As a boy, Ekai had been addicted to study rather than following his father’s trade. He became a monk at a young age but did not really fit in. After hearing that manuscripts of the purest Sanskrit were hidden in the Himalayas, he became obsessed with the idea of finding them and bringing them back to Japan to revive Buddhist studies. We have the clearest idea of why Tibet so galvanised the imagination of the world – it was where the spiritual heritage of India was able to escape the Mogul invasion from Afghanistan. The early Moguls had no truck with Buddhist monasteries and destroyed a vast number of manuscripts. Fortunately, some survived, having been hidden away in Himalayan fastnesses like Mustang and Dolpo in Nepal, while others were in Tibet.
A supporter of the Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party squats in the high mountains
The Hindu population have long harboured a certain resentment against the Moguls who built so much of what we think of as India, from the Taj Mahal to the great parks of Delhi. Over the centuries, this resentment gave rise to a desire for the return of the original works (rather as the Greeks have come to invest great emotional value in the Elgin marbles, which, had they remained in Greece, might well have been ignored or forgotten). The British, particularly those who had anything to do with Hindu or Buddhist spiritual matters, inherited that longing for the original manuscripts. This was further enhanced by stories of Tibetan wonders and by the sheer difficulty of visiting the country – though, it must be pointed out, many non-Buddhist foreigners visited Tibet, but no non-Muslim has ever visited Mecca. If Tibet was a land of wonders alone – running monks and fire walks – it would have remained a novelty. Rather it is the fact that key scriptures of the Buddhist faith were stored there. Imagine if an original copy of the Old Testament, say the first version in Hebrew, was known to be hidden away in the Hindu Kush – wouldn’t that be enough to give an air of mystery and constant spiritual beckoning to a place?
But it would take a foreign Buddhist of no little commitment to find out if these rumours of ancient wisdom transcribed into early Sanskrit were actually true. Kawaguchi’s three years in Tibet were preceded by three years of study in India and Nepal. He knew no Tibetan or Hindi when he arrived from Japan, and there were no Tibetan dictionaries for him to learn from. Finding teachers in monasteries and the street, he pursued his religiously inspired quest with down-to-earth practicality. And he succeeded: he visited Lhasa, gained an interview with the thirteenth Dalai Lama, but most importantly Kawaguchi brought back many manuscripts that had never before been seen outside Tibet. On his return to Japan he gave lectures about the sex lives of the Tibetans, wrote Zen poetry and maintained his scholarly interests. Kawaguchi lived to the age of 78, dying in 1945. Right to the end he maintained his principles, refusing to divulge any geographical information about Tibet to the militarist Japanese government in the Second World War.
Though it reaches forward to the interwar period, I think it is interesting to contrast the secret journeying of Ekai (he had no permission from Britain or Tibet for his travels, relying instead on disguise and superb linguistic skills) with the secret 1933 journeying of the would-be conqueror of Everest, Maurice Wilson. Both of them had reason to sneak out of Darjeeling disguised as Buddhist monks, and both wanted to enter Tibet. But by Wilson’s day the ‘forbidden’ was no longer Lhasa, it was Mount Everest, which the British had no intention of letting an amateur like Wilson attempt.
Wilson had fought in the First World War at eighteen and distinguished himself bravely, winning the Military Cross for singlehandedly holding a machine-gun post. The citation for the medal read: ‘It was largely owing to his pluck and determination in holding this post that the enemy attack was held up.’
After the war, Wilson travelled the world and was successful in business, though he was often ill and dispirited. This changed in 1932 when, after thirty-five days of fasting and concentrative prayer, he became physically well again. He also received a series of visions telling him what he should do next.
The 1920S saw the opening of Tibet to the British. Early Everest expeditions fuelled Wilson’s imagination, as did another scheme mooted at that time: an aerial expedition over the Himalayas. Back then, flying to such high altitudes was probably as daring as climbing them. Hence Wilson’s mission: to fly to Tibet, crash-land on the upper slopes of Mount Everest, and climb to the summit. His motive was to spread the good news about the power of prayer and fasting. That Wilson was driven by the desire for publicity – it is unimportant that it was for a cause rather than himself – makes him much more of an attention-seeker than Ekai.
The chances of Wilson’s mission succeeding seemed slim; he knew nothing about climbing or flying. A poor student, his flying teacher claimed he would never reach India, let alone Tibet. But Wilson proved him wrong. By 1933 he had learned to fly, more or less, and bought a second-hand Gypsy Moth plane he named Ever Wrest. He promptly crashed it in Bradford, where the wrong kind of publicity encouraged the Air Ministry to ban him from leaving Britain by plane. He did, of course. Another ban, this time in Iran, was also ignored and eventually he was able to land, if not on Everest, at least in India.
Sneaking out of Darjeeling, he headed for the Rongbuk Monastery, which was becoming the unofficial monastery presiding over Everest attempts. The monks quickly realised his incompetence and urged him to turn back. He didn’t. Using equipment left behind by the 1933 expeditions, he managed to get himself some way up the mountain’s north-east side – though he was so ignorant of climbing (his sole training had been to wander around some low British hills for a mere five weeks), he threw away his crampons rather than use them as a climbing aid. Instead, he laboriously cut steps and finally exhausted himself. After eighteen days’ rest at a lower altitude, he tried again – but died at 6,919 metres. An optimist to the end, his last diary entry was: ‘Off again, gorgeous day.’ His body and diary were recovered in 1935 by that other dreamer – though, in climbing terms, supremely practical – Eric Shipton. Imagination can only carry you so far.
Always good to see prayer flags
10
AC on K2
Don’t try to wipe someone else’s behind if yours is still unclean.
Tibetan proverb.
While Ekai was learning Tibetan, the ‘world’s wickedest man’ was hoping to climb the highest mountain in the world. It was 1902 and at that time Everest was impossible to get to (Young-husband’s expedition would change that) owing to Tibetan and Nepalese intransigence, so K2 was where Aleister Crowley made his ascent.
In a sense, he is the darkling twin of Younghusband. He wants everything Younghusband wants but he isn’t prepared to work for it in a systematic way. As a result, he is more ambitious – he plans to climb higher than anyone else in the world – but is also less organised.
Dark mystics, those who use insights denied more worldly folk to achieve mere worldly ambitions – attention in the form of fame and fortune – are often accompanied by ill luck and misfortune, which usually attaches to those who travel with them. They can often remain unscathed while those around them are driven mad or simply die. Knowledge has no favourites; these people know something – and that protects them – but it is a stillborn form of knowledge.
Those who are attracted to dark mystics, for whatever reason, are likely drawn to power. This means they cannot acquire the street smarts of the normal power seeker, nor the insights of the mystic. They come a cropper. Plenty of such people surrounded Crowley while he – corpulent heroin addict and alcoholic – survived his three score years and ten. To gain especial attention he liked to call himself the wickedest man alive, but apart from his own wild claims there is no evidence that he killed anyone; the worst that can be said is that he led people astray. World leaders from Napoleon to Tony Blair have far more blood on their hands than funny old Aleister Crowley . . .
Crowley, born in Leamington Spa, educated at boarding school and Cambridge – where he excelled at chess and climbing – at first sought to make his name as an explorer. Here he ha
d already intuited that the remaining goals for terrestrial exploration were fast disappearing; the North and South Poles were sure to go to some Norwegian or other. Far better to concentrate on a more British-dominated area – the unknown heights of the Himalayas. Like all mystics, he had better antennae than the average man; he knew that the twentieth century would be the one in which Western man would start to go higher in every sense.
Crowley, who, perhaps in imitation of JC, preferred to be known by the abbreviation, AC, came to an agreement with one Oscar Eckenstein, an experienced British climber and the inventor (or at least promoter) of bouldering, the short ice axe and the crampon (which later Crowley would claim to have invented). The purport of the agreement was ‘that they should together climb a mountain higher than any previously ascended’. The mountain chosen was Chogo Ri, Mount Godwin Austen or Peak K2 of the survey, depending on your inclination for nomenclature. Crowley bought his way in, though he was a fine rock climber, bold and experienced in Britain and the Alps. He paid £1,000 for the privilege – by today’s spending equivalent, around £75,000. Not so far off the cost of a modern expedition to the region, once permits, porters, Sherpas and oxygen have been factored in.
There was some discussion as to who would be the leader (it was to be either of them, depending on subsequent agreement), and an interesting addendum:
Clause 5: All members of the party pledge themselves to have nothing whatever to do with women in any way that is possibly avoidable; nor to interfere in any way whatever with native prejudices and beliefs.
There were two Austrians on the expedition. Crowley claimed they could not understand the native mind. ‘It was a great mistake to bring them . . . the question of international jealousy contributed indirectly to our failure.’
But the first thing that happened was that Eckenstein was detained by His Majesty’s government in India and informed most strongly that he could not enter the border territory where K2 thrusts upwards from the lengthy magnificence of the Baltoro Glacier. For three weeks he chased round India trying to find out why (it may simply have been British prejudice against his European name). Meanwhile Crowley assumed leadership of the expedition.
Unfortunately, he contracted dhobi itch – a fungal infection of the groin and ‘suffered perpetually from the irritation’. In the end, painting his nether regions with stinging iodine cured it in twenty-four hours.
After beating a driver with his belt for deliberately delaying the carts, Crowley discovered the coolies feared they were to be used to make a pass to Yarkand, following Younghusband’s expedition – one that had cost the lives of seventeen Indian porters. But they told him they were prepared to die on the forthcoming expedition if need be: ‘they were almost disappointed when I sent them back from camp 10’. Crowley claimed that in dealing with Indians one must always be just; a traveller must be ‘uniformly calm, cheerful, just, perspicacious, indulgent and inexorable. He must decline to be swindled out of the fraction of a farthing. If he once gives way, he is done for.’
Though he loved to shock, Crowley had his insights: ‘Indian civilisation is far superior to our own and to enter into open competition is to invoke defeat. We won India by matching our irrational, bigoted, brutal manhood against their etiolated culture . . . the best master is a go-as-you-please generous gentleman who settles everything by rude common sense.’
The expedition proceeded through Kashmir, where ‘the air is clear and exhilarating, yet an atmosphere of peace tempts the wayfarer to pass away the time in the delights of live-in-idleness’. He noted astutely that the ancient bridges of Srinagar were built on the principle of the cantilever – known since Alexander the Great and not invented with the Forth Bridge as modern prejudice might have it.
The journey to K2 passed over Zoji La – at 3,500 metres, a low pass in the Himalayas, dividing Kashmir from Ladakh. Twenty-one days of marching brought them across Ladakh to the Baltoro Glacier, now in modern Pakistan. After ten minutes without snow goggles, Crowley began to get snow-blind, underestimating a cloudy sky. Climbers trained in the Alps were often careless of snow blindness – because one can climb all day without goggles and get away with it, but not in the Himalayas. Crowley cursed the two Austrians who had gone ahead to mark a route down the snow-laden pass. He found they had set a trail that was through thigh-deep snow, unnecessarily difficult for the porters carrying loads. It did not bode well for the expedition ahead.
On the other side of the pass there is a dramatic change, one of the sudden landscape shifts that occur in the Himalayas: the western side of the pass heralds a new country of barren rockiness, far fewer flowers and sparse rough grass instead of forests and meadows. Ladakh is a country of browns, every shade is represented, so you have to adjust if you have a partiality for greens. From here, they followed the Indus to Skardu. Crowley felt the only way life could be said to exist here was in the terraced fields fed by running irrigation channels from the plunging rivers that supply the Indus – the source of which is near to Kailash in Tibet. He noted that in some places these terraces watered by the river could produce up to five harvests a year including delicious apricots. But it seemed scant reward for the hard march through arid, rocky wilderness, assailed by blasts of icy wind. Crowley was obviously more intrigued by the difficulty of climbing than the environs of mountains, or at least those that did not conform to more verdant models of beauty.
Crowley believed that some dogs had spiritual significance
The travellers were entertained by rajahs and headmen of villages: ‘Travel in the East is essential for any sort of understanding of the Bible. The equivalent of the word king is constantly used to describe men who may be anything from absolute monarchs over hundreds of thousands of people, to country squires or even headmen of a tribe of gypsies.’ Crowley admired the stoicism of Himalayans. He described how a boy whose leg had been gashed by a falling rock remained awake, making no comment except to ask for some water the whole time the expedition doctor was cutting away flesh in a wound laid open to the bone, and then stitching it up.
When they came across a hot spring, Crowley was entranced: ‘I experienced all the ecstasy of a pilgrim who has come to the end of his hardships’. He looked at his thinning body and declared himself to be in peak physical condition. On the subject of the best age for making Himalayan expeditions, he concurred with many other climbers: ‘For rock climbing and lyric poetry one is doubtless best in one’s twenties. For a Himalayan expedition or dramatic composition, it is better to be forty than thirty.’
Crowley was in agonies of ecstasy when they finally cooked and ate some fresh mutton rather than the canned food they had been living on for the last two months, but his greed got the better of him: ‘Never in my life have I tasted anything like that mutton. I gorged myself to the gullet, was violently sick and ordered a fresh dinner.’
Reflecting on other expeditions he had been on, he reported that canned food ten years old had nothing like the nourishment of freshly canned food. Moreover the energy derived from eating freshly killed meat – i.e. before rigor mortis has set in – was far superior to that from ordinary meat from the butcher. This led him to wonder whether food might contain some element, a ‘subtle principle attached to organic substances which gradually disappears after death’. In this he was perspicacious; as we now know, vitamins and minerals rapidly deplete in ageing food.
The first confrontation, a small one, came with Eckenstein, who wanted Crowley to leave behind his extensive library that weighed over forty pounds. Crowley refused, on the very reasonable grounds that they were essential for keeping him balanced and sane. I know that the moments reading at the end of a day’s hike can be the best time, when you can forget everything. He wrote:
I attributed the almost universal mental and moral instability of Europeans engaged in exploring to their lack of proper intellectual relaxation far more than to any irritations and hardships inseparable from physical conditions . . . Perfectly good friends become ready to kill e
ach other over a lump of sugar. I won’t say that I couldn’t have stood the Baltoro glacier in the absence of Milton . . . but it is at least the case that Pfannl went actually mad, that Wessely brooded on food to the point of stealing it. . .
According to Crowley, he and the doctor (who occupied his mind by taking observations of nature, writing articles for the Swiss press, and playing chess with Crowley) were the only two to stay sane.
Crossing the Biafo Glacier, Crowley remarked on the huge temperature ranges encountered in the Himalayas at these altitudes. By day the maximum shade temperature sometimes got close to 40 degrees Centigrade, and was rarely less than 25. The minimum at night was always about zero – and on the glacier sometimes – 10 to – 30. Thick crusts of snow could evaporate in moments, leaving a ‘mass of seething crystals’. Rocks heated up and fell in situations where they would have stood ‘for twenty years’ in the Alps.
White Mountain Page 17