White Mountain Page 4

  * Philip Larkin, ‘Water’ in Whitsun Weddings

  * Dr Jeremy Narby’s 1999 book The Cosmic Serpent documents such activity.

  5

  The Mountains and the Weather

  To catch fish you must not mind getting wet.

  Lepcha*proverb

  The day began to deteriorate around lunchtime. We were all sitting on rocks in misty rain, the fine misty rain you get in Scotland in the hills any time of the year. On a short multi-day walk in the Garwhal in 2014 we had no knowledge of what was happening in Nepal across the border. It would develop into the worst storm in years.

  We had cleared the high pass and seen a distant view of 7,000-metre peaks; now the wind set in and the driving rain turned to hail. The guide was soon lost in the fog. I put on my overtrousers – or overshorts; they were cut-down heavy plastic overtrousers, the kind worn by road workers, but they extended just over the knee. I was wearing gaiters and making cut-offs saved weight and increased airflow; overtrousers can get very hot otherwise. We all had rainwear – some fancy and breathable, other stuff baggy and unbreathable but 100 per cent waterproof. No lightweight breathable gear will keep out driving rain after four or five hours, not unless it has been recently reproofed. Our faces were raw, revived then frozen by wet hail, large lumps, not golf balls but still painful to the face. I noticed we’d walked past the same ruined sheepfolds for a second time. I was torn between elation that we were off the high parts, devoid of people and animals, but troubled by knowing we were now going round in circles. The guide said that in ten years of travelling in this part of the Himalayas he’d never known weather like this in late autumn; in the monsoon season, perhaps, but not now. None of us knew that just over the border the same storm would cause forty-three deaths in Nepal – twenty-one of whom were trekkers like us. It would be the worst trekking disaster in Nepal’s history. Though over 1.5 metres of snow fell in a day in some areas, it was the poorly equipped who suffered most. Many were killed on the production-line trek known as the Annapurna Circuit. This is a high-level trek but the accommodation is all in hostels and tea houses. Not needing to carry tents, tour companies encourage people to hike in light boots and shoes and minimal waterproof and insulating clothing. When a group of such lightly clad people were trapped at a snow-filled pass, they started to freeze to death.

  A hundred miles away, we finally found the path. It took us down through the deserted ski resort of Auli, all wet mud now, the carcass of a dead cow blocking one of the black runs. The rain-soaked concrete buildings were empty; the resort would open the following month. We dried off in a watchman’s hut, our wet clothes steaming around his burning stove.

  Out of doors all day and night in the mountains, some develop a nose for the weather. It is certainly one of the key skills of the advanced mountaineer. To hang back and then strike when a weather window appears, and be confident that it will last, or turn back when that confidence goes, all this comes with spending days and nights outdoors. Some never acquire this intuitive sense of what the weather will do. And many Himalayans, who live in houses, do not have any better a sense of the weather than a visiting climber or trekker. We will see later that the local weather advice given to trekker James Scott was crucial in encouraging him to try and make a perilous hike in Nepal that resulted in him being lost for forty-three days in the wilderness.

  Though forecasters have become better at predicting the weather, any forecast that aspires to provide weather information more than two weeks in advance will be relying on statistical likelihoods rather than actually perceived conditions. Even in this day of satellite coverage and complicated technological mumbo jumbo the weather remains in the realm of the invisible and the imaginary.

  High mountains make big weather; indigenous people, fearful of thunder and lightning, colossal downpours and rivers of ice, conclude that the mountains are where the Nagas make the weather. It is hard, when caught out at higher altitudes in a storm, to disagree. The Himalayas, being the world’s highest mountains, also endure some of the most extreme weather in the world. K2 is famous for winds well over a hundred miles an hour, wind that will rip a climber and his ropes right off a snowfield. Rain and snow may be dumped by the monsoon, especially in the more easterly parts of the Himalayas; around Ladakh, however, it is a virtual desert with less than 7.5 centimetres of rain a year. High up, blizzards may rage with arctic intensity, while people viewing the same scene from Camel Back Road in Mussoorie may only see blue skies and scudding clouds. No one can accurately predict weather more than sixteen days in advance* whatever model they use, and this unpredictability is higher for the high mountains.

  The prevailing winds in the higher altitudes of the Himalayas and Tibet are strong westerlies, often gusting at gale force. Above 7,000 metres, as we have mentioned, such winds may be well over a hundred miles an hour, destroying tents and making forward progress impossible.

  The mountains create the weather in one sense, but they are fed by the monsoons. There are two monsoons that affect India – a south-west monsoon and a north-east monsoon. The eastern Himalayas, Nagaland and Burma act as a barrier to the northeast monsoon, which has little effect on India and skips over the northern parts completely. In this area there are three seasons (as opposed to the two seasons in the lower parts of India). Cold weather from early or mid October to about the end of February, hot weather from March to mid June, and the rainy season – from mid June to the end of September.

  The heavily humid monsoon comes off the ocean and strikes India in late May or early June. Rain is dumped all across India. The eastern Himalayas of Sikkim, Bhutan and Assam receive the full impact. In the monsoon, Darjeeling gets 259 centimetres of the 310 centimetres it receives each year, with forty-five wet days (i.e. very wet) in July and August. Mussoorie has around twenty and Murree about fourteen. Rain is heavier and the days are less clear in the east than in the western parts of the Himalayas. The vale of Kashmir Srinagar only has about five wet days in August, receiving only 5-8 centimetres of rain.

  In the Hunza, where the summer rains make valleys impassable, in winter they allow exploration. Though it is too cold to go really high. In Ladakh there is almost no rainfall and summer is the best time to visit, unless you fancy walking along frozen rivers.

  Around 15 June the monsoon bursts over Delhi and sweeps north into Nepal and the Garwhal. Tibet is not seriously affected by the monsoon. Approaching the Himalayas from the north can be deceptive. The northern slopes can be affected by the monsoon rise in temperatures, even though the monsoon itself may not be apparent. Everest is traditionally climbed in the window of three or four weeks in May where the high westerly winds are checked by the approaching monsoon which has yet to burst.

  The ‘burst’ of the monsoon is like no other rainstorm. However, in the high mountains, the chhoti barsat, which occurs about three weeks usually before the monsoon bursts, can be felt. It is a period of unsettled weather that can give the inexperienced climber or traveller the impression that the monsoon has arrived early. The onset of the monsoon on the plains is sudden; in the higher mountains it may be sudden or gradual, but unlike the barsaf* it does not clear up after a day or two – it is continuous.

  The place where the gods make the weather

  The ending of the monsoon is much more gradual. Periods of bad weather in the Himalayas get shorter and periods of fine weather increase. By October it is over; October and November are usually freer of rain and cloud than any other months in the mountains. This is the traditional time for trekking and seeing the high peaks when they’re not veiled in cloud. For climbers, however, there are drawbacks. As the monsoon air current lessens in strength, the high westerly winds start up again. In November they can easily reach gale force – far more deadly at high altitude than cloud; not only are you likely to be blown over, it is also very much colder than pre-monsoon in May. The days are getting shorter, too, and the sun is lower and has less warming power. The one good thing is that streams, previously swo
llen with meltwater or monsoon rain, are easily fordable.

  From December to February it is too cold for most climbers, though in the 1970s a hardy breed of Polish mountaineers started to make winter ascents in the Himalayas; this trend continues today with a broader range of nationalities. The mountains are not affected by the north-east monsoon off the China Seas, but the bitterly cold winter air settles in the valleys and then is sucked out on to the warmer plains below. This causes northerly winds in the Himalayas. There are also cyclonic disturbances felt from Iran and as far away as Iraq, bringing snow and rain.

  The high passes can be affected at any time through to May. Former mountain surveyor and climber Kenneth Mason wrote:

  On a cloudless night in April or May after two fine days the Zoji La offers an absolutely safe passage to a large caravan; by dawn or soon afterwards it may be dangerous. I warned a small party of Ladakhis not to cross by daylight on 17 May 1926; they took no heed and were swept away by an avalanche and killed, though two nights earlier I had taken over a party of 160 laden porters. Much the same applies to the Burzil, Kamri and other passes.

  In the Karakoram the monsoon has less effect. North-westerly and westerly winds predominate in Gilgit and the Pamirs from May to August; only occasionally does a monsoon-inspired reversal make itself felt. In the Hunza and Nagir the old travellers believed that fine weather, unaffected by the monsoon that far west, was to be had between July and August.

  In winter, going above 3,000 metres it is cold but worth it for the dry clarity of the air. At 2,000 metres it is often sunny, day after day. I spent a week in the 1990s teaching aikido to Indian soldiers at a training camp above Dehradun. In a great barnlike structure with soft judo mats to fall on, wearing only judo pyjamas, we worked on locks and throws with the double doors open to the clear cold air and blue sky, Everest visible in the very far distance. At night the hotel room was below freezing and I slept in a fur hat.

  * Lepchas are the original inhabitants of Sikkim.

  † Michael Fish, ‘The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction’ lecture, 2013

  ‡ Literally ‘little rain’, a precursor to the great rains of the monsoon.

  6

  Mythical Origins

  Everything that enters a salt mine becomes salt.

  Proverb common in the Himalayas

  Himavant was the ancient ruler of Himalayan India. He was the father of Ganga, the river goddess. His wife was the daughter of Mount Meru, the sacred mythical Hindu mountain (not to be confused with the Garwhal Himalayan Meru Peak, scene of some of the world’s highest BASE jumping). T. S. Eliot captivated me as a young reader of poetry with:

  Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

  Waited for rain, while the black clouds

  Gathered far distant over Himavant.

  There seems to be a continuum from sign to symbol to myth. That we have magic words, whose meaning is the way we use them; that we can freight public words with our own meaning – and maybe convey some of the excitement of that semi-private meaning to others – makes us doubt the bland scepticism of de Saussure that assures us that there is no essential connection between the thing itself and how we depict it. The inference we are meant to draw is that the words we use are just random signs, any word would do just as well. In theory, yes. But evolutionary etiolation prefers some words to others. The common occurrence of onomatopoeic words from Japan to Britain suggests they have a high survival rate. It is the words we like saying that survive. The latest neuroscientific research into multisensory neurons suggests that synaesthesia is not rare at all; in fact, it is part of the human condition. The words we use suggest colours, sounds, images. To be sure, much poetry depends on it. Who can ignore the suggestive imagery and undeniable effect of Eliot’s next line:

  The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

  Once you get used to the fact that a symbol is a highly potent thing, at least as powerful as a line of poetry or a certain set of musical notes, you understand the way the Himalayas can worm their way into the consciousness of even the most prosaic-minded of walkers and climbers. Though, to be honest, most trekkers I have met were not prosaic at all except in their choice of foul-weather gear or boots; most are quite open to, if not full-on mysticism, at least Buddhism lite and all its confusing symbology.

  The people of Tibet call the place Bod. The bods of Bod are called Bod-pa. The higher places of the plateau are known as high-bod, or Tu-bod – hence Tibet. But once Tu-bod was actually a bed not a bod, not bad if you like alliteration.

  The bed of the Tethys Ocean, or part of it, which once encompassed all of the Mediterranean as well as the Indian Ocean, was forced up to become the tableland of Tibet. This modern geological fact, explained elsewhere, the ancients knew too: Tibet was mythologically once an undersea world which soared upwards, drained and dripping and new. Wild animals such as the drong *proliferated and lived alongside unspeakable apes and mythical ogresses. At long last, after many aeons, a very meditative monkey indeed, an incarnation of Avalokitesvara himself – became the progenitor of the Tibetan people (thousands of years before Darwin suggested similar ideas). The monkey, after long thought, searched out an ogress in order to have the strongest progeny possible. The union brought forth the first ‘red-faced’ humans, which is how the early Tibetans thought of themselves. With a true lack of reverence for chronology, this is all supposed to have happened after the historical life of the Buddha. A verse from the Buddhist text Manjusri-mula-tantra is often cited to show how the Buddha predicted the draining away of the sea and the tenacious growth of the sal tree into great verdant forests. Tibet was not exactly at the centre of the Buddha’s compassion, however, which is why he neglected the place in favour of India and Nepal; nevertheless, it is held that he deputed the wise monkey Avalokitesvara to tame the country and populate it with monkey-derived progeny, including the great emperor Songtsen Gampo of the seventh century AD and the current Dalai Lama (which may, in part, account for his admirable humility). To this day, traditional Tibetan historians – who tread a fascinating line between myth, textual history and oral tradition – still uphold the primeval primatological origins of the country.

  The Bon religion of Tibet existed before the introduction of Buddhism. It was not the only religion but it may have been the most prevalent. The Bonpo chronicles refer to the earliest people of Tibet as Bon instead of Bod. If this is accurate, then the earliest Tibetans were Bonpos, the people who welcomed the first King of Tibet down from the sky. There are still Bon monasteries in Tibet, but their difference from Buddhist monasteries is not so great. Monasticism as a concept may well have originated in Tibet, spreading into Buddhism and then via the Greco-Buddhist world back to Egypt, influencing the early hermits and anchorites in the desert. It isn’t an obvious connection to make – if you want to get away from the community, why try and build a community in the wilderness? Unless the monastic community contains something that can be taught to its members: secrets.

  If monasticism is a Tibetan/Himalayan invention, it makes sense that the monasteries in the Himalayas should look rather similar, as they do. But this doesn’t mean they haven’t a history of trying to do each other down.

  The first histories – written accounts of the past – were accounts of this religious feuding. The battle between the original Bon religion and the newer arrival, Buddhism, becomes the subject of the first histories of Tibet, the first myths of the country. This battle is such a key event in Tibetan history – albeit plainly exaggerated to a great degree or even mythological – that it deserves to be recounted in some detail. There are elements within the story that, when drawn out, provide considerable insights into the nature of Tibet and its magic mountain, Kailash. Another name for Mount Kailash is Kang Rinpoche or ‘Precious Snow Mountain’ – the white mountain of all white mountains. †Kailash was recognised throughout the Himalayas, by Jain and Hindu and Bon alike, as the holiest and most magical place.

  Mount Kailash was presided over by a
supremely powerful Bon magician called Naro Bon-Chung. His Buddhist opponent in battle was Milarepa, one of the most important Tibetan Buddhist poet-mystics.

  Milarepa lived in the late eleventh century and was a disciple of Marpa the Translator, leader of the Buddhist Karma Kagyu school, which Milarepa – a respected teacher in his own right – eventually headed. He is often depicted with one hand to his ear as if straining to hear the right note, and in paintings his body is always an odd shade of green, a symbolic (or perhaps literal) reference to having lived exclusively on nettle stew for long periods of his life.

  When Milarepa went to the mountain he was met by the local deities; recognising his advanced mystical powers, they welcomed him. He then travelled the short distance to the sacred Lake Manasarovar, where he encountered Naro Bon-Chung who was not at all polite. In fact, he laughed at Milarepa and told him he would have to convert to the Bon religion if he wanted to meditate there. ‘This is a Bon Po place,’ said Naro Bon-Chung. Milarepa could not accept this, for the Buddha himself had prophesied that one day Kailash would be a Buddhist place, and Marpa the Translator also spoken of the mountain. ‘Are you to take away my teacher’s words from me?’ asked Milarepa, and then he counter-suggested that Naro renounce the faith of Bon and become a follower of the Dharma and a Buddhist. Naro was so confident in his magical abilities he believed he could settle the dispute that way. He suggested that the winner of this magical contest would win the mountain and the loser must slink away.