Himalaya
Page 50
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A few weeks after Günter Dyhrenfurth received his award for alpinism at the Berlin Olympics, Tom Longstaff was on Shetland when a laconic telegram reached him: ‘two reached the top August 29’. The veteran mountaineer, whose career stretched back almost to the beginning of Himalayan climbing, was now in his early sixties, his famous red beard fading to grey, but he was as interested and enthusiastic as ever, and knew exactly what the message meant. Nanda Devi had been climbed. No mountain meant more to him: it had been his ambition ‘years before I set foot in the Himalaya’. Even after a lifetime’s mountain travel, and an expedition to Everest in 1922, he still believed Garhwal, where Nanda Devi was located, to be ‘the most beautiful country of all High Asia’, a ‘sum of delight unsurpassed elsewhere’. The prospect of Nanda Devi being climbed filled him with dread, ‘a sacrilege too horrible to contemplate’. Yet somehow the terseness of the telegram reassured him. No names were mentioned, no conquering heroes identified: ‘here was humility not pride’.
In some ways, Longstaff was typical of his era and class, an Eton and Christ Church man. On his way to Everest in 1922, for example, he was delighted at Gandhi’s arrest for sedition, ‘which was greeted joyfully by everybody’. Yet when it came to alpinism, he was as thoughtfully progressive as anyone. The juggernaut of the Everest expedition was far less appealing than a small group of friends moving as lightly among the mountains as possible. It was almost an article of faith. In 1905 he had climbed from the Johar valley east of Nanda Devi to reach a ridgeline, from where he could look down into a stupendous hidden valley, a sanctuary as enticing as it was difficult to reach. Longstaff returned in 1907 for another try. He climbed the neighbouring peak of Trisul, believed to be the highest summit reached for the next twenty-one years, but Nanda Devi’s sanctuary remained untouched. There were more attempts in the 1920s but only in 1934 did a party manage to scramble through the difficult Rishi gorge and reach the foot of the peak: two English climbers, Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, and three porters, ‘blokes’ as Tilman liked to call them: Ang Tharkay, Pasang Bhotia and a cousin of Ang Tharkay’s, Kusang.
Shipton and Tilman: their names as readily connected for a mountaineer as Lennon and McCartney, shorthand for a method of adventure that was lightweight but ambitious, a paradoxical combination of the expansive and the understated. Nanda Devi was Shipton’s idea. In 1933 he had been on Everest, the first expedition following the thaw in relations with Tibet. Its leader was a self-effacing former Indian civil servant called Hugh Ruttledge who while stationed in Almora had mounted two expeditions of his own to Nanda Devi. Inspired by Ruttledge, Shipton looked around in vain for a companion to go with him. He had resigned himself to travelling as the only European with Ang Tharkay and the others when a letter turned up from an old climbing acquaintance from his years as a coffee planter in Kenya. Bill Tilman was ten years his senior and had recently returned home after crossing Africa from east to west on a bicycle. He was proposing a fortnight in the Lake District. Shipton’s counter-proposal was an expedition of seven months in Garhwal. A photograph of the pair embarking at Liverpool shows them smartly dressed in the 1930s fashion: wide ties, high collars and fat lapels. Shipton, the taller man, has an overcoat on, his wavy hair at odds with his sharp cheekbones. Tilman has a crisp, military moustache, his hair oiled and scraped flat, his dimpled cheeks offering a glimpse of the humour beneath the terse manner he presented to the world. He had fought in the Great War, turning eighteen during the Battle of the Somme. Unlike the generation of climbers before him, the war had been his formative experience: a burden he carried with him in near silence for the rest of his life.
Shipton was far more affable but in his way even more enigmatic. His father was a Ceylon tea planter who died when Eric was three. To escape her grief, his emotionally distant mother travelled before settling in the cool relief of Kerala’s Nilgiri hills, a way of life that appealed hugely to an adventurous boy. That freedom ended when his mother remarried and returned to London and a flat in Kensington Gardens. Eric was sent to an uncongenial preparatory school where his slowness to read alienated him further. Although he portrayed himself as dreamy and rather lonely, Shipton had a talent for friendship and unlike Tilman, who is often marked down as a misogynist, he charmed women his whole life. Beatrice Weir, daughter of the political officer who replaced Eric Bailey and negotiated the 1933 Everest permit, met Shipton in 1938 at a garden party in Kashmir when she was seventeen. ‘He had blazing blue eyes everyone used to talk about; he just sat and looked. It was indefinable. I melted like an ice cube.’ They took walks together in the Shalimar Gardens but her mother knew better and squashed the liaison. ‘This man’s a dreamer and just lives on a glacier.’
Shipton had certainly found a way of life that set little store by position or career, a philosophy that would cost him the leadership of the Everest expedition that made history in 1953. Around the time of his first expedition to Everest in 1933, he realised there was no reason to curtail the things that made him happy: freedom, mountains, exploration. ‘Why not spend the rest of my life doing this sort of thing?’ The obvious answer was money, but while hardly cheap, Himalayan travel, especially the Spartan version Shipton and Tilman practised, was becoming more affordable. Their seven-month expedition in 1934 cost less than £300, including the voyage from England: perhaps £9,000 each in today’s terms. The future war hero Freddy Spencer Chapman and his five-man team of two Europeans and three Sherpas managed to climb the gorgeous peak of Jomolhari for £39 5s: little more than £2,600 now. (This was the peak Sir William Jones had spotted from the plains in 1784; it’s rarely been climbed since Chapman’s day.) Most frugal of all was the Austrian Herbert Tichy, later a reluctant Nazi propagandist, who in 1935 rode a Puch motorcycle to India. Disguised as a pilgrim, he crossed the Lipu Lekh, just beyond Nepal’s western border into Tibet where he made a circumambulation of holy Kailas before attempting the first ascent of Gurla Mandhata. As Shipton wrote during the war, so far as wealth was concerned,
There are few treasures of more lasting worth than the experience of a way of life that is in itself wholly satisfying. Such, after all, are the only possessions of which no fate, no cosmic catastrophe can deprive us; nothing can alter the fact if for one moment in eternity we have really lived.
Tilman felt roughly the same but was cured with irony, like an old leather boot, and would never articulate such ideas out loud: he was better on weather than emotion, his eye most usually on the horizon. Human judgments in his writing were rare and often came from the most oblique angle. He praised Shipton for being ‘one of the first to doubt that in mountaineering the great and the good are necessarily the same,’ by ‘great’ meaning famous. Both men viewed self-promotion by climbers with distaste. Anything that diluted the richness of immediate experience – publicity or reputation – was ditched from their rucksacks. Anything extraneous was cast aside: ‘bagging and scrapping’ Tilman called it. Both preferred lentils and flatbread to hampers from Fortnum’s. Even their friendship was carefully rationed. Tilman was, Shipton once said, ‘astringent company’.
Solving the problem of the Rishi gorge and gaining access to Nanda Devi’s inner sanctum, which he and Tilman achieved in the summer of 1934, was among the sweetest moments of Eric Shipton’s life. The appeal of a secret or hidden valley like the Rishi gorge is a common trope: for Tibetans, beyul, as they were known, had been part of how they conceptualised their sacred landscapes for centuries. Shipton found in them a kind of psychological relief.
My most blissful dream as a child was to be in some such valley, free to wander where I liked, and discover for myself some hitherto unrevealed glory of Nature. Now the reality was no less wonderful than that half-forgotten dream; and of how many childish fancies can that be said, in this age of disillusionment?
With access to the valley impossible for local herdsmen, Shipton had stumbled into a lost world of botanical riches:
the giant cliffs of Nanda Devi rose sheer and forb
idding in true Himalayan style; but, bounding the glacier on the right-hand side, beyond a well-defined lateral moraine, an expanse of undulating grassland stretched for miles, in lovely contrast . . . Now this pasturage is a sanctuary where thousands of wild animals live unmolested. Long may it remain so!
It did not remain so for very long at all. In the aftermath of China’s border war with India in 1962, Indian and American climbers, with Sherpa support and backing from the CIA, secretly attempted to place an atomic-powered sensing device near the summit of Nanda Devi but had to abandon it in bad weather. The device subsequently disappeared in an avalanche, much to the embarrassment of both governments when the story, if not the radioactive material, leaked out in the mid 1970s. Climbers and trekkers had a more obvious impact, leaving behind so much trash that in 1982 the Indian government banned access altogether. The impacts of climate change can now be added to that list.
Perhaps such degradation was what Tilman had in mind when he reached the summit of Nanda Devi – not with Shipton but with the geologist Noel Odell – in the summer of 1936. It was late in the day and afternoon cloud hid many of the surrounding peaks, but to the north the brown, sunlit Tibetan plateau stretched far into the distance.
After the first joy in victory, [he wrote,] came a feeling of sadness that the mountain had succumbed, that the proud head of the goddess was bowed.
This was as close as Tilman came to opening a door to his emotional world. Behind it you can make out a world-weariness born in the shadow of war. The expedition itself had been a great success, an energising mix of enthusiastic young Americans and veteran British climbers, brought together almost by chance. Charlie Houston, then a young Harvard medical student, would have stood on the summit instead of Tilman had he not eaten some spoiled tinned meat at their top camp.
The Brits didn’t know what to make of us Yanks, [Houston recalled,] and had some difficulty understanding our form of the language we were supposed to share.
Yet despite their differences, their climbing philosophy was similar, a far more potent connection in the mountains than a shared passport. Nanda Devi, the thirtieth highest peak in the Himalaya, was the highest summit to be reached before the Second World War.
Shipton kicked himself for not being there with Tilman instead of wasting time ‘on that ridiculous Everest business’: that same summer, there had been a fourth attempt to reach the summit. But despite any private envy, Shipton publicly acknowledged the achievement as ‘the first of the really difficult Himalayan giants to be conquered’. This latest Everest expedition had been another colossal enterprise costing half a million pounds in today’s terms, lavishly equipped and expertly planned. Yet it didn’t come close to matching progress made on the previous three tries. Bad weather and frequent heavy snowfalls shut the climbers down before the expedition could properly begin. In late May Shipton and Frank Smythe had shepherded forty-one porters, an almost grotesque number, to the north col when, in Smythe’s words, ‘the heaviest snowstorm I’ve ever experienced in the Himalayas’ began.
Two feet came down. The camp was half-buried. There was nothing to do but lie up for two whole days in our sleeping bags with the Primus stove between us cooking hot drinks to keep warm.
The team had the latest radio equipment and Smythe was able to talk to base camp and seek advice. He decided to descend despite the avalanche risk. ‘It was a big responsibility – 41 men’s lives – and one I hope I never have to face again.’
The miseries of base camp, pitched in the stony wasteland above the Rongbuk monastery, preyed on Smythe. ‘So intensely dry is the air that we all suffer from congested throats. Otherwise I’m O.K. and can smoke a pipe all day long.’ His nose, blasted by the sun of high altitude was ‘blotchy red, cracked, raw and covered with congealed blood’. What kept him going were dreams of the English countryside and his newly built Surrey home.
I can picture that very well – the fruit trees out in bloom and Tenningshook wood in vivid green, with a carpet of bluebells drifting beneath the trees. What a contrast to this utter desolation. There is nothing so beautiful as an English countryside.
There was something of the little Englander about Smythe: bristling at the German Hettie Dyhrenfurth dancing with an Indian man or talking loftily of Himalayan cultures he marched past but barely understood. Much of this was insecurity. Raymond Greene had known Smythe at Berkhamsted School where Greene’s father was headmaster and Tilman had been a pupil ten years earlier. Berkhamsted was where Smythe started climbing, ‘a rather frail fair-headed boy who was said to have a weak heart and was not allowed to play football because of a murmur in the chest’. When they went to Everest together in 1933, Greene, by then a doctor, could still hear it through his stethoscope. Smythe may have looked frail but was arguably the best alpinist Britain had between the wars. ‘At great altitudes a new force seemed to enter Frank,’ Greene wrote in his memoirs.
His mind, too, took on a different colour. At sea-level the mistaken sense of inferiority so unfairly implanted by his early experiences rendered him sometimes irritable, a little tactless and rather easily offended.
And despite his Everest dreams of English gardens, Smythe never could quite relax at home. He felt trapped by domesticity and was a remote father.
Smythe found a different sort of sanctuary in the upper Bhyundar valley of Garhwal, a place so botanically rich he called it the Valley of Flowers, a name the Indian authorities used when they designated the area a national park. Smythe had discovered its riches with Eric Shipton while climbing Kamet in 1931, a peak not far from Nanda Devi and one of the landmark ascents of Himalayan mountaineering. Frustrated at the dismal failure on Everest in 1936, Smythe chose to spend the following summer in what he called his Shangri-La, alone with a small crew of Sherpas.
For the first time in my life I was able to think [he wrote]. I do not mean to think objectively or analytically, but rather to surrender thought to my surroundings. This is a power of which we know little in the West but which is a basic of abstract thought in the East. It is allowing the mind to receive rather than to seek impressions, and it is gained by expurgating extraneous thought. . . . When this happens the human mind escapes from the bondage of its own feeble imaginings and becomes as one with its Creator.
Smythe was a prolific writer, although as Raymond Greene observed he ‘was always trying to be “literary” and somehow never brought it off because he was trying too hard’. (The old Everester Edward Strutt, by then a vituperative editor of the Alpine Journal and member of the Mount Everest Committee, called it ‘psychological bilge’.) Smythe’s writing has few admirers these days, unlike that of Tilman, yet despite the straining for effect, it’s touching to consider this self-absorbed and scratchy man momentarily at ease with himself in one of the most beautiful valleys on earth.
Tilman might himself have been on Everest with Smythe and Shipton in 1936 but he acclimatised badly the year before, during a reconnaissance put together at the last minute when permission from Tibet arrived unexpectedly. Little new had been learned from that trip, even though the weather remained settled and fine deep into July, more than a month after the monsoon was expected. (Had the weather in 1936 been anything like as good, it’s quite possible Everest would have been climbed before the war.) Instead a large number of lesser peaks were climbed during the reconnaissance of 1935, twenty-six over 20,000 feet (6,096 metres), ‘a veritable orgy’ as Shipton described it. Michael Spender, brother of the poet Stephen, did much surveying work and the expedition also gave work to a young Tibetan-born high-altitude porter called Tenzing Bhotia, better known to the public after 1953 as Tenzing Norgay, or Sherpa Tenzing. It was his first job as a mountain porter, selected at the last moment by Eric Shipton on the basis of his warm smile. At least the 1935 venture had been cheap to organise.
While the team was at Everest, a bleak discovery exposed the raw and questionable motivation behind their venture. Charles Warren, the expedition’s doctor and later a well-regarded pae
diatrician, had the shock of finding the body of the adventurer Maurice Wilson, a veteran of the Great War. Wilson had won the Military Cross at the fourth Battle of Ypres but was later wounded by machine-gun fire that struck his chest and left him with a chronic injury in his left arm. Too mentally fractured to continue his old life he emigrated from his native Bradford: first to the United States, then New Zealand, searching for some kind of resolution or purpose. He was in no way a sad or pathetic figure: tall and physically fit despite his chronic injuries, he prospered well enough, but couldn’t settle anywhere for long. On a boat back to England in 1932 he got to know some Indian yogis and discovered a little about fasting and their spiritual practice. When he fell ill after his return and conventional medicine failed him, he used this knowledge to heal, melding it into his strong Christian beliefs. Galvanised by this experience, and wanting to demonstrate his powerful new tool of faith and fasting, he settled on climbing Everest: ‘faith – only faith: the thing that moves mountains you know.’
Wilson had the idea of flying to the foot of the mountain and so joined the London Aero Club. Despite a lack of aptitude he got his pilot’s licence and bought a second-hand Gypsy Moth, which he dubbed Ever Wrest. When the press got wind of his plans, Wilson became a minor sensation, attracting the disapproval of authorities from Whitehall to Delhi and all points between. Despite this, Wilson persevered and finally reached India only to be denied permission to fly over Nepal. Undaunted, he sold his aircraft and in the spring of 1934, disguised as a monk, trekked through Sikkim and Tibet with three experienced Bhotias to base camp. The monks at Rongbuk were a little surprised to see a lone British climber but he told them he was one of the team from 1933 returning to the mountain. The monks handed over food Ruttledge had stored with them for a future attempt. Sadly, Wilson had not prepared himself as a mountaineer as thoroughly as he had an aviator, and he perished in his tent after several attempts to reach the north col. Warren concluded that a combination of hunger, exposure and exhaustion had done for him. The final entry in his diary read: ‘Off again. Gorgeous day.’