Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  (Local natives took a darker view. Years later, when John’s brother Charles visited William’s grave, he learned that the house where he died was popularly known as “Murder House” and had remained uninhabited ever since.)

  It was a melancholy leave-taking, and for Nigel the mood lingered on during an outing with S—— that followed. They rode out from Peshawar into a canyon that debouched from the mountains, accompanied by a dozen rough-looking men with incongruously exquisite manners. S—— identified them only as “friends.” They reached their destination the following day, emerging into an upland of undulating ridges after navigating a succession of ever-steepening tracks through a vertical maze of rocky ramparts. This was Jagdalak, with its deposits of precious red corundum in a matrix of chalk-white marble.

  We do not know whether Nigel entered one of the trenches where rubies were mined. Afterwards he wrote only of the “miners” at Jagdalak, without saying what they mined. But we do know what he saw there, because Jagdalak is also the site of the killing ground where the last of the Army of the Indus was slaughtered. He saw a hill of bones, and it unnerved him. He told S—— that he could not but fear for the future of his countrymen, so sure of themselves yet so vastly outnumbered.

  20

  * * *

  A Crossing

  WITHIN A FEW weeks of his visit to Hasan Abdal, Nigel decided to follow Nicholson’s example and put in for home leave. Though he was just short of the decade of service in India that was usually required to qualify, paid leave was sometimes awarded earlier, on grounds of medical necessity or service in difficult conditions. It may have been Nicholson who advised Nigel that his work at Hoshiarpur and Kapurthala entitled him to special consideration. The Jullundur Doab had never been a war zone. But it qualified as a hardship post for civilians in peacetime, and life had only gotten rougher around the edges with the onset of the Second Anglo-Sikh War.

  It probably did not hurt his chances that the dust had yet to settle from the reorganization of the Punjab administration. There were sure to be changes in the way revenue officers went about their business. But the nature of those changes remained in dispute—one that increasingly pitted John Lawrence against his brother Henry. For the rank and file caught in the middle, it was a convenient time to take a break, and at the end of January 1850, Nigel duly received leave to depart for England.

  Most of those awarded leave made haste for the steamship docks of Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras. They hurried not only to escape the climate but to cut to the matrimonial chase in England, which was officially regarded as the main point of a Company man’s first home leave. Marriage—to virtuous women of European descent—had been championed as a boon to empire since Richard Wellesley first advanced the idea that the British were a superior people who ruled most effectively by keeping to themselves. With the rise of the Evangelical movement and with parsons and missionaries flooding into India as never before, it was counted a Christianizing force as well. The dutiful memsahib who diverted her husband from giving vent to his “ungovernable passions” in the arms of a native mistress was also expected to compel his attendance at daily matins.

  Young men who wanted to work for the Company, however, were still required to apply while in their mid-teens. They consequently arrived in India unattached, and the marriageable women of the “Fishing Fleet” that followed in their wake typically sought matches with bachelors whose griffinhood was long behind them. Home leave was the mechanism that corrected the imbalance of supply and demand. John Nicholson told Nigel at Hasan Abdal that the sole object of his upcoming leave was to comfort his mother in her bereavement. But Henry Lawrence had other ideas. “Get married, and come back soon,” he wrote in approving Nicholson’s request in October 1849.

  Whether or not Nicholson meant to comply with Lawrence’s wishes, he chose to tarry awhile in India after wrapping up his Company duties, and so did Nigel. Nicholson, accompanied by Herbert Edwardes, who was also bound for England, made a seven-hundred-mile river voyage in a rustic Indian houseboat down the Sutlej and the Indus in January 1850. It was a lazy interlude in which the two officers slipped into a companionable routine, exploring the shore after making fast to the riverbank each evening, searching for tiger tracks in the sand as their boatmen smoked “hubble-bubbles” and cooked simple meals. Nigel found himself on the lookout for big cats, too, on a detour that was far more challenging. On a fine winter morning in February, three days’ journey out of Patna, still accompanied by S—— , he alighted from a bullock cart on the bank of a poisonous-looking stream, its water black with rotting leaves. Eight or nine low-walled mud huts with shaggy mounded roofs like haystacks straggled up the opposite bank, interspersed with clumps of bamboo, tamarind, and mango trees. Beyond was a vivid green line of vegetation, running east and west to the horizon.

  Nigel and S—— were bound for the heart of the Great Himalaya Range, and there lay the way to hidden Nepal. There the mountain torrents met the lowland plain. There the plain’s fine sediments and clays formed a natural dam for the groundwater flowing through the coarser soil brought down from the highlands, forcing it to the surface in marshes and springs. There was the Terai, a natural barrier twenty miles wide and a thousand miles long.

  The “moist land.”

  Beneath its emerald canopy, everything seemed to be dissolving—the huge, shiny leaves, the tree trunks covered with dripping lichen, the slippery, squelching, rotting earth. It was a realm of fungi and ferns, worms and snakes, the Bengal tiger and the Indian rhinoceros, carnivorous flowers, indigo butterflies, mosquitos and malaria.

  A no-man’s-land.

  The Terai had stymied would-be conquerors for millennia. The Mauryas. The Guptas. The Mughals. The British. Even the indigenous Tharu, with their inherited resistance, fled the vicious malaria, called awal, that plagued the Terai from the end of April to the end of October.

  Nigel addressed the heavily built driver in local dialect.

  “Yo kun tao ho?”

  What place was this?

  The driver repeated the question, turning the answer over in his mind.

  It was, he said finally, a Tharu place.

  The last place.

  Nigel had guessed as much. The terms negotiated the night before in Segowlee had provided for the driver’s services as far as the kalo pani, a few miles distant. The “black water” could only be the unwholesome stream before them.

  It was also the boundary of British jurisdiction thereabouts, but that had nothing to do with the driver’s reluctance to cross it. The stream marked the end of the road. No track or path traversed the jungle. There was only a route, a route known only to the Tharu.

  But the village looked deserted. Where were the Tharu themselves? asked Nigel. Back in Segowlee?

  No, said the driver. Those particular Tharu would reside in that village for a while yet, until the rains came. They were usually employed in the difficult and dangerous task of catching wild elephants. Even women and children joined in the pursuit, watching and waiting in the jungle.

  Well before dark, they would make their way back. No one dared pass the night in the dread Terai, where ferocious beasts stalked unsuspecting prey, and the air itself was poisoned by the breath of serpents.

  In that case, Nigel said, the Terai must be crossed in one day’s time. Was that possible?

  The driver thought so.

  The Tharu were thulo manche, big strong men.

  From time to time, other sahibs had made the journey, borne in hardwood litters bound with coarse hemp rope.

  Or so it was said.

  One heard many things, of course.

  One did indeed. Nigel had already heard that the Tharu bearers were a stalwart lot. But he also heard of their profound unease in the jungle’s depths. In the vaporous half-light with its malignant shadows, amid the pipings and squeakings, there was always the temptation to abandon Englishmen to their own devices. On more than one occasion, according to Company records, it had proved irresistibl
e.

  S—— was no better informed than Nigel about the way ahead. The dusty cargo of the bullock cart included two exquisite pony saddles of hand-tooled leather, crafted to order in Lahore. S—— had furnished the specifications. An accomplished horseman, he surmised from his experience of mountain tracks in his native Afghanistan that full-size mounts would prove unsuited to the still more treacherous terrain beyond the jungle.

  They had planned to make their way to Kathmandu on sturdy ponies purchased in Segowlee. Upon arrival, though, they found no ponies to be had—even for hire.

  It hardly mattered. The dissonant voices of the local bazaar spoke as one in dismissing the notion of mounted travel to the sovereign kingdom of Nepal.

  The track was too rough and too steep.

  Too confined here, too airy there.

  No horses could be led through those mountains, let alone ridden.

  “We were assured that we must only proceed in doolies, borne by coolies to be hired for each stage,” wrote Nigel afterwards. “By no means relishing the enforced separation, nor the discomfort of such a jarring progress through the precipitous country, we privately resolved to walk.”

  All they really knew was that crossing the dismal stream meant entering forbidden territory. There was nothing complex about Nepalese foreign policy. Its sole object was the prevention of foreigners from entering the country. So it had been since the kingdom’s founding in 1768, and so it would remain until the mid-twentieth century. The Terai functioned as Nepal’s main bulwark against the outside world. But there was man-made reinforcement. Two or three days’ journey into the mountains beyond, loopholed walls marked the checkpoint and choke point of Sisaghari. Its fortress-like facade commanded a defile where the only track to Kathmandu dwindled into a traverse of a ledge beside a precipice. The orders issued to its tenders brooked no disobedience:

  “If any person has constructed unauthorized tracks in your area, discover and locate such tracks and install pikes or plant thorny bushes there in such a manner that no persons can pass through them. If any person tries to pass forcibly, capture him if possible or else fell him with poisoned arrows . . . If you permit any person, irrespective of his status, to proceed onwards without a document bearing the signature of the passport authority, we will behead you.”

  The necessary signature could be obtained only in Kathmandu. Lacking bona fides, Nigel and his companion hoped to substitute a letter of introduction to Maharaja Jang Bahadur, which S—— carried in the pocket of his jacket. They were counting on the literacy of someone at the checkpoint, someone moreover with fluency in Persian, the language of diplomacy in British India.

  Which was counting on rather a lot. Nigel stood there peering into the rampart of jungle that checked the encroachment of the civilizing plain. No one would call him a novice at choosing a road less taken. He had forsaken the fast track to advancing his career at Government House in Calcutta. He had turned his back on the Bengal Club. He had invited Henry Lawrence to “borrow” him for service even farther afield than Patna, in locales so rustic and obscure that he was virtually certain to be overlooked for promotion. But this was different. Crossing the black water meant abandoning the road itself. Crossing the black water meant taking his life into his hands.

  He might end up in the mouth of a man-eating tiger. Even if he made it as far as Kathmandu, he could hardly count on a welcoming embrace from the maharaja. He was just as likely to be handed over to a dungeon master or executioner—perhaps more likely, based on the stories he had heard in India of the murders attributed to Jang Bahadur in his ruthless pursuit of power.

  More than murders, actually.

  Massacres.

  Anyone would feel uneasy. Nigel must have harbored second thoughts, but he kept them to himself. He scrambled down the bank and got his feet wet.

  PART II

  21

  * * *

  Chandragiri

  1975

  NOTHING LOOMED LARGER in the legend of Nigel Halleck than the palace he was said to have occupied in Kathmandu. There were footmen by the regiment, my mother had assured me, and a vast gilded ballroom. There was a dining hall crowded with hunting trophies big as houses, menacing tigers and charging rhinoceri, glass eyes glowering as he tucked into his tea. There was a bevy of maidens in tight black blouses and long pleated skirts, who daily brought in baskets on their backs the rhododendron wood that burned beneath the cauldron heating water for his splendid morning bath.

  These details—and many more, all mined from the same gorgeous vein, polo grounds and palanquins and pink Italian marble—were preserved in the collective memory of his family and passed down the generations, but none were documented in the three surviving letters that chronicled his life there. When I thought about Nigel as I closed in on Kathmandu myself, on foot, following the same route through the Himalayan foothills that Nigel and S—— had taken in 1850, I could not help doubting every one of them. Some sounded a suspiciously personal note. Rhododendrons struck me as an unlikely source of firewood, but they were definitely my mother’s favorite flower.

  Nepal itself seemed an implausible setting for such extravagance. It had always been one of the poorest countries in the world. That morning I had awakened before dawn to the drumming of rain on the corrugated tin roof of the Sisaghari rest house, a few minutes’ walk past the decaying fort whose officers had been charged with beheading any foreigners attempting to enter the kingdom without official permission. Before I left, I was careful to leave a few rupees in coins for the caretaker. Paper money had yet to catch on in those parts. Barter was as prevalent as cash. Prices might be quoted in eggs or needles or hard dried cheese.

  The caretaker had promised me tea and a boiled egg for breakfast. But I was anxious to leave. The rain had stopped when the sun rose, leaving the green hills steaming under a blue sky dappled with thin silver clouds. A sign gave the elevation as 5,875 feet. I had grown up in the shadow of Mount St. Helens, then regarded as an “extinct” volcano. After climbing it several times, I had gone up most of the other great peaks of the Cascade Range, and I knew mountain weather. The clouds would fatten as the day wore on. I didn’t want to miss the chance of seeing the Himalayas from the overlook of Chandragiri, high above Kathmandu.

  After weeks of rattletrap buses and “hard class” railway cars, it felt good to be moving under my own power. Two days before, after leaving Patna and crossing the Terai on a narrow-gauge line to Raxaul, on the Nepalese border, I had parted company with my classmate. She boarded a bus bound for Kathmandu on the motor road completed in 1956, the first to reach the city. I started hiking.

  The path stayed high for a mile or so, then plunged down the dry bed of a seasonal torrent. Pines gave way to a graceful forest of tapering sal trees, the forest to wild rose and pomegranate in the valley of a shallow river. Sometimes a scent like grape stole across the way, clean and sweet, carried from masses of blue Vanda orchids. The outcrops of hard clay that emerged here and there from the sandy soil were the deep red of lungcha, used by the Newars of Kathmandu for painting the walls of their houses.

  Across the river was a mountain to climb. I zigzagged up a giant’s staircase of cultivated terraces that ended in a vertical wall below the top. The wall was rent by a deep, narrow fissure, and the track followed the fissure. A carmine-daubed deity stood guard at the pass. Protruding from an excavation in the fissure beside it was a black stone phallus, brightened by a garland of marigolds. While I caught my breath, a laden bullock heaved into view, baskets of betel nuts lashed to its back. Another followed, loaded down with sheets of copper. A third carried bales of calico cloth. Their barefoot driver was a boy in tattered shorts. He stopped in his tracks and stared, surprised to see a sahib. Then he pressed his palms together in front of his chest and murmured, “Namaste.”

  I salute the god in you.

  The caravan passed, heading south toward the plain. The track now angled toward the hidden valley like a needle swung by a lodestone. At the
bottom of another long descent flowed a full-throated stream, its near bank grassy, the far a lustrous butte of blackest earth—eaten most greedily, I was given to understand in the village on the other side, by elephants when indisposed.

  The face of the man who gave me directions was pitted from smallpox. He was renewing the thatch on the roof of his house when he saw me fording the river. He climbed down a notched-log ladder to point out the way up the mountain that loomed behind the village.

  Or, in local parlance, the “hill.”

  Elevation, 7,500 feet above sea level, higher than any point in the United States east of the Rockies.

  There were two routes to the top, he indicated. One, the old elephant track, was the prominent gash that gouged the mountainside from top to bottom. The other, well to the right, was an indistinct path, its airier sections interrupted with disquieting frequency by debris from rock avalanches. That the old way was nonetheless the greater of two evils he made clear despite the language barrier.

  If I fell, I would die.

  The new way was longer but not so bad.

  Either way looked impossible to me without a rope. Fortunately, I had read the journal of a Scotsman who reported that he had been carried up the rightward path on the backs of coolies in 1947, at the age of sixty-three.

  I was still climbing when I knew that there would be no glimpsing the Himalayas that day from the summit. The wind blew the smell of rain down the mountain ahead of the rain itself—the smell of wet earth and fiddlehead ferns. Before long, a mesh of clear water silvered the slope, mica flakes sparkling in the channels of its rivulets and rills. I unfurled my umbrella just as the gradient eased and walked fast in the downpour toward a gap in the forest on the other side of the mountain. I could almost taste the anticipation of my first view of Kathmandu, even as I mentally closed the book on the fable of Nigel’s palace there. Coolies might have managed to haul a Scotsman up Chandragiri Hill, but slabs of Italian marble?