‘when I reached the bottom and looked back, it seemed utterly impossible that any man could have come down such a place’. They were tired now and one of the Baltis fell through the thin covering of a crevasse. Again the improvised rope of reins and belts came to the rescue and they were able to lower it down to him and pull him out. At midnight they found a piece of ground that wasn’t pure ice. They lit a small fire and Younghusband deemed the moment auspicious enough to break out a bottle of brandy he had been given by Lady Walsham in Peking. It had survived all of China and the Gobi – but the descent down the Mustagh Pass had been too much – the bottle was smashed and Younghusband’s sleeping bag was awash with the fumes of alcohol. But still he slept ‘as if nothing could ever wake us again’.
They were now on the Baltoro, the largest mountain glacier in the world, and Younghusband’s boots were falling apart: ‘My native boots were now in places worn through till the bare skin of my foot was exposed, and I had to hobble along on my toes or my heels.’ The following night they slept in the first clump of fir trees. They had a few dry biscuits to eat and that was all. The following day he had to be carried across a river – unfortunately his porter slipped and both men almost drowned. ‘The only thing to do was to walk on hard till we could find some shelter.’
Two days later they came across their first Balti village. They were now on the fringes of British Imperial influence – but far from safe. Wali refused to leave You
nghusband’s side in case the villagers tried to kill him and take whatever wealth they assumed he had.
Younghusband soon recovered his strength. He reconnoitred the ‘new’ Mustagh Pass, but found it more impassable than the old one he had taken.
They headed now down towards Kashmir. He had a pony to ride and there were apricot trees at the roadside. They had passed the fearsome Mustagh Pass. And by this act Younghusband became the ‘father of Karakoram exploration’.*
* Kenneth Mason
7
Tortured in Tibet
Contentment is the real form of happiness.
Lepcha proverb
One of the more interesting but perhaps risible figures to be lured by the mysteries of the Himalayas and what lies beyond was the grandson of the poet Walter Savage Landor, Arnold (sometimes Henry), a friend of Dickens and Swinburne. Arnold Henry Savage Landor still had some of the creative energy of his grandfather – Tibetan explorer Sven Hedin claimed that Landor’s bulky two-volume In the Forbidden Land was an ‘extraordinary Munchausen romance’. The mountaineer Tom Longstaff found a highest-point cairn that Landor had left behind on a mountain in Nepal. Landor wrote that he had climbed to 7,000 metres; in reality, the cairn was at 5,000 metres. A true maker of imaginary journeys!
But Landor did visit Tibet and made his way to Lake Kailash. Owing to a propensity for beating and abusing locals, he soon lost his entourage – bar two intensely loyal Indians, one of whom was a leper. When Landor was insulted by a Tibetan he deemed it ‘unwise to allow it to pass unchallenged’. After a short tussle in which the Tibetan’s pigtail was pulled and a number of blows landed, Landor described with relish how he made the sorry lad ‘lick my shoes clean with his tongue . . . thus done, he tried to scamper away, but I caught him again by his pigtail, and kicked him down the front steps.’
Savage by name, savage by nature. But such behaviour was bound to bring some bad karma in its wake. Landor was warned repeatedly that he should turn back to India but he wouldn’t be deflected from his aim to reach Lhasa. Eventually, he was captured in a village he names as ‘Toxem’: ‘When I realised that it took the Tibetans five hundred men all counted to arrest a starved Englishman and his two half-dying servants . . . I could not restrain a smile of contempt. . .’
But the smile would soon fade: he was tightly bound and forced to ride a horse with a spiked saddle – which savaged(!) his back and nether quarters. Using their fuselock rifles, his guards amused themselves by taking random pot-shots at their captive as he squirmed on his saddle. At one point he was bound to the sharpened edge of a prism-shaped log and informed by a crazed Grand Lama (Landor’s description) that his eyes were about to be put out. A red-hot iron was flourished in his face and the Englishman assumed the worst when he later had problems seeing. But his eyesight returned and the only permanent damage was a scorched nose. The butt of a rifle was placed against his forehead and discharged – but Landor forced himself to laugh, despite the nasty blow, just to show his tormentors that he was their moral superior. He was then taunted by a sword before being tied to a rack and stretched in true medieval fashion.
These tortures, though, seemed designed to scare Landor away rather than really punish him. For the cocksure Englishman was led to Taklakot and allowed to escape with his loyal servants.
Back in India, Landor sailed from Bombay to Italy, where he lived as a true English gentleman in exile.
There is a curious parallel with Younghusband – who always maintained that good manners were what enabled him to dominate the natives that he met, or at least impress them enough to help him. Those who make journeys into the wild places are usually either diplomats or ruffians – both tactics can work, though being a ruffian can sometimes get you killed whereas being a diplomat may just see you kidnapped . . . In reality the single most important factor for the traveller is his determination to not give up, his willingness to use everything at his disposal to complete his journey.
8
Nanga Parbat: the First Mountaineers
A father deserted by a wise son is like being caught in a rainstorm without a felt to protect you.
Tibetan proverb
Younghusband is, as I’ve already mentioned, a key figure in any full account of the Himalayas of the last century or so. He is the first Himalayan climber, he is the man who connects to the pantheistic god while stumbling down a Himalayan mountain cliff, he forces, penetrates – no less a term is appropriate – his way into Lhasa, demonstrating the yang confusion of the West; Madame Blavatsky had already ‘visited’ using a yin method twenty years earlier. In a sense, they complement each other; both reflect the mighty confusion of a civilisation attempting to deal with something it doesn’t understand. We laugh heartily (in private now, I imagine) at the lack of understanding Native Americans showed to technology, to the Iron Horse, the Fire Stick and other marvels. I’ve spent time in Haiti trying to explain that a glinting flashing flying mechanical horse does not exist. But surely it must; after all – as they slyly pointed out – you have space travel and atom bombs . . .? Eastern religions attract similarly convoluted and wishful thinking. We may have ‘studied’ it in our schools of anthropology and comparative religion – but that’s about as useful as an American Indian laboratory of nuclear physics.
But mountain climbing is what we must look at next rather than the hidden realms reached by the mystic. In the early twentieth century a new activity emerges in the Himalayas. A hybrid of nineteenth-century exploration and alpinism creates modern mountaineering, which reaches its ultimate form in the various assaults on Everest, the most significant being the final successful climb in 1953. Interestingly, the climbers are symbolically from East and West and yet clad in the spacesuit-like apparel of dark goggles, bulked-up down-filled climbing wear, with shining aluminium oxygen tanks in a framelike structure not unlike what would later be recognised as the engineer-naїf style of the lunar module and lunar rover.
Britain rather than America (who at that moment had already shifted attention to outer space rather than the mere Earth) was accorded full honours for finally climbing Everest. It was as if the Americans already sensed the bigger game of altitude was indeed outer space. Americans have lagged behind in the urge to conquer new and remote peaks in the Himalayas, until the current era of commercially guided climbs. The ‘poor’ ex-communist country of Poland has more hard Himalayan climbs to its credit than the US; indeed, Polish climbers pioneered extreme winter climbing in the Himalayas.
Mostly, there’s no money in climbing – nor much glamour. It is interesting that American interest exploded with the idea of the ‘seven summits’ – a notion that can be commercialised, and has been; wealthy(ish) men and women paying to be guided up the highest summit on each continent. Dick Bass, a businessman, was the first to prove this ‘model’ worked – and many have followed in his footsteps. The second ascent, which is worthless in an exploration sense, makes complete sense when it becomes part of the athletic business success culture of the US.
But all that was a long, long way ahead.
In what follows, we’ll see compared two assaults on Nanga Parbat, the ‘first’ mountain of the Himalayas in several senses. It is the first 8,000-metre peak in the chain of peaks that constitute the Himalayas and it is one of the most accessible – so it naturally drew the first attentions of serious climbers.
Two climbers, the earliest and one of the latest, an Englishman and a German, underestimate the mountain and treat it as if it is an extension of the Alpine excursion – their training ground. The Himalayas are physically an extension of the Alps – as we’ve seen, part of a continuous ridge of mountains through Europe, Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan onwards . . .
Such lightweight, daring, Alpine-inspired climbing has always vied, and continues to vie, with the heavy-handed methods of fixed ropes and porters. Though Everest was climbed using ‘siege-gun tactics’ reminiscent of a military operation like Young-husband’s invasion of Tibet, there has always been a
minor key of climbers – Mummery, Shipton, Tilman, and later on Messner, Gajewski, Czok and Venables – who would attack at every opportunity the big, heavily sponsored stumbling expeditions as being unworthy and uncalled for in the high mountains. They uphold that such methods of climbing desecrate the mountains. It is no accident that these climbers who tend towards Alpinism and minimalist climbing are usually mystically inclined – albeit well-hidden mystics like Bill Tilman.
Nanga Parbat, until the commercial era dawned, had more than any other the reputation of being a mankilling summit. In 1895 it was responsible for the first death of a sporting mountaineer in the Himalayas; a dubious distinction, but one that set the pattern for a series of disastrous expeditions in the 1930s. Even today, it was the scene of the first murder of climbers by extremist militants, owing to its position of relative accessibility – the same reason it was targeted as an early peak to climb.
The curse of the mountain started, perhaps, in 1841 when an enormous rockslide from the mountain created a dam across one branch of the River Indus. The ensuing lake was some 55 kilometres long, a vast quantity of backed-up water which eventually burst through the rockslide dam in a wall of water 24 metres high. This riverine tsunami carried all before it – mainly rocks, trees and livestock, until it reached Attock where what is described as a ‘Sikh army’ was washed to its death. Since an army in the field is, in modern terms, taken to be over 80,000 men, one cannot be entirely sure of just how many people were killed. In the mid nineteenth century what would now be called a division – around 10,000 men – would probably also be considered in local terms an army. One thing is certain: when a 24-metre wall of water hits any sizable group of people, huge loss of life is bound to ensue.
White Mountain Page 15