White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  The following morning, he heard John Krakauer leaving and shouted: ‘Just what do you have to do to get service around here?’

  This time, he managed to get to his feet. His boots were on and he was ready to go – partly because his feet were so swollen he couldn’t get them off. With the help of others, he was able to limp down the mountain. But without the use of his hands, he was dreading having to descend the icefall with its 700 lengths of ladder to climb across and down.

  His wife now knew that Beck was alive. She rallied her friends to lobby everyone influential they knew in order to get him flown out in a helicopter. This worked; for the first time, a helicopter landed and picked up someone from above the icefall at Camp 1. Flying at 6,000 metres was not easy, but in a virtuoso display of rotor control, the pilot safely removed Beck to Kathmandu hospital. Though he lost the lower arm, large parts of his face and all the fingers from the other hand, he has returned to working as a pathologist – an extraordinary recovery. He wrote: ‘I learned that miracles do occur. In fact, I think they occur pretty commonly.’

  The penalty for going higher is the danger of death from altitude, or attitude – that of those who disagree with you. The new stories about the mountains have changed; as we have seen, they are about the survival of greenhorns and wannabes, not the great triumphs of explorers and pioneers. Surviving is the new way of winning, since mere winning is too easy now, what with all the tech and backup and oxygen and GPS. This path is blocked and I knew I had to take another. The clue was to look at the forgotten people of the Himalayas, those who had been overlooked but still lived on, who connected to the land, yes, but also my own nebulous reasons for being here. The Naga gods and the Naga people. It would bring me back to the demons, those that are real and those that are imagined, and the journeys we make to placate them.

  PART 5

  Nagas

  1

  In Nagaland

  Do not teach others the way a fish teaches.

  Naga proverb

  Nagas, those serpent gods and ancient rulers of India, coincidentally share a name with the half-forgotten tribes living on the border with Burma. The people of Nagaland may have been called Nagas not because they are snakelike or worship snakes (they don’t, though politely revering the python, they will happily eat most snakes). It was thought that the name comes either from the Sanskrit words for ‘hill people’ or ‘naked people’ – though there are plenty of both in other parts of India and they aren’t called Nagas. One convincing explanation suggests the name comes from Naka, meaning pierced ear in Burmese, and that they are migrant remnants of the Nakari tribe from Thailand, who were also characterised by hugely pierced ears. Certainly, the plugs and roundels you see in Hoxton and Brooklyn have nothing on the pierced ears, and noses, you see in Nagaland – among the elderly pre-Christian men, mainly. My grandfather used to give away his Players cigarette tins to Nagas, who would pierce their ears, enlarge the hole until the tins could be inserted and used as a handy metal pocket. The Naga people also use cowrie shells in their traditional costume, though they are very far from the sea; it suggests significant contact with people who were. A band of tribes who use cowrie shells runs across Burma and Thailand and Cambodia; maybe the Nagas are connected to these people.

  The word and the people are getting better known. The night before I left England, I had an Indian meal with a ‘dorset naga chilli’ – which for a while was the world’s hottest chilli, a hybrid developed from a chilli pepper that originated in Nagaland, before spreading to Bangladesh and then to England. Now I was going to where the chillis came from.

  Nagaland. At long last. Nagaland was a part of my childhood – haunted it, in fact. Like most people in the current era, I put peculiar importance on my childhood. Perhaps we can thank Freud for that; he certainly instigated a wholesale restructuring in the importance of our inner lives. The Tibetans only have their past lives to worry about. When I met a Buddhist monk who had been away from his family since he was eight, he seemed so very normal – unlike a modern product of a British boarding school, wrenched away from home at the same age. But perhaps that was some innate prejudice speaking. We seem to have replaced God and the Infinite with ourselves; instead of past lives, we have our past life – our school and childhood, which, if it was a happy one, takes on the form of a sort of nirvana, except you dwell there before and not after life. What do we have to look forward to?

  So, Nagaland; my father spoke about it a great deal. His own father had been reticent, spoke hardly at all about his childhood; my father resented this, so we were spared few details of his – to my mind – utterly idyllic years of growing up. The main and almost intoxicating fact was that he had not been sent to school until he was thirteen! Oh, there had been those few months at that prep school in Mussoorie – but he and his brother had been expelled, for loading the tablecloth with a tureen of rice pudding and trapping the huge bulge by pressing their tummies to the table. When they walked away, the whole lot splatted all over the dining hall floor. I knew I could never compete with such chutzpah. And also: how on earth did they expect to get away with that?

  Misty morning in the Naga hills

  No school! I hated and despised school, loathed the end of the holidays, faked headaches and cold symptoms every few months just to get a break I felt I deserved. My sisters loved school and looked forward to the end of the summer holidays, which for me were dark days laden with gloom. And partly, perhaps, this was encouraged by so deeply imbibing my father’s tales of building treehouses in the jungle, playing in Japanese foxholes (they lived in Kohima, site of a turning-point battle in the Second World War), and going on hikes in the jungle with the Naga warriors who lived all around them. I could hardly imagine anything more exciting than traipsing around with a couple of dao*-wielding, head-hunting, spear-carrying warriors. My grandfather had brought many mementoes back from Nagaland, and as a child visiting his huge draughty house I could play on the stairs with the spears he kept standing in a gigantic brass shell case along with his umbrella.

  My grandfather had been in Nagaland both during and after the war. He had been friends with Sir Charles Pawsey, the District Commissioner, who once came to dinner and my mischievous dad, aged seven, had pulled his chair away from under him leaving the poor DC sprawling on the floor. Much punishment followed. But Sir Charles never held it against the lad and inspired my father to go to Oxford and enter the Indian Civil Service (which he did, though the ICS had ended before he finished his studies).

  It was on Charles Pawsey’s tennis court that the turning-point battle of Kohima was fought. There, and the immediate surrounds of the small sleepy town in the Naga hills. The battle of Kohima and the resupply over the ‘hump’ of the Himalayas and the Ledo Road through what is now Arunachal Pradesh are all part of the Second World War involvement of the Himalayas. Strategically, they stood, as they always have and always will, as the supreme barrier between East and West. As weak points go, the Naga hills are remarkably resistant: hundreds of miles of jungle-infested hilltops, many over 1,800 metres, with no major rivers and certainly no roads. But the Japanese had proven they were masters of jungle warfare – indeed, until the British began experimenting with operations behind the lines, the Japanese were the pioneers and best exponents of jungle fighting in the Second World War. They travelled light – instead of cumbersome hobnailed leather boots, they wore the canvas and rubber ‘two-toed’ tabi that are worn by construction workers in Japan. They eschewed roads for travelling along jungle tracks – using local guides to show the way. Bicycles were found to make excellent vehicles: you could load a bicycle with a fifty-pound box of ammunition and still ride along a jungle track. If the going got rough, you could push the bicycle and use it like a cart as long as you pushed a stick into the handlebars to extend it so the bike could remain upright as it was pushed. Spreading out through the jungle, you could live off the land to some extent, extorting food from villages along the way. This method of fighting had beate
n the British in Malaya and Burma.

  Defeat in Malaya and Singapore had shocked Britain to the core, more so than the setbacks in Europe. Japan had defeated the Russians in 1904 – but it had been a rump force, far from the capital. Japan could not conceivably be a threat to Britain . . . And yet they had stormed down the Malayan peninsula and then out-bluffed the British, who had three times the number of troops as the Japanese.

  By 1944, things were a little different. The Americans had gradually reoccupied the Pacific and, after the battle of Midway, had strategic control of the area. The Japanese continued their advance westwards through Burma, but their supply lines were getting longer and longer. Crucially, a special forces operation – of the kind disliked by senior army officers but beloved by Churchill – took place in Burma behind Japanese lines. The Chindit force, under wayward General Orde Wingate, failed to achieve any significant operational victories, but their role was not in vain. For the first time, it had been shown that the British soldier could fight and win in the jungle, that he could survive in the steaming inhospitable forests of Burma – that he could be dropped and re-supplied from the air, surviving disease and climate to face the seemingly invincible Japanese. They discovered the foibles of the Japanese, their preferred tactical methods. All this was of immense value when it came to fighting at Kohima and Imphal. These places were chosen by Field Marshal William Slim to be where the decisive battles should take place.

  At Imphal, the British needed a transhipment point ahead of the battle they intended to fight. This camp was built by my grandfather, who had been sent ahead with only his bearer to get the job done. Relying on hundreds of Nagas to help him, he piped in water using Naga technology – halved bamboo poles strung together to form a pipeline – that is still in use today. He dynamited limestone cliffs to get the raw material for lime, which he cooked in homemade kilns. Using this basic cement, he made concrete hut bases, essential against the mud-inducing monsoon. The Nagas helped him clear a vast area of forest, chopping the trees down with their well sharpened daos. Huts were built and thatched with palms, still used in most Naga villages to roof houses.

  Building the camp achieved a sort of mythical status in my childhood. It showed that a single man could stand against a whole marauding army and still achieve something – as long as he had willing native warriors to help him. It was, I suppose, the same kind of colonial fantasy so well depicted in The Man Who Would Be King,Kipling’s yarn about two ordinary soldiers who find a hidden kingdom to rule over in the mountains of the Himalayas. Perhaps a major lure of the colonial experience is to be able to shuffle off your lowly or highly born – but nevertheless, fixed – position in the over-populated islands of Britain and arrive, like R. L. Stevenson in Samoa, as a fully fledged king with an adoring people to rule with fairness and compassion. This is what is so easily misunderstood when studying colonialism – many of the people drawn to such work desired to serve the people to the very best of their ability (while getting lots of kingly attention too, maybe).

  A Naga log drum: it can be heardfive miles away

  District commissioners in Nagaland were drawn from the Indian Civil Service – as Charles Pawsey was. This was the most competitive branch of the empire’s civil service; to gain entry, you needed higher marks than for the Foreign Office. The calibre of men sent out to this end-of-empire outpost is reflected in the books they wrote; previous ICS men Hutton and Mills were essentially amateurs, but their anthropologies of the Naga peoples have stood the test of time as classic works. Their value also stands in the high regard the Naga people themselves have for such tomes. When I met with Naga leaders, I was asked on more than one occasion if I could help get hold of certain ethnological works from the late nineteenth century, since some of the knowledge (admittedly largely about territory) had been lost with the steady incursion of the Indians since partition. It surprised few that not a single Naga attended the 1947 Kohima independence day parade that my grandfather was present at. The Nagas knew they would fare far worse under the Indians than under the British. The insurgency that started soon after and still bubbles away in the further reaches of the Naga borderlands is a reminder that the British once were able to rule a land without aspiring to lead it; the Indians wanted to lead the Nagas to a ‘better’ way of life. Which led to war.

  In my grandfather’s cabinet of curiosities there was a Naga headdress made of wild boar hair and a breastplate of cowrie shells. Later, I would see similar things on display in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, but these were artefacts that had been my toys.

  My father spoke of one occasion when he had gone with his father hunting for jungle fowl. They had walked and walked all day, taking no food with them. The Nagas had made a fire and brewed up some wild tea – that was all they consumed, all day – and they covered, he told me, twenty miles through the jungle from dawn until dusk when they returned. ‘And it was all up and down in the Naga jungle,’ he added. Twenty miles and only a few cups of tea! Brilliant!

  Everything about my life was so regular and planned. I had never once been without breakfast, unless I was ill – let alone lunch and tea too. It seemed a reckless but wholly attractive mark of freedom that a casual stroll out into the jungle should become an epic one-day hike. My own mother, I knew, would not have allowed such a thing. My father never went anywhere without letting her know.

  It was a kind of nostalgia for a bygone age of greater wildness and freedom, a wildness enhanced by the presence of real wild men, noble savages; my father always spoke of the Naga skill at making traps and hunting, but also their quiet dignity and loyalty. He’d show me how to make a razor-sharp knife from splitting a bamboo – I’d later see Nagas using slivers of bamboo as knives to butcher meat. He and I built a trap, just as he remembered. It had a withy bent back, which acted as a spring to lift and hang any small game caught. He told me how the Nagas had scattered a poisonous plant in the streams and ponds (there were few rivers in Nagaland, he told me, mainly just streams running down the hills and along the tortuous valleys, and ponds they made themselves for fish), and this plant had stunned the fish for a while, allowing the Nagas to wade in and scoop out the lot.

  I have always been intrigued by the French philosophical notion of ‘the other’. That which is similarly human, but opposite and desirable, even if the desire is unconscious. The Nagas were my ‘other’. They were wild and dangerous and lived at the tail end of the Himalayas. They were the eastern barrier between India and the rest of S. E. Asia. They ate dogs! And were head hunters! Human skulls adorned their long houses. And they had never been conquered by the British.

  For me, as for all children brought up in the Seventies and Eighties, the Second World War continued to hang heavy on the cultural agenda. There were still a few bombsites in major towns, boys’ comics featured Second World War stories and Steve McQueen jumped his motorbike (actually a disguised Triumph rather than a BMW) over the fence between Germany and Switzerland every Christmas or Easter Day afternoon – for years, it seemed. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole Seventies obsession with jumping motorbikes over big obstacles wasn’t started by massive exposure to Steve McQueen . . . I digress. The fact that we had ‘won the war’ was part of growing up, but so was industrial decline, strikes, and the end of empire. For me, Nagaland brought end of empire and winning the war together in striking fashion. Though the British had ruled the country, they had never occupied or really exploited it. Quite the contrary; they had created a protective zone around the Nagas, insulating them from the commercial and exploitative instincts of the Assamese and Bengalis. The British administered this time-bubble, which was rudely burst when the Japanese decided Kohima would be the spot to fight the determining battle for India. Suddenly, these almost Stone Age tribesmen were in the midst of the rabid madness of twentieth-century warfare. And my father had lived there both before and after the war. His presence guaranteed me, I felt, a vicarious front seat on both war and empire.

  In 1945 my g
randfather returned as the garrison engineer for Kohima, overseeing some of its reconstruction. Which it needed – the town had seen some of the most vicious fighting of the Second World War, with the Japanese determined to win or fight to the death. In the post-war years, the hills around Kohima quickly recovered from the blasting they had received from British and Japanese artillery. It became for my father and his siblings the most wonderful playground you could imagine. If I had the odd bomb crater, fenced off and soon to be developed, to play in, they had foxholes, blown-up tanks, heavy artillery and discarded weapons to play with.

  My uncle took it a stage further. Perhaps inspired by the Naga ritual of wearing a wild boar’s tooth on a necklace, he collected the teeth of Japanese soldiers, rooted them out of skulls with a found bayonet. He kept them in a Players tin, ready to be strung as beads on a thread. When my grandmother found out, she was appalled and he had to throw them away.

  * Dao: a Naga machete used for taking heads.

  2

  An Encounter on the Train to Nagaland

  Snake fears man. Man fears snake.

  Tibetan proverb

  The train took six hours, or would. I was in the station in Guwhati in Assam, waiting to get to Dimapur in Nagaland, the last stage in my journey along the Himalayas. All Indian stations are big, even the small ones. Guwhati was no exception. Confusion was everywhere. Despite my efforts to be all Zen about it, I was agitated. Though trains were rarely on time, sometimes they left a minute or two before time. I was haunted by that possibility. And there were no boards to signal what platform a train would be leaving from. The staff had only a cursory knowledge. They’d direct you to the usual platform, but all too often there had been a last-minute change and only the red-shirted and red-turbaned porters had any clue what was happening. It was miraculous how they would know exactly what platform the train would be leaving from and where to stand for the right carriage – especially when no one else could tell you this. No one. I did not begrudge handing over fifty rupees – an excessive amount, I knew – to find out such valuable data.