by Michael Gill
An exception was a late-afternoon puja performed as a blessing for the second half of the journey. Ed was joined by Harish and Jim Wilson, whose knowledge of Hinduism had come from two years of study in Varanasi. The pujari was a strikingly handsome, supple young man, dressed in a yellow robe. He was soon lost in the chanting of mantras; crimson petals and oil lamps floated at the river’s edge; drums rose to a crescendo. At the conclusion, Ed knelt with the young priest and touched his forehead on Ganga’s wet sands. The sanctity of the river was palpable.
We left Varanasi on 12 September. As the big tributary rivers from Nepal were left behind, the immensity of Ganga diminished. Allahabad at Prayag, the confluence of Ganga with Delhi’s Jamuna River, was another place of great Hindu sanctity, host to the great Kumbh Mela gathering held every 12 years. We made a three-day diversion by road to Delhi, in part because Jon Hamilton needed expert medical care for a debilitating fever of unknown origin. We returned to the river whose bed was changing from silt to shingle as we approached the foothills of the Himalayas. We passed through Haridwar, the Gate of God, and on to Rishikesh where we stayed the night in a government forest bungalow, a modest building set among trees where a forested spur came down to the river. From here Ganga would start its climb into the mountains, and the increased gradient would change a swift but easy river into a series of steepening white-water rapids which must eventually become impossible cataracts. The unnerving question hanging over us was how we would identify that point. Perhaps by the sinking of the first boat? Or would we continue until the last boat had vanished beneath the waves?
Wild river of the mountains
The landmarks ahead of us were five confluences, called prayags, spread along 190 kilometres of river, each of them a site of pilgrimage. We would be camping from now on and Mingma had joined us from Khunde. Leaving in the afternoon of 24 September, we were soon confronted by a big rapid, but Jon led it easily. Beyond it we entered a gorge enclosed by steep rock walls in which two further rapids were handled without problems. The day was coming to an end and the gorge darkening when we heard the roar of big water and, turning the corner, found a rapid that was the most difficult yet. With not another human in sight, we camped on a beach of white sand at its foot. When the moon rose, it shone on big white waves. We called it Moonlight Rapid.
In the morning Jon showed the way by crossing to the far side in the trough between two huge standing waves. Then he was working his way up the far bank, disappearing from sight behind big waves, then reappearing before driving out into the centre of the river and on to the smooth steep tongue at the head of Moonlight.
Jim, with Ed beside him, followed, but while crossing the trough the boat moved so violently that he was thrown off the accelerator. The engine cut, the boat sank off the plane and in a moment was dropping two metres into the bottom of the trough. Back at the wheel, Jim pressed the starter button and in a moment the power of the jet was pushing them out of the waves. He had not driven water like this since the Sun Kosi nine years earlier. He was learning fast.
The next morning provided more encounters with large rapids but none caused serious problems before we arrived in Viyasi. Jon led, taking a load of five people and, as he so often did, made the moves through the waves and on to the tongue look easy. Having dropped his passengers, he returned to where others were waiting at the foot of the rapid. Again he led off, but this time something went wrong. He seemed to be right of his original line. The bow dropped and buried itself in the wave ahead. The boat seemed to skid sideways, drop into a hole, and then disappear from view in a welter of foam. We onlookers stared, certain that the boat had gone, incredulous that this had happened to the master. But slowly the boat rose to the surface, wallowing. Amazingly Jon got the motor started and limped out of the tail race on to the nearest beach. Our second day and we had nearly lost a boat. Part of the problem was that Jon was still tired from the fever he’d had since Varanasi. The best physician in Delhi had shrugged his shoulders as to the diagnosis, administered intravenous antibiotics and fluids, and assured Jon he was cured, but long days driving big rapids were not ideal for convalescence.
After an oil-change and repair of a lifting deck, we drove on, knowing that the first prayag, Devprayag, must be close. We came around a corner and there was a golden temple, some white houses and two rivers mingling their waters. We pitched a camp a few kilometres upstream and that night Mingma’s prayers were said with a new fervour.
The next confluence was Rudraprayag, and we had seen from a photo on the wall of the Rishikesh bungalow that it looked down on a big rapid. We came to it in the afternoon. At the end of a gorge in which the water surged under our boats was a prayag with a narrow line of steep steps coming down the sharp ridge between the two rivers. The steps and the opposite bank were crowded with spectators waiting for the jet boats to attempt the rapid guarding the branch on our right. Jon threaded his way between big waves to the foot of an impressively steep tongue. For a long time he hovered, trying to get a grip on the slope ahead without slipping under the waves behind. Jet boats must be on the plane to be manoeuvrable but on fast steep water they can plane without moving forwards. Jon hovered, waiting for the changing level of water in front of him to swell up, then with full throttle he was surging forwards on to the tongue and up. Even to us who had been with them for five weeks, they seemed like magic boats that could leap at will.
Next day brought the boats to a pair of rapids that we had been warned might be impossible. They were The Deer’s Leap and The Chute, a sequence of two rapids linked by a short narrow gorge. The Deer’s Leap was so-called because Lord Siva in the form of a deer had been seen to leap across its six-metre gap. As a rapid it was not difficult, but The Chute at the upper end of the gorge was a different beast altogether. The river here was only a fraction of its size 1600 kilometres downstream, but it was still full of power as it funnelled through the steep narrow entrance to The Chute. Jon handled it perfectly, hovering, waiting, timing his move on to the tongue to perfection.
Then Jim took his place on the boiling water. The crowd fell silent as he waited minute after minute, watching the movements of the water as it swelled or drained away. There seemed to be no recurring rhythm to the pattern. Suddenly Jim made his move, and at full throttle the boat leapt forwards, biting into the hard green water of the tongue. It knifed a little to the left, then right with the stern swinging hard across to miss by inches the narrowing rocks; then he was in the smooth water of the pool above. Mike Hamilton followed Jon’s line exactly. All three boats were up The Chute – but it was hard on everyone’s nerves.
That evening we camped beside Czech Hat Rapid, named for two Czech canoeists who had died only few days earlier when their boats capsized shortly after entering the river. The hat was a helmet we found on the river’s edge – an unsettling reminder that even with a life-jacket one can drown in big rapids.
Next day a long sequence of rapids took us to Karnaprayag, where we turned north to the fifth and last prayag, Nandaprayag, quite close now but up an ever-steepening gradient. The river was continuously fast and was narrowing between banks of boulders on either side. Jon was in the lead, looking for a way up a big wave. He had crossed to the centre, then turned up-river and was easing forwards when suddenly the bow dipped and bit into the wave ahead. Hard green water poured over the bow, forcing it down, then flooded over the low windscreen as the boat disappeared in a chaos of white water. Surely it would sink! But then it was coming up, soggy and wallowing. Jon restarted the motor and brought the boat ashore with its gunwales awash. Sobered, we camped for the night.
We never reached Nandaprayag. We could see its houses but we could also hear a swelling roar ahead. We came around a corner to find ourselves confronted by a wall of water three metres high. We drove around the boiling pool at its foot, but it was clear that this was the end. The crowds dispersed, disappointed by the failure of our magic boats to leap the fall, but we were relieved to have reached such an end-poi
nt and still be alive. Our jet-boat journey was finished. From here we would continue on foot into the mountains.
On foot to the sky
Our destination was Badrinath, a walk of four days, but at the suggestion of Sikh expedition member Mohan Koli, and for the sake of fitness and acclimatisation, we spent three days walking into the Valley of Flowers and to the Sikh pilgrim destination known as Hem Kund, a mountain lake at 15,000ft. In the gurdwara at Ghangaria, the Sikh lodging at 10,300ft, Ed noted in his diary the return of the old bad dreams which he thought must be due to altitude. The night before our climb to the lake a storm blew up, with hail beating on the roof and fresh snow down low on the mountains. Even in these bleak conditions late in the season there were pilgrims of all ages on the trail. Under a grey sky some immersed themselves in the freezing lake before returning down-valley.
We read about ourselves in a local newspaper: ‘GANGA BEATS HILLARY, EXPEDITION ABANDONED’. The people had expected that our boats would reach a true source, a cave perhaps in the side of a mountain, with a river flowing from deep in the earth.
On the seventh day we entered Badrinath with its temples and lodging houses. There was an autumnal air to the place. An icy wind whistled down the deserted streets and the few pilgrims left were wrapped miserably in shawls and balaclavas, their arms wrapped around themselves to keep out the cold.
Murray Jones and Peter Hillary had gone ahead for a first look at Narayan Parbat, the mountain we were expecting to climb. Their news was not good. It was too difficult for our minimally equipped group, and there was fresh snow everywhere. Repeating their climb next day we could only agree, but we needed a mountain. We looked east across the other side of the valley and liked what we saw. Grass and bluffs led to steep but easy rock and a site for a base camp at 15,000ft. Above this was an indolent glacier leading to a snow plateau at 18,000ft which could be the site for our top camp. A further thousand feet of snow-climbing led to an attractive snow summit which we named Akash Parbat, Sky Peak, and this became our objective.
It was hardly a major climb, but with 10 of us for a week and the usual film equipment we had 29 loads and needed porters. We tried the Bhotia village of Mana, where Ed had recruited porters in 1951. Then the guidebook had described Bhotias as ‘few in number, powerfully built, both men and women, dirty in their habits and greatly addicted to drink’. In Mana we found that their number was very few indeed. A few old men came forward. Ed said that they looked like the same bunch he’d hired in 1951 and neither he nor they had grown younger during the intervening 26 years.
Ed appealed to the ever-helpful military, represented here by Major Bawa, a robust, noisy Sikh who lived in an unpretentious hut halfway between Mana and Badrinath. Thanks to an oil stove, the hut was cosy; the food he served was excellent; somewhere he had a case of rum; and at one elbow stood a telephone. It was a very functional headquarters.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I will get you porters,’ and he did. They were not eager, but by the evening of 10 October we had a snug base camp on a rock ledge at 15,000ft served by a small trickle of water. After a second night at base we set off for the top camp, but this time without porters. It was a tough day. Ed wrote in his diary, ‘I found it a terrible struggle at the end and was greatly relieved to come on our camp site at over 18,000 feet. I had a warm but restless night with lots of dreams.’7
The 13th was a rest day, with Ed staying in his tent feeling subdued and without much energy. At 10 o’clock that night, while the rest of the camp slept, I was woken by an obviously worried Murray. ‘Ed’s been calling out for Jim,’ he said. ‘He’s got a bad pain in his back. I thought maybe you’d better have a look at him.’ I put on some clothes, grabbed a stethoscope and trudged through the new snow to Ed’s tent. He had an acute pain in the small of his back; it had come on only in the last hour or so. I could find nothing wrong with Ed’s lungs to suggest pulmonary edema. It left me puzzled and uneasy. Why this sudden, severe back pain? Was it due to the load he’d been carrying? He’d taken paracetamol tablets without relief. My only other painkiller was Omnopon which contains morphine. I decided to give him half an ampoule, the alternatives being this or nothing. Back in my own tent, I lay awake, questions turning over in my mind. Just before falling asleep I heard Murray calling out, ‘How’s it going, Ed?’
‘Okay,’ came the reply. ‘The pain’s going.’ He sounded drowsy.
In the morning a worried Mingma, who had taken tea to Ed, came to see me. ‘Burra Sahib some checking …?’
Finding Ed fast asleep, I gave him a hard shake, at which he opened his eyes slowly and said, ‘I … A-a-a-h …’ It was all I could get from him. Cerebral edema came immediately to mind and I felt a panicky sense of urgency. I was only too aware that my injection of Omnopon would have made the problem worse. There were only three treatments – a helicopter, oxygen, or a lower altitude – and of these only the last was immediately available.
The camp swung into action. Murray raced down the mountain to Major Bawa to summon a helicopter. The rest of us put together a sledge made of foam mattresses and sleeping bags all wrapped in a tent. We towed Ed down the gentle incline of the snow plateau to a suddenly steepening snow gully where he was lowered rather than dragged. In an hour we’d dropped 1500 feet and Ed was a better colour already.
‘Where are we?’ he said, his speech slurred but recognisable.
Lower down, the ice of the gully was broken by small crevasses but none of them too wide. Three hours and we were down to 16,000ft at the bottom of the snow gully. From now on we would be carrying Ed on broken rock. Graeme Dingle made a one-man carrying harness from a coil of rope, and for a while one of us tottered down the slabs, supported on each side and behind. Then we tried walking Ed down with support. By mid-afternoon we were within a few hundred feet of base camp, with Ed clearly on the mend. We heard the sound of a chopper but it couldn’t find us in the mist, so we camped for the night.
Next morning Ed was so much better he could have walked down on his own, but soon soldiers with radios arrived to guide the helicopter to where we were. Ed and I piled aboard and dropped down to Major Bawa’s headquarters where a helicopterful of newspaper men was waiting. ‘I’m staying here,’ said Ed, but he was no longer in control of the situation and in two hours we were in a military hospital at Bareilly down on the plains of the Ganga in Uttar Pradesh. They took x-rays but found nothing. Ed was oppressed by claustrophobia. He just wanted to get back, and eventually we persuaded the reluctant doctors to release him from their hospital.
On 19 October the group was reunited in Badrinath. While Ed and I had been in Bareilly, the climbers and film team had returned to the high camp, climbed Akash Parbat and poured the water from Ganga Sagar on the summit. Ocean to Sky was complete.
When he finished the book of the expedition, Ed wrote as his concluding sentence, ‘It had been a unique experience for all of us – we would never be quite the same again …’ without explaining what would not be the same again. Like so many of Ed’s ideas, the concept of Ocean to Sky was at once brilliant and so simple that one wondered why it had not been done before. We had all known it would be a great trip, but the reality was beyond anything we had imagined: the extraordinary variety on the river, the brightness and radiance of the colours, the other-worldly intensity of the Hinduism informing every human contact, the adulation of the huge crowds lining the river banks, the dangers of the white water, the loneliness of the mountains. Perhaps Ed was thinking that never again would he conceive of or execute an adventure that could compare with Ocean to Sky.
– CHAPTER 30 –
Reconciliation
The trouble was the return to earth. Ocean to Sky was the last of the great adventures Ed had stored in his imagination and there was none to follow. There was the book of the expedition to be written but he lacked the urge to write with his usual vigour. Other expedition members contributed to it extensively. It was the nearest he ever came to using a ghost writer. The Ocean to Sky
film was completed successfully but it was the end of the line. There were no more adventure films.
The work in Nepal could go on forever but that world was still haunted by the ghosts of Louise and Belinda. ‘Oh Louise, my darling, my life and energy did indeed disappear with yours!’ had been a diary entry in 1976, but the same sentiment was there in 1978.1 There was no one Ed wanted to turn to for help. His sister June, usefully trained as a psychologist, was linked to Ed by strong family solidarity, and she shared with him a sense of adventure, but she lived in the UK, as did George Lowe. Rex was busy with his own family. The two people who were closer than anyone else were Peter and Sarah, but Ed was never able to share his troubles with them, even though they were locked in the same grief. Being the son and daughter of a famous father had been difficult enough even before the accident.
Peter and Sarah
Ed had raised his two children on a diet of adventure yet hoped they would acquire the sort of tertiary education he had walked away from. On leaving school at the end of his sixteenth year, Peter had enrolled at Auckland University for a BSc majoring in geology, influenced by Louise’s sister Shirley Anne, who was married to a geologist, and by Arnold Lillie, a good friend of Ed’s who was Professor of Geology at Auckland University. But as Ed would say on more than one occasion, Peter was ‘a chip off the old block’, and at the end of two years he followed his father’s example by abandoning university in favour of a factory job to earn money for a 750cc Kawasaki motorbike. In summer he began climbing in the Southern Alps and in winter joined the ski-racing circuit.