Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  Mountaineers were not initially welcome in Nepal and only allowed in if accompanied by scientists. In this way, Bill Tilman spent almost four months in the summer of 1949 exploring the Langtang massif north of Kathmandu, the border crossing at Rasuwagadhi, where the Qing army had once invaded, the rugged peaks of Ganesh and finally the Jugal massif to the east. With him was the climber Peter Lloyd, who had shared the adventure of Nanda Devi, and two men of science, Hamish Scott, an undergraduate geologist and former Scottish rugby international, and the botanist and botanical writer Oleg Polunin, brother of the environmentalist Nicholas, who wrote a plant collector’s addendum to Tilman’s 1952 book Nepal Himalaya. Tilman hired his old friend Tenzing Norgay to manage arrangements and heard all about Tenzing’s adventures with Tucci the year before:

  he told me they had brought away forty maunds [around a tonne] of books. Tensing [sic], who gets on well with everyone and handles the local people well has a charming smile, great steadiness on a mountain, and a deft hand for omelettes which he turns out nicely sloppy and firm.

  Tilman entered into the spirit of things, deciding he would collect beetles – in fact any beetles, although happily one of these turned out to be new to science. Yet the complexity of sometimes competing interests wasn’t to his liking. ‘The killing of two birds with one stone, however desirable, is seldom achieved intentionally and never by aiming consciously at both.’

  The improvement in Nepal’s diplomatic ties with western countries was beyond exciting for mountaineers around the world. There are fourteen mountains over eight thousand metres in the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges and eight of them are either partly or wholly in Nepal. While a number of climbers had gone above that altitude, no summit had been reached before 1950 and all the Nepali peaks had been off limits. By 1960 only one remained unclimbed. Seven of the eight in Nepal had been polished off by 1956: a mountain-climbing feeding frenzy. A number of Himalayan climbers both before and after the war had expressed the hope that climbers from many nations could come together to climb these giants. It didn’t happen. An international team was responsible for only one of the eight-thousanders, Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest. Individuals could not afford to climb these mountains – it took national sporting organisations to raise the finance and deal with the diplomatic difficulties of getting official permission – and the opportunities for European countries rebuilding national prestige after the war were too important to waste.

  The French were the first to profit from the new openness. When Tilman got back to Kathmandu in 1949, he buttonholed the maharaja Mohan Shamsher, pointed to the Annapurna massif on a map of west Nepal and asked for Mohan’s permission to go there; but by the time permission had been granted, a French expedition was already in the field that would eclipse anything Tilman’s expedition could do: a dazzling ascent of Annapurna, one of the great achievements in exploratory mountaineering as the first and only eight-thousander to be climbed first try. There were two obvious reasons for this: French mountaineering had arguably the strongest cadre of young alpinists in its history, men like Louis Lachenal, Lionel Terray and Gaston Rébuffat; and all the important French national climbing organisations, including the Club Alpin Français, were run by the same man, a domineering autocrat called Lucien Devies who drove the project with relentless energy.

  The third advantage the French held, something largely ignored since, was diplomatic. Working in the French embassy in Delhi was a young alpinist and resistance hero called Francis de Noyelle. Knowing that France had just appointed Daniel Levi to be its first ambassador in Kathmandu, de Noyelle asked Levi to help put the case to Mohan Shamsher’s government for the first attempt on a Nepali eight-thousander to be French. Noyelle’s reward for his success was to be made liaison officer on the expedition; in later life de Noyelle also served as ambassador to Nepal. Permission was granted for two mountains, Dhaulagiri and Annapurna, which rise five kilometres and more on either side of the Kali Gandaki gorge. Dhaulagiri, in expedition member Lionel Terray’s phrase, proved ‘fiendishly difficult’ and so they turned their attention to Annapurna, so far unseen. Just getting a view of it would prove surprisingly elusive. By mid May and with time running out before the monsoon, the team still hadn’t made much progress, so Maurice Herzog, their intensely ambitious leader, called a council of war at their base camp in the village of Tukche. Working at extraordinary speed, the climbers first tried the peak’s north-west spur before coming to a dead end. Then in rapid order they pushed a route and a series of camps up the north face. Eric Shipton’s old friend Ang Tharkay had led the Sherpas and in a spirit of equality was offered a place on the summit team, which he politely declined. Terray and Herzog had proved the strongest and best acclimatised, but when the supply chain stalled, Terray gave up his chance for the summit to bring supplies to a high camp. Fellow member Louis Lachenal took his place at their top camp for the push on the summit.

  Lachenal and Herzog were wearing leather boots that offered insufficient insulation and Lachenal, who earned his living as a mountain guide, was anxious about his feet. What would Herzog do, he asked, if he turned around? ‘I should go on by myself,’ he told Lachenal. ‘Then I’ll follow you,’ Lachenal replied. They reached the top at 2 p.m. on 3 June, although whether they were at the very top of Annapurna has proved a matter of controversy in recent years. The descent would become an unquestionable nightmare as Herzog lost his gloves and suffered appalling frostbite. It would take six weeks for Herzog to make it home, suffering agonies in his hands, by which time his blackened feet were riddled with maggots. Yet the image of him on the summit holding the tricolour sold more copies of Paris Match than any in its history: they called him ‘our number one hero’. The French president Vincent Auriol was at the premiere of the expedition film and when it ended Herzog held up his ruined hands to acknowledge the applause. The book Herzog wrote sold eleven million copies, far more than any other mountaineering book in history. By the end of the decade he was a government minister married to the daughter of the duc de Brissac. Lachenal also suffered badly but his life after Annapurna was more troubled, and he died aged thirty-four falling into a crevasse while skiing the Vallée Blanche above Chamonix.

  The success of the French concentrated minds among other climbing nations. The Swiss also had a strong cadre of experienced mountaineers, like the climbers who had taken Tenzing Norgay to Garhwal, André Roch and René Dittert, who had more experience of the Himalaya than the French. The Swiss had their own diplomatic secret weapon as well, the travel writer Ella Maillart who was in Kathmandu and able to press the case for the Swiss to be given permission ahead of the British for a first try at Everest. They also had an organisation, the Schweizerische Stiftung für Alpine Forschung, capable of supporting not one but two attempts on Everest in 1952, before and after the monsoon. On their first attempt, the Swiss solved what was widely regarded as the critical problem of reaching the upper slopes of Everest from the south side: the Icefall. This jumble of vast ice blocks is the consequence of the Khumbu glacier flowing over a steep drop and fracturing, presenting climbers with what amounts to a lethal maze. A number of climbers had speculated that there might not be a route through it and if there was, had doubted whether the risk was worth it. Once above this barrier, the climbers reached the Western Cwm, the vast hanging valley that George Mallory had looked down into during the reconnaissance from the north side in 1921. The Swiss climbed the steep slope above this to reach the South Col, giving access to the last eight hundred metres. During the spring attempt, Raymond Lambert and Tenzing Norgay attempted to reach the summit from a camp on the south-east ridge above the South Col but their oxygen equipment was barely worth its weight and after five hours they gained only two hundred metres; they were still three hundred metres below the top, at roughly the same height Edward Norton reached on the 1924 Everest expedition, the previous known high point.

  The Himalayan Committee that replaced the Mount Everest Committee had been aghast when M P Koirala’s g
overnment preferred the Swiss; it was a clear signal that British influence had faded, along with the Ranas. It was also true that the British weren’t quite ready. While the Swiss were on Everest, Eric Shipton led an expedition to the nearby peak of Cho Oyu, sixth highest in the world. Although unsuccessful, the team did important research work under the maverick eye of physiologist Griffith Pugh. It also galvanised the Himalayan Committee into a moment of ruthless pragmatism, sacking Eric Shipton as leader of the planned 1953 Everest attempt and replacing him with John Hunt, dubbed ‘Thruster John’ for his ambition and drive. Politically Hunt was to the left of most of his predecessors, a bit more social democrat than imperial adventurer, in tune with Britain’s Commonwealth era. The choice of the successful summit team, the New Zealander Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay from the locality itself, reflected that.

  Once M P Koirala’s government had granted its permission, a small army of porters – hundreds of them – left Kathmandu in stages with supplies and equipment for the dozen foreign climbers and twenty-eight Sherpas Hunt had planned to hire. Hillary and Norgay had not climbed together, just the two of them, until the expedition reached the Western Cwm, Hillary having led the route through the Icefall. Both men had their eyes on the summit and Hillary calculated that Hunt might not want to see the expedition’s two Kiwis, himself and George Lowe, partnered for the top. Hillary was curious about Tenzing, who at that stage had more experience of the mountain than anyone else.

  Although not perhaps technically outstanding in ice-craft, he was very strong and determined and an excellent acclimatizer. Best of all, as far as I was concerned, he was prepared to go fast and hard.

  He soon had reason to thank Tenzing. Racing down to base camp from the Western Cwm, as much for a bet with George Lowe as anything, Hillary went into a crevasse. As the New Zealander attempted to brace himself between its walls, Tenzing whipped the rope around his ice axe behind his boot and held his partner in exemplary fashion. Again and again, the two men went out of their way to illustrate their strength at altitude; it was clear from events that Hunt regarded the pair as his best card in beating Everest’s formidable hand. When progress to the South Col stalled and the expedition seemed in jeopardy, Hunt sent the pair up to boost morale and get things moving. The fact that Hunt’s team was able to lift far more supplies of oxygen, fuel, equipment and supplies than the Swiss to the South Col was the key difference.

  The British pair of Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon had first crack on 26 May, using an experimental ‘closed’ oxygen apparatus that was more efficient and effective than the ‘open’ system but prone to breakdown. Although they made rapid progress, when they paused to change cylinders, Evans’ set began acting up and it was already one o’clock when they reached the mountain’s south summit, the highest anyone had ever been on Everest. To push on would have been reckless, so they turned around and descended safely. Thanks to the immense supply effort to the South Col, a second summit attempt now began, with Hillary and Tenzing using the more reliable ‘open’ oxygen gear. A team of support climbers helped the pair establish an intermediary camp between the South Col and the summit, increasing their chance of success. Leaving camp at 6.30 a.m. on 29 May, and despite snow conditions that left Hillary anxious with worry, they reached the top in good order five hours later. ‘My first sensation was one of relief,’ Hillary wrote, ‘relief that the long grind was over.’ That soon gave way to satisfaction. ‘I turned and looked at Tenzing. Even beneath his oxygen mask and the icicles hanging from his hair, I could see his infectious grin of sheer delight.’ Hillary offered his hand, but that wasn’t enough for Tenzing, who threw an arm around Hillary’s shoulders and the two ‘thumped each other on the back in mutual congratulations’.

  Thanks to Hunt’s leadership, Pugh’s science, strong logistics and two highly ambitious climbers, Everest was finally climbed, the news arriving just in time for the coronation of Elizabeth II. As in France, the nature and scale of the achievement somehow matched a new mood of hope in Europe that followed post-war austerity. In the Himalaya, the political consequences of Tenzing Norgay being one of the successful pair were huge, and hugely complicated. A humbly born Asian had become globally famous almost overnight. Some Indian journalists called for the mountain to be renamed in his honour. In Darjeeling, when All India Radio broadcast news of Tenzing’s success, his friend Rabindrinath Mitra had pictures of him put up all over town. Mitra was a Bengali born in Calcutta but from a local family who had taken over a failing tea plantation and started a Nepali-language newspaper Sathi, meaning ‘friend’. He had run articles on the Sherpa community, feeling their contribution to mountaineering had been overlooked. He also encouraged them to organise for themselves and stop relying on the colonial-era Himalayan Club. It was Mitra who gave Tenzing an Indian flag to take to the summit. Stories began appearing in the Indian press, quoting ‘sources close to the expedition’, that Tenzing had reached the summit first and led Hillary to the top. This idea hadn’t come from Tenzing; he was still walking back from the mountain, but the notion chimed in postcolonial India. Inder Malhotra, then a young journalist but later editor of The Times of India, recalled:

  The idea that white man is the leading one, oh no rubbish, this time, we have done it, our people have done it, Tenzing has done it and why should this credit be misappropriated by others. This was the feeling.

  The problem was, who were ‘our people’? Tenzing had been born in Tibet, spent time in Khumbu and lived in Darjeeling for the last twenty years. In that time an empire had crumbled and new nations risen. Nepal, deeply sensitised to Indian interference, was no less keen to claim Tenzing as one of ‘our people’. Nepal’s newspaper Gorkhapatra picked up the Indian story that Tenzing had reached the summit first. Dharma Raj Thapa, a poet who worked as a radio producer in Nepal, was with Mitra in Darjeeling when they heard the news and set to work on a lyric that began ‘Hamro Tenzing Sherpa le’, ‘our Sherpa Tenzing’, later going to Calcutta to record it to music. The song was a huge hit and it carried the same message, that Tenzing had guided Hillary, only this time it wasn’t an expression of Indian nationalism but Nepali nationalism. The publisher Kamal Mani Dixit, a student in 1953, recalled ‘Wherever Nepalese were, they were singing this song. Nepalese songs on 78 rpm records were new. The idea of Nepalese nationality was new.’ More than that, Tenzing had been born poor and yet almost overnight had become globally famous. In a place as hierarchical as Kathmandu, where caste and class defined you, that was truly revolutionary. ‘For those of poor birth,’ Dixit said, ‘Tenzing’s success was a big impetus. At one time he was more popular than King Tribhuvan.’ The mood in Kathmandu when the expedition returned was, as Jan Morris put it, ‘a cross between a circus and a hustings’. Tenzing would leave the city on Tribhuvan’s own private aircraft and into the embrace of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

  From the very first, Panditji was like a father to me [Tenzing said]. He was warm and kind, and, unlike so many others, was not thinking of what use he could make of me.

  If that was naïve, Nehru did take a genuine personal interest in Tenzing, whose success reflected what Nehru hoped for his country: that ordinary people could thrive. The glow of Nehru’s attention would give Tenzing an Indian passport and a sense of mission – ‘If Nehru had told me I was Indian,’ Ed Hillary said, ‘I would have believed him’ – but when Tenzing next came to Kathmandu, in the late 1950s, his reception was cooler.

  The immense global coverage of the 1953 Everest expedition and the avalanche of articles, books and films that followed it fixed in the public mind that how this mountain had been climbed was how all mountains must be climbed: with fixed camps and huge teams. On the day the newly titled Sir John Hunt and his team arrived in London, the Austrian climber Hermann Buhl reached the summit of Nanga Parbat. Buhl had toasted the British success with a can of Munich beer when he heard about it almost three weeks later, camped at six thousand metres on Nanga Parbat’s Rakhiot face. The expedition leader was Karl Herrligkoffer,
half-brother of Willy Merkl, whose own expedition in 1934 had ended in such disaster. Herrligkoffer, in the mould of Paul Bauer, despised the ‘zeal of individuals’, and preferred ‘the collaborative expedition that didn’t reach the summit’. On the other hand, he wasn’t much of a climber, while Hermann Buhl was one of the best in the world. When Herrligkoffer ordered Buhl to descend following a poor weather forecast, Buhl ignored him, making a bravura dash for the summit from his top camp, some four thousand feet below, twice the height Hillary and Tenzing had needed to cover, fuelled by Panzerschokolade, the chocolate methamphetamine used by the German military in the Second World War. (Buhl was far from the only climber to rely on speed to keep him going on a tough ascent. It was on the British equipment list in 1953.) After a forty-one hour round-trip he was back at his top camp in a state of frostbitten exhaustion but triumphant. Herrligkoffer never forgave him and the two ended up mired in legal proceedings. Buhl would make another lightweight first ascent of an eight-thousander in 1957, Broad Peak in the Karakoram, but died soon after, stepping through a cornice on the summit ridge of a nearby peak on yet another alpine-style climb.

  This golden era of mountain climbing added lustre to the Himalaya as a fashionable and exotic tourist destination. The man who drove that fashion more than anyone was a Russian emigré called Boris Lissanevitch. Previously a dancer with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes whose career came to end with Daighilev’s death in 1929, Lissanevitch met his first wife Kira Stcherbatcheva in Monte Carlo, and the pair earned their living dancing the tango in smart hotels and clubs from Shanghai to Bombay. When the marriage failed, Boris became the inspiration, manager and frontman of the 300 Club in Calcutta, an exclusive ‘mixed’ venue where Europeans and Indians could get a drink together at any time of day or night, assuming they could afford it. The club was a favourite of King Tribhuvan, and in 1951, after restrictive licensing laws killed his business, Boris took up the king’s invitation to move to Kathmandu. With his new Danish wife Inger Pheiffer and backing from Tribhuvan’s alcoholic younger son Basundhara, he opened Nepal’s first successful European-style hotel in the wing of a royal palace. The Royal Hotel was considered the only place in town for diplomats, spies, aid workers, mountain climbers, yeti hunters, celebrity guests – from the movie stars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant to the economist and diplomat Kenneth Galbraith – and the trickle of wealthy tourists Boris managed to attract through his contacts at the travel agency Thomas Cook. The hotel was, as one visitor put it, ‘an exhibit hall of some Victorian museum’, its lobby full of stuffed crocodiles, chandeliers and gilt-framed oil paintings of Rana princes, a kind of Raj fantasy of tiger shoots and derring-do. Inger’s mother, who lived at the Royal, kept a pet red panda – called Pandaji – given to her by regular guest Ed Hillary. The standard was often ropey. Guests would spot enormous rats in their rooms and there was a pig living in the kitchen. But stays were always memorable.