I have spoken with Himalayans from Ladakh, Nepal and Bhutan about the reality of the yeti (the Bhutanese even put a yeti image on a postage stamp in 1966). All agree there must be some truth in the legend. All agree that it is a legend. Maybe we can learn from them to hold two seemingly contradictory states in our minds at the same time . . .
* Dr Bryan Sykes, BBC News, 19 October 2013
10
Crowley Again
It is easier to put leather on the soles of your shoes than cover the world in leather.
Tibetan proverb
Aleister Crowley wrote in his Confessions-. ‘I was keen as ever to capture [a world record] that of having reached a higher point on a mountain than any other climbers.’
Three years had passed since the K2 adventure. Crowley had travelled, got married and had a child. He repaired to his country estate in Boleskine in the Scottish Highlands (a place of madness and mayhem, later bought by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin in 1970, the interim owner having shot himself in Crowley’s bedroom. Fittingly, Boleskine burned to the ground in 2015). In Scotland he kept up his rock climbing and gully scrambling. But as 1905 began, the lure of the big mountains would not go away. As ever, he was in a hurry. There was no time to lose if Kanchenjunga was to be climbed that summer. Not only was it the third highest peak, it had a forbidden summit, a microcosm of Tibet that demanded forcible Western entry.
Crowley planned to use a heliograph to signal progress of the climb forty-five miles as the crow flies from signal hill in Darjeeling to the peak of the mountain. Easily glimpsed through the satellite dishes on Darjeeling’s hilltop roofs is incredible range of Kanchenjunga. It is some five peaks, all strung out with a great folded apron of white extending downwards. It is the most astonishing mountain view, as the low point in front of the mountain is less than 1,000 metres high. Unlike Everest, which protrudes less than 4,000 metres from a 5,000-metre plateau, Kanchenjunga towers 7,000 metres up from its base. There is no doubt as to its majesty and mystery. From the sunny hilltop of Darjeeling it seems to float like a snowy mirage, extending across the far horizon, at this distance too high to be true. Crowley wrote: ‘There, above the highest hills, at an angle for which even one’s experience of Chogo Ri (K2) has not prepared me, there stands the mass of Kanchenjunga, faint rose, faint blue, clear white, in the dawn.’
Eckenstein believed that many of the problems on K2 had been caused by the doctor – Jacot Guillarmod – whose lack of climbing experience had slowed them all down. Perhaps he was not forgetting the incident where Jacot left the porter to die in a crevasse. But AC is too tempted to care that the good doctor is coming on the Kanchenjunga expedition too. Eckenstein, despite entreaties to come, refused; he claimed that ‘the vanities, inexperience, fatuity and folly’ of Dr Jacot would end in disaster. AC admits, ‘I was still much too young to realise how much mischief may be done indirectly by the mere presence of such a man.’
With his new training regime of feeding up and relaxing before a single powerful push to the summit, AC lounged around on a P&O ship from London to Bombay via the Red Sea. He crossed India by train and took the ‘toy train’ up its steep rails to the 2,000-metre heights of Darjeeling. Sadly, the train only runs a short distance now and much of the track is falling into disrepair. It is only a 24-inch gauge and runs for much of the way alongside the vertiginous road up to the old hill station. The road is crowded, potholed and dangerous. I looked with envy at the old railway, surely a far more civilised way to ascend a hill.
AC stayed at what was then the best hotel, Woodlands; Mark Twain would also stay there when he visited the Himalayas during his 1896 tour. The hotel burned down in the 1940s and on its site stands the rather plain and workaday rest house for the circuit judge. It rained a great deal while I was in Darjeeling – which is not uncommon; it gets around 330 centimetres annually – and rains 126 days of the year. When Sir Joseph Hooker was sent to find a hill station for the sultry summer months in Calcutta he recommended the Chumbi valley, nearer the border with Tibet, which has a rainfall of only 102 centimetres a year. Darjeeling was 50 miles nearer, so there it was built, on vertiginous ridges with clouds and rain and only the views to recommend it.
Many an adventure starts in the backstreets of Darjeeling
Crowley complained of Darjeeling: ‘The whole town stinks of mildew. One’s room is covered with mildew afresh every morning.’ With a pair of powerful field glasses he surveyed the mountains and compared the scene to photographs taken on the Freshfield expedition a few years earlier. With his usual confidence he wrote, ‘I have already told of my ability to describe accurately parts of a mountain which I cannot see. I judged the snow basin accessible. My clairvoyance turned out to be exactly correct.’
The confidence was not all bluster. As with K2, Crowley had picked the route which would eventually be the one that was successfully climbed in 1955 by the English genius of rock and ice, Joe Brown. The route went from the Yarlung Glacier to the snow basin and then up a rake or couloir of sorts to a col west of the highest summit.
Though less than fifty miles from Darjeeling, the country north to Kanchenjunga is hilly in the extreme. Even today it will take more than ten hours’ of Jeep travel, rarely topping 30 kmh on the winding potholed mountain roads. Crowley left Darjeeling in early August, faced with two weeks of marching to reach the mountain through leech-infested forest. The summer leeches of Sikkim are legendary – it is claimed that if a leech gets into the nose of a pony it will bleed to death. The Hindi word for leech is ‘jok’, and an Anglo-Indian proverb has it: A jok’s a jok, but a jok up your nose is no jok.’
Crowley relates watching a leech on a grass stalk start swinging back and forth, using this as a kind of catapult to whang across the road. He remarks correctly that legless creatures are helplessly slow on open roads – they need something to push against. A cobra on a road is nothing to fear compared to one in the grass. (He also commented on the sheep, which were muzzled to protect them from eating wild aconite, a precaution foolishly ignored on the Younghusband expedition.)
There was some predictable trouble with the coolies – there always seemed to be with Crowley around – though he claimed that the cause was the bad management of an Italian member of the party called Righi. ‘He actually threatened a disobedient coolie with his kukri and revolver, and the man, knowing he would not dare to use them, laughed in his face. The natives despised him as a weak man, which is the worst thing that can befall anyone that has anything to do with them.’
Righi was another of Crowley’s famous errors of character judgement. For a professed magician, he was strangely incompetent at reading people. He often picked entirely unsuitable team members. Maybe he just didn’t care.
The climb started well enough. Crowley was very fit – his time in Darjeeling and the two-week walk in had acclimatised him perfectly. He quickly led the way up to Camp 4, where his porters developed what they took to be mountain sickness. When Crowley dropped a little atropine in their eyes, the symptoms of nausea and headaches disappeared – they all had nascent snow blindness, not altitude sickness. AC surmised that what we call altitude sickness is a compound of symptoms that include dehydration and snow blindness as well as the lack of oxygen found at greater heights.
By day, the climbing was very hot, but there was little wind and the conditions were good for a successful ascent. Then the trouble began. One of the porters deserted, carrying off a sleeping valise that belonged to Pache, one of the climbers. The man, in his hurry to escape, tripped and fell and was killed.
Crowley sent the doctor to make an inquiry into the matter. He sent word that, aside from suffering the loss of his sleeping valise, Pache had complained that Righi was withholding food. Food again! Crowley was incensed. But he climbed on.
He mentions a kind of snow he had never seen before. Rain that had blown against the mountain froze as it touched the ground:
The result is to produce a kind of network of ice; as a frozen drop serves as a
nucleus from which radiate fine filaments of ice in every direction. It is like a spider’s web in three dimensions. A cubic foot of network would thus be almost entirely composed of air; the ice in it, if compact, would hardly be bigger than a tennis ball, perhaps much less. With the advance of the evening, the rain turns to snow; and in the morning it may be that the network is covered to a depth of several inches. The temperature possibly rises a few degrees and the surface becomes wet. It then freezes again and forms a hard crust. Approaching a slope of this kind it seems perfectly good névé. One strikes it with one’s axe and the entire structure disintegrates. In front of one is a hole as big as a cottage and as the solid slope disappears, one hears the tinkling of falling ice . . . it is a most astonishing and disconcerting phenomenon.
Pache and AC continued climbing; they were now at around 6,400 metres and going strong, but a replacement for Pache’s sleeping kit had not arrived so they were having to share AC’s sleeping bag and blankets. And they had no food or petrol for the stoves either.
Righi, owing to some perceived insult, was holding back food and supplies needed further up the mountain. In response to AC’s increasingly furious memos asking why, Righi eventually set out with the doctor and seventeen porters. They duly arrived at Camp 5 – but without any supplies. There was nothing for it but to send them back down to Camp 4 to shelter under the rocks. The snow was in an unsafe condition and it would be madness to attempt to descend further that day. To Crowley’s horror, Pache decided to go down with the doctor and Righi and continue past Camp 4.
The porters, more sure-footed than the clumsy doctor, reached Camp 4 without a problem. But a mere fifteen minutes below Camp 5, the doctor managed to get six men, roped far too closely, well and truly entangled in a small avalanche when ‘a single man could have ridden it head first without the slightest risk of hurting himself’.
Instead of taking warning from this accident and waiting with the porters at Camp 4, the climbers continued going downwards. Crowley heard strange cries and shouts during the night and the next day went to investigate. He passed the porters at Camp 4 and found:
a place where the snow had slipped off the glacier ice for some distance. The angle was decidedly steep, and though I was able to cross it easily enough in my claws [crampons], it would not do for the coolies . . . but they said they wanted to follow me, which they did . . . at the time I had no doubt that this place was the scene of the accident, if there had been one, of which I was not sure . . . on arrival at camp 3 I was able to understand what had happened . . . Pache and three of my best coolies had been killed. [The doctor] was badly bruised, and thought his spine was damaged. The accident had brought him completely to his senses. He realised I had been right all along, and was appalled by the prospects of returning to Switzerland and meeting Pache’s mother . . . Righi, on the other hand, showed only what an ill-conditioned cur he was. He had not been hurt at all badly, but his ribs were slightly bruised; he claimed that he had ‘rupture of the heart’, and spent his time moaning and bellowing . . . but he forgot all about them directly he was engaged in conversation.
Crowley concluded the expedition had to end. ‘I would not risk any man’s life,’ he wrote. The others wanted to carry on. Righi went so far as to claim that the five dead men would be seen as a sacrifice to the five peaks of Kanchenjunga, thus ensuring success. This appalled Crowley and his will prevailed. The expedition returned to Darjeeling.
Crowley wrote about his experience in the English press and attacked the ‘fatal fatuity of putting seven men on one rope, and that without knowing the use of the rope, so that one fall of one man must inevitably drag down the others.’ It was a lesson few would learn until later. In 1922 the Everest expedition would suffer a similar disastrous fall with seven porters dragged to their deaths in an avalanche.
11
What Makes Sven Tick?
Learn to stand up where one falls.
Tibetan proverb
Sven Hedin is usually left out of the roll call of great explorers these days. His achievements might be acknowledged, but his later disgrace as an unashamed supporter of Nazism has coloured opinion about this Swedish pioneer. He was, however, despite all his prejudice and belief in Nordic superiority, not an anti-Semite. He petitioned successfully for several people, including Jews, to be pardoned and released.
A small and bespectacled man, he revelled in appearing tough; the account of his crossing of the Taklamakan Desert almost seems boastful in the disregard he had for his expedition team. He claimed two died, though later explorer Bruno Bauman – who replicated the journey with camels in 2000 – claimed that at least one of those survived; he also noted that such a journey could never carry enough water for camels and people – it was doomed from the start.
Hedin claimed a doctorate and a ‘von’ – though he was elected to the Swedish nobility it was as someone without a title. As for his doctorate, it was based on eight months’ study producing a twenty-eight-page document; he more than made up for such sparse writing with the lengthy tomes his expeditions produced, especially the three-volume Trans-Himalaya. It was his books, which he rewrote as popular editions for children, that captivated an omnivorous young reader living in Austria before the First World War-Adolf Hitler.
Hitler loved adventure stories – many ruthless dictators do; Lenin had Jack London, Castro had Hemingway and Hitler had Karl May and Sven Hedin. He and Sven exchanged letters of mutual appreciation and met several times. Hitler always extended considerable courtesy to the old explorer, who appeared as ‘keynote’ speaker at the 1936 Olympics. When Hitler complained that he felt old when he was fifty, Hedin insisted, ‘Fifty is nothing at all. When you are as old as I am [75], Herr Reich Chancellor, you will feel just as fresh and energetic as I do.’
‘Oh no, no, I will be exhausted long before that,’ replied a slightly more prescient Adolf Hitler.
Sven wrote a book entitled America in the Battle of the Continents in which he exculpated Hitler of any blame for starting the Second World War (Roosevelt gets it instead). Hitler read the book in one night while up at the Wolf’s Lair commanding the doomed Eastern Front in late 1942. He wrote to Hedin:
Most Honorable Herr Doctor Sven von Hedin,
You were kind enough to forward to me a personally inscribed copy of your book America in the Battle of the Continents, which was recently published by the FA Brockhaus Verlag Leipzig. I thank you warmly for the attention you have shown me. I have already read the book and welcome in particular that you so explicitly detailed the offers I made to Poland at the beginning of the war. When I think back on that time, it all seems so far away, and seems so unreal to me that I almost blame myself for having been so forthcoming with my proposals . . .
The fate of the habitual liar: to be condemned to believe his own lies; as the soon-to-be-dismissed General Halder put it, Hitler practised Selbsthypnose before any hypnosis of others.
Sven was also comfortable with a few lies. Though he most probably went where he said he went, the details were always a little hazy. Between 1905 and 1908, Sven claimed to be the first European to accurately describe the origins of both the Indus and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, but though he tried hard, he never made it to Lhasa.
His accounts have been re-examined for examples of possible exaggeration or outright lying; incidents of cruelty to natives and fellow travellers have been noted. Sven had once been called the ‘greatest explorer in the world’ – no more. What his harshest critics will concede: at least Sven was kind to animals; there’s no shooting and eating dogs as Amundsen did.
Hedin, who looks (he always removed his specs first) in photos like a robber baron in his Tibetan nomad’s gear, had been turned back in 1902 after getting deep into Tibet. He returned in 1905 after the Younghusband expedition, reasoning that perhaps he would have more luck after Tibet’s prestige had been somewhat dampened. In Simla he managed to impress all the big names: Minto, Kitchener, and Younghusband himself. But the India Office in London
were less sure of this Swedish freebooter. They gave him permission only to visit Kashmir and Ladakh, where he might join a caravan to Turkestan. Hedin had enough backing to put together a caravan of 130 yaks, mules and dogs – which he loved more than people. He engaged thirty porters to carry his special gear — without which no bona fide explorer travels. Possibly influenced by the explorer’s explorer, Stanley, Hedin brought with him a collapsible boat of oiled canvas, large-format camera and surveying equipment, and a burnished aluminium medical case full of useful drugs supplied by Burroughs and Wellcome.
Sven was driven by a belief in the heroic possibilities of exploration. Being ‘first’ to the source of a river or over an obscure desert or mountain range was the equivalent to him of the legendary feats of the heroes of old – Jason bringing back the Golden Fleece or Odin finding Mimir’s Well. When times were bad and his spirits low, he would meditate on the Swedish hero Marcus Curtius who ended his life by spurring his horse into making an impossible leap over a vast abyss . . . suicide, yes, but suicide with bells and whistles and a go-faster stripe.
Hedin talked this heroic talk whenever he met influential men and potential sponsors. It called to their own sense of the heroic, which, in the late nineteenth century, was somewhat harder to locate in everyday life. It seems appropriate that Hedin’s expeditions should be generously underwritten by that strangely conflicted dynamite millionaire Alfred Nobel. Indeed, when Sven and his team were starving during the eighty-day crossing of the Chang Tang Desert they at least had sacks of money: thousands of rupees which eventually allowed him to buy new supplies and pack animals from passing nomads.
White Mountain Page 23