Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  To call it an expedition is too grand. It was a climbing party, a collection of friends from the Alps. In camp with Charlie Bruce, watching the sheep being butchered, was the Yorkshireman Geoffrey Hastings, strong, quietly determined, the trusty lieutenant type. He ran a worsted business in Bradford. In the Alps, he was famous for producing welcome delicacies from his rucksack, like bacon or champagne, at the most opportune moments. Having injured his foot a few days before, Hastings spent much of this expedition roaming bandit country trying to buy food. Last into camp were Norman Collie and Fred Mummery. Collie was tall and distinguished, a chemist at University College, London working with his boss, the future Nobel Prizewinner William Ramsay, to discover the noble gases. Some mountaineering contemporaries thought him austere, but students loved him, appreciating his quietly sarcastic wit and profitable racing tips. He had wide-ranging tastes, loved claret, was an expert on Japanese carving and could blow his own glass flasks without removing his pipe from his mouth. In Norway, where he did a great deal of exploratory mountaineering, the combination of pipe and deerstalker meant Collie was often mistaken for Sherlock Holmes.

  The mountaineering star of this group was undoubtedly Albert Frederick Mummery. Approaching his fortieth birthday, Mummery came from Dover where his father owned a tannery and served as mayor. Although his reputation has endured into the twenty-first century, we know little about his early life: family papers were lost in a German bombing raid. We do know he developed a perinatal weakness of the spine and was badly short-sighted. Classed as a sickly child, he was kept at home rather than sent away to school like most of his contemporaries. Bruce had been to Harrow, where he set a record for the number of times he was beaten, Collie to Charterhouse. Mummery never forged the connections they made, or left a paper trail. Generally indifferent to posterity, he was self-conscious about his appearance and hated having his picture taken. Yet Collie did get a snap of Mummery on Nanga Parbat, sitting next to Bruce. Bruce, nicknamed ‘Bruiser’, sits with legs splayed, arms resting on his knees, his neck, swollen with mumps, adding to the general impression of a bulldog in a pith helmet. (‘I think,’ he once wrote, ‘I have run away from every tribe on the Frontier at one time or another.’) Mummery, cunningly, wears two floppy hats, with snow sandwiched between them, a solution to the stifling heat of a Himalayan summer’s day. His thin limbs are gathered to his body like those of a wary spider, thick spectacles balanced on a beaky nose, his chin arrow-shaped, the overall impression that of an attenuated Mr Magoo.

  As a sixteen-year-old, on a family holiday to Switzerland, Mummery had seen the Matterhorn ‘shining in all the calm majesty of a September moon’ and instantly fallen in love. He served a patient apprenticeship, learned his craft and discovered how to cope with the limits of his physical ability. Eight years later, climbing with his guide and great friend Alexander Burgener, he made the first ascent of the Matterhorn’s Zmutt ridge, the first of many important new routes in the Alps that provoked admiration but also jealousy. His first application to the Alpine Club, supported by Douglas Freshfield, was blackballed anonymously at the sly instigation of a Foreign Office civil servant called William Edward Davidson. Mummery was plunged into a spiral of self-doubt and almost quit climbing alogether.

  In the 1880s, during this mountain furlough, he developed what was clearly an original intellectual life. His friends, highly regarded academics like Collie, thought Mummery an incisive thinker. He had, according to Martin Conway, ‘the same original, unfettered freshness of mind, with which he approached a mountain’. His great passion, beyond mountains, was economics. Many climbing historians have judged this aspect of Mummery’s life as an interesting aside. In fact, his ideas were more than merely interesting: they were influential. With John Atkinson Hobson, he co-authored a treatise on the negative impact of under-consumption, The Physiology of Industry, a work that influenced John Maynard Keynes. Mummery wasn’t Hobson’s sounding board; it was Mummery who convinced Hobson of the dangers of austerity. (There’s no evidence Mummery shared Hobson’s antisemitism.)

  Mummery’s fascination with unpicking complex human behaviour extended to mountaineering. When he returned to the mountains, he applied his curious mind to unravelling his sport’s multifaceted appeal. No one before Mummery, in his book My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, had articulated so shrewdly how the sport’s core principles might best be practised. While equipment and knowledge have developed exponentially since Mummery’s era, leading modern climbers still draw on these ideals. Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb Everest alone and without bottled oxygen, with his own deep relationship with Nanga Parbat, the place where his brother Günther died and where he did his hardest climb, once described Fred Mummery as perhaps the most important climber in history.

  Mummery’s key insight was the importance of self-reliance, ‘the great truth’ of alpinists ‘trusting exclusively to their own skill and knowledge’. He stopped climbing with guides and refused those aids that diminished the challenge. He upended the status quo, climbing difficult routes with women, to the annoyance of more conservative elements in the Alpine Club. ‘The essence of the sport,’ Mummery wrote, ‘lies not in ascending a peak, but in struggling with and overcoming difficulties.’ Theodolites bored him. Large-scale expeditions didn’t interest Mummery either; he turned down the offer of going to the Karakoram with Martin Conway. Climbing was supposed to be fun: ‘unmixed play’ is Mummery’s phrase. One of his friends wrote: ‘He was always happy on a mountain, and that is what made him such a delightful companion.’ It’s not surprising that a hard-bitten professional like Edward Whymper, for whom climbing was business, despised him. Davidson, Mummery’s Foreign Office nemesis, was equally dismissive, writing to Whymper:

  I don’t fancy either that Mummery can spare the time or the money requisite for success in such a difficult and distant field of exploration and therefore do not anticipate any results of importance from it.

  Mummery chose Nanga Parbat for its size and accessibility; he and his friends didn’t have the time or funds for a longer campaign. He wrote to Bruce, already an expert in Himalayan travel, to supply a couple of Gurkhas, strong lads to support the climbers in their efforts, ‘who can speak English and the native lingo’. Then, in his good-natured, spur-of-the-moment way, he invited Bruce along when they met in Kashmir. There were no learned institutions offering grants or commercial sponsorship. They were simply on holiday. The letters Mummery sent to his wife – ‘I think we are bound to have the summit,’ he told her, ‘as it is merely a matter of steady training to get our wind in order’ – are full of his breezy optimism, prompting the charge of naïvety from historians. Yet that was the point for Mummery: to find out things that weren’t known, and test limits so far not reached. There was no point being disheartened.

  The team, however, was undoubtedly depleted. Hastings was injured. Collie was ill. Bruce had recovered from his mumps, but his leave was over and he was obliged to return to his regiment. Undaunted, Mummery made a final attempt with one of Bruce’s Gurkhas, Raghubir Thapa, climbing a series of difficult pillars of rock in the middle of Nanga Parbat’s colossal Diamir face. They reached over 6,000 metres before Raghubir called a halt. When in 1939, an Austrian party that included one of the first people to climb the Eiger’s famous north face, Heinrich Harrer, tried the same route, they found a piece of firewood at the top of the first rock rib Mummery climbed. They described the climbing as continuously difficult; Mummery had not set an altitude record on Nanga Parbat but he and Raghubir had done the hardest climbing achieved in the Himalaya for decades to come.

  A few days later, while Collie and Hastings took the long way round with the bulk of the expedition’s equipment, Mummery set off to find a short cut to the Rakhiot valley, below Nanga Parbat’s northern flank, the only face of the mountain they hadn’t yet seen. With him went the two Gurkhas, Raghubir and Goman Singh. They never arrived and were never seen again, most likely buried in an avalanche. Mummery had reassured
Collie that he wouldn’t risk anything for the sake of a pass, but he had risked everything – and lost. These were the first climbing deaths in the Himalaya; it was grimly prophetic that two Asian men suborned into the enterprise should be among the casualties. Douglas Freshfield told the Alpine Club: Mummery’s ‘untimely death is a grievous loss to the Club’. Edward Whymper underlined these words in his copy of the Alpine Journal and wrote in the margin: ‘I do not agree.’ There were difficulties with the Indian authorities after the expedition and Geoffrey Hastings felt obliged to resign from the Alpine Club. Norman Collie never went to the Himalaya again. In 1929, an English army officer who crossed the Mazeno pass, as Mummery had done, met an old man from the nearby village of Chilas who remembered the impressive feats of the English ‘lat’, or lord, a distant echo of an enterprise years ahead of its time. Whatever Whymper thought, it would be Mummery’s legacy, and not his, that inspired the future.

  *

  It’s widely held that the Nanga Parbat catastrophe turned mountaineers against the lightweight style of Himalayan expedition, certainly until the 1930s. That simply isn’t true. Lightweight ventures continued without pause alongside larger, more expensive ‘national’ expeditions, with as much if not greater success. Of these less formal ventures, historians have been drawn, moth-like, to the more garish flames that lit up Himalayan expeditions after Mummery’s, like that of Aleister Crowley, the self-styled ‘wickedest man in the world’ and a good friend of Oscar Eckenstein. They climbed together in the Alps, and Crowley was even proposed as a member of the Alpine Club, nominated by Norman Collie, who liked a joke, and Sir Martin Conway, whose support is simply baffling. His application disappeared before a vote was held, and in later years Crowley roundly mocked the Alpine Club, complacent and conservative in comparison to a man like Eckenstein. He and Crowley put together an attempt on K2 in 1902, which included the talented Austrian Heinrich Pfannl. Although some useful exploration was done, and the mountain attempted, the expedition was ill fated. Eckenstein was briefly arrested as a spy, possibly at the instigation of Conway, while Crowley brandished his pistol at another expedition member, forcing him to quit. A second expedition, to Kangchenjunga in 1905, destroyed Crowley’s reputation as a mountaineer. There was an argument at 6,400 metres over whether to camp or retreat late in the day. Among those who foolishly chose the latter option, three local men died in an avalanche. Crowley, meanwhile, remained in his tent sipping tea, technically correct in his judgment, but callously indifferent to the fate of his companions. In 1923, when Raoul Loveday, an Oxford friend of Raymond Greene’s, died at Crowley’s occult ‘anti-monastery’ on Sicily, Greene went there to track Crowley down for an explanation, finding a corpulent, peevish man; he thought him rather silly. Greene expected exciting stories of drugs and sex; all Crowley wanted to discuss was rock climbing.

  The contrast between Crowley and Eckenstein’s expedition and that of Prince Luigi Amedeo di Savoia-Aosta, Duke of the Abruzzi, could not have been greater. Abruzzi, grandson of the first king of Italy, had immense wealth and had used it in lavishly funded expeditions to Mount St Elias, on the border of Alaska and the Yukon, the Arctic and the Ruwenzori. The hallmark of these expeditions was their scale, and Abruzzi’s attempt on K2 in 1909 was no exception; it began an enduring fascination with K2 in Italy that reached its climax with the first ascent in 1954. Abruzzi brought with him seven Italian guides and porters, the guides all having Himalayan experience, six tonnes of equipment requiring five hundred local porters, all of which allowed his team to spend months in the field. ‘What Whymper and Conway had shaped,’ wrote the mountaineering historian Walt Unsworth, ‘the Duke brought to perfection.’ Abruzzi’s team made a spirited effort on what would become the route of first ascent, the south-east ridge, known more commonly as the Abruzzi spur, reaching 6,710 metres; his deep pockets meant the expedition was beautifully recorded. Doctor and researcher Filippo de Filippi, who worked in London during the Great War, wrote the official account, moving hurriedly past Eckenstein’s earlier attempt, but catching the almost incomprehensible scale of the Karakoram, ‘so vast that one cannot get an impression of the whole at any one moment; the eye can take in only single portions.’ Luckily for Abruzzi, he had with him an exceptional eye, that of Vittorio Sella, who had been round Kangchenjunga with Douglas Freshfield as well as travelling with Abruzzi on his other expeditions. Sella remains one of the very best mountain photographers in history, capturing images that recorded the architectural structure of the mountains but also something ineffable, something of their spiritual power. His photographs would inform and inspire generations of mountaineers to come. Nor was Sella the only Italian photographing the Himalaya; the Piedmontese climber Mario Piacenza made the first ascent of the Kashmiri 7,000-metre peak Kun in 1913, in the same year touring Sikkim with his camera. But Sella was the master.

  While Abruzzi was on K2 with his expensive pantechnicon, a very different kind of venture was unfolding eighty kilometres to the south-east. Three English mountain explorers crossed the Saltoro Pass for the first time and looked down on what would become known as the Siachen glacier, Siachen meaning ‘abundance of roses’, for which the Saltoro region is famous. Given the continuing and bloody high-altitude conflict between India and Pakistan for this glacier, it’s a melancholy name, but likely the invention of one of those Englishmen, Tom Longstaff, whose piratical red beard became a common sight in the Himalaya in the years before the Great War. Longstaff was the son of Llewellyn Longstaff, a wealthy businessman who paid for the Discovery, the boat Robert Falcon Scott and his crew sailed to Antarctica. Free of the need to work and inspired by William Graham, Longstaff dedicated himself to mountain exploration, explaining that his medical degree was simply a way to make himself more useful on expeditions. A dedicated botanist, he taught himself a working knowledge of the languages he would need and often travelled only in the company of locals.

  Longstaff’s approach was the antithesis of Abruzzi’s. His first expedition to the Himalaya lasted six months, to start with exploring and climbing in Garhwal, attempting Nanda Devi East and Nanda Kot with the brothers Alexis and Henri Brocherel, mountain guides from Courmayeur, on the Italian side of Mont Blanc. Then he took advantage of an invitation from Charles Sherring, deputy commissioner at Almora, to join him on a journey through Tibet, near the north-west corner of Nepal, including a daring attempt on Gurla Mandhata, the mountain that towers above the southern shore of the lake Manasarovar.

  We were like Cortez, [he wrote,] seeing the Pacific for the first time; for no other eyes had seen these peaks from such a height spread as a continuous range.

  He and the Brocherels reached 7,300 metres before turning back. All this he accomplished on a budget of less than a hundred pounds. Longstaff would be the inspiration for the famous names of lightweight mountaineering from the 1930s: Eric Shipton and H W Tilman chief among them.

  Longstaff’s great year in the Himalaya was 1907, the fiftieth anniversary of the Alpine Club’s formation. He had hoped to join a reconnaissance of Everest, with Charles Bruce and the publisher Arnold Mumm, enjoying, like Younghusband, the patronage of Lord Curzon. Alas, the secretary of state for India Lord Morley disapproved of Curzon in general and Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet in particular, and vetoed the enterprise. Instead, the three men hired the two Brocherel brothers, Alexis and Henri, and travelled to Garhwal, where they failed, as Graham had done, to find a way through the Rishiganga gorge to Nanda Devi. With the Gurkha Karbir Budhathoki, Longstaff and the Brocherels did, however, climb Trisul, which was, for a few years at least, the highest mountain yet climbed, at 7,120 metres. On the day he reached the summit, Longstaff had managed to climb 1,800 metres from his top camp, a prodigious act of stamina.

  In Sikkim that same year, two twenty-year-old Norwegian students, Carl Wilhelm Rubenson and Ingvald Monrad-Aas, came close to reaching the summit of Kabru, just as Graham claimed to have done in 1883. Rubenson had some climbing experience, his partner Monrad-Aas none
whatsoever. The energy of youth was enough, but strong autumn winds turned them back short of the top. When they outlined their experiences to the Alpine Club in London, they expressed their admiration for their Sherpa ‘coolies’, using the term of the era, who had supported them so well. Taking careful note was a thin man, ‘stooping and narrow chested’, according to the Everest climber George Mallory, his appearance ‘made grotesque by veritable gig-lamps of spectacles and a long pointed moustache’. His name was Alexander Kellas, and he contributed more than anyone before the Great War to our understanding of human physiology at altitude.

  That Kellas remains unsung is not surprising. Like Mummery, he wasn’t overly concerned about posterity, not for himself anyway. Unlike Mummery, he was shy, essentially a loner, and published little on his own account. He could write that ‘mountaineering, in its widest adaptation, is the most philosophical sport in the world’, and leave almost no trace of his own. He was born in Aberdeen in 1868; there are clues in his childhood to some underlying psychological illness that would trouble him most in his last years with auditory, paranoiac hallucinations. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he lived alone. He trained as a chemist and worked in the same laboratory as Norman Collie, but he was never a leading climber as Collie was, let alone Mummery. He was considered reliable rather than inspired at work and, feeling thwarted, took a job lecturing medical students at Middlesex Hospital. His mountain experience accreted slowly and then suddenly burst into flame when he travelled to Sikkim in 1907, the same year as Rubenson and Monrad-Aas. He took with him two Swiss guides, but on subsequent expeditions, and there were several, he took Sherpas instead, the Tibetan ethnic group who had arrived as migrants in the high mountains of eastern Nepal, including the Everest region of Khumbu, centuries earlier. Often climbing without a European partner, Kellas developed a deep affection for his Sherpa friends, equipped them well and became fascinated not only by their physiology but their culture too. If Kellas was not the first to admire the Sherpas, he became their most influential advocate. The biologist J B S Haldane knew Kellas, who was a friend of his father, J S Haldane, like Kellas another great self-experimenter. Haldane junior told a high-altitude symposium in Darjeeling in 1962: