Shambhala Publications, Inc.
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Anthology © 2016 by Speaking Tiger
Preface © 2016 by Ruskin Bond
Introduction © 2016 by Namita Gokhale
Frontispiece by Karan Shah, from larger photo “A View of the Dengboche Valley, Eastern Nepal.”
The copyright for the essays vests with the individual authors or their estates.
This is a slightly abridged version of the book first published in India by Speaking Tiger Publishing in 2016.
Every effort has been made to trace individual copyright holders and obtain permission. Any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover painting: Mount of Five Treasures by Nicholas Roerich
ISBN 9781611805901
eISBN 9780834841536
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.
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In a thousand ages of the gods I could not tell thee of the glories of the Himalaya…
—THE PURANAS
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
ADVENTURES
The Travels of Fa-Hien
H. A. Giles (Trans.)
An Emperor’s Sojourn
Jahangir
Slipping into Tibet
Sarat Chandra Das
Report of a Route-Survey
Made by Pundit [Nain Sing] from Nepal to Lhasa
Between Wolves and Shipwreck
Sven Hedin
Mark Twain
The Abominable Snowman
Frank S. Smythe
Mutiny on Kangchenjunga
Aleister Crowley
The Summit
Edmund Hillary
To Namdapha and Tawang
Anil Yadav
MEDITATIONS
Fragment from the Adi Purana
Jinasena
Just a Strand in Shiva’s Hair: Face-to-Face with the Axis of the World
Arundhathi Subramaniam
Himalaya on a Pushcart
Dharamvir Bharati
Travels in India as an Unknown Sannyasin
Swami Vivekananda
The Travels of Swami Haridas
Rahul Sankrityayan
In Search of the Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen
Sunlight on Kinchinjunga
Francis Younghusband
Ladakh Sojourn
Andrew Harvey
A Mountain Retreat
Vicki Mackenzie
Mountains in My Blood
Ruskin Bond
LIFE
A Night in a Garhwal Village
Ruskin Bond
Three Springs
Jemima Diki Sherpa
White Bearers: Views of the Dhauladhar
Kirin Narayan
Friends in Prison
Jawaharlal Nehru
A Vacation in Dalhousie
Rabindranath Tagore
The Lopchak Caravan to Lhasa
Abdul Wahid Radhu
The View from Cheena
Jim Corbett
Dev Bhumi
Bill Aitken
They Make a Desolation and Call It Peace
Amitav Ghosh
The Wrath of Mandakini
Hridayesh Joshi
Tibetans from Peking
Dom Moraes
Gyaltsen Has a Video
Manjushree Thapa
Notes on the Contributors
Copyright Acknowledgments
E-mail Sign-Up
PREFACE
Some years ago I asked a sailor to describe the most exciting moment of a long sea voyage, and without hesitation he said: “My first sight of land!” And when I asked a landlocked villager from the mountains to describe his most exciting moment, he replied: “The first time I saw the sea.”
It is always what lies beyond the horizon that excites us the most, and a seaman has this advantage, that his ship is almost always on the move, from sea to sea, and port to port, while the mountain-dweller is often confined to a particular range or valley. And no matter how beautiful the mountain or the valley, it can grow monotonous after some time. Life in an Indian hill-station is pleasant enough, but two weeks in a remote village at the end of a day-long trek, without electricity or a toilet, and the visitor is soon pining for the fleshpots of the cities.
It isn’t surprising, then, that the mountains have been celebrated in prose more often by travelers looking back at a brief adventure than by residents who brave the elements year after year.
The mountainous lands, and the Himalaya in particular, are visited by travelers, explorers, climbers, naturalists, pilgrims. These are people who are evanescent, who come and go and vanish, occasionally giving us their impressions in the books and journals which describe their personal experiences, but they tell us little or nothing about the people who eke out a living on hostile mountain slopes. Only a very few have left enduring and insightful records of their experiences. This is particularly true of those who come in order to “conquer” mountain peaks. In India, Nepal, climbers turn up every year—a handful once, but now in their hundreds—toiling up the slopes of Everest or some other challenging peak and in the process littering the mountain slopes with a trail of garbage as an offering of thanks to the guardian spirits of the Himalaya.
Just occasionally a Frank Smythe comes along, or a Rahul Sankrityayan, with a literary bent and a feeling for both mountains and mountain people. The best of them feature in the first two parts of this collection and make for compelling reading.
There is plenty to choose from, as far as accounts of climbing expeditions go. Edmund Hillary has left us a step-by-hazardous-step description of his ascent of Everest; Sven Hedin is more animated in his narrative. Mallory and Younghusband have had their moments and memories. And we have an extraordinary account of a “mutiny” on Kanchenjunga by Aleister Crowley, the self-avowed “wickedest man in the world,” who dabbled in black magic and devil worship and became the subject of several sensational biographies such as The Magical Record of the Great Beast 666. In his account of an abortive attempt at Kanchenjunga he is at pains to present himself as a nice guy and the ideal leader; even so, he was deserted by most of his companions.
Crowley is, however, genuinely funny at times, especially in his description of the Darjeeling climate; and humor is rare in mountain writing. Climbers are apt to become irritable and quarrelsome when they ascend to great heights, and altitude sickness doesn’t help.
The inclusion of an essay by Mark Twain provides welcome relief. He genuinely enjoys his hand-car ride down the railway track from Darjeeling, and he conveys his enjoyment to the reader. The surprise, for many readers in English, will be the Hindi writer Rahul Sanskrityayan, who writes with a light touch, moving effortlessly from humor to contemplation.
We should remember that mountains are impersonal. You can climb a peak but you can’t possess it. It is simply there, serene and impervious to your love or hate, and it will be there long after you and I are gone. But sometim
es they shift, as we saw last year when an earthquake ran through Nepal, flattening dwellings and causing massive avalanches in the higher reaches of the Himalaya. And in the Indian Himalaya, in Uttarakhand, unseasonal heavy rains and flash floods devastated entire villages and townships, changing the landscape and geography of an entire mountain range. It has happened before; it will happen again.
Yes, the mountains are impersonal, for beauty really exists in the beholder’s eye. Once, admiring the view from a fallow field, I commented on the beautiful sunset. My companion, whose crop had been destroyed in a hailstorm, responded: “But you cannot eat sunsets.”
The reality of life in the Himalaya has rarely been described as convincingly as in the final part of this volume, which is also my favorite section. Jemima Diki Sherpa, Namita Gokhale, Manjushree Thapa, Bill Aitken, Kirin Narayan, and others bring genuine insight and empathy to their accounts, perhaps because they have lived in the Himalaya themselves. Dom Moraes and Amitav Ghosh prove to be sensitive and intelligent travelers.
Living in the mountains is not a romance for everyone. Wresting a living from the stony, calcified soil does not leave much time for poetry and contemplation. Even so, the mountains have become very personal to me, as they have to other writers who have made their homes here. The changing colors of the hillside, the trees, birds, cicadas, horse-chestnuts, pine cones, cow bells, mule trains, the rain on old tin roofs, the wind in tall deodars, wild flowers in the morning dew—all these things are largely personal, appealing to both the spiritual and sensual in our own natures. If we haven’t produced much literature, it is probably because we have still to come to terms with the majesty of these great mountains. Or, perhaps, the Himalaya have taught us humility. We know that just living, and helping our fellow creatures through life, is enough; it is greater than any art.
RUSKIN BOND
Landour, Mussoorie
June 2016
INTRODUCTION
This collection of essays and musings evokes the majesty of the tallest, and youngest, mountains in the world—sky-high peaks that were once the ocean floor.
Variously known as Sagarmatha, Chomolungma, or Everest, the highest peak on our planet stands tall at 8,848 meters. Its neighbors are equally grand: Kanchenjunga (8,598 meters), Makalu (8,481 meters), and Dhaulagiri (8,167 meters). It is but natural that the Himalayan range has inspired awe and wonder since the beginning of mankind. It is Giri-raj, the King of Mountains.
In the opening segment of this collection—“Adventures”—Edmund Hillary tells us of his famous first ascent with Tenzing Norgay in 1953. Hillary recalls,
But mixed with the relief was a vague sense of astonishment that I should have been the lucky one to attain the ambition of so many brave and determined climbers. It seemed difficult at first to grasp that we’d got there. I was too tired and too conscious of the long way down to safety really to feel any great elation. But as the fact of our success thrust itself more clearly into my mind, I felt a quiet glow of satisfaction spread through my body—a satisfaction less vociferous but more powerful than I had ever felt on a mountaintop before. 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. I held out my hand and in silence we shook in good Anglo-Saxon fashion. But this was not enough for Tenzing and impulsively he threw his arm around my shoulders and we thumped each other on the back in mutual congratulations.
Navigating this remarkable book, the reader gets very different views of the Himalayan massif. The second section, “Meditations,” comprises the writings of poets, mystics, and seers, such as Swami Vivekananda, as well excerpts from classics like Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard and Andrew Harvey’s A Journey in Ladakh.
But there are also surprises: the Himalaya alter the souls of even those who do not come to them, or behold them, as seekers. The imperial adventurer Francis Younghusband writes, in “Sunlight on Kinchinjunga”:
A sense of solemn aspiration comes upon us as we view the mountain. We are uplifted. The entire scale of being is raised. Our outlook on life seems all at once to have been heightened. And not only is there this sense of elevation: we seem purified also. Meanness, pettiness, paltriness seem to shrink away abashed at the sight of that radiant purity.
And in the third section, “Life,” Bill Aitken describes how he and his companion Prithwi, initially unimpressed by the Valley of Flowers, returned to find unexpected beauty:
I came across in a protected dell the first outburst of flowers in the form of crocuses. The dew on their golden petals glowed like diamonds in the cold sun and I beckoned Prithwi to descend and see how the valley had won its reputation for beauty. She grumbled at having to lose height but once in the magic dell was bewitched by the tenderness of nature’s new leaf….The intensity of the beauty in its uncurled potential seemed more wonderful than the even spread of a thousand species in full blossom.
This final section is more within the immediate range of experience of a native pahari and armchair traveler like myself. The peerless Ruskin Bond, for example, takes us to a village in Garhwal. He sets the scene with a moving description of the Himalayas “striding away into an immensity of sky.” He spends many days with the residents of the village, watching how they fashion a life for themselves in the difficult terrain where “pale women plow,” laughing at the thunder “as their men go down to the plains for work; for little grows on the beautiful mountains in the north wind.”
From his last evening in the village, he brings back this magical memory:
The moon has not yet risen. Lanterns swing in the dark. The lanterns flit silently over the hillside and go out one by one. This Garhwali day, which is just like any other day in the hills, slips quietly into the silence of the mountains. I stretch myself out on my cot. Outside the small window the sky is brilliant with stars. As I close my eyes, someone brushes against the lime tree, brushing its leaves; and the fresh fragrance of limes comes to me on the night air, making the moment memorable for all time.
Nostalgia and sepia-tinted views yield to present realities. In a characteristically intense and thoughtful piece, Amitav Ghosh transports us to the troubled vale of Kashmir, where men and mountains meet amidst the toxic “altitude sickness” of warmongers and politics. On the highest battleground on earth, India and Pakistan are locked in tragic, pointless conflict:
It is generally agreed that the [Siachen] glacier has absolutely no strategic, military or economic value whatsoever. It is merely an immense, slowly moving mass of compacted snow and ice, seventy miles long and over a mile deep.
* * *
This, then, is the Himalaya, where life unfolds in all its grace and terror, revealing as much as it withholds. This anthology attempts to capture some of its complexity and vastness, traveling through time, place, and altitude. Beauty and melancholy, courage and defeat, philosophy and poetry surprise and illuminate us in these pages. What remains in the end is the sense of intimacy, the exhilaration, and yes, the desolation, of these rugged mountains, the “self-born mockers of man’s enterprise.”
NAMITA GOKHALE
Nainital
June 2016
ADVENTURES
You don’t conquer Everest—you sneak up on it and get the hell outta there.
—ED VIESTURS
THE TRAVELS OF FA-HIEN*1
H. A. Giles (Trans.)
Along the route [southwest from Karashar in northwestern China] they found the country uninhabited; the difficulty of crossing rivers was very great; and the hardships they went through were beyond all comparison. After being on the road a month and five days they succeeded in reaching Khotan.
This country is prosperous and happy; its people are well-to-do; they have all received the Faith, and find their amusement in religious music. The priests number several tens of thousands, most of them belongin
g to the Greater Vehicle. They all obtain their food from a common stock. The people live scattered about; and before the door of every house they build small pagodas, the smallest of which would be about twenty feet in height. They prepare rooms for traveling priests, and place them at the disposal of priests who are their guests, together with anything else they may want. The ruler of the country lodged Fa-Hien and his companions comfortably in a monastery, called Gomati, which belonged to the Greater Vehicle. At the sound of a gong, three thousand priests assemble to eat. When they enter the refectory, their demeanor is grave and ceremonious; they sit down in regular order; they all keep silence; they make no clatter with their bowls, etc.; and for the attendants to serve more food, they do not call out to them, but only make signs with their hands. Hui-ching, Tao-cheng, and Hui-ta, started in advance toward the country of Kashgar; but Fa-Hien and the others, wishing to see the processions of images, stayed on for three months…
Seven or eight li to the west of the city, there is a monastery called the King’s New Monastery. It took eighty years to build and the reigns of three kings before it was completed. It is about two hundred fifty feet in height, ornamentally carved and overlaid with gold and silver, suitably finished with all the seven preciosities. Behind the pagoda there is a Hall of Buddha which is most splendidly decorated. Its beams, pillars, folding doors, and windows are all gilt. Besides this, there are apartments for priests, also beautifully and fitly decorated, beyond expression in words. The kings of the six countries to the east of the Bolor-Tagh range make large offerings of whatsoever most valuable things they may have, keeping few for their own personal use.
The processions of the fourth moon being over, one of the party, Seng-shao, set out with a Tartar Buddhist toward Kashmir, and Fa-Hien and the others went on to Karghalik, which they reached after a journey of twenty-five days. The king of this country is devoted to the Faith; and there are more than one thousand priests, mostly belonging to the Greater Vehicle.