White Mountain Read online

  WHITE

  MOUNTAIN

  A CULTURAL ADVENTURE THROUGH

  THE HIMALAYAS

  ROBERT TWIGGER

  To Nonaka Iku Sensei

  To all Mothers of Invention and Mothers of inventors

  Contents

  List of Maps

  PART 1

  Demons

  PART 2

  Pundits

  PART 3

  1904

  PART 4

  Going Higher

  PART 5

  Nagas

  Acknowledgements

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  Maps

  The Himalayas

  Nanda Devi

  Tantric Map of the Himalayas

  The Explorations of Nain Singh, 1865–7

  The British Expedition to Lhasa, 1904

  The North Face of Everest

  The South Face of Everest

  Nagaland and its Environs

  In your country you may be a great lord, a tax collector or a substantial landowner. Here, you are nothing. Even I, the ruler of this whole province, am nothing. Only the gods rule here.

  Tibetan Garpon or Viceroy, Western Tibet, 1936

  All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues, shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers and visionaries, as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end.

  Rudyard Kipling

  Only much later on, when I had already journeyed to all the continents, did I sense that adventure is not made up of distant lands and mountain tops, rather it lies in one’s readiness to exchange the domestic hearth for an uncertain resting-place.

  Reinhold Messner

  Watch out for the yak without horns, since he butts hardest.

  Ladakhi proverb

  PART I

  Demons

  1

  Magic Mountain

  There is no really compelling geological argument to show clearly where to divide the Himalaya from adjoining mountain ranges. They are all part of a huge knot of mountains that is hard to fully disentangle. Consequently the placement of boundaries to shape the region is a problem of geographical interpretation. Some measurements of the Himalayas include Afghanistan’s Koh-i-Baba range in the west and the highlands of northern Burma in the east, making the Himalaya over 4,000 km long . . . The northern and southern boundaries of the Himalaya likewise are not firmly fixed.

  Professor David Zurich, author of Himalaya, Life on the Edge of the World

  Neighbours living near are better than relatives living far away.

  Balti*proverb

  The Anglo-Afghan Sufi writer Idries Shah was born in the Himalayas, in the hill town of Simla. In his many books he often retells ancient tales with an emphasis on their usefulness rather than their folkloric value. One story tells of a river that finds herself weaving through a dry sandy desert in front of a mountain range, perhaps the Himalayas. The river throws herself against the foot of the mountain and forms . . . a puddle in the sand. What can I do? she thinks miserably. A voice, the voice of the wind, tells the river, ‘You must give yourself up to the winds, become clouds that will blow over the mountains. There you will fall as rain on the other side and find yourself rushing down to the sea.’ The river was nervous and especially disliked the idea of giving up her individuality to the winds and then the sea, but the winds told her, ‘Even if you throw yourself for a thousand years against the mountain foot the most you will become is a vile swamp. Instead, trust that your essence will survive even if your outer form changes – and finally you will find yourself home, with the ocean.’ The river used all her courage and gave herself up to the winds and flew into the sky and over the mountains and finally down to the sea. There she at last understood how to be both a drop of water and an ocean at the same time and yet not lose sight of either; truly it was worth the journey.

  It’s always further, always higher

  I had been planning a journey to the Himalayas, the place of my father’s birth (Mussoorie, another hill resort), for many years. As a young lad he had been carried in a sedan chair through the snow to his first school high in the hills. Such snippets of family history can act like a small demon, driving you on. Sir Richard Burton, an explorer I particularly admired, explained that he had to roam around endlessly because ‘the devil drives’. While in India he also studied Sufism, along with falconry, and was tireless in his acquisition of local languages and dialects. Yet once I arrived I spent months not going near the mountains. For many weeks I lacked even the oomph to get out of Delhi.

  We are so bombarded with images of the mountains, great photographs and YouTube documentaries featuring people squirrel-suiting† down canyons at 27,000 feet that, long before I’d been there, I felt I’d done that. Oddly enough, the weird and clunky end to A Passage to India (the movie) is very similar to the effect the Himalayas have on you when you finally get among them. Pristine angled mountains, often glimpsed from a road that is carved into a damp shale-collapsing hillside. But all that would come later.

  In the meantime I was revelling in just being in India, the epicentre of all backpacker action, where the hippy traveller cliché is a daily reality and yet seems to dent the lives of Indians hardly a bit. Though in the fifteen years since I’d last been there the tent cities of semi-homeless people had grown bigger, and the smell of buffalo dung had given way to the more pervasive smell of diesel exhaust.

  Amid displays of limes pyramiding in the harsh sunlight, endless tooting and underpowered revving, fewer people seemed interested in me as a foreigner. I had experienced the same in Cairo, my home for the last ten years: the falling off of interest in foreigners. Life the world over takes more out of you, or makes you more self-centred – why, I wasn’t sure; maybe on this trip I would find out.

  I was in the modern part of Delhi, out near the airport, not so distinguishable from the part of Cairo where my apartment was; it felt as if I had exchanged one dusty polluted madhouse for another. Ring roads spanned and spasmed across dry rubbish-filled canals and fields stacked with bricks and other indications of their future. Wind down the cab window: a smell of burning – part straw on fire, part sweet reek of garbage. Still, there was always the curry. I became a considerable glutton, surprising myself at the extent to which I loved Indian food. I also became a connoisseur of Indian lagers – especially Kingfisher Super Strong and Godfather – surely a unique name for a beer in any language. I was sort of searching for traces of my grandfather – he’d been an engineer in the Indian army – when I wasn’t searching for my next . . . Godfather. I also loitered in chain coffee shops such as Costa or Starbucks, which abroad have more caché than they have at home, owing, I imagine, to the relatively huge price of coffee.

  The Costas I went to entailed going through a micro-park, every leaf grey with the daily downfall of airborne soot. There were monkeys in the trees and cowardly stray dogs that got bolder at night, even menacing me when I was crossing said park with a few cans of Godfather from the late-night liquor store. I was living free of charge at a friend’s house, sleeping on his office floor; it was a beguiling combination of ease and discomfort.

  My plan, such as it was, was to try and work out what was ‘special’ about the Himalayas. This would require both historical research and some tramping around. By ‘special’ I meant specifically some kind of meaning off the usual utilitarian/hedonistic scale, somewhere in the batsqueak-inaudible zone, the muted emissions of spirit and soma. I was loath to use the normal words: spirituality, numinous (no, actually I quite liked numinous), religion, prayer, worship, faith, because they seemed to take me in the wrong direction, back into abstraction. India is more about distraction than abstraction, for su
re, as everyday reality and cosmic coincidence get rubbed in your face till you can’t stop blinking. If I ignored the heartfelt urgency that piled-up coincidences bring on, then I’d be lying about the attraction of India; the trick was to try and broaden this out, roll it up to the mountains, their history, and why for centuries man had hurled himself at this huge rocky spine.

  The book I would write would end up skewed around, skewered upon, the years 1903-05, which is when Kipling suddenly was proved wrong and East and West really did start to meet, cross over, intermingle or at least show some interest in each other after long centuries of semi-cocooned isolation. It would also begin and end with Nagas of one sort or another: gods or demons of Hindu mythology, depending on your perspective, but also a hill tribe in north-east India.

  I have mentioned the reading and the tramping. Another tool in my formidable bag of writer’s tricks was a tireless psychogeographical exploration/explanation of the Himalayan region using the tried-and-tested formulas of derive and détournement. Derive meant wandering, circling, drifting – usually through a city, though I saw no reason not to apply that to the whole of the region (mainly India) that bordered the Himalayas. My reasoning was that ‘drift’ became meaningful when incidents occurred that related to earlier incidents in this or previous journeys. Though ‘drifting’, which entailed obeying one’s intuition rather than mere randomness (drifting was not rolling a dice to get directions), might be less daunting within the limits and confines of a city, India, as I have mentioned, had long ago proved to me to be a kind of coincidence generator i.e. merely travelling there produced the kind of meaningful incident that linked back and forward both in that journey and others. Many times I have travelled in India on a journey sparkling with details that I barely later recall, save that so many seemed to link up, and so many encounters seemed to channel one forward to some kind of destiny, maybe only in a small sense, but still an overwhelming sense of meaning that sadly seems to evaporate on my return to Blighty.

  The bare facts of such a journey, the places visited, the trains ridden, the meals eaten – that would be ‘real’. And yet what one made of it, the sense of magic that grew up around these mundane details, that would be the incomparably more powerful and influential imaginary journey. Being fairly bored by now with my own true-life adventures – which, if truth be told, were a little meagre alongside the great climbers, explorers and adventurers of the past – my imaginary journey around the Himalayas would therefore be a journey round the real exploits of others. But therein lay a side problem, also interesting.

  For almost as long as I had been planning my trip to the Himalayas I had been observing with some relish the quantity and quality of the lies told by the great explorers. Some I had been able to check up on myself. I found that Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie had exaggerated the ferocity of Rocky Mountain rivers. Gerhard Rohlfs had reported certain dunes in the Sahara as fifty metres high and almost impossible to cross; these same dunes, which have barely shifted in 5,000 years (we know this from the evidence of prehistoric hearths found partly covered by slow-moving sands), I discovered were a mere 10 metres high and took no more than a couple of hours to cross. I liked these little lies because they showed the great explorers were human after all, regardless of their heroic exploits and travails.

  Not for a minute am I impugning the psychological courage of Mackenzie or Rohlfs. To go where no man (or at least no European) has gone before, without a satphone or GPS – that is the real test; the physical one is merely a footnote. Several explorers, including Richard Burton, completed their major journeys while being carried by natives, having become too sick to travel under their own steam. And, thus, while I am properly amazed and impressed by such modern exploits as walking the Nile and the Amazon, I can’t help feeling it is facing psychological unknowns rather than physical ones that sorts out the sheep from the goats. Not that goats are everyone’s cup of tea; here is a proverb from the Himalayas that failed to make the collection I have dispersed under every chapter heading: ‘If you have no problems, buy a goat.’

  A cyclist with purpose

  So, I would drift.

  Drifting would, I theorised, generate the right connecting material for the reports of the visible and invisible worlds made by others more daring and ambitious than myself. By drifting I would allow my intuition to find the way; a fallible guide, but no more so than any other.

  The invisible world includes the magical world, the world of demons – which is where I start. As I have almost hinted, any book about mountains has to be, inter alia, also. . . and, inevitably, about some forms of magic, even if it is just the snow-crunching magic of walking on a glacier in the blue light of dawn. Let us not be so limited! Here we must look at, and deal with, the magic endowed by, conjured up by, associated with, every aspect of the world’s vastest range – the Himalayas.

  In this way I hope to avoid the requirement to be either credulous or metro-sceptical. And yet we are sceptical. We live in the scientific age, despite Wittgenstein’s caveat that ‘too little is made of the fact that we include the words “soul” and “spirit” in our own civilised vocabulary. Compared with this, the fact that we do not believe that our soul eats and drinks is a minor detail.’‡

  I have travelled in lands where souls do eat and drink – and I hope to take you there with me.

  Do I eschew the scientific? I couldn’t if I wanted to. It is the given of our age. Which means that it allows people the luxury of believing anything . . . as long as it is peer-reviewed and appears in Nature.

  Magic hovers over the inexplicable. We seek it out because we love it. We adore mystery and we don’t mind being conned, provided it is done well. Magic starts where we cease to believe an explanation will add anything. Of course we all want to know ‘how the trick is done’, but the reason magicians refuse to tell us is not just about self-aggrandisement; we do not really want to know. This may look like a wish to be fooled, but in reality it is about reaching a place where explanation in words adds nothing – in fact, it detracts. Magic is analogous to the next stage of our evolutionary journey, where we enter a region in which experiences are beyond words. It’s about leaving the leaden prosaic world behind and flying. Is it any wonder that in all the Himalayan countries the shaman/sorcerer is portrayed as a flying man?

  I once asked the writer Roger Clarke what Bruce Chatwin was like; ‘he was a magician’ was his answer. I knew instantly what he meant (though I never met Chatwin): he was the kind of person who could make something out of nothing, who would take coincidences and everyday occurrences and turn them into something significant. (Everything is meaningful, everything is a sign to the paranoid and also to those living under the rule of the local shaman.)

  I would define magic as that instance when imagination and reality seem linked. When the world takes a personal interest in you. It is a ‘live version’ of the central problem/situation of religion: how to square being a grain of dust in the universe with being the centre of the universe? It is hinted at in the story related above, of the river that must learn how to be happy as both a drop of water and as part of an ocean.

  So, I would employ drifting to find all these different kinds of magic.

  I also planned a little détournement. This more or less translates as ‘hijacking’ – as in hijacking an idea or image that has one official use and twisting it to suit another purpose that, to one’s own mind, is truer. There were plenty of worthy biographies of willing mountaineers and endless tales told by explorers and climbers and men and women of the mountains – ‘Because it is there’ is both the most absurd and truest reason for climbing a mountain, but the blank-eyed prosaic duplicity of such answers would no longer be tolerated. I would hijack their yarns and turn them to my purpose: to better reveal the magic.

  Back to magic. Here’s another kind: if you perform certain breathing exercises and visualise a flame roaring inside you, it’s possible to raise your base body temperature. It’s an old Tibetan
trick called gTum-mo – and Western scientists have managed to replicate it with people who are almost complete beginners. The esoteric literature claims it took ‘years’ to achieve the power to do this – probably because it looked impossible. When Westerners first saw Inuit doing Eskimo rolls, it was ponderously agreed that no European could ever do such a thing, you had to be born into it; nowadays you can learn how to roll on YouTube in about three minutes . . .

  Magic promises shortcuts, it attracts the greedy and those who seek power. It’s got a bad name. Yet look at these mountains, their incredible beauty, the way they create a kind of inner silence that is in the ‘imagination’ yet coincides with a reality . . .

  Magic comes in two parts: the imagination, the image, the idea; and the context, the props, the setting, the result, the hard reality. You can’t have one without the other. And the hard reality of the Himalayas is hard – rock and ice, millions of years old. But even considering that period when the mountains were formed becomes an exercise in pure imagination. How do you imagine a million years? I cannot imagine the passing of ten with any claim to accuracy.

  Perhaps before we look at the hard rocks and geographical features of the Himalayas, we should decide how to pronounce it. I came up against this dilemma very early on in my research; when speaking to others, should I pronounce it English-style, as my father and grandfather did, i.e. ‘Him-a-layer’ to rhyme with prayer? Or should it be the Indian way: ‘Him-marl-ee-a’ to rhyme with . . . er, gnarlier? And no ‘s’ on the end. I did not call Paris ‘Paree’, or Cairo ‘El Kahira’ (though I did call Marseilles ‘Marsay’ rather than ‘Marsails’), so I was not entirely logical. But then again, no one seemed to mind that Everest was pronounced Ever-rest (the irony of it! – more like Never-rest, as mountaineer Stephen Venables would later call it) rather than Eve-rest which was how George Everest, the mountain’s namesake, insisted his name be pronounced. Known as the ‘most cantankerous sahib in India’, he probably enforced that pronunciation too. But, no longer. Seek reason in such things and you are lost, so: Him-marl-ee-a when speaking to Indians, Nepalis, Bhutanese – otherwise I would stick to my old ways and rhyme it with prayer and hope that both would be sufficient. Though it did surprise me how many people were hung-up or irked by the way the name was pronounced; for some it seemed an issue almost overshadowing the place itself. . .