Lachenal and I were the scout party. Each morning we would set out well in advance of the main body, accompanied by a few Sherpas. It would still be cool and for some time we could walk fast until the mid-morning heat became oppressive and the immense boughs of a banyan tree, growing on a shoulder above a curve of the river, would tempt us to rest in their shade. Then we would stretch out and gaze at the ribbon of water winding through the green paddies as they rose step-like towards the ridges above. Other travellers would also stop in the coolness of the shade, and with a Sherpa to interpret it was fun to gossip with them. The ones that intrigued me most were the coolies, loaded like mules and running with sweat. I used to ask them where they came from and where they were going. These unaccustomed questions would make their wide faces wrinkle up with astonishment until their eyes almost disappeared, but few of them could supply a coherent answer. For them, ceaselessly coming and going, life was just one immense journey from the cradle to the grave.
Sometimes we would bathe in one of the rivers, and the startled washerwomen would rush away giggling and screaming, much hampered by their skirts. Many of them were extremely pretty, somewhat in the Japanese style, despite the large gilded ornaments they wore on their pierced left nostrils.
But our preferred halting places were the villages, where we sometimes spent hours sitting in little tea shops watching the leisurely rhythm of life flowing round us. I loved haggling in the tiny stalls with their pigeonhole shelves stuffed with curious foods, wooden combs, jewellery, bright dyes, and unappetising-looking spices. My Sherpa Aïla had been with Shipton and Tilman and spoke passable English.[8] I bombarded him with questions, and despite his natural good nature I think he found this abnormal curiosity rather trying at times. Lachenal was also very interested by all that went on around us, but patience was never one of his characteristics, and he found my halts too frequent. When he got tired of waiting he would lope off on his own, and I would find him asleep under a banyan a few hours later. Towards evening we would catch up with Panzy the cook, a veteran of many expeditions, whose job it was to choose the campsite for the night. He would start off with us each morning, but continue on his way when we halted. By the time we arrived his fire would be crackling under the fearful and invariable stew, a product of his own total lack of culinary talent, and of the habits acquired by long association with British masters. Shortly afterwards the rest of the sahibs would roll up, then the first of the coolies and Sherpas, the latter visibly lit up from the quantities of chang they had imbibed in the villages along the way.[9] Laughing and singing, they would pitch camp with the slickness of a conjuring trick, and in a few moments we could get into our tents and find our sacks unpacked, and everything laid out with the care of a perfect valet.
The bulk of the porters would drift in towards nightfall, in bands of ten or twelve. Still dripping with sweat they would set down their loads in the middle of camp, pick up the threadbare blanket and battered mug that constituted their total baggage, and trudge off to join their comrades. They cooked in little caste and tribal cliques, each with its own fire. Everyone had a job to do, the old men cooking vast quantities of the inevitable rice while the younger ones went off to chop wood and draw water. Meanwhile a few villagers draped in cheap cottons would gather in the shadows, silently contemplating these curious and fabled creatures which most of them had never seen before. I was invariably astonished by the philosophic way they accepted this new phenomenon – imagine the uproar and excitement if a Nepalese caravan camped on the outskirts of a French town! One could not help feeling that in learning to escape from passion and inquisitiveness these people had found wisdom, perhaps even happiness.
The children had of course not yet acquired the calm detachment of their elders. At first they would be timid, but before long they would invade the camp and start trying to get into the tents, causing our ordinarily gentle Sherpas to chase them like watchdogs. To see so many people ranked round the various fires was impressive, rather like a picture of an army bivouacking: and after all were not these muscular, flat-faced men, with enormous kukris stuck through the tops of their loin-cloths, related to the Mongol hordes which had once devastated Asia and Europe?[10] Were not their brothers in the British army the best soldiers in the world? They could have murdered us in a minute. To beings so deprived, our supplies must have seemed a treasure beyond price, and to escape from punishment would be no problem in such tortuous and sparsely policed country. Many more dangerous crimes have been committed for a great deal less, yet looking round their peaceful, laughing faces, one could see that for all their muscles and their kukris such an idea had never entered their minds for a moment. Personally I have never felt safer than I did then.
After a fortnight of this kind of thing we came to wilder country where the valleys narrowed to gorges looking as though sabred through the hills, each with its torrent. To negotiate these otherwise impossible obstacles, the track would turn into a veritable staircase among featureless walls of rock. I know of nothing which more spectacularly demonstrates the perfect adaptation of this mountain civilisation to its environment. Sometimes, as we crossed over a col, a glimpse of the great snow peaks would show us that we were approaching our goal.
We met with more and more Tibetan caravaneers who, unlike those we had encountered among the foothills, were often driving flocks of sheep, goats, and small donkeys loaded up with yak wool, sacks of salt and borax. Towards midday the animals would be unloaded and turned out to graze on the thin scrub and grass of the hillside until it should grow cooler. Then the long-haired drovers would gather them again with outlandish whistlings and plod on for a few hours more.
Finally the valley widened out and we came to a boulder-strewn plain, covered by the sediment of enormous floods. Above this stony desert Dhaulagiri rose into swirling clouds, vast and solitary. For twenty thousand feet there was nothing but the glint of riven glaciers, ridges that seemed like streamers in the wind, and sombre rock but-tresses higher than the Walker. The sight was so overwhelming that we sat down by the side of the trail feeling slightly numbed. I could only think to myself: ‘Well, there’s your dream come true at last.’ Then, as the first effect wore off, other thoughts came crowding: ‘How can we climb a giant like that? Those glaciers look awful, the Alps are nothing by comparison. Will we find a way out of the labyrinth? Let’s hope the other sides aren’t quite so inhuman.’
Our base camp was pitched at the extreme point of the mountain’s north-east ridge. The tents stood in neat rows on a wide terrace of scrubby yellow grass just above the village of Tukucha. It was quite different from the towns of lower Nepal, with its roomy, flat-roofed stone houses, able to serve both as stores and hostelries to the caravans that passed through several times a day during the season, coming and going between Nepal and Tibet. There the heavily laden men and women driving their pack-beasts from dawn to dusk could buy the tea, sugar and rice which are the essentials of life to them, and the mules and yaks could find fodder to nourish them after the arid mountain pasture. All kinds of trade went on in the shade of those houses – including, it was rumoured, opium and guns. Despite the fact that the caravanserais were built in the traditional style of their own country there were relatively few Tibetans about, and most of these seemed to be servants of the Nepalese merchants.
In theory we had maps, made by Indian surveyors at the time of British rule, but although they were artistically executed they bore no relation whatever to the topography except in the immediate area of the valleys. The whole of this part of Nepal was in fact virtually unexplored in the modern scientific sense of the word, the only exception being the visit of the American ornithologists the year before. The one thing we were sure of was that there were two eight-thousanders in the vicinity, and we owed this certainty to the fact that in clear weather they were visible from the plains of India, whence they had been accurately triangulated by expert British surveyors.
For practical purposes maples
s and without even photographs, we were feeling our way in the dark. This total ignorance of what to expect was the reason we had not decided in advance which of the two giants to attack: our plan was to reconnoitre them both, then to attempt the one that looked easier. Annapurna had always seemed rather the more probable, but Dhaulagiri was perhaps more desirable, being higher and very beautiful in its isolation. In the event we reconnoitred both summits simultaneously, and in order to cover the maximum ground with minimum loss of time we divided into four parties.
The only side of Dhaulagiri visible from the valley was the east face, so we decided to investigate it first. The lower part was really one great icefall, but we hoped that beginners’ luck would enable us to find a way through it to the north-east ridge, which linked the summit with another, farther to the right, which we called Tukucha peak. The ridge rose at an almost uniform angle of forty-five degrees and gave every sign of being simple enough … if only we could get to it. We had begun to realise that the main problem on Dhaulagiri is to get started at all. Four separate parties tried to force the East Glacier in vain. Finally Oudot, Aïla and I got to within some six hundred feet of the crest, only to find the way barred by an impassable labyrinth of gigantic crevasses after all our risks. We retreated without any regrets, our route having been far too dangerous to justify any further attempts. Even if a few ropes might have got away with it, it was out of the question for the constant heavy traffic of an expedition.
We also tried twice to get on to the north-east ridge from its other, northerly, flank. A two-day march brought Oudot and myself to a col commanding a good view of the colossal north face, which seemed to consist of steep, overlapping bars of limestone like the tiles of a roof. It certainly did not look like a reasonable line of ascent, yet during the next few years five expeditions were to attempt Dhaulagiri by this route. The Argentine party of 1953 even reached the north-west ridge about a thousand feet below the summit, and some people have suggested that, given a little more luck with the weather, they would have climbed the mountain. Personally, I doubt it. By the time they got to the ridge they were exhausted, and their leader, my friend Ibañez, had such bad frostbite that he died of it later. At such an altitude a thousand feet of extremely jagged ridge would be a doubtful proposition for a fresh party, let alone one in their condition.
Nor did it look to us possible to attain the wide snow-saddle between the north-east ridge and Tukucha peak. As far as we could see this sector of the mountain presented nothing but impossible bars of séracs, which appeared to go on round the corner. The whole cirque was so threatening that the idea of making a route up it anywhere never even occurred to us. Yet history was to prove us mistaken: nine years later the sixth expedition to Dhaulagiri reached the snow-saddle by exactly this route, and the following year the seventh repeated it and went on to the summit.[11] They found a dangerous gangway through the ice farther to the north, almost on the Tukucha peak itself, but it must have been far from obvious if well-organised parties of experienced mountaineers had succeeded in missing it for several years. It seems so extraordinary that I wonder if some major alteration to the glacier has not occurred.
Naturally I have sometimes regretted not pushing my reconnaissance a bit farther, but taking everything into account I do not think we would have got up Dhaulagiri even if we had succeeded in finding the way to the snow saddle. In 1950 the time was not yet ripe for such an exploit. We were short of time, experience and equipment; and above all we were short of Sherpas. Thus we had neither the strength nor the knowledge to exploit such a long, complex and difficult route. The English mountaineer Frank Smythe, one of the greatest of his generation, a member of five expeditions, the conqueror of Kamet and a man who had reached twenty-eight thousand feet on Everest without oxygen, had said flatly: ‘Himalayan mountaineering offers such difficulties that it seems unlikely that any expedition will succeed on one of the dozen highest summits at the first attempt.’ Smythe was a pioneer, and events have since proved him mistaken, but after all we were pioneering too, and Himalayan technique at that time had not progressed at all since his day. The weapons which brought success on Dhaulagiri in 1960 had not yet been forged: the party used an aeroplane to land some of their men and supplies on the snow saddle.
Herzog quickly came to the conclusion that Dhaulagiri was too tough a nut for us to crack, and without waiting for any further confirmation he switched all our efforts towards Annapurna. This mountain was difficult even to find, and at first we didn’t so much as succeed in getting a view of it. We almost began to wonder if it was another figment of our fairy-tale maps. In fact it was hidden from us by the Nilgiri range, and we had to get quite high up on the flanks of Dhaulagiri before we could see it. So far as we could make out there were steep crags on the south and east, but the northern side, which we commanded in profile, was a vast medium-angled snow slope, scarcely more than thirty-five degrees. There seemed no particular reason to suppose any major change of character lower down, and if we were right about this the ascent ought to be comparatively easy.
These favourable omens restored our morale. But in order to climb our easy snow slope we still had to find a way to the foot of it, and this was beginning to assume the proportions of a mystery. The Nilgiris, seen from a distance, gave the impression of an unbroken chain, and Annapurna therefore looked as though it began in another system of valleys beyond. Apparently we were either going to have to make an immense detour round the north-west of the range or cross it at some point of weakness, always supposing that one existed. We chose the latter solution as being the quicker, and the first reconnaissance attempted to cross the range by following the course of the Miristi Khola, which led to a deep breach in the mountain’s defences.
To tell the truth we were rather intrigued by the amount of water that came down this defile: it seemed too abundant to be accounted for solely by the relatively minor glaciers of the Nilgiris. We had an inkling, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it might drain the west face of Annapurna, or perhaps just possibly the north face; and the map, whose full inaccuracy we did not even yet suspect, appeared to bear this out. It showed the source of the river below the Tilicho col, and a straightforward path leading along it, over the col, and down to the Manangbhot valley on the other side. But it was too good to be true. Inquiries by the sirdar Angtharkay revealed that no one in the area had ever heard of Tilicho col or of any path leading up the Miristi and over the range. It was certainly puzzling.
Our European minds could not adjust to the idea that any map could be so inaccurate, and after all it seemed as logical to trust it as the word of a bunch of villagers who had little interest in the remoter parts of the mountains. Wishful thinking led us to suppose that knowledge of the trail might have died out owing to trade changes. Such things had happened before, and only recently we had found the greatest difficulty in discovering a man who could guide us up the valley to the west of Dhaulagiri, though when we got there we found not only a path but signs of erstwhile inhabitation. In the end we decided to see for ourselves. If the river could penetrate the heart of the range, why shouldn’t we?
Further inquiries by the Sherpas confirmed that the lower gorges of the Miristi were indeed impassable, but we had had certain views from Dhaulagiri which suggested the possibility of joining the river higher up. The obvious thing now was to put all this to the proof, and accordingly Oudot, Schatz and Couzy, accompanied by Angtharkay and some of the other Sherpas, set out to explore. They were able to get through the dense jungle of the lower slopes thanks to a tiny track placed by a beneficent providence precisely where it was most needed. This led them up to open country again, where they bore more to the right until they came to a shoulder on the south-west ridge of the Nilgiris. Thence a four-mile traverse along the sole ledge between a couple of three-thousand foot precipices brought them back to the torrent just above the point where the gorges widened out into a valley again. By this time, unfortunately, they wer
e exhausted from lack of food and could go no farther. Shortage of provisions forced them to turn back before they had explored the valley to its end.
The statements they made on their return did little to clear up the mystery that seemed to cloak the mountain. They were now quite convinced that the Miristi did drain at least the west face of Annapurna, and had also had a close look at a gigantic rock spur that appeared to lead to the north-west ridge. They had not found any obvious way of getting on to the glaciers of the north face, and the only possibility they could suggest seemed fantastic in its audacity: it consisted of climbing the spur and then the north-west ridge until the glacier could be gained from it. Presupposing that the hidden parts of the route did not reserve any nasty surprises, and given the fact that the main difficulties would come relatively low down, such a route was theoretically possible, but it was excessively complex and would raise technical problems so far never even considered in the history of Himalayan mountaineering.
None of this was exactly encouraging. Herzog, like the rest of us, felt that before committing ourselves to an enterprise of such uncertain issue we should find out definitely whether or not the North Glacier could be approached via the Manangbhot valley. While Oudot and I took a final look at the East Glacier of Dhaulagiri, therefore, Herzog, Ichac and Rébuffat would make a wide circuit of the range over the col separating the Nilgiris from the Muktinath massif. Though apparently unknown to the natives this pass offered no particular difficulties, but on the other side the party found themselves still cut off from Annapurna by an unknown chain of mountains which they dubbed ‘the Great Barrier’. They got back to Tukucha on 13th May, and the topography of Annapurna remained as baffling as ever. Our minds, accustomed to the less complex formations of the Alps, had difficulty in formulating the idea that the mountain and its satellites might, like Nanda Devi, constitute a closed circle without other issue than one narrow defile.
Conquistadors of the Useless Page 34
