White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  The radio tracking device needed a power source – and appropriately for something used to spy on nukes, it was nuclear-powered. Weighing 17 kilos it comprised a ‘nuclear battery’ – 5 kilos of plutonium 238 and 239; the bomb on Nagasaki was made of 6 kilos of the same material. The constant heat of the plutonium was converted into electricity by a surrounding bank of thermocouples – an inefficient method unless you have constant high heat – which the nuclear power pack did indeed have. Five loads were made up to carry the radio, power pack and other pieces of necessary kit. The porters, recruited from the nearest villages of Lata and Peini, competed for the right to carry the nuclear pack SNAP 19C – it kept whoever carried it toasty warm. Unfortunately, it may have had a more long-lasting effect. When Indian journalists went back to find the original thirty-three porters in 2010, apparently none were still alive. The outer case of SNAP 19C was just 2.5 mm of nickel tungsten alloy. Though the radioactive leakage would probably have been safe for the porters in small bursts, no one had thought to calculate its effect during prolonged contact. And since the device was to be planted at very high altitude, its resistance to frost and snow was greater than its resistance to water.

  Images of gods are everywhere

  The Indian mountaineer in charge was called Kohli. The American in charge of training was the venerable and outstanding climber and National Geographic photographer Barry Bishop (who would later die in a mysterious car crash, where he apparently just lost control on an empty road in 1976; conspiracists reckon he knew too much, those who believe in the curse of Nanda Devi claim he was yet another victim).

  In 1965, less than a year after the first Chinese bomb test, the Indian team were flown to Alaska for training with Barry Bishop in the placement of SNAP 19C at high altitude. Everything went swimmingly, and, after forty days, they returned to place the device on the second highest mountain in India – twenty-third highest in the world.

  Following the route of British climbers Tilman and Shipton, who had been the first to breach the ‘sanctuary’ – the rock circle protecting Nandi Devi and its allied peaks – the Indian team established camps up the mountain. For the higher-altitude carries they employed nine Sherpas from Sikkim.

  But then the weather began to get worse. Nanda Devi, which had been climbed without the use of modern equipment, was still not an easy climb. At Camp 4 on the mountain, further progress looked impossible. Kohli made the decision to leave the nuclear-powered radio scanner behind.

  They found a largeish rock that formed a small semi-protective overhang. Here they covered up SNAP 19C and descended the mountain.

  The following year they returned. They ascended to their old high point, yet everything looked different. The rock seemed to have moved. But when they found it, Kohli realised it was a different one. There was only one answer – there had been an avalanche and it had carried away all the equipment.

  They looked everywhere, and discovered not a thing. The next year a similar device was lodged on Nanda Kot, a lower mountain in the vicinity. But they continued the search on Nanda Devi. Still nothing came up, despite using Geiger counters to scan the mountainside. It began to dawn on the Americans that SNAP 19C was no snap, that in fact it may have fallen into a crevasse and be deep inside one of the slow-moving glaciers inching their way out of the Nanda Devi sanctuary. This realisation prompted a final search in 1968, but also the decision to reclaim the device on top of Nanda Kot. It had done its work, or enough, and no one wanted to lose another nuclear battery on a mountain.

  Everyone kept quiet about the debacle on Nanda Devi until 1978, when an article appeared in Outside magazine. This prompted embarrassing questions in the Indian parliament. A report was commissioned and ninety-four pages were filled with advice about what to do and the possible dangers involved. The main one being: what if the nuclear device should enter the Ganges? The glaciers of Nanda Devi feed the upper Ganges. It is one reason the mountain is considered sacred. Had man over-reached himself again and left a poisoned offering in the heart of sacred India?

  The conclusion of the report was that very little could be done – aside from a 1982 ban on climbing Nanda Devi or entering the Sanctuary. In 1993 Indian army engineers, under the auspice of ‘cleaning up the sanctuary’, searched again for the nuke. They found nothing. In 2000, an expedition was sent to the Sanctuary and it recommended it be opened for climbing again – but it remains closed.

  14

  Messner Nearly Messes up

  Whether it is upstream or downstream you’ll have to toil.

  Naga proverb

  We’ve met Messner before. He is, without doubt, one of the most extraordinary climbers of the twentieth century. Perhaps not an admirable role model – his example supports well the thesis that almost anything can be achieved if you are willing to sacrifice everything and anybody, including parts of yourself, to achieve it. Reinhold Messner wanted to climb Mount Kailash. The Chinese, who decide such things nowadays (and then – it was 1985), were not so sure. On the one hand, Messner, the ‘ Tabubrecher' (notorious taboo breaker), was one of the world’s most famous and well-regarded mountaineers, the only man to have soloed Everest without oxygen; so it would be a huge coup for materialistic communism if he could summit the peak and piss all over thousands of years of tradition and opium-like religious practice. Put like that, you can see the problem immediately. But what of the distress he would cause by violating a sacred spot for millions of Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Bonpos, not to mention a number of Zoroastrians? His former wife, journalist Ursula Demeter, wrote that Messner believed that he should be able to climb the mountain; it was, he declared, about an individual’s right to freedom. He added that taboos were only for those who create them and nobody would be insulted if they didn’t see him climbing the mountain . . . It was a rather stupid idea, of course; clearly he was searching for feeble excuses to justify the fact that he wanted to climb this most sacred peak.

  Messner and his team arrived in Tibet and waited for Chinese permission. Determined to make his mark, Messner made the ‘fastest ever pilgrimage’ around Kailash – 45 kilometres in twelve hours. The next day he went one better and circumnavigated the 80 kilometres around Lake Manasarovar in twenty-two-and-a-half hours. He bartered for food with nomads and for payment they accepted a lock of his hair. All was set for an assault on the summit.

  The Chinese knew that the huge uproar against this insult would be directed against them, not the bearded psycho climber. Despite this, they had told Messner that when the time was ‘politically propitious’, he was guaranteed to have first crack at the summit.

  Something intervened. Messner, as we’ve seen, had already lost one brother. He heard that he had lost another: Siegfried, who’d plummeted to his death in the Dolomites. The Kailash expedition decided to cut short their visit and return home.

  Messner has declared he has no fear of death. He thinks the afterlife or any description of it is beyond our human thinking. He has conquered many Himalayan summits, all, in their way, sacred summits. He has lost two brothers – both while climbing. We tend to assume that punishment comes after some crime or act of folly, but there is a Tibetan belief that karma may punish you before the event concerned happens. You may be punished in childhood for a crime you’ll commit in old age . . .

  To date, Reinhold Messner has not climbed Mount Kailash.

  15

  Drug Trade Routes of the Himalayas

  A wise man is better than a king: a king is honoured only in his own country, a wise man everywhere.

  Nepalese proverb

  Walking through the western Himalayas you’ll pass wild marijuana growing by the path. By rolling the leaves and flowers in your hand you can accumulate small balls of resin, which can be ingested or smoked – or sold to other backpackers. Dope is a key attraction for some travellers and it has long been part of the hippy trail to go to India and get stoned. The true mystic alleges dope is correctly named – it is a soporific, a false friend, heightening s
enses but dulling the intuition when sober; it mimics states that can be made permanent only through rigorous work on the self, including, perhaps, journeys into the mountains.

  In any part of northern Nagaland, the tribal borderlands between Burma and India, you can buy old opium pipes made from bamboo. Many will still have the sour odour of opium about them. They were probably only given up recently. During the British occupation, opium was tolerated: ‘Opium they shoud have, but to get it they should be made to work for it’, Sir Andrew Mills wrote in an 1854 report. The missionaries who arrived in the twentieth century were opposed to opium, and most of Nagaland is now Baptist country, with the huge high churches standing on every peak where the morung longhouses used to stand. But closer towards the Burmese border, opium is still being smoked. Tired old men, who look as if they have given up fighting, puff all day long and argue with their pals. But opium was only ever a minor trade good in the Himalayas; most of it went by sea after the Russians gained control of the Central Asian Khanate Khiva in 1873.

  In the central Himalayas, the old trade routes, made up of endless lines of yaks going over the high passes, moved salt from

  Get high on religion instead?

  Tibet to India. Surplus agricultural products moved the other way. There was also a trade in carpets, furs, medicinal plants (Tibet has always been a major exporter of these), hawks, selected kinds of timber. From the earliest times, rice was shipped down from Nepal into India. Cardamom went from Sikkim and also Nepal. Most copper used in northern India came from mines in Nepal – it was used for making pots and coins, which were minted by kings as they moved from palace to palace, minting coins on the move, their own cashpoint.

  Nepal, being the most dominant central Himalayan country, controlled much trade across the mountains. Rulers based in Kathmandu rarely strayed into the provinces. Instead, they were visited by their own rural agents who operated through mandis, local markets, and brought a cut to the big bosses in the capital.

  In Nepal I am offered hashish, with that alluring half-heard whisper, all the time. It’s funny to think of smoking, which impairs breathing, working as a substitute for the hard breathing of climbing. Of course, many climbers smoke dope, some having picked up the habit when they first visited the Himalayas in the Fifties and Sixties. In many ways, the stiff old English climbers started the hippy trail. Tilman would turn in his grave at the thought, but the example of carrying your own gear and trekking where you like started with people like Eric Shipton and him. Their contemporary Frank Smythe wrote about the Valley of the Flowers in the Himalayan foothills, which encouraged the mystic Peter Caddy to ultimately found the Findhorn New Age community in Scotland. Climbers and seekers, those who would go higher, have a real but not always obvious influence on us all.

  16

  The Discarded on Everest

  The stolen food was eaten by the crow, but the beak of the raven is red.

  Ladakhi proverb

  Years ago, driving through the Sahara Desert, I was surprised that the tourist party I accompanied were most excited by finding the bonnet of a 1940 Ford truck lying on a dune some 300 kilometres from any human habitation. We had seen tektite silica glass, rock carved with images of long-extinct giraffes and baboons, we had found fossils and discarded flint tools including Acheulean hand axes and elegantly fashioned harpoon tips – but none of this compared to finding this man-made, metal, recent – within living memory – slightly rusty artefact. Shell petrol tins that dated from the Second World War were also found to be mesmerising . . .

  Everest was as blank and clean as a desert until the early part of the last century, yet now it is increasingly defined by what is discarded on its slopes. Base camp has become so engorged with its yearly fill of garbage there are now annual clean-ups to restore it, if not to its primal pristine nature, at least making it bearable. Everest base camp is built on a glacier, you can hear it creak and move slowly down the hill, stretching your tent guy lines, distorting the tent’s shape a little each day.

  Ice moves, but it moves slowly. A glacier cannot flush rubbish away like a river. The glacier serves to slow time down as you approach the mountain. The cold preserves and the slow movement of the glacier means that what is preserved, remains.

  The discarded on Everest is divided into bodies and climbing detritus.

  The dead on Everest can become landmarks. ‘Green boots’ is the body of an Indian climber still in a small cave high up on the north-east ridge. He lies face down; his garish lime green plastic boots seem absolutely new. He looks like someone resting, except his head is buried in snow; like a child playing a game, perhaps, his head rammed into a snow bank. There are two discarded used oxygen cylinders; dull red and vaguely industrial-looking, they stand in contrast to the newness of the dead Indian’s boots and clothes. The extreme difficulty of moving a body at altitude is a large part of the problem, but not insurmountable. Think of the ingenuity it takes to weld pipelines at five miles below the surface of the sea . . . But perhaps I am missing the point here: the discarded remain on Everest because we wish them to be there.

  When Chris Bonington climbed Everest in 1975 ‘the hard way’, up the previously unclimbed south-west face, the presence of a Chinese discarded aluminium ring flag at the top was strangely reassuring. It proved that the Chinese had indeed climbed Everest and by leaving behind this tethered sturdy remnant they had somehow tamed the mountain. It is by the accumulation of garbage that we claim the planet and render it safe for human consumption . . . the very sight of an old shoe in the wilderness, or a Godfather beer can on a rocky mountain path, is unwelcome to the tourist who is already ‘safe’ and simply getting away from it all for a simulated wilderness thrill, but for the real adventurer, lost, feeling the incredible loneliness of places where you don’t count, it can be a very heartening thing to find. It means you are less insignificant.

  Of course, you only have such thoughts when you have signally failed to connect to the oneness of the mountain, its mystico-religious significance. On a materialist, Darwinian perspective, the absence of anything human or human-made only serves to make one feel very small, a mere drop in the ocean. But one purpose of life is to reconcile ‘dropness’ with ‘oceanness’ in as much as the drop contains a consciousness of being both the ocean and the drop . . .

  The materialist, the type who calls an ice axe an ice axe and never believes a thing that isn’t right in front of his eyes (except scientific theories) is confronted by the vast wilderness of Everest, the highest mountain on earth – the supreme example of the unreachable. And then he finds . . . Edward Norton’s sock. Left after the failed summit bid of 1922 (so close, and without oxygen) at a camp at 8,000 metres, found in 2001 by the party looking for the dead ones of the 1924 expedition. He or she may claim that they would prefer it to be pure and empty as the day man first set foot on its upper slopes, but they are lying. The comfort of seeing discarded oxygen bottles at the South Col, the handy ladder up the second step, the tangled cables of fixed rope . . . Some of the detritus works as an informal signpost system – ‘this way’, it tells you. The flapping ripped tent bases at Camp 3 may serve as a ghostly reminder of your potential fate, but they also tell you that humans have been here. Man is a track-following creature, we feel happier when we are on a well-marked trail.

  When a mountain is first surveyed for climbing it is truly in a pristine state. The rock may be mossy, overgrown, dripping with water or melting ice. There may be cracks and ramps of snow – accidental ways up the mountain – but man has not left his mark. With the littering of the mountain comes its transformation into a series of ‘routes’. Following another’s traverse of a snow slope provides a narrow ledge in the snow to walk upon, making the whole experience seem suddenly vastly safer than heading out for the first time across a virgin slope. Climbers know that a raw mountain promises reward, but they mostly cleave to mountains that have already been processed into climbing centres, rather like the snow slopes veined with ski runs of
varying difficulty. Aiming for such places – and Everest is the daddy of them all – is to aim for a kind of hybrid wilderness experience, one very much mediated by man’s psychological domination of the peak. The equipment one brings to assault a mountain is less important than what one leaves behind; a siege-gun attack on an unclimbed mountain is a very different, much rawer experience than soloing a littered, much-climbed prominence like Everest. But that rawness is not what the climber is usually seeking.

  The need to litter Everest extends to the leaving of human sacrifices – signpost corpses of those who lost their struggle with the mountain. The most famous, and almost most shocking, are the remains of George Mallory. His white exposed buttocks strike the po-faced as indecent. They certainly serve to memorialise the fragility of the climber – what a contrast we feel to the Zarathustra fist-shaking supermen who dare to raid the unreachable. Mallory’s body – the first symbolic sacrifice to the mountain – was examined in a scientific manner in 1999 – his pockets rifled – in order to ‘work out’ what exactly happened. The main concern was to discover whether he and Irvine reached the summit or not. There is still a missing camera that all such detritus enthusiasts (and I include myself) longingly hope will reveal that these two did make it to the top first. This operates like the desire to prove Columbus was beaten to America by St Brendan or the Arab navigators from Spain.