Nepal Himalaya E-Book

H.W. Tilman

• Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Throughout 1949 and 1950 H.W. 'Bill' Tilman mounted pioneering expeditions to Nepal and its Himalayan mountains, taking advantage of some of the first access to the country for Western travellers in the 20th century. Tilman and his party—including a certain Tenzing Norgay—trekked into the Kathmandu Valley and on to the Langtang region, where the highs and lows began. They first explored the Ganesh Himal, before moving on to the Jugal Himal and the following season embarking on an ambitious trip to Annapurna and Everest. Manaslu was their first objective, but left to 'better men', and Annapurna IV very nearly climbed instead but for bad weather which dogged the whole expedition. Needless to say, Tilman was leading some very lightweight expeditions into some seriously heavyweight mountains. After the Annapurna adventure Tilman headed to Everest with—among others—Dr Charles Houston. Approaching from the delights of Namche Bazaar, the party made progress up the flanks of Pumori to gaze as best they could into the Western Cwm, and at the South Col and South-East Ridge approach to the summit of Everest. His observations were both optimistic and pessimistic: 'One cannot write off the south side as impossible until the approach from the head of the West Cwm to this remarkably airy col has been seen.' But then of the West Cwm: 'A trench overhung by these two tremendous walls might easily become a grave for any party which pitched its camp there.' Nepal Himalaya presents Tilman's favourite sketches, encounters with endless yetis, trouble with the porters, his obsessive relationship with alcohol and issues with the food. And so Tilman departs Nepal for the last time proper with these retiring words: 'If a man feels he is failing to achieve this stern standard he should perhaps withdraw from a field of such high endeavour as the Himalaya.'

Leseprobe

NEPAL HIMALAYA

H. W. TILMAN

NEPAL HIMALAYA

H. W. TILMAN

– Contents –

Foreword – Ed DouglasPrefacePART ONE:THE LANGTANG HIMAL, 1949Chapter I – To NepalChapter II – KatmanduChapter III – To The LangtangChapter IV – The LangtangChapter V – Rasua GarhiChapter VI – The Ganesh HimalChapter VII – The Langtang AgainChapter VIII – The Jugal HimalPART TWO:ANNAPURNA HIMAL, 1950Chapter IX – The StartChapter X – The MarsyandiChapter XI – ManangbhotChapter XII – To the MountainChapter XIII – On the MountainChapter XIV – A Change of SceneChapter XV – MustangbhotChapter XVI – MuktinathChapter XVII – Bimtakhoti and Himal ChuliChapter XVIII – A Fresh StartChapter XIX – Approach to Mt EverestThe Natural History of the Langtang Valley – O. PoluninH. W. TilmanPhotographs and Maps

– Foreword –

Ed Douglas

‘I  FELT I COULD GO ON LIKE THIS FOR EVER, that life had little better to offer than to march day after day in an unknown country to an unattainable goal.’ Bill Tilman wrote these words in Two Mountains and a River, published in early 1949, the year he went to Nepal for the first time. They capture so much of his appeal as an adventurer, in fact, the adventurer, a man whose extraordinary and unrepeatable life has achieved a sort of mythological status. He is a modernist Odysseus, crossing a fractured ocean, the old world no more than smoking ruins, his hand firmly on the tiller. Odysseus, of course, had a home to aim for: Ithaca, where Penelope waited oh-so-patiently. Tilman had no one waiting for him. Only one thing held his attention: the horizon.

The impact his experiences in the Great War had on Tilman were visceral and permanent. He went to war a month before his eighteenth birthday and was soon wounded, in the thigh, but recovered and went back to the front in time for the Somme. ‘When one took stock,’ he wrote decades later, ‘shame mingled with satisfaction at finding oneself still alive. One felt a bit like the Ancient Mariner; so many better men, a few of them friends, were dead.’ And then he quotes Coleridge: ‘And a thousand thousand slimy things / Lived on; and so did I.’

Odysseus too found himself washed in gore and horror, but he came from an honour culture that saw such bloody outcomes as affirmation. For Tilman, the Great War was a cultural catastrophe, one he felt guilty to have survived. He clung to great literature as one would to wreckage after a storm rather than regarding it as foundations for a new order. Jim Perrin recalled Tilman quoting the war poet Max Plowman’s When It’s Over: ‘I shall lie on the beach / Of a shore where the rippling waves just sigh, / And listen and dream and sleep and lie / Forgetting what I’ve had to learn and teach / And attack and defend.’ That is principally what Tilman spent the rest of his life doing, except during the fight against fascism, which he might have avoided but didn’t, serving once more with distinction.

So there are hints of the bitter past as well as romance in Tilman’s wanderlust. And there is sadness too in the notion that he could go on marching day after day forever, because, as he well knew, he could not. Nepal Himalaya was his last mountain book, before the great shift to life afloat and another quarter century of astonishing adventures. He arrived at a moment of immense upheaval, both political and cultural, across the Himalaya. In Nepal, the consequences of Indian independence were fast unwinding: the Rana regime, preserved like a mosquito in amber, sucking the blood of its own people from beyond the grave, was about to fall. The old order was changing, yielding place to something Tilman regarded with some horror: the modern world. Nepal, he knew, was the largest inhabited space left that remained unexplored to European travellers. He was entering the endgame.

Starting in the monsoon of 1949, Tilman made three journeys to Nepal, at the front of a mad rush of explorers wanting to ‘discover’ this beautiful, complex and accommodating country. As he explains in his book, that complexity and cultural depth was well understood in the region; it was the West that remained in ignorance. He was wary of projecting the Western desire for some untouched Eden onto a people who always greeted you with a smile. On the third of those journeys, to the Khumbu region below Everest with the American climber Charles Houston and his father Oscar, Tilman reached Namche Bazaar, the quasi-capital of this corner of Sherpa country. Houston saw the Himalayan equivalent of the noble savage, as though Sherpas were a lost North American tribe with the wisdom of the earth still in their veins. Tilman noticed that some of the windows had glass in them, and understood the impact remittances from migrant workers in Darjeeling were having on this paradise.

On the first journey, to Langtang, Tilman overcame his allergy to science so the expedition would have some higher purpose and so have a greater chance of being allowed in. He took along a geologist and a botanist, both of whom did useful work. Tilman himself got into the swing of things, promising to collect a certain species of beetle. ‘Not knowing much about beetles,’ his biographer J.R.L. Anderson wrote, ‘he interpreted this as collecting any beetle that came his way, which he did conscientiously, one of his beetles turning out to be new to science.’ You can almost hear him cursing in disappointment.

In Khumbu, Tilman faced another challenge that set his teeth on edge: the presence of a woman. A fair bit is made of Tilman’s supposed misogyny but his relationship with Betsy Cowles, an old climbing friend of Charlie Houston’s who joined them in 1950, suggests at least an alternative view. Tilman sulked when he realised she was sharing their adventure, but Cowles promised to win him round and soon did, the pair becoming inseparable, prompting a small burst of jealousy in Oscar. Cowles was then in her late forties, Tilman fifty-two; there is something in their friendship of the road not travelled, an unusual experience for Tilman, who travelled most of them.

The concluding lines of the book have a quiet but noble melancholy, the old soldier finally bowing before his greatest adversary: time. ‘The best attainable should be good enough for any man, but the mountaineer who finds his best gradually sinking is not satisfied.’ Tilman then quotes Beowulf’s stern demand that in old age the heart should be bolder, the spirit harder, and suggests that because he can’t achieve such a high standard, he will withdraw. Breezy self-deprecation was his literary signature, the bathetic always just around the corner. In his diaries he was almost darkly hard on his himself. I think Beowulf would have approved of his shift to the ever-restless oceans.

‘He was a deep and private man,’ Charles Houston wrote, ‘with an immense willpower and strength and an incredible sense of humour which he reserved for greatest effect, and one of the toughest men I ever knew. One sometimes felt that he courted disaster, longed for trauma, and he never did things the easy way if with a little effort they could be made to be impossible.’

That he is still read, when so much of mid-twentieth-century travel literature is not, says a great deal about his ability as a writer. He was shrewd enough not to strain too hard in his prose, which often reads like a translation from Latin, old-fashioned even when it was written, but often charming. He understood what his readers loved about him, twinkled with humour and mastered the English habit of self-mockery. And despite all that he suffered, was never quite overtaken by the deep shadows he ran from, to the ends of the earth.

– Preface –

A WRITER OF TRAVELS, by the title he gives his book, should not promise more than he performs. But titles must be brief and, if possible, striking. The brief and rather too all-embracing title of this book may conjure up visions of the author stepping lightly from one Nepal peak to the next, or surveying the whole from the top of one stupendous giant. In the course of three journeys herein described, only one mountain, a modest one, was successfully climbed, a fact which may account for any wordy pomposity, not unlike the style of a White Paper put out to cover up some appalling blunder on the part of Authority. Moreover, two of the three journeys had a serious purpose, which may account for the comparatively few occasions on which cheerfulness manages to break in. I am glad that the learned will benefit from the report on the Natural History of the Langtang valley specially contributed by Mr O. Polunin in an appendix.

Again I have to thank Dr R. J. Perring for criticism and help; and R. T. Sneyd, Esq., for attending to the reading of proofs in my absence.

H. W. TILMANBarmouthSeptember 1951

– PART ONE –

The Langtang Himal

1949

– CHAPTER I –

TO NEPAL

THERE CAN BE NO OTHER COUNTRY so rich in mountains as Nepal. This narrow strip of territory, lying between Sikkim and Garhwal, occupies 500 miles of India’s northern border; and since this border coincides roughly with the 1500-mile-long Himalayan chain, it follows that approximately a third of this vast range lies within or upon the confines of Nepal. Moreover, besides being numerous, the peaks of the Nepal Himalaya are outstandingly high. Apart from Everest and Kangchenjunga and their two 27,000 ft. satellites, there are six peaks over 26,000 ft., fourteen over 25,000 ft., and a host of what might be called slightly stunted giants of 20,000 ft. and upwards, which cannot be enumerated because they are not all shown on existing maps.

In trying to grasp the general lay-out of this mountain region it is convenient to divide it into three parts, represented—from west to east—by the basins of the Karnali, the Gandak, and the Kosi. These three important rivers, some of whose tributaries rise in Tibet north of the Himalaya, all flow into the Ganges. The Karnali drains the mountains of western Nepal between Api (23,339 ft.), near the Garhwal border, and Dhaulagiri (26,795 ft.); the basin of the Gandak occupies central Nepal between the Annapurna Himal and the Langtang Himal; and the Kosi drains the mountains of eastern Nepal from Gosainthan (26,291 ft.) to Kangchenjunga. It should be understood that, except for Everest and those peaks on the Nepal-Sikkim border, most of which (except Kangchenjunga) have been climbed, this enormous field has remained untouched, unapproached, almost unseen, until this year (1949) when the first slight scratch was made.

Nepal is an independent kingdom. Like Tibet it has always sought isolation and has secured it by excluding foreigners, of whom the most undesirable were white men. A man fortunate enough to have been admitted into Nepal is expected to be able to explain on general grounds the motives behind this invidious policy and, on personal grounds, the reason for such an unaccountable exception. But now that the advantages of the Western way of life are becoming every day less obvious no explanation should be needed. Wise men traditionally come from the East, and it is probable that to them the West and its ways were suspect long before we ourselves began to have doubts. Anyhow, for the rulers of countries like Nepal and Tibet, whose polity until very recent days was medieval feudalism, the wise and natural course was to exclude foreigners and their advanced ideas. And the poverty and remoteness of those countries made such a policy practicable. A hundred years ago the rulers of China and Japan regarded foreign devils with as much distrust and aversion, but unfortunately for them their countries had sea-coasts and ports; and, unlike Tibet and Nepal, promised to become markets which no nation that lived by trade could afford to ignore.