Day 130: Book Excerpt: Call Of the Everest

In the fall of 1984 I trudged northward across a broad, flat snowfield. Its highest point arose in the form of a stout wooden pillar, marking the border between Nepal and Tibet. This was the legendary Nangpa La, the 19,050-foot (5,800-meter) pass located in the shadow of Cho Oyu, a peak that rises to the west of Mount Everest. I tied a kata prayer scarf to a tangle of others on the post and recited Buddhist mantras common to Tibetans of the Tibetan Plateau and to the Sherpas of Nepal to the south. Retracing my steps, I caught a fragrance that blew in gently from the south: pine and juniper forests warmed by the sun, melded with dust and incense and wood smoke from the lowlands of Nepal and the Gangetic Plain of India.

Descending on the Nepal side of the border, I followed a maze of granite rubble that had been churned up and deposited on the glacier’s surface. Yaks can follow the scent left by previous caravans, but lone travelers must decode their way through the monochromatic scree. I found no sign of yak dung—every scrap had been thrown onto the loads of the yak trains for use as cooking fuel. And the cairns meant to mark the trail were just as the Tibetan traders had described them: imaginary piles of stones that moved and disappeared like phantoms.

The route over the Nangpa La has long been a conduit of history, trade, and culture for Tibetans and their Sherpa kin—the people of Everest. I was entering Khumbu, the Sherpas’ homeland—a region circumscribed by the headwater valleys that drain the Nangpa La and the south side of Mount Everest. Khumbu’s waters eventually merge into the Dudh Kosi River and flow toward India. One monk described the outline of Khumbu and its veins of rivers as “shaped like a flower bud about to bloom.”

Nearly 500 years ago, Sherpa legend says, hunting dogs belonging to a man named Kira Gombu Dorje chased a wild sheep across the Nangpa La. The dogs, in turn, were pursued by the hunter—the first Tibetan to settle in Khumbu’s fertile, temperate valleys. The south side’s greener pastures soon drew a pioneer community of shar-pa, “people of the east,” who became citizens of Nepal.

In winter, when farming and herding is relatively dormant in Tibet, people from the north side of Everest still climb over the Nangpa La. They are either traveling on Buddhist pilgrimage or as refugees from China, seeking opportunities in India or the West. Their bid to reach the outside world—by scaling the spine of the Himalaya—underscores the Tibetans’ irrepressible desire to experience the freedom that the Sherpas to the south enjoy.

THE SPIRIT OF KHUMBU

The Sherpas of Khumbu barely number more than 3,500, with a parallel population of 17,000 more in Solu, a region three days’ walk to the south. For at least a century these two enclaves, distinguished by subtle differences in dialect and dress, have been closely linked by marriage. From the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries, the arcane laws of Nepal’s Rana oligarchy restricted trade with Tibet to men who lived in border districts. This made Khumbu husbands especially desirable to brides from Solu, by allowing their families to marry into a valuable trade connection.

But the Sherpas’ connection with Tibet was maintained as much for religion as it was for trade. Beginning in the early 1900s, many of the Khumbu Sherpas sent their boys north, back across the Nangpa La, for monastic training at the Buddhist monastery of Rongbuk, near Everest’s Base Camp on the Tibet side of the mountain. From this monastery the Sherpas drew much of their formal religious traditions.

Tenzing Norgay, who climbed Everest with Ed Hillary in 1953, grew up in the Tibetan village of Kharta, directly to the northeast of Everest. After studying briefly at Rongbuk, he crossed the Nangpa La, in the 1920s, and settled with his parents in the Khumbu village of Thame. At age 18, he left Khumbu to search for work in Darjiling—a hiring and staging point for foreign climbing expeditions to Everest.

Tenzing’s nephew Nawang Gombu—who climbed Everest with Jim Whittaker in 1963—also studied at Rongbuk for two years, until he could no longer endure the strict monastery regimen. One night he bundled up his clothes, sneaked out through the hole of a latrine, and walked over the Nangpa La to Khumbu.

The Cultural Revolution began in 1966—seven years after the uprising against the Chinese in Lhasa. During that chaotic period, the Rongbuk monastery was destroyed. Fortunately, most of Rongbuk’s arcane and colorful Buddhist traditions had already regerminated, with a distinctive flair, and were thriving in the Sherpa monasteries of Solu and Khumbu.

SACRED SITES

Below the Nangpa La lies no ordinary mountain valley. I was now descending into a beyul: one of several “hidden valleys” of refuge designated by Padmasambhava, the ninth-century “lotus-born” Indian saint, revered by the Sherpas as Guru Rinpoche, who subdued the often wrathful territorial deities of the mountains and converted them into defenders of the Buddhist faith.

In order to protect Buddhist beliefs and teachings during times of adversity, Guru Rinpoche’s female consort is believed to have hidden “treasure texts” in the valleys’ forests and hillsides. These sacred documents are time capsules, essentially. When revealed in future eras, devout people will be able to recover their faith and relearn the wisdom of the ancients.

These beyul are blessed with spiritual energy, and the Sherpas say that one should behave with reverence when passing through this sacred landscape. Here the karmic effects of one’s actions are magnified, and even impure thoughts should be avoided.

Sites of spiritual power are scattered throughout Khumbu: ancient meditation caves, “self-emanated” handprints and footprints impressed in rock, and curious snakelike intrusions that for Sherpas represent the lu serpent spirits. Small shrines and bamboo wands, adorned with prayer flags, are set up at springs, wells, and stream confluences—places graced by the nourishing flow of water. Villagers say that the rain from the sky and the water in their springs can dry up if these sites are defiled—for instance, if a lowlander were to slaughter a goat nearby and dress the meat in the water source. This offends the lu and can cause them to flee.
Khumbu’s harsh environment only seems to invigorate the Sherpas’ faith. Just as the Himalaya were formed by intersections and accretions of geologic material, the religion of the Sherpas is accretionary—a blend of shamanism, pre-Buddhism, and Bon and Tibetan Buddhism—while pantheons of clan gods and territorial deities lurk and cavort on the hillsides.

~~Call Of the Everest -by- Conrad Anker

Day 111: Book Excerpt: Into The Silence

George Nathaniel Curzon, 11th Viceroy of India, suffered from a congenital curvature of the spine that in time would condemn him to an iron corset and bring pain to his every step. But this did not stop him from traveling on foot and horseback halfway across Asia on several occasions. He began in 1887 with a slow circumnavigation of the world, by sea and rail, west to Canada and beyond to Japan, Hong Kong, India, Aden, and home. A year later he penetrated the khanates of central Asia, traveling overland from Moscow, crossing the Caspian Sea, moving by rail to Bukhara and Samarkand, and thence by horse-drawn cart to Tashkent and the Black Sea. In 1889 he traversed Persia, riding as much as seventy-five miles a day through searing desert sands, his precise observations filling hundreds of pages of notebooks that in time would yield a definitive two-volume account, Persia and the Persian Question, published to acclaim in 1892. His eye was that of a spy. Nothing, it seemed, escaped his notice.

In 1894, following a second journey around the world, Curzon traveled alone to India and, after a stubborn effort, secured permission from the Raj to embark on a diplomatic mission to visit the newly instated emir of Afghanistan. His route of approach was deliberately circuitous. He marched north from Gilgit to the Pamirs, beheld the savage beauty of Hunza, and continued northward to become the first Westerner to trace the Oxus River to its source in Russian Turkistan, a feat of exploration for which he would be later awarded the coveted Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. When finally he entered Kabul, he did so in style, having arranged with a theatrical costume designer in London to outfit him with a dazzling uniform, complete with massive gold epaulets, a row of glittering medals and decorations, and a giant curved sword. The entire getup was a purely constructed fantasy, given meaning and power by the audacity of the man.

Moving through life with cold certainty, his awkward gait concealed by what one peer described as an “enameled self assurance,” Lord Curzon in many ways embodied the essence and contradictions of British rule in India. The scion of a seven-hundred-year-old aristocratic dynasty, he was the son of a distant father and the product of a sadistic nanny who once forced him to write the family butler to order a cane to be made with which he might be properly thrashed. At Eton and Oxford he acquired an air of “ineffable superiority.” In London society his libido was said to rival his intellect. He inherited lands and titles, but found wealth in marriage to a beautiful American heiress, Mary Leiter. His family seat in Derbyshire, Kedleston Hall, had inspired the architecture of the regal palace in Calcutta, and thus he slipped readily into the role when finally, in 1899, just short of his fortieth birthday, he achieved his political dream and became viceroy of India.

Like the entire British adventure in India, Curzon was at once pompous and vain, earnest, ruthlessly enterprising, and rigidly devoted to a mission of moral superiority. He wrote books on Indian carpets, restored the glory of the Taj Mahal, and preserved the Pearl Mosque of Lahore, the Mandalay Palace, and the temples at Khajuraho. He sought justice in the abstract and demanded accountability from the army, punishing entire regiments for the violation of a single Indian woman, even as his government stood idle while famines swept the land and the cadavers of children fed growing packs of jackals and wild dogs. Like his queen, whose only knowledge of India was derived from her dispatch box and the behavior of her servants—Victoria, empress of India, never visited the jewel of her realm—Curzon believed that he had a special feel for the real Indians, the colorful and quaint villagers, who were so unlike the educated classes he disdained. “There were no Indian natives in the Government of India,” he once observed, “because among all 300 million people of the subcontinent, there was not a single man capable of the job.” It was the idea of India, not its reality, that fired his imperial imagination.

As viceroy he sat alone at the pinnacle of a cadre of a mere 1,300 British men of the Indian Civil Service that ruled fully a fifth of humanity. The Indian Army was strong and well trained, but it numbered only 200,000, and only a third were British regiments, and these were dispersed from Siam to Persia. In much of the subcontinent, British authority resided solely in a single district officer, who spent each day in the saddle, moving from village to village, adjudicating disputes, levying taxes, enforcing the rule of law, and maintaining order across thousands of square miles with populations sometimes measuring in the millions. Mercantile zeal, severe military reprisals, and the subversion of local elites all played a role in the maintenance of the Raj. But what really held it together was the very audacity of the venture, the sheer gall of a small island nation that had never set out to rule the world, and yet did so with such flair.

The entire British presence in India, as Curzon fully understood, depended on the presumption of power, which in turn was reinforced on a daily basis by ten thousand acts of domination and will intended to inculcate in the Indian people a sense of their own inherent inferiority. This was the essence of colonialism. Image counted for everything. The summer palace at Simla employed three hundred domestic servants and no fewer than a hundred cooks. In a typical season, the viceroy would hold court at a dozen grand dinners for fifty, in addition to twenty-nine somewhat smaller affairs, which flanked the summer’s truly important events: the state ball, a second, equally sumptuous fancy dress ball, a children’s ball, two evening parties, two afternoon garden parties for a thousand, and six dances with 250 invited guests. A stickler for ritual detail and protocol, Curzon insisted that his servants dress in livery, white breeches and silk stockings, and he took precise measure of the length of the red carpets unrolled before him on ceremonial occasions.

Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, in 1898, was the most expensive event ever staged in the history of humanity, but for color and exotic opulence it was no match for the 1902 Durbar orchestrated by Curzon in celebration of the coronation of her son Edward VII. With the new king unable to attend and represented in Delhi by his brother, the Duke of Connaught, the entire two-week extravaganza became, in fact, a tribute to the viceroy, just as Curzon had anticipated. His moment came on New Year’s Day as a million Indians lined the streets of Delhi to behold the imperial procession as it moved from the city to the plain above, where five miles of railroad had been laid simply to handle the flow of the invited guests, who numbered 173,000. A great amphitheater had been constructed, and along the axis of the approach were magnificent pavilions containing the largest displays of Indian art ever assembled—acres of carpets and silks, pottery and enamels, priceless antiquities. Every region of India had its camp, identified with glorious silk banners that shone in the sun through the dust of the parade.

Flanked by a peacock array of ambassadors from some fifty princely states, the viceroy received all the native rulers of India, as prayers and hymns celebrated the investiture of scores of men and women being honored for their fidelity and service to the Raj. A yellow haze spread over the fields as the first of some sixty-seven squadrons of cavalry and thirty-five battalions of infantry, artillery, and engineers trotted or marched past in a military review that lasted for three hours. Finally a mounted herald approached the dais and throne and, with appropriate flourishes, proclaimed the coronation of the new king. The imperial salute of 101 guns still resounded as Curzon moved front and center to summon the multitudes in their loyalty to the unchallenged supremacy of the British Crown. “There has never been anything,” he would later write, “so great in the world’s history as the British Empire, so great an instrument for the good of humanity.”

THE BRITISH had indeed transformed the face of India, building thousands of miles of canals and railroads, bringing into being entire cities. But at a deeper level, the British presence was but an ephemeral veil over the body of a land that was more a state of mind than a national state, a civilization that had endured for four thousand years as an empire of ideas rather than territorial boundaries. India had yielded time and again to the onslaught of invaders, but had always won in the end, absorbing foreign impulses and, through the sheer weight of its history, prompting mutations that inevitably transformed every novel influence into something indelibly Indian.

At the same time, India was itself a British invention, an imagined place defined by the ever-changing and expanding boundaries of political and commercial interests, which, in turn, were woven into reality by the mathematicians and technicians of the Survey of India. Maps were the key to the very notion of India. They codified in two dimensions the geographic and cultural features of a subcontinent, even as they created the rationale for occupation. India the imagined landscape became concrete and meaningful when reduced to a map sheet. Thus it was not by chance that the greatest scientific undertaking of the nineteenth century was the literal measurement of India, or that through this endeavor would be discovered the highest mountain in the world.

~~Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and The Conquest of Everest -by- Wade Davis