Conquistadors of the Useless

by Roberts, David, Terray, Lionel, Sutton, Geoffrey

  The technique of carrying has been perfected in Nepal beyond anything known in Europe. From the moment they can stand children are taught to support loads by means of a strap passed across the forehead, from which is suspended a carrying basket. This apparently rudimentary method is very difficult to acquire unless one has been brought up to it, and I have never heard of any traveller mastering it fully. In order to support the weight without tiring the neck muscles, the force has to be kept exactly in line with the vertebral column, and only a lifelong familiarity enables this to be done over uneven ground. I have personally tried very hard to master the art, but my troubles were so obvious that the porters, with typical humour, nicknamed me ‘the French Sherpa’, a title always accompanied with roars of ironic laughter. In the end I adopted a compromise method utilising both shoulder straps and a head band.

  Thanks to these head bands, then, the Nepalese carry unbelievable weights over great distances. By the age of eight or nine they can already transport more than their own weight for several kilometres. The strongest and fittest men are capable of unheard-of performances.

  Fifteen years ago I worked as a porter on the construction of the Envers des Aiguilles cabin in the Mont Blanc range. Twice each day we would do a journey that takes a lightly-laden man just under two hours, so that our total labour added up to the equivalent of over seven hours going in normal conditions, half of which was with very heavy loads that slowed us down considerably. Naturally, the days were hard and long. In such conditions I rarely managed to carry more than 120 pounds., and often a good deal less. All my mates were sturdy lads who had made a speciality of portering for the sake of the high wages, yet few could cope with more than 130 pounds. Only a gigantic Italian, six foot four and weighing over 220 pounds himself, would manage 145 pounds, and even 155 pounds on exceptional occasions. Yet in Nepal this phenomenal athlete, using the inefficient method of shoulder-straps, would be made to look ridiculous by men a good sixty or seventy pounds lighter.

  For the approach march to Annapurna a team of professional porters offered us its services. Some of them were quite big men, and all looked supremely fit. Their legs were particularly impressive, with tanned thighs as muscular as cart horses’ emerging from the whiteness of their loincloths. There was not an ounce of fat on them anywhere, however, and the heaviest of them cannot have weighed more than 175 pounds. They sized up our loads, the average weight of which was 80 or 90 pounds, with an air of some disdain, then announced that they were not interested in the job. I was rather surprised at hearing this, and asked if the charges were too heavy. With a roar of laughter they replied that, on the contrary, they were so light that the wages would not be worth their while. Somewhat nettled, I declared that there could be no question of splitting up the loads and that we were not prepared to pay extra wages. To this I received the astonishing response that it would be a bit on the heavy side, but if we were willing to pay double the money they would carry double the load. They were as good as their word: transporting 170 pounds twelve or fifteen miles a day and laughing and talking as they went, they were never the last into camp.

  Later, in exceptional circumstances, I was even to see Tibetan and Nepalese porters carrying 200 pounds over steep grass and scree at an altitude of twenty thousand feet, taking spells with the charge between two or three of them. And these were not even professionals but local peasants, many of them rather skinny-looking and weighing no more than 130 pounds.

  In 1950 Nepal had only just begun to open its gates to western influence, and the total number of European visitors had not exceeded a hundred, most of whom had gone no farther than the capital. To get there they had either had to ride on horseback or in a litter, or walk, there being no vehicular road linking it to India. Oddly enough, they found a few cars there before them. Had they been parachuted in, or transported in small parts? Nothing of the sort: they had been carried over the mountain trails complete, lashed to joists supported on the backs of hundreds of men, like the stones of the Pyramids. To anyone who knows the narrow staircases which pass for tracks over the Siwaliks and Mahabharats the idea of carrying a Rolls along them is almost inconceivable. Such examples help one to realise the amazing pitch of efficiency to which the Nepalese have raised the technique of human portaging, and, by the same token, how Nepal in 1950 was still living in another age.

  Although, as I remarked earlier, the various peoples of Nepal are linked by a common culture and tradition, those who live along the frontiers of Tibet are an exception. By race, by religion and by culture they resemble the Tibetans far more closely than their compatriots, and despite the high ranges which fence them from each other they keep in close contact with their relations whenever the season permits. Dialects, clothes and manners are closely similar on either side of the border, and the form of religion, Lamaic or Tantric Buddhism, is identical.

  The doctrines of the Buddha, in a sense more philosophical than religious, lost a good deal of their original definition in the process of being adopted by these primitive mountaineers, who mixed them up together with ancient beliefs of their own. Lamaism today is for the majority of believers a perfected form of paganism in which magic practices play an important role. The well-known prayer-wheel is a mild form of it, but these are not in any case thought of as having the same type of significance as Christian prayers. Religious mottos engraved on walls or written on the inside of rolls of paper are not always intended to have any precise effect, and their symbolic meaning has often been lost, but their frequent movement in space is supposed to have a generally beneficent influence. This comes less from the meaning of the words than from the magic power of the movement.

  Both in character and physique the Tibetans of Nepal differ considerably from the other inhabitants of the country. They vary a good deal in size, but as a rule they are small and quite frail-looking. Their rather unathletic appearance makes their stamina and load-carrying abilities all the more astonishing. Living as they do at high altitude in an environment hostile to man, they only survive thanks to an extreme frugality. Apart from a few rare exceptions they never wash at all. Yet in spite of all their difficulties they are the jolliest people you could hope to meet, and any excuse will do for a drink and a dance. Intelligent, lively and full of initiative, there is a certain abandon about their attitude to life which is in contrast to the slightly heavy reserve and tidiness of their compatriots among the foothills.

  The most numerous and interesting of these frontier tribes is undoubtedly the Sherpas, whose name is practically synonymous with Himalayan exploration. Literature, the Press and the cinema have combined to make them famous, but few seem to have any real idea of what they are.

  The Sherpas come from the Sola Khumbu valley, which drains the south-western flank of the Everest range. A few of them also live in the upper reaches of neighbouring valleys. They are divided into two slightly differing castes, one living in the upper part of Sola Khumbu between eleven and fourteen thousand feet, the other, far more numerous, in its lower reaches. It is difficult to estimate their number even approximately, but it may be something between three and six thousand.

  One thing is certain: there are too many of them to live off their few laboriously-cultivated plots and their small herds of yaks. Quite a few live off the caravan trade over the twenty-thousand-foot Nangpa La, which leads from Sola Khumbu into Tibet. They are quite gifted commercially, and some of them become well-off merchants, but for the most part they turn into yak-drivers or simple porters. Their profession takes them far afield into India and Tibet (the closing of the Tibetan frontier by the Chinese has badly upset their economy) and it would seem that this roving life has given the Sherpas their vivacity, adaptability and taste for adventure. Despite the important openings which the trade between India and Tibet has given them there is not enough to go round in their native valley, and a large proportion of them are forced to emigrate.

  Towards the end of the last century the British
built the little town of Darjeeling on a rather unusual site, a high hill dominating the plains of Bengal, close to the borders of Nepal and Sikkim. Situated at over eight thousand feet, it was designed to enable the families of British administrators to escape the furnace of the months preceding the monsoon in the fresh air of the mountains. For reasons hard to understand this region was relatively little inhabited, despite the overcrowding a few miles away in Nepal. The building of the town, and subsequently the clearing and working of vast tea plantations, provided an important source of employment in the area. Most of the labourers came from Nepal. Many of these were hard-working, disciplined Raïs and Thamans, but among them also were long-haired, turbulent little men all in rags, looking rather like the Bhotias of Tibet: these were the Sherpas. They had walked for three weeks to find this new land of promise.

  At first, no doubt, the British did not make much distinction between them and their various cousins, but before long events were to display their special character. Even before the First World War English climbers had thought of attempting Mount Everest, but the time was not ripe. The idea continued to simmer during the war years, and in 1921 a reconnaissance party was organised. Permission was obtained from Tibet to cross its territory, and the expedition set out from Darjeeling, turning Nepal by the south-east, to explore the north side of the mountain.

  Altogether six expeditions followed the same route between the two wars. Almost all of them got very high despite their archaic equipment, and some even exceeded 28,000 feet. They were astonishingly large-scale by modern standards, running in certain cases to nearly a thousand porters. Naturally a fair proportion of these were recruited at Darjeeling from among the Tibetan immigrant labourers and it was not long before the Sherpas came to the fore as high-altitude porters. Now there is no great difference between the various Himalayan races as regards their load-carrying powers or their resistance to the physical effects of high altitude, and it follows that the superiority of the Sherpas was really a moral one. They showed no fear of angering the gods of the high summits, like their Bhotia and Bouthanais cousins, but went enthusiastically with their European employers wherever they led. Their courage soon became legendary, and the British called them the ‘tigers’.[7] They proved honest, straightforward and full of initiative, with an excellent sense of humour (not too easily found among Indians or other Nepalese); and rarer still, they had a real code of honour and devotion to duty. Whatever the dangers, they followed their sahibs to the end.

  Himalayan history is full of examples of the heroic faithfulness of the Sherpas. Perhaps the most remarkable of all occurred during the 1934 Nanga Parbat expedition. Several German and Austrian climbers died of hunger, cold and exhaustion in the high camps. Their better-adapted Sherpas could no doubt have saved themselves by descending through the storm, but they stayed to look after their masters. Only when the last European succumbed did they try to escape from the trap, and only one succeeded. Notes found later on the remains of Welzenbach revealed the self-sacrifice of the others.

  Contact with civilisation has nowadays corrupted a few of the Sherpas, but the vast majority retain their ancestral virtues. The days I have spent in the company of these narrow-eyed little men with their huge grins have been among the happiest of my life. We have fought together for goals more symbolic than real, and it may be that the point of it all partly escaped them, but this in no way affected their enthusiasm and willingness. We faced the cold and storm, yet even when fear turned their tanned faces grey they remained capable of courage and altruism. Burdens were accepted and dirty jobs carried out with speed and good humour. Together, too, we trekked the pleasant pathways of Nepal in sympathy with nature. Many and many a time my Sherpa has turned to me with shining eyes, as we came over a crest upon some new harmony of earth and sky, with a cry of: ‘Look, sahib, very nice!’ Around camp fires we have yarned for hours about our respective worlds, and in the coppery light cast by a giant brazier we have danced and sung our native songs under the stars. For me as for many others the contact with the Sherpa porters is one of the main charms of a Himalayan expedition. They have their faults, certainly, among them carelessness and lack of attention to detail, but their good-heartedness, gaiety, tact and sense of poetry give a renewed flavour to life, and after a spell in their company dreams of a better world have always seemed to me suddenly less foolish.

  The conquest of the Himalayas had already begun in a small way before 1914, and with the first Everest expeditions it became a major undertaking. All the developed nations wanted to take part in the enterprise, and every year men came from all over the globe to join the assault on the abode of the gods. The British were the most active. Apart from strenuous efforts to climb Everest, they attempted and climbed numerous lower peaks while the Germans and Austrians, politically barred from attacking the highest mountain in the world, tried hard to be the first up an eight-thousander. Their assaults on Kangchenjunga and Nanga Parbat are among the bloodiest and most heroic stories in the epic of Himalayan mountaineering. The Americans, Italians, French and Japanese also played their part. Altogether, more than a hundred full-scale expeditions visited the Himalayas between the two wars.

  All these parties required native porters to carry their impedimenta to the foot of the mountain, and also to establish camps on it. Nearly all the Himalayan races proved excellent carriers up to the point where the actual climbing began, but as soon as real hardship and danger came into the picture the superiority of the Sherpas was overwhelming. Before long their employment became automatic, and up to 1939 all the major expeditions had recourse to their help. At least a hundred of them, based on Darjeeling, became professionals, and some thus acquired sufficient experience and technique to be able to lead roped parties almost like a guide. In years when the demand for porters exceeded the supply at Darjeeling runners would set off, covering the two hundred and fifty miles of switchback trails to Sola Khumba in ten days, and returning at once with reinforcements of brothers and cousins.

  The Himalayan Club, founded by British people living in India, presently drew up regulations for high-altitude portering. It fixed the fees, formulated the contracts and made lists of names. Each Sherpa received a number and a testimonial book, and at the end of every expedition the leader entered it up with details of the mountains climbed or attempted and the man’s conduct. Once the British left India the club lost much of its authority, but after the ascent of Everest in 1953 the Sherpa Tenzing, a most intelligent man, had sufficient influence to set up the ‘Sherpa Climber Association’ along the lines of the various Alpine companies of guides. In spite of initial scepticism in some quarters, this has turned out a reasonably efficient organisation.

  For some time now this scheme of things has been a good deal upset because some expedition leaders believe that Sherpas arriving direct from Sola Khumba are physically and morally superior to those recruited in Darjeeling. They assert that in learning to wash and cook and speak English, the city Sherpas have exchanged many of their ancestral virtues for European and Indian vices. Personally I find all this exaggerated. I have had occasion to employ both kinds without noting much difference. In my opinion Sherpas living in Darjeeling do not lose their qualities, even after a number of years, provided they were born and bred in Sola Khumbu. By contrast, however, those actually born at Darjeeling do not seem any better than the rest of the hill people, and have often acquired the vices of civilisation.

  However that may be, there has recently been a growing tendency to engage Sherpas direct from Sola Khumbu, and despite a considerable demand for porters those living at Darjeeling have begun to find it difficult to get work. Some of them have even found it paid them to return to their native valley. Lately the situation has been further complicated by the Nepalese government, who, in an effort to profit from the touristic side of mountaineering, have tried to prohibit expeditions from recruiting any Sherpas not affiliated to an organisation it has set up in Kathmandu. Pakistan has for
bidden the importation of Sherpa porters ever since independence, and Nepal is now by a long way their main field of action. From now on it seems clear that the best porters will have to leave Darjeeling and live in Nepalese territory.

  But when I stood on the crest of the Siwaliks, that 7th April, 1950, with the splendour of Nepal spread out before me, I knew nothing of all this. There was only the desire to learn every secret of this unknown land, and as we marched along day by day I tried to fulfil it. Maurice Herzog has already told the story of our approach march in his incisive, brilliant style, and anyone wishing to know all about it should read his book Annapurna. Personally I found nothing particularly exciting about these sixteen days. The route had only been followed once before by Westerners, a group of American ornithologists, but to recount all its details would be to copy Herzog with less talent. Only one thing still needs to be remembered: we were late in the field, and any waste of time would abbreviate still further the already short period available for our assault before the onset of the monsoon.

  This absolute necessity not to lose any time lent a certain feverishness to our progress, and when our coolies came out on strike we went through agonies. Most of my companions, after the initial strangeness had worn off, became bored with the short but physically tiring days’ marches in the tremendous heat. They had come to climb one of the highest mountains in the world and they could not wait to get to grips with it: these two weeks in its waiting room were a slow torture. I was as keen as the rest of them, but perhaps more attuned to nature. Every step of our slow advance brought some new discovery to be engraved in memory by surprise and delight.