A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  Like Webb three years earlier, Moorcroft and Hearsey failed to appreciate at first that they had broken through the main Himalayan barrier. They emerged from the Dauli gorge onto a broad glaciated valley covered in tall deodars and flowering scarlet rhododendrons. This was the Niti valley, which runs parallel to the Mana valley, twenty miles to the west, and had replaced it as the main thoroughfare to and from Western Tibet. Here the Bhotia people had their summer village of Niti, a few miles south of the 16,630-foot Niti pass into Tibet. On the far side lay Daba, which had replaced Tsaparang as the district capital of that part of Western Tibet. The name of Gugé had long since ceased to be used and Moorcroft and Hearsey knew of the area only as Hundes (or Undes), inhabited by Hunyias and part of Eastern Tartary.

  Moorcroft had sent a gift forward to the Tibetan Governor at Daba, on the far side of the pass, but on arrival at Niti he found that it had been returned together with a warning that, ‘to prevent the entrance of white people’, troops had been sent from Daba to guard all the main passes leading into Tibet. He refused to take this warning seriously: it was simply not in his nature to accept defeat. ‘My obstinacy is almost equal to my enthusiasm,’ he was later to write of himself. A new messenger was found and ordered to tell the Tibetan authorities at Daba that the pilgrims Mayapori and Haragiri were no more than ‘men of character really intending to go to lake Mansarowar, having merchandise to dispose of and not harbouring any evil design against the general welfare of the country.’ But the messenger was evidently none too happy at having to take such a message; Moorcroft and Hearsey watched in dismay as he was carried dead drunk to his yak. Before he and the yak passed out of sight at the head of the valley he was seen to fall off four times.

  They now had to spend three tedious weeks at Niti, using the local Bhotias as middle-men in their negotiations with the Tibetans. The Bhotias were the traditional go-betweens of the Western Himalayas but Moorcroft and Hearsey seriously misjudged the extent to which they were prepared to risk upsetting their neighbours. Much of the Bhotias’ livelihood came from trade with Tibet and they saw no advantage in offering assistance to two extremely dubious characters from the Indian plains. Hearsey found this attitude intolerable. ‘To such a degradation has human nature fallen,’ he wrote furiously in his journal when it became apparent that their negotiations were getting nowhere. ‘Although I have been in various parts of India, I have never met with such a mean, cunning, low race and Cowards to an extreme.’

  Dr Moorcroft reacted with some low cunning of his own. He brought out his medical kit and doctored anyone who cared to come to him for attention, including a young Bhotia boy whom he successfully tapped for dropsy. It was a relatively simple operation but a spectacular one and it won him the gratitude of the boy’s father, a trader from the neighbouring valley of Johar named Deb Singh Rawat. By a happy chance, Deb Singh Rawat and his brother, Bir Singh, were among the wealthiest and most influential Bhotias in the region – and by winning their confidence, Moorcroft set the seal on a remarkable alliance between the Bhotias and the British that still survives today.

  The first practical effect was a sudden end to all local obstruction; after a final round of negotiations – greatly sweetened by a bottle of brandy broached and turned into a punch – the travellers were told they could continue, together with a guide, new porters and two yaks, known to the Bhotias as chowhurs. ‘Surer footed animals do not exist in the Creation than these Chowhurs,’ wrote Hearsey admiringly as he and Moorcroft proceeded on their new mounts slowly but very surely towards the crest of the Niti La. The firs and rhododendron gave way, first to ‘gooseberry and wild rose-bushes’, then to small alpine flowers and finally to bare rock and snowfields.

  As night fell on 29 June 1812 they camped just short of the pass under ‘mountains like spires, fracturing with cold’, and looking back down the Niti valley saw the – then unidentified – peaks of Nanda Devi and Trisul catching the last rays of the setting sun.

  Before dawn next morning Moorcroft woke with ‘a great oppression about the heart’ and breathlessness. He was now in his forty-seventh year, which was old by Indian standards and ancient by Himalayan ones. From this point onwards scarcely a day passed without Hearsey making some reference to his companion’s poor health in his journal. However, on this morning both men were up and astride their shaggy transport by 6 am. It was a bright sunny day with few clouds in the sky and very little wind, and when they reached the saddle of the Niti La they found themselves looking out, somewhat apprehensively, over the seemingly limitless vista of the Tibetan plateau. ‘The prospect was awfully grand,’ wrote Hearsey. The country immediately below us to the N & E appeared a plain intersected by immense ravines – rounded on the horizon by the Kylass Mountains, many of whom were tipt with Snow.’ Moreover, to their great relief there was no reception committee of armed Tibetans waiting for them. They rode on until they came to the first sign that they had entered Buddhist territory, a lapcha or cairn of white stones topped by prayer flags on long poles. Here every member of the party halted to add a stone to the cairn. ‘This ceremony was observed very punctually by our Marchas,’ Hearsey recorded, referring to their Bhotia guides from Niti. ‘The success of an enterprise is dependent on this custom.’ Soon afterwards they camped and Dr Moorcroft bled himself of 16 ounces of blood to ease a headache. Hearsey, who was also feeling in poor spirits, dosed himself with ‘Black Salt and Aniseed’.

  Next day they met their first Tibetans, two pipe-smoking traders on ponies carrying salt destined for Niti. Afraid that once out of sight they might secretly double back and inform the authorities of their presence, Moorcroft persuaded them to turn their horses round and accompany him to Daba. These are the two Tibetans who appear in Hearsey’s well-known painting at the India Office Library, recording the moment when they crossed a second rise and saw the holy mountain rearing up ahead of them. Moorcroft watched the Tibetans dismount and prostrate themselves, bowing seven times before the mountain. On the same day their shikari, a professional hunter who had been conspicuously unsuccessful up till now, shot a burrhel (Blue Wild Sheep), a goat-like creature with long curved horns. Moorcroft was greatly intrigued by its physical characteristics and noted perceptively that ‘were it not fanciful to suppose a chain between the works of nature, I should say that this animal was the link between the deer and the sheep’.

  Two days later they reached Daba, a collection of flat-roofed houses and cave-dwellings built round a high promonotory of rock jutting out over the river Sutlej. As soon as their tents were up they received a visitor sent by the Deba, the town’s head lama. He came ostensibly, to inquire after their health but at the same time gave their temporary living-quarters a very thorough going-over. ‘He looked about my small tent with much curiosity,’ wrote Moorcroft, ‘and observed that my friend’s [Hearsey’s] half-boots were like those of a feringi [European]. I had taken the precaution of having my English shoes furnished with long turned up toes and tags at the necks and his not being done excited his suspicion.’ But while Moorcroft was still congratulating himself on his foresight the Tibetan began to ask why the doctor should have such a strange complexion: ‘The redness of my face, which from being exposed to a hot sun and a cold wind was almost wholly deprived of skin, particularly attracted his attention.’

  Next came a meeting with the Deba himself and a more direct cross-examination. But after accepting gifts of scarlet broadcloth, sugar and spice, the Deba pronounced himself satisfied that ‘the first representation of their being Gorkalis or Feringis was a mistake.’ He had already sent a messenger on horseback to the Military Governor at the trading post of Gartok informing him of the arrival of two foreigners at Daba; now he sent a second horseman with a fresh message that was intended to supersede the first.

  The Governor cannot have been greatly impressed by the Deba’s judgment, since Mayapori and Haragiri were at once summoned to appear before him at Gartok. There had been a scare four years earlier when it had seemed that foreigners w
ere about to invade the country – almost certainly a reverberation from the Ganga expedition of 1808 – and the Governor was not prepared to take chances.

  For William Moorcroft, this deviation from his original plan to go straight to lake Manasarovar suited him very nicely. As well as being a staging-post on the Ladakh-Lhasa highway, Gartok was the most important trading centre in Western Tibet and the possibility of opening up or diverting some of this trade down into India had been one of Moorcroft’s principal reasons for coming to Tibet. The party left Daba and crossed the Sutlej a day’s march upstream of Tsaparang. They climbed up into the mountains that Moorcroft had named the ‘Kylass range’ and soon afterwards crossed into the area drained by the Indus. Crossing a plain on which they saw some wild asses and a ‘prodigious number’ of hares they reached the bed of a ‘clear, broad and rapid, but not deep river’ which (like Desideri before them) they took to be the upper course of the Indus. Had they been allowed the opportunity to continue downstream past Gartok for another sixty-five miles to the confluence of the Gartang and Senge-Khambag rivers, they might well have had second thoughts. As it was, they felt sufficiently confident to claim on their return to India that they had established the source of the Indus.

  Gartok itself was something of a disappointment; it turned out to be no more than a few stone huts surrounded by traders’ tents. However, the meeting with the Governor went off very well from Dr Moorcroft’s point of view. During the next few days he spent many happy hours sipping Tibetan tea with the Governor and the agent of the Rajah of Ladakh and discussing various possibilities for future trading ventures. His chronic weakness for commercial transactions soon had him deeply involved in the Gartok livestock market. The goods they had brought up from India were traded in and Moorcroft and Hearsey left Gartok with a large flock of sheep as well as fifty pashmina goats, whose soft undercoats provided the pasham wool from which the shawls and woollens of Kashmir were made.

  Moorcroft envisaged a great future for this pasham wool in India. The goats themselves could only live at high altitudes but he foresaw that if their wool could be brought south through Garhwal a very substantial trade could be developed. This is exactly what happened: pasham wool became the mainstay of trans-Himalayan trade and within half a century it was the proud boast of the Bhotias that the shawls woven by their womenfolk were gracing the shoulders of the greatest monarch of them all, Bilayat ki maharani, Victoria, queen of the British.

  The Governor had given Dr Moorcroft permission to take his party back by way of Manasarovar, provided they kept to the traditional pilgrim routes. They hung on to their Indian identities but no longer felt the need to match their behaviour to their appearance and turned their attention, instead, to observing and mapping their surroundings with greater care, as well as to tending their herds of sheep and goats. Allowing their livestock to graze their way across the western slopes of the Kailas range, they slowly moved south again. As they crossed the Jerko La, Moorcroft was once more seriously affected with altitude sickness: Hearsey notes in his log that, in an unsuccessful attempt to purge himself, the doctor took ten grains of Calomel, three of James’s Fever Powder and two of Dr Robinson’s Brown Pills.

  On 31 July they were back beside the Sutlej but now almost at its source. Camped at the village of Tirthapuri Hearsey learned from its inhabitants that the river came from the nearby lake of Rawan Hrud (Rakas Tal). Yet as they made their way east he could see no connection between any of the streams flowing into the Sutlej and the lake. He therefore assumed – incorrectly – that the outlet from Rakas Tal must be further south and marked it in accordingly on his map.

  A week later they were crossing the extensive meadows that sloped down from the foot of Mount Kailas to the shores of the lakes. Below lay the turquoise lake that they had travelled over three hundred miles to see, with the Gurla Mandhata Range beyond, stretching out along the southern horizon. They made their way through herds of grazing yak, goats and sheep, and down past a series of mani-walls – ‘terraces of stone with the usual inscriptions’ – until they came to a lamasery at the lakeside, where they camped. The next morning Moorcroft and Hearsey celebrated their arrival, each in his own style.

  Hearsey’s log for 6 August 1812 begins, as usual, with a note on the weather: ‘Morning early raining & very cloudy Therm 47°.’ Then comes a cryptic remark – ‘Amamus today at 11 AM’ – which suggests that his earlier efforts to engage the interests of the opposite sex may not have been in vain. After breakfast he prepared to have a swim and a shave but then decided that the weather was against him. Instead he got out his fishing tackle and started to walk along the shore of the lake, in the path of Dr Moorcroft, who had set out about half an hour ahead of him: ‘I followed his footsteps looking for a place proper to throw in my tag line, but could not find one, the surf being so very high and the shore stony.’ After walking some three miles he gave up all thoughts of fishing and observing some ‘Poland Wild Geese and their young ones unable to fly’, attempted to stalk them: ‘I made my servants to lay down and they would have come closer, had we not have started up to catch the young Geese; we had a smart run for it & the youngsters were obliged to exert their legs for it & beat us hollow.’ Having had his fun Hearsey settled down to begin his survey of the lake.

  William Moorcroft’s behaviour was equally in keeping with his character. He knew that the lake was considered by Hindus to be ‘the most sacred of all places of worship, founded probably on the difficulty of access to it’ but he was consumed less by feelings of awe than by an overwhelming curiosity to know what river – or rivers – flowed out of Manasarovar. He now knew that of the several rivers that were said to derive their sources from it, the Ganga could now definitely be discounted. The ‘old pundit’, Harballabh, had told him that there was a channel running between Manasarovar and Rakas Tal, as well as an exit from Rakas Tal, ‘which, escaping from its western extremity near the foot of the great mountain, formed the first branch of the Sutlej.’ Moorcroft was now ‘determined not to leave this point in doubt.’

  At about ten o’clock he began walking south-west along the beach – ‘although very weak from the frequent attacks of fever to which I had lately been subject’. Soon he passed a number of simple cave-dwellings set back a little from the water’s edge, in one of which lived an elderly Tibetan nun. She did her best to solicit Moorcroft but the doctor was ‘so ungallant as to refuse the lady’s hospitality’ and decided to give her motives the benefit of the doubt: ‘A weather-beaten face, half-stripped of its natural covering, blistered lips, a long bushy beard and moustachios, in a country where the former is carefully plucked out, had probably raised emotions of Pity.’

  He continued to walk along the beach until he reached a high bank of shingle that seemed to form a ‘natural barrier’ against any exit of water from the lake. A little further ahead he could see a knoll; he climbed up to it, hoping that this would give him a good view of the shoreline further south and so ‘put an end to a task which I now found somewhat too much for the little strength I possessed.’ However, when he got to the top ‘another mountain intervened to prevent my view. When I reached the summit of this, another equally high presented itself. My servants were much fatigued: for my part I was obliged frequently to lay down.’ It was not until four o’clock that the indefatigable doctor finally reached a ‘small religious pile’ that marked the spot where he could get an uninterrupted view:

  The sky, which had frequently been overcast and disturbed with violent gusts of wind, now became clear, and sunshine illuminated the whole of the circumference of the lake, so as to enable me distinctly to define every portion of its shore close to the edge of the water, and up to the foot of the mountains, by which it is embayed.

  There were numerous watercourses leading into it, the most important of which was the Krishna, sweeping down a ravine between two high mountains of the Himalayan range, and expanding like a sheet as it approached the verge of the lake; but not a break, nor any other appeara
nce indicated the escape of any river or even of any small stream from it. Although this was clear enough from the naked eye, I employed a telescope; and this showed that the Mansarovar sends out no rivers to the South, North or West. [My italics.]

  Having established that there was no exit from the lake, Moorcroft began to retrace his steps back to the camp. Hearsey meanwhile had been observing the varied forms of wildlife to be found on and beside Lake Manasarovar – including, it seems, the lake’s own monster:

  On returning before sunset I saw an enormous large Animal or Fish take a porpoise. He kept a considerable time upon the Surface, was of a brown colour and had apparently Hairs; I at first mistook it for a dead Chowhur until I saw it in motion when it disappeared.

  At sunset a strong wind blew up and it was not until 11 o’clock that the exhausted Moorcroft finally stumbled into camp, ‘almost starved from hunger and cold’. Next day the younger of the two pundits, Hurruck Dao, and a companion were sent out to check Moorcroft’s observations. They returned just before midnight, having completed an astonishing round rip of some thirty-six miles. They had kept close to the shoreline all the way but, as Hearsey noted in his journal, ‘could find no Channel by which this Lake had any connection with Rawan Rudd.’

  The second day by the lake was spent taking measurements and bearings. Manasarovar revealed itself to be a large, nearly oval-shaped lake sixteen miles wide from south-east to northwest and about ten miles wide at its narrowest point. On the strip of land running between the two lakes were three ‘distinct eminences’, which took away all probability of any communication between the two. ‘From these Observations,’ Hearsey concluded, ‘it is fully proved that this extensive Lake to which such sanctity is given in the Hindu Shastras has no communication by exit with any River or even with Rawan Rudd. It is perfectly insulated and girt by mountains.’