The treachery of Nanga Parbat, which means Naked Mountain, was evident from the very first attempt to climb it by the alpinist Albert Frederick Mummery in 1895. The top climber of his day, Mummery was a pioneer of what would become standard practice later on. He was highly skilled, innovative and not dependent on alpine guides, though he worked with them at times. His ambition exceeded theirs – which is what brought him to Nanga Parbat – an incredibly audacious first peak to climb in the Himalayas (actually the Karakoram, but within the greater sense of the Himalayan range). At 8,126 metres it is one of the fourteen 8,000-metre peaks in the world and therefore not an easy target. Its proximity to Rawalpindi made getting there a little easier, but it was a more dangerous mountain than Mummery could perhaps imagine.
In a sense, he parallels Reinhold Messner, who also sought to make his name on Nanga Parbat with his brother in 1970. By the 1970S Nanga Parbat had become a ‘German’ mountain in the sense that Everest was a ‘British’ one. There had been numerous German expeditions since the 1930s, many deaths and finally a German triumph in 1953.
But Mummery came before all that. Thin and bespectacled, but with the long arms and large hands of a rock-climbing tyro, he was the son of a well-to-do wholesale merchant in Dover. Not out of the top drawer, but neither was Edward Whymper, arguably one of the most influential of early alpinists, who had been a humble draughtsman and wood engraver (just as Howard Carter the archaeologist was – is there something about graphic art that enables one to grasp other skills easily?), Mummery had upset the rather staid Alpine Club in Britain and had been blackballed when he’d tried to join – despite and perhaps because of putting up some of the hardest new climbs of the day. Seeking further challenges, he’d visited first the Caucasus and then the Himalayas.
Mummery’s group included two other climbers from Britain and some Gurkha soldiers and local porters for assistance. They were shocked by the effects of altitude when they warmed up on neighbouring peaks, but Mummery was the least affected. Norman Collie, one of his fellow British climbers, wrote:
I quoted an article I had read somewhere about paralysis and derangement of the nerve centres in the spinal column being the fate of all who insist on energetic action when the barometer stands at thirteen inches [i.e. is above 21,000-feet altitude, pressure being the easiest way of measuring altitude at that time]. It was no good, Mummery only laughed at me.
Like many of the fastest and most successful Himalayan climbers, he seemed less affected by altitude than most. Allied to this was a fearsome ability at rock – and ice-climbing with the basic equipment of the time: nailed boots and a long ice axe. Crampons and short ice axes, ice screws and stronger ropes would make everything somewhat easier as time went by. But nailed boots have one advantage: on mixed terrain – you save time. Crampons need to be taken off for serious rock work, whereas Tricouni nailed boots grip on ice as well as rock.
In a restless fashion, Mummery assayed the various approaches to Nanga Parbat. He was an impatient man. He hated climbing down the same route he went up – something that would bedevil the Messner brothers on their attempt on the mountain seventy-five years later. Mummery made a stab at the Rupal face – the one Messner would climb – and decided there were easier ways up the mountain. He tried the Diamir face, but his Gurkha assistant Raghobir fell ill from altitude sickness so they had to turn back. He decided to try another approach. But instead of going all the way to the bottom he made another traverse round the mountain to the Rakhiot valley. This was where the eventual first ascent was made from, so Mummery was on the right track. But first he had to ascend the Diamir Glacier and cross a high pass to reach the Rakhiot Glacier. Years later – descending rather than ascending this glacier – the Messner brothers would meet disaster. And so did Mummery. We cannot know for sure that he died here in one of the many avalanches that sweep the slopes, but he and his companions never returned. The leading climber of his day became the first martyr in the world of Himalayan climbing.
The Germans turned their attention to Nanga Parbat in the Karakoram partly because Everest was, at that time, off limits to nationalities other than the British. In 1932 Willy Merkl reached a height of 6,950 metres. He returned two years later and lost four German climbers and six Sherpas. In 1937 the bad luck continued – seven German climbers and nine Sherpas were swept away by a huge avalanche that destroyed their advance base camp.
The mountain was finally climbed in 1953 – by a German team. At the time it was the second highest unclimbed peak after Everest, which had been summited a few weeks earlier. The summit was taken by Herman Buhl, who, without oxygen, a tent or food, took advantage of a sudden burst of perfect weather to storm the peak alone. It was perhaps this astounding lone feat, snatching glory from the Germans at the last moment, that motivated the youthful Reinhold Messner seventeen years later and on a different side of the mountain.
Messner, never a particularly imaginative pioneer, sought to simply go one better on similar terrain to those who had gone before, usually German climbers. On Nanga Parbat it would lead to a tragedy some say he never really recovered from.
Messner was twenty-five and already had fifty hard first ascents behind him in the Alps. He was invited to join the 1970 expedition to climb the notoriously difficult Rupal face of Nanga Parbat, the face that Mummery had initially been drawn to. The leader of the expedition, Dr Karl Herrligkoffer, provided a link back to the successful 1953 expedition – which had been riven by argument, as many German expeditions seemed to be, unlike the more easy-going, and successful, British ones. Messner’s younger brother Gunther was also invited; the two were very close and, despite Reinhold’s predilection for climbing solo (by this time he had twenty solo firsts to his credit), Gunther was one of the few he liked to climb with.
In his autobiography, Messner writes a lot about Gunther. There is even a strange passage written as if authored by Gunther; it may be Messner’s way of honouring Gunther by incorporating a fragment of his writing or it may be pure imagination. Certainly Messner, always by nature a loner, never formed such a close climbing relationship again.
The account Messner has written is dreamlike and full of the regret he felt at what was to happen. Towards the end of the expedition, which had laid fixed ropes up part of the Rupal face, Messner had received the go-ahead to make a solo summit dash. But he claims his brother Gunther trailed after him. It is all rather vague. He later expresses remorse for not sending Gunther back – but already Gunther had apparently crossed several difficult parts of the climb alone and unroped – as indeed Messner had. Neither was carrying any bivvy gear, just dried fruit, drink powder and a Minox camera. Yet they made it to the top – except only Reinhold should have been there.
The series of epic failures of communication began with Reinhold believing he had arranged with Gunther and another climber that he would climb to the summit alone while they busied themselves fixing ropes in the Merkl couloir. Before dawn, at around 2.30 a.m., Reinhold left the tent; the other two were still asleep. Were they fully clothed, like Messner? We don’t know. He set off up the Merkl couloir. The route wasn’t obvious and he took some time finding his way. Then he noticed someone coming towards him. His brother! According to Messner: ‘I waited and soon he was standing next to me. I did not ask him why he had followed me.’
You think you’re soloing a mountain and, unannounced, you are suddenly joined by your brother – who doesn’t bring a rope to the party? . . . The weirdness of it all is somewhat heightened by the fact that, despite leaving at least half an hour after Reinhold, Gunther managed to catch him up – clearly he was fit enough to climb the mountain.
They made it to the top, but ‘Gunther did not feel up to climbing down the difficult sections that we had overcome on the ascent.’ So they decided to descend a new route – but first they needed to bivouac. Though they had nothing but a foil space blanket with them, they bedded down. Gunther ‘kept trying to pick something up. But there was nothing . . . My brother’
s condition made me uneasy. In his state, and without a rope, the traverse from the saddle to our ascent route was risky.’
This was clearly a potential emergency – in as much as one member of the party was incapable of descending by the agreed route. Messner writes: ‘I decided to call for help.’ As if by magic, at 10 a.m., two climbers came towards them up the Merkl couloir, going for the summit. Messner assumed they were a rescue party. When he realised they weren’t, his embarrassment made him so flustered that his response to a gesticulated ‘Is everything all right?’ from one of the climbers was to indicate that all was well. Within moments the climbers were out of sight. In the understatement of the century, Messner writes, ‘We had misunderstood each other.’ Was it his colossal pride that had stopped him from communicating the direness of their situation – out without a rope, he needed to beg for one – and he didn’t?
So instead of being rescued, they were now all alone again and without a rope. With one, they could have backtracked down the Merkl couloir.
As if realising the colossal cock-up he’d made, Messner stumbled a few times and hurt his hand – punishing himself. He writes, ‘It was as if I had gone mad . . . I wept without knowing why.’ Gunther told him to pull himself together and the pair of them set off down the Diamir face, which Mummery had part climbed in 1895. ‘If Mummery had managed to get up there in 1895, we ought to be able to do it without belaying. I did not find this plan exciting and mad, just feasible.’
Moving off, they became aware of a violent thunderstorm below them (which was hardly surprising, as the weather reports had been unfavourable). Hail rained down on them. Messner writes: ‘I went ahead to find a route in the mist.’ They stopped for a while and then pushed on once the moon rose to light their way. By eight the following morning they had reached a steep slope at the foot of the face, where they decided to separate: ‘Tacitly we agreed to meet at the first spring; there one would wait for the other.’ There is something utterly bonkers about such a plan. It is no different from the Irish (or Belgian, etc.) joke: ‘If I get there first, I’ll put a stone on the wall. If you get there first, knock it off.’ ‘Tacitly’ suggests it was a common practice when they climbed in the Alps; regardless of the difference in scale between the Alps and Himalayas, Reinhold now ploughed on without checking that Gunther was following behind. When he couldn’t see him, he assumed he had taken a faster route ‘so as to reach the greenery quickly. Perhaps he was already there.’
The next bit is slightly mad. Messner writes about seeing people on the glacier, ‘a horseman among them’; he was convinced he could hear his brother. Then it becomes apparent by a sort of ellipsis that Gunther has been buried under an ice avalanche.
This must have been very painful for Messner to write – even twenty years after the event. That is apparent in the incoherent and fractured style (Messner claims he wasted his time on formal schooling, but some might argue he didn’t get quite enough in some areas), and also the strange need to prove he did everything he could to rescue Gunther. The painful fact is, he did what we have all done as kids: looking after ourselves and forgetting about the others. Messner was only twenty-five, he had little experience except in technical climbing. He’d no experience of dealing with the complications of a high-altitude Himalayan emergency.
It is by this time too late, but Messner tries. He punishes himself by getting frostbite and losing four toes on his left foot (only the little one remains) and the first two on his right. He flails around making a desperate effort to find Gunther, who he knows with a sickening and growing certainty is dead, killed by an avalanche in much the same quick and efficient way that an avalanche probably killed Mummery. Veteran British climber Chris Bonington has written perceptively:
A snow avalanche is such an ephemeral affair. It starts with a crack, an almost imperceptible movement of the slope, and breaks away over the first ice cliff in a great boiling cloud, that gives little hint of the colossal weight of the snow and the power of the vortices in the silent, plunging cloud. It lands on the glacier, the cloud spreads out, billowing like cumulus on a summer afternoon. The distant rumble of sound only reaches the onlooker as the cloud begins to clear. It leaves hardly a trace. The permanent avalanche cone will be a little bigger, but there is no way of measuring those thousands of tons of snow that fell through the still, silent air. Only a few minutes after the avalanche, the scene looks exactly as it did before. And yet someone perhaps is buried under that fresh mantle of snow.
As Messner dashed back and forth searching for Gunther, his feet became wet and cold from wading through so much snow. Delirious now, he made it down the mountain to a place where Himalayan people dwelled. Yet Messner, half-crazed, lacked the instinct for ‘making contact’. He claims it took an hour to make ‘the poor peasants’ understand that he was hungry. What kind of an hour was that? They finally give him a chapatti. He swapped his overtrousers for five eggs and a hen, but couldn’t trust the locals to carry him, despite the state of his frostbitten feet. His paranoia is apparent as he describes being approached by two men and wondering whether they will try to kill him rather than help him (naturally, they help him).
The regret is very real, palpable and disturbing to read. You sense that in everything there is only his way of doing things. The incredible inflexibility of the man – that ‘my way or the highway’ style of climbing – is both his strength and weakness. Years later, Messner would tell fellow climbers and explorers that he had to move at his own pace – it was dangerous to do otherwise as it would tire him and put the whole expedition at risk. There is considerable truth in this: once you find your natural pace, which could be faster rather than slower, energy seems to be conserved rather than expended. You can feel yourself getting stronger as you move onwards. However, one has a responsibility beyond selfmaintenance and not becoming a burden. One also has to look out for others. An expedition has to accept it is only as fast as its slowest member. If you can’t accept this, don’t travel with others. And this is exactly what Messner tended to do from then on, climbing solo even when it came to the great 8,000-metre peaks in the Himalayas, crowned by his extraordinary solo, without oxygen, ascent of Everest’s north face.
Messner, one of six brothers, while deeply scarred and upset by Gunther’s death, felt guilty too. He writes:
The death of my brother weighed heavily on me. I had to bear the responsibility for that. He would not have died if I had not encouraged him to come on the expedition. If I had not been his brother, he would probably not have tried to catch up with me on the last part of the Rupal face. I had not sent him back. During the descent I had frequently gone on ahead. Seen in this light, I was responsible for his death . . . [but] It did not help my brother if I gave up climbing.
This admission of responsibility does not seem wholehearted. There is an implication that the real cause is the weakness of Gunther, when it is obvious that a failure of foresight and a failure in the ability to plan and communicate a plan and stick to it were the real cause. It was a classic accident with one small solvable problem piling up on another.
A year later, he was trying to get to the top of the Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea – another German shrine of a climb, in as much as Heinrich Harrer made the first ascent. The Dani tribesmen, noticing Messner’s amputated toes, assumed the injury was self-inflicted as in their culture, when a loved one died, grieving relatives would hack off a finger joint to expunge the grief. Reinhold tried to explain it was the cold that took his toes – but it wasn’t. Like the primitive Dani, whom he respects and resembles in some ways, he lost his toes out of grief for his beloved brother.
9
Ekai and Maurice: Zen Buddhists and Christians in the Himalayas
A hundred male and a hundred female qualities make a perfect human being.
Tibetan proverb
If you visit the Himalayas with a view to entering Tibet, you must cross your fair share of rivers. Many have rope – or chain-supported suspension bridges; some
are crossed on logs, easily swept away in a flood. But many you must simply wade across – and this is what the Japanese timid/brave explorer/poet/priest Kawaguchi did during his successful 1902 bid to secretly visit Lhasa. His first attempt at crossing fast water was not propitious. It was a wide shallow river over a hundred metres across. He wrote:
Oh! That plunge! It nearly killed me, the water was bitingly cold, and I saw at once that I could never survive the crossing of it. I at once turned round and crawled up the bank, but the contact with the water had already chilled me, and produced in me a sort of convulsion. What was to be done?
Despite being one of the world’s most unlikely explorers, Ekai Kawaguchi was nevertheless the equal of any of them, from Burton to Stanley, exceeding in courage and intelligence such blusterers as Sven Hedin and Nicholas Roerich. Kawaguchi, though, had a different motivation; he was a devout Buddhist who wanted to gain access to original Buddhist scriptures found only in Tibet. That he would be the first Japanese (and one of very few foreigners) to visit Lhasa was of secondary importance. The son of a Japanese barrel maker, he decided, at the age of fifteen, to forswear alcohol and women and all meat and fish. This sort of dedication characterised his relentless studies: he learned enough classical and vernacular Tibetan to pass as a native scholar of the language.
Though he restricted his diet to purely vegetarian food (which is hard in Tibet), the eccentric Kawaguchi was a great believer in Japanese folk medicine. He always carried clove oil, probably for any toothache he might suffer. After falling into the freezing river, he slathered this all over his body in an attempt to protect himself from the cold. Though his legs went numb, he just about made it to the other side, ‘almost a frigid body, stiff and numb in every part’. It took two hours of lying in the sun and rubbing his body to recover enough strength to walk. He managed to stumble less than two miles before meeting another river. He gave up for the day and had a good cry. This is the great thing about Kawaguchi and why he is one of my favourite explorers: he’s always on the verge of being beaten, he often cries with frustration or sheer worry – but he invariably keeps going. Sometimes it is all just a matter of using Hotan – a patent remedy he brought from Japan and carried with him at all times. More than clove oil, Hotan was his miracle drug. When he first encountered high altitude – over 5,000 metres – Kawaguchi suffered a bad attack of altitude sickness. Short of breath and overcome with acute nausea, he reached for his Hotan and recovered enough to continue.
White Mountain Page 16