Sven didn’t believe in hobnobbing with the people he met, or with his porters. He kept himself to himself; even after perilous encounters with wolves and crazed yaks he didn’t bond with his team. In his account, people do not merit much enthusiasm, whereas a funny incident involving a puppy or a mule will take up several generous sentences.
Not that there weren’t adventures galore – Hedin understood that all the science in the world wasn’t much use without being deeply in peril a lot of the time. Trying out his patent collapsible boat on Lake Lighten, the sail proved a liability when the wind blew up and he was forced to endure a night storm. On another lake the boat could not be used as it was frozen solid – as was the lake – so they explored on sledges. He was always off exploring, which really meant being the first European to see a new thing that had never been recorded before on a map. Because of course all of Tibet was frequented, then as now, albeit sparsely, by nomads.
Despite haggling with the Tibetan authorities, Sven never managed to get to Lhasa (years later he congratulated Heinrich Harrer on his visit there). Instead, he turned back to the Kailash region where he discovered the sources of the Sutlej, the Indus and the Tsangpo/Brahmaputra. In a heroic but sacrilegious act, he unpacked his collapsible boat – which, two years on, was a little leaky – and ventured out on to the holy Lake Manasarovar. He upped the religious insult by paddling around on the sacred Rakshas Tal too. It was either brave or foolhardy, as such violations could be expected to meet with decapitation. In any case, the locals informed him he would surely perish as this was a dire trespass on the home of the gods. He dismissed their practical explanations too – that Manasarovar was actually a transparent dome of water – to sail on it would mean climbing up one face and then plunging dangerously down the other side. He took many soundings for depth and discovered the now dry channels that connect the lakes together and to the Sutlej. He believed that this meant the Sutlej and Tsangpo had their sources very close together. It was a theory also to be found in the eighteenth-century Chinese work on hydrography by Chi Chao Nan.
Three years had now gone by and after a quick re-equip in Ladakh, Sven went back for more. But eventually the Tibetans had had enough and deported him for good. And perhaps this was his real heroism: his ability to go for years and years all alone, devoted to the cause of exploration, beside which he held all else to be trivial. By giving himself such a grandiose task he had solved one dilemma which the pilgrims at Kailash solved in another way: how to give perspective to life so that little things do not become big things.
But unlike the pilgrims’ progress, Sven Hedin’s solution was temporary. The British establishment decided they didn’t like the cut of his jib, even after it had been on all those uncharted lakes. Tom Longstaff suggested that the earlier British explorers Strachey and Smythe had found the Sutlej and Tsangpo sources first, grudgingly conceding that Hedin might just claim ‘the distinction of being the first traveller to reach the ultimate source of the Indus’. During an RGS debate, it got so heated there had to be diplomatic intervention. His old supporter Curzon tried to make amends by awarding Sven a knighthood, but what Hedin wanted was glory, tons of it – he was, after all, the last of the real heroes. He decided to spurn Britain and supported the Kaiser in the First World War. Then he got involved in supporting people who really appreciated the myths of the past and the lure of conquering heroes: the Nazis. Another bad choice; after the war he was very much persona non grata, living quietly until 1952 in a modern highrise in Stockholm with his siblings inhabiting the floors above and below him.
Once you have stormed all the forbidden places on earth that really exist, what next? You go to war with the world. And when the smoke cleared, the Himalayas would still be there, but now the visions were more rarefied. After the First World War there could be no more talk of duty and honour, except in private or in speeches by hypocrites. The mountains became a source of purity, a place to escape the world and find yourself by going higher.
PART 4
Going Higher
1
Climbing the Invisible
Cattle do not die from the jackal’s curses. Lepcha proverb
The world abounds in sacred summits. Some you are encouraged to climb, on others the summit is forbidden, but a nearby viewing point, lake or pass becomes an agreed pilgrimage spot. Indian and Tibetan sacred peaks are usually forbidden. Chinese summits are not; mostly it is a plus to climb them – the same is true in Japan with Fuji-san and countless smaller sacred peaks in that country.
Mountain meditation
Everest is not a sacred summit in the way that Kanchenjunga is. Though many – Western climbers included – believe that bad karma definitely might accrue if you were to climb it in the wrong way, disregarding local traditions and customs, perhaps.
A mountain is a rich symbol. The eye follows it upward. We refer to increase of any kind, usually positive, as a ‘mountain’. A person moving upwards is a symbol of achievement, triumph over adversity. The height of the mountain symbolises its superiority over the plains, its nobility, stillness, permanence, coolness. The highest mountain is therefore the highest achievement; it is a kind of turning away from the futile barbarity of the First World War. By climbing the mountain we can forget; it also utilises the heroic – which inevitably is mocked by modern war – it is no accident that in the aftermath of both the First and Second World Wars a huge spurt in climbing took place.
Every ascent of a mountain is a passage to the beyond, to the place thought impossible. It is a symbolic entry into heaven, where all is laid out below for you to see and pass judgement upon. It is a place of temptation – didn’t Satan take Jesus to the top of a mountain and show him the whole world, which could have been his? The top of the mountain is a place of transcendence – the human transcends his normal earthbound condition to climb higher. The otherworldly spacesuit-like apparatus of high altitude: the oxygen mask, the rack of cylinders, the huge overboot suggestive of a gravity boot used by a spaceman. Indeed, the more equipment the climber uses, the more we appreciate his transcendence. Super alpinists like Reinhold Messner who eschew gear as ‘artificial’ and climb Himalayan peaks with just boots and an ice axe are levelling and debasing those peaks; by their superhuman efforts they make them more ordinary, less sacred – in as much as any high peak is sacred by virtue of its transcendence-conferring qualities.
Even the first Everest expedition had oxygen tanks, though they were problematic and not used by everyone. And supplementary oxygen was used on the second too, which has become the quintessential mythological climbing expedition: the 1924 failure in which Mallory and Irvine famously disappeared. Edward ‘Teddy’ Norton, the leader of that expedition, set a record of 8,573 metres without oxygen, a record that stood for fifty-four years. This was a few days before the mysterious disappearance of Mallory and Irvine. The fact that Norton climbed so high without oxygen helped foster the belief that Mallory and Irvine actually made it to the top before they fell. At the time, though, such thoughts mattered far less than whether the two men were alive or not. Norton wrote in his diary on the day of their summit attempt: ‘Of all the truly miserable days I have spent at [Camp] III this [is] by far the worst. By now it appears almost inevitable that disaster has overtaken poor gallant Mallory & Irvine – 10 to 1 they have “fallen off” high up.’
The climber seeks to transcend his human condition, the weakness and emotion-wracked everydayness of his life. By climbing the mountain, he draws on reserves he did not know he had. He proves to himself many things. He is above other men, literally, when he is atop the mountain. Many smoke a cigarette in unconscious or conscious parody of a post-coital celebration. Climbers who are non-smokers may still smoke a symbolic cigarette on the top of the mountain – even summits where the oxygen is rare in the extreme, like Everest. This overriding of their usual health concern is another element of the transcendence effect induced by climbing the mountain. The climber has reached the unreachable – especially
if the peak has never been ascended before. But then there is a sort of sadness; it has been ‘used up’. A common enough occurrence is a desire to not climb the last three or four metres of a climb, to leave the peak sacred. This is observed on specific sacred peaks such as Nanda Devi. The apparently agnostic Shipton and Tilman deliberately ‘failed’ to reach the very top, though after a Japanese team made the summit all later assault parties tended to go for the very top too. It is interesting to speculate on why the Japanese sought to violate the traditions of the mountain; almost certainly it was a reflection of their own culture, where man is welcome at the summit and becomes less a supplicant of the gods than a welcome participant in the godly life, if only for a few moments, before lack of oxygen, bad weather, incipient fatigue, etc. draw him back down to a more ordinary existence.
When the climber dies in an attempt on the summit, and before his body appears – sometimes, as in the case of Mallory, tens of years later – on a rocky frozen mountainside (or, sometimes, emerging out of the bottom of a deep glacier), in that interregnum the stories begin to grow. These stories mimic the days after Christ’s body disappeared from the tomb. Just as Christ was seen by various favoured people after his death, Odell claimed to have glimpsed Mallory going strong for the top.
The Nagas, in the far eastern continuation of the Himalayas, build totem-like ‘skypoles’ in favour of sacred summits, though on 12,553-metre Mount Saramati, they have a place venerated as a home of benign spirits. Skypole or mountaintop, the proximity to heaven is obvious. The winding path up a sacred mountain becomes a kind of Sulam Yaakov or Jacob’s ladder. Indeed, the use of multiple ladders in the icefall sections on Everest, ladders stretching away upward to the snowy heights, is suggestive of a crude actualisation of the very ladder climbed by the prophet Jacob on his visit to heaven.
The very section which Mallory was supposed to have climbed – the second step – has been free-climbed with some difficulty by top modern climbers. Conrad Anker has climbed it twice; on the first occasion he claimed it would have been beyond Mallory, but climbing it again he said Mallory would have been able to make it. It is most usually climbed by the use of a ladder installed by the Chinese on their ascent of the north ridge in 1975.
Several Talmudic commentators suggest that the site of Jacob’s ladder would have been an actual peak, such as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. What is important is the way a ladder is provided for the one seemingly in the wrong, but still in God’s favour. The mountain rewards those willing to climb it with insights and status above those who loiter at base camp or on the plains.
Jacob, it is easy to lose sight of, is actually a trickster figure who constantly twits his older brother Esau, the hunter. Jacob uses the weaknesses of Esau against him; for example, when Esau is hungry, Jacob swaps a ‘mess of pottage’ – a bowl of soup – for Esau’s birthright. Jacob also wears a sheepskin to make his father Isaac think he is the hairier Esau – this is symbolic trickery by its very implausibility. Jacob flees the enraged Esau, and it is during this period of indeterminacy that God provides the ladder to the heavens. Here he tells Jacob that all of the land of Israel shall be his. It is the symbolic overthrow of the hunter-gatherer life for the semi-settled pastoralist with all his claims of land and ownership – Esau, being a hunter, was unconcerned about such things.
Mallory – photographed wearing nothing but his saucy smile and a rucksack in the approach hike (probably impossible to do in the twenty-first century) – is very much the modern climber: no respecter of tradition. His famous comment – ‘Because it is there’ – seems to fly in the face of the po-faced statements about duty and excellence made before the war.
The mountain touches the heavens – it is the cross-over point, a sort of bridge. Again, the elaborate bridges over crevasses on the approach glaciers of Everest and other high peaks come to mind. The very existence of a super crevasse, the bergschrund, where the ice detaches from the mountain to create a chasm that must be bridged, links or leads us to the sky-bridging from summit to heaven that the mountaineer may symbolically achieve. Typically, the sighting of stars on a mountain is greeted with a proprietorial air, as if by climbing the peak one ‘owns’ the constellations, or the individual stars of the constellations, more than the unworthy mortals lower down. Indeed, the Sherpas are very awake to the appearance of special stars when climbing Everest. Before the disaster of 1996, a low star was seen in daylight, hovering over the western cwm. It sent the Sherpas into paroxysms of superstitious anxiety, an anxiety justified by the terrible nature of what subsequently happened.
The death of Mallory turns over in the mind with additional symbolic spin as it reminds us of Sir Thomas Malory, compiler of Le Morte d'Arthur. The climber Mallory becomes a knight errant with the inexperienced Irvine as his squire. The quest for the Grail is now a bid for the summit. The desire for Mallory to have succeeded in his quixotic quest now revolves around the fact that Mallory was intending to leave a photograph of his wife on the summit – and that photo was not on his body when it was found in 1999. This too mimics the obsessive dedication of Sir Lancelot, dedicating his quest for the Holy Grail to his ideal love, Guinevere.
The knightly quests of King Arthur’s men are a courtly manifestation of the tasks – such as pilgrimage – set by a mystical master for his disciple. The quest, though, is not ritualised and safe like the pilgrimage. The pilgrim only makes a ritual ascension into heaven, he doesn’t try to climb up there for real. The ritual nature of the event assures his safe descent. He is only a spiritual tourist, so to speak, seeing ‘the heaven we show to visitors’.* His is simply one of countless ascents. We can see that a first ascent, however, is a kind of violation, though all too soon it, too, will become ritualised. Then climbers seek to make a new version. For example, on Everest we see first the south-eastern ridge (the Tibetan northern ridge, though the first to be explored, was only climbed in 1960 by the Chinese), and then the west ridge, then the south-west face, and finally the immensely hard Kangshung face being climbed.
By ascending the same peak but by different routes, the climber evades the ritual nature of the ascent and violates again the sacredness of the mountain. He makes a nihilistic compact to ascend into heaven and not return. The latent nihilism of climbing is noted by Phil Bartlett in his excellent The Undiscovered Country. The Sherpas perhaps understand this and force climbers to make copious ritual offerings before any attempt – and double that for a new route. Typically, new routes are punished by bigger accidents of greater severity; on one level, for entirely logical reasons, but on another level, this is the revenge of the mountain for violating the peak again. In an irreverently sexual sense, the mountaindwelling people demand a proper marriage – the ritual ascent – whereas the climber, a Westerner typically torn loose from any established spiritual tradition, or part of one deeply alien to such high mountains, seeks, like a trickster, to get away with seducing a virgin peak. The climber as trickster – as we’ve seen – fits both the heroic Mallory and the controversial Messner.
The interest the Sherpas show in fixing ropes and making any route more and more permanent is not simply rooted in a financial sentiment. It is a desire to ritualise ascent and make it safer both literally and symbolically. The anger seen in 2013 when Sherpas cut the ropes of Swiss super alpinist Ueli Steck, is the anger of any ritual-minded people when an important ceremony is disturbed. Given the sacred nature of Mount Everest in so many indigenous cultures involved in its current financial exploitation, we must expect to see ever greater ritualisation of ascent. In the future it makes sense to expect fixed ropes up both the north and south ridges – from top to bottom and controlled not by Western interlopers but by the Sherpas themselves.
Any ascent of a mountain, sacred or otherwise, is a symbolic raid on the unreachable. It is to visit a place not possible for humans. The top of Olympus was, rightly, seen as the home of the immortals. There is a sense that to reach a truly unclimbable peak confers immortality – as indeed it has o
n the early ascenders of Everest, Hillary and Tenzing, albeit an immortality brokered by the materialist global/gobbling culture of the occidental world. But Hillary and Tenzing belong to the secular end of revealed religion, whereas Mallory is firmly canonised as some sort of mystical entity.
The unreachable is also a way of conceptualising the absolute. Nothing gives modern man more trouble than holding the idea of the absolute in mind at the same time as the obvious relative truths revealed by anthropology and sociology. Seemingly unassailable scientific theories are always by definition only relative truths. Beyond that, any man who claims the existence of absolute truths may find followers, but he will not be taught in the academy. Still the absolute remains as something we require as a backdrop to a stable existence, without which all notions of significance begin to crumble.
Do we desire unreachableness, just as we desire the absolute? There exists a tension between the unreachable and the desire to reach it, which can bring out, through stretching of human capacity, both a de-trivialising of life and a growth in real abilities, strength, singlemindedness and stamina. Mallory exists as a warning that the unreachable exacts a price, but his example remains an inspiration for all climbers. Comparing the tweed jackets and ventile hoods of the 1922 expedition with modern hi-tech clothing is a common conversation among climbers.
Sometimes the symbolic mountain is destroyed by man’s greed. The sacred mountain of Gauri Shankar in Nepal was voted inviolable by the people indigenous to its lower flanks. But the government, anxious to make money from climbers wishing to ascend, overruled them. The sacred summit was violated. Many locals believed that earthquakes would follow, a demonic retribution for this violation. Reinhold Messner was asked by the Chinese to violate the summit of Mount Kailash, arguably the greatest sacred summit on the planet. He turned them down. They could send a team of their own climbers, but interestingly they have not.
White Mountain Page 24