White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  They crossed virulent streams of meltwater. In one, the youngest member, Knowles, was almost swept to his death. Crowley observed the truth that Himalayan mountain streams are always much faster and much more deadly than their innocuous looks would suggest.

  Crowley found the native Kashmiris excellent, but here he couldn’t help offending someone: ‘Their character compares favourably with that of any race I have ever seen. We never heard of them coming to blows or even to really high words. Imagine the difference with European peasants!’ He found the Balti natives ‘simple minded’ but went on: ‘they were all innocence, all honesty, all good faith . . . they were absolutely courageous and cheerful even in the face of what they supposed to be certain death. They had no disquietude about death and no distaste for life.’

  He observed the way they made bread by heating a stone in the fire and coating it in dough, wrapping the whole in their shawl while they continued walking. By the time they reached camp, the bread would be baked.

  The clever use of long hair, grown into a fringe in front of the eyes, protected the locals from snow blindness; there were no cases among the porters, but on Kanchenjunga a few years later where long hair was not worn, they had several.

  Conditions on the glacier were exceptionally dry. All natural grease was stripped from the hands. Water and soap tended to strip off the skin, leaving it painful. Crowley followed the local habit of not washing, keeping his hands as greasy as possible. In all, he abstained from washing for eighty-five days: ‘I found myself absolutely clean except my hands and face.’ The only inconvenience was lice, which found their way into the seams of all their clothes.

  Along the way, Crowley described the incredible series of peaks they passed as they trudged up the huge glacial moraines. Whatever one may think of Crowley, he nails in one sentence the effect of being in such tremendous places:

  The utterly disproportionate minuteness of man purges him of his smug belief in himself as the final cause of nature. The effect is to produce not humiliation but humility, and this feeling is only the threshold of a selfishness which restores the balance by identifying one with the universe of which one’s physical basis is so imperceptibly insignificant a fraction.

  He missed only that such feelings and revelations form an ever-proceeding spiral, that to indulge and search for repetitions of the same is to be stalled, eventually to lose all such connection. The effort must always be directed at perceiving more, at registering the magisterial while understanding that this is only a small glimpse of an ever-burgeoning whole.

  In thirty miles of walking, past the nasty black snub nose of the Baltoro and onwards, Crowley’s party only ascended a few hundred metres. But it was hard going nonetheless. He found that the local footwear, consisting of straw wrapped around the feet by leather thongs, though good on the glacier, and warm, needed large steps to be cut while going over snow.

  Having made numerous sketches and plotted out a route to the summit (the one still used today), Crowley eventually established ‘Camp 10’ at 5,710 metres. It was exposed, but Crowley chose it specifically to be out of the way of rockfall and avalanches. He wrote about how the type of avalanche encountered in the Himalayas differed from the alpine variety. The snow did not melt unless subjected to pressure; mostly, it just evaporated – he claimed that ten feet of ordinary snow could disappear in an hour’s sunshine. Avalanches that started high, where the conditions were colder, could evaporate before they reached the bottom – something that never happened in the Alps.

  By this time Eckenstein’s party had begun to unravel. Crowley concluded they were too mixed a bunch. In order to show there was no favouritism of one nation over another, Crowley was forbidden to cross the bergschrund at the end of the glacier and start climbing the south-eastern slopes until the Austrians arrived at Camp 10. According to Crowley, he could have sprinted up the slope to the shoulder below the pyramid and made a dash for the summit before the weather broke. Weather is always the big problem on K2. In the end they spent sixty-eight days on the mountain and only had eight days of passable climbing weather (and no three days were consecutive).

  They were cold and miserable, huddling in their tents, waiting for a break in the weather. Conditions were so poor, the kangri* would not work because of lack of oxygen: ‘The natives put it under their blankets and squat on it. It is alleged that this habit explains the great frequency of cancer of the testicles or scrotum in the country. The analogy is with “chimneysweep’s cancer”.’

  Having spent too long in the ‘death zone’, Crowley and his team were all beginning to deteriorate mentally and physically. He supported Richard Burton in holding that altitude sickness was as much about digestion as the lungs – and there is some truth in this. Interestingly, Crowley anticipates Messner and Boukreev, who hold that a mountain should be rushed, that waiting for long periods must be below the level of Everest base camp (5,400 metres) at 4,000 metres or less. Crowley asserted that acclimatising at altitude was a waste of time – of course, he had walked in over several months and was to do so again with Kanchenjunga. He claimed to be in perfect condition, having fed himself up in Darjeeling, and then taking only three weeks to get up to 6,400 metres (where he was in ‘absolutely perfect condition’) from the base.

  But on K2 no one was in perfect condition. The two Austrians had managed to push up to Camp 12, around 6,400 metres. Pfannl became sick and was found to have oedema on both lungs. He was also babbling, which suggests he had cerebral oedema too; he told Crowley that no one could understand that he was actually three people, but AC, as a poet, could surely understand that. . .

  Pfannl was awkwardly sent down on a sledge, despite the Baltis not understanding how to use one. Then came another drama: what looked like an approaching snow bear or yeti turned out to be the doctor, who had left his accompanying porter down a crevasse. It shows that selfishly leaving people to die on high mountains is nothing new. Eckenstein and Crowley donned skis and went down to the crevasse, where they found the rope that the doctor had untied from his waist. Eckenstein used just one hand to pull the man out of the crevasse, though Crowley noted, he looked as if he ‘had made up his mind to die and rather resented our interference!’

  Days later they discovered that Wessely, the second Austrian climber, before he left the camp, had stolen the bulk of the emergency rations. They decided to court-martial him when the next opportunity arose. But the weather simply got worse and Crowley felt they had done enough on K2 – it was time to leave. Once they left the high altitudes and were able to eat mulberries and melons, Crowley’s health improved a great deal. He wrote of the journey back to the city:

  To see distant prospects to the best advantage one needs foreground. In rock climbing and travelling through mountain forests one sees nature in perfection. At every turn, the foreground picks out special bits of the background for attention, so there is a constant succession of varying pictures.

  Crowley had made a serious assault on one of the world’s most difficult mountains in terms of altitude, weather and technical problems. They had been equipped in the manner of 1904 and had survived – it was a commendable achievement. The world of the pundit had opened up three new possibilities: mountaineering and mystical tourism – Crowley was a pioneer of these – but in the third new zone of activity, storming the forbidden, Younghusband was the master. To this end he employed the new-found and overwhelming force that had created colonial power in much of the world: the Maxim machine gun and the repeating rifle. Force rather than skill and guile were now leading the way.

  * Kangri: a copper or iron pot in which charcoal is burned.

  PART 3

  1904

  1

  What of Lhasa?

  At the bottom of patience, there is heaven.

  Tibetan proverb

  There are certain key years around which significant events seem to naturally accumulate, the innocent date bobbing along like the surfacing fin of some great hidden force not clearly in v
iew; 1904 was such a year. Some hint of the forces at work is indicated by publication of Sir Halford Mackinder’s ‘Heartland’ Theory coinciding with the Russo-Japanese war and the planned invasion of Tibet.* Something was in the ether – a growing realisation that once instantaneous communication exists and the sea has been conquered, the unit of defence becomes the land mass rather than the mere nation. And the largest land mass, as Halford Mackinder realised, was the Eurasian. Here, one could get further from the sea than anywhere else and therefore away from potentially aggressive sea powers. Mackinder believed that control of the Heartland of Eurasia led to control of the whole supercontinent, which in turn led to control of the world. He identified the portal to the heartland as Eastern Europe – very presciently siting the place where both world wars were to erupt so few years later. But the heart of the heartland was the inner fastness of the Himalayas and associated countries: Afghanistan, northern India and Pakistan, Tibet. And it was here that Russia, Britain and China would compete for control. With China currently controlling the heart of the heartland as a result of the 1959 invasion and occupation of Tibet, it does not seem so surprising that despite the disparities between average wealth – in the USA, GDP per capita in 2014 was $54,000; in Europe $45-60,000; in China $7,000 – that China seems so powerful on the global stage. They control the heartland.

  At the very moment that Crowley was planning to conquer the highest places on earth, Curzon and Younghusband were seeking to force their way into Tibet, the highest and one of the most inaccessible nations on the planet. We see here a two-fold attempt, a last-ditch declaration of belief in the reality of the Western journey before both endeavours collapse in the face of Oriental imagination – Crowley to espouse his own wild form of mystical endeavour and Younghusband to embrace a more socially acceptable fusion of faiths and intuitions of God’s work, which would culminate in him creating the World Congress of Faiths.

  The British Empire of Curzon, in the few years before the Great War, was still a place where the well adjusted could entertain ideas of real but beneficial control over the lives of others. The war changed all that; vast industrial concerns and technological progress would make men – first Western, then Eastern – the mere playthings of their self-created toys. The wisdom of Hero (and the Arabs who translated his work, which is how we know of it today), who created a steam turbine in AD 50, and never sought to harness its power, preferring to see it as a kind of executive game for Athenians, a mere bagatelle, was overthrown and lost for ever. Circumstances had overtaken man; his creations, his maps and guns and machines were now the mad master, dictating what he should do. From here on there would be no one at the controls, except nominally and destructively – it is very easy to change the world if you want to make it a worse place.

  Younghusband’s campaign tent

  One rejection of all this is the quest to go higher. But there, at the start, Crowley and Younghusband still had the belief in the external path – the yang-style venture, though it was heavily influenced by yin intuitions – drawing them both to the abode of snow. The compromise was: invade Tibet. Why? We’ll see the various paper-thin reasons for the venture. The real reason: the fumbling literalist attempt to grapple with the hidden, the invisible.

  But what was the reality behind the fantasy ideas of Tibet at that time?

  The clergy were the dominant feature, if not the most resilient – that must go to the nomadic Tibetans, still resisting Chinese efforts to enslave them in the sedentary life. But in 1904 the lamas were all-powerful, or seemingly so, entrenched in monasteries that took one son from every family (though for the wealthy scion, one night spent in a monastery plus a handsome contribution, a well-recognised fee, would be enough to be ordained as a lama). As in other theocracies, you had to do your time, ideally since childhood, to rise up the ranks of the ruling class.

  The Tibetan aristocracy was made up of less than 300 secular families. Naturally, they had very strong connections to the elite. The families closest to the oldest kings of Tibet were highest up the pecking order. Then came members of the Dalai Lama’s family, who, being plucked from anywhere, added a rogue element, a strengthening from without – outbreeding, in a sense. His family would all be ennobled once the God-King was enthroned.

  Even up to the middle of the twentieth century, the majority of town and large village dwellers would be serfs, bound in a feudal relationship either to the monasteries or to the leading families. Beneath them came the lowest class, not exactly untouchables, but sharing some similarities to that Hindu caste, and also, oddly enough, with the mizu shobai of Japan, the ‘water trade’. These were the beggars, prostitutes, fishermen, musicians, actors . . . and blacksmiths. In common with many traditional cultures – from North Africa right across Asia – metalworkers were held in low esteem. They symbolically dabbled in the work of the devil; casting metal entailed creating a miniature hell on earth. But beyond the doctrine of signatures lay a perhaps well-founded distrust of metal itself; remember, there was no word for it in Tibetan, a kind of precaution against the metalworkers taking over with their fiendish machines and weapons of war. Industrialisation entails the veneration of the metal maker and worker, and brings with it great wealth – along with pollution, satanic mills, and an escalating trade in weapons of war. It was a price we gladly paid, but the Tibetans did not.

  And then there were the nomads, freest of all. They populated all of Tibet, moving across borders into the Altai or down to Nepal. Meat eaters, as most Tibetan Buddhists are (including the Dalai Lama), the nomads were armed with old matchlocks which they gladly used for hunting wild sheep and bears.

  Meat eating – forbidden in some branches of Buddhism – was never outlawed in Tibet. Some people lived on vegetables, as they do in many places today, simply because of the scarcity of meat, not out of a strongly held conviction against eating it. Lamas kept animals at their monasteries and employed Muslim butchers to slaughter and prepare the meat for them.

  What could wrongdoers expect? The legal system was based on that introduced by the great fifth Dalai Lama – the Ganden Podrang Codex – which in turn drew heavily on the thirteenth-century Yasa – the statute book of Genghis Khan. Punishments, as was usual in countries where there were no police, were draconian. Getting caught was hard, but if you got caught. . .

  For stealing – expect the removal of limbs; for libel – tongue torn out; spying or deceit – blinding. Then there was the efficient winter technique of simply leaving the accused outside until they froze to death. Though a death sentence was strictly against Buddhist strictures, criminals would be tortured very close to death, and then it would be simply left to karma whether they would survive or not. The pillory was often in use. As were various forms of shackling, yoking and public whipping. For the very unlucky: lifelong incarceration in damp pits and monastery dungeons.

  Murder was not necessarily the worst crime. As is still the case in many Gulf countries today, payment of blood money or ‘life tax’ to the relatives of the deceased ended the matter. It would cost thousands of dollars to buy off a high lama or monastic official’s family (US$8,000-$10,000 in the 1950s) whereas a lower-caste person might cost a pound of silver.

  The monasteries were economic units, selling holy images, amulets, and other paraphernalia, as well as farming and trading their surpluses. But it was the rich trading families who brought wealth into Tibet, or what wealth there was. One thoroughly Tibetan source of money was the sale of faeces and urine donated by the higher tulkus (those recognised as being of a significant former life). Pills and cakes made of lama shit and seasoned with reduced urine were popular cures for all manner of ailments. According to one researcher, when the thirteenth Dalai Lama travelled, his shit would be sequestered by his chamberlain in a golden pot and sent back to Lhasa to be processed into medicinal cures.

  * Mackinder was an influential English geographer and inventor of geopolitics.

  2

  Curzon’s Little Invasion


  A nibbling rabbit can also die of overfeeding.

  Tibetan proverb

  There is something a little fascistic about Lord Curzon – fascism, once you strip away its love of power, being about a cult of the hard. It doesn’t seem surprising that, of Curzon’s three daughters, one had an affair with Oswald Mosley and one married him. Or was it that other strand that seems to bump along with fascism – an interest in the occult, hidden powers latent in Tibet?

  Curzon had one of those faces where, one feels, each half displays accurately the inner man. The left half with its hostile eye and downturned mouth looks harsh, even cruel. The right half looks questing, open, perhaps haughty. He was an exceptionally clever and ambitious man, who had ‘a tendency to approach all public questions from a personal point of view’.*

  He had written a letter to the Dalai Lama – several letters – and received no reply. He was not just piqued, he was annoyed. Something would have to be done. It was a curious reversal of a situation Britain had endured some thirty years earlier when, in 1860, Emperor Theodore of Ethiopia, receiving no reply to his effusive missive to Queen Victoria, captured and held all the Europeans in his realm until a satisfactory apology could be made. In later years, George W. Bush was strongly motivated to attack Saddam Hussein because of the latter ‘disrespecting’ his father George Bush, Senior. Big egos have the twisted energy needed to succeed in a job most would rather not do; the downside is that they can take things too personally. And no one likes an email ignored, let alone an exquisitely crafted diplomatic letter to a world leader.