Conquistadors of the Useless (37 page)

Couzy was the youngest member of the expedition. Highly intelligent, he was an engineering graduate of the Polytechnique. Later he was to become one of my most valued friends and a companion on Chomolonzo and Makalu. Eventually he became one of the greatest mountaineers of all time, with a list of climbs to his credit hardly ever equalled for difficulty and variety – but at the time we are now speaking of he was still little more than a youth. He had already done some very big rock climbs, particularly in the Dolomites, but his high mountain experience was definitely limited.

Schatz was also an intellectual, with a degree in science, but for family reasons he had become director of a big clothing store. Powerful and athletic, he was, like his great friend Couzy, a first-rate rock climber, but with limited experience in the field of ice climbing and all-round mountaineering. Their selection for a Himalayan expedition was, therefore, open to dispute on technical grounds.

Virtuosity on rock is practically irrelevant to the ascent of eight-thousanders, where the climbing is mainly on ice and snow. The highest summit in the world, Mount Everest, was after all conquered by a party neither of whose members had much experience of rock climbing. Hillary, the New Zealander, had done virtually all his mountaineering on the exclusively icy summits of his own country and the Himalayas, and the Sherpa Tensing, for all his justly famed toughness and daring, was in much the same case.

At first sight, then, it would seem that it might have been more judicious to have selected two less brilliant rock climbers but more experienced mountaineers than Couzy and Schatz. In choosing them the committee must have taken their characters into account, and also the advantages of having such a well-tried team at their disposal. I think, too, that Lucien Devies wanted to try out one of his pet theories, namely that the conquest of an eight-thousander required less technical skill, even on snow and ice, than will-power, courage and endurance; all qualities developed by high-standard rock climbing. In its favour he could quote the example of several German expeditions, composed mainly of rock climbers, which had nevertheless been very successful in the Himalayas.
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Since then history has proved him right. None of the eight-thousanders has turned out to be technically difficult, even as regards ice climbing. The main obstacles have been those of remoteness, length, route-finding, weather, and the effects of altitude. The rarefaction of the air reduces the physical and mental abilities even of the most gifted to an enormous extent. In tough but not particularly acrobatic situations moral qualities, when allied to good form and physique, are the determining factors. Rock climbers, provided they are sure-footed on snow, can therefore be valuable members of a team as long as it also contains some experienced mountaineers. The story of Himalayan mountaineering is full of examples, one of the most remarkable being that of the British expedition to Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, which was mainly made up of pure rock climbers.
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The second rope chosen by the committee consisted of Lachenal and myself. Our general experience and our ascents of the greatest climbs in the Western Alps were our qualifications.

The sixth member of the assault party was Gaston Rébuffat. He too was primarily a rock climber, but his wide mountain experience and great achievements made his selection a foregone conclusion.

The party comprised two other members, my friend Dr Oudot and the well-known film photographer Marcel Ichac. Oudot, who had an international reputation for his cardio-vascular surgery, was to be our doctor. As a first-class climber in his own right he would be able to play a part in the ascent, and even to replace a member of the assault party if one should fall out. Ichac, who specialised in mountain photography, was to make a film of the expedition and to write dispatches for newspapers which had supported it. He too was a fine climber, and had taken part in the 1936 expedition to Hidden Peak. He was the only person with any previous experience of the Himalayas, and his advice was to be useful on more than one occasion.

Finally there was François de Noyelle, a young diplomatist attached to the French Embassy in New Delhi. He was to be our interpreter and transport officer, thanks to his knowledge of the local dialects.

The world of greater mountaineering is quite a small one, so that with the exception of François de Noyelle the whole team knew each other despite their diverse origins. Personally I was already firm friends with most of them, and only Couzy and Schatz were less familiar. Thus our assembly was more like a reunion of friends than anything else and there was no ‘running-in' period.

The late arrival of our permit to travel in Nepal, combined with the fund-raising difficulties, had left us all too little time for our preparations. The work went on in an atmosphere of feverish haste, and even up to a few hours before we were due to leave it was by no means certain that things would be ready in time. Everyone toiled as for a sacred cause, however, and in the end all the obstacles were overcome and the last crate nailed down precisely on D-Day, less than two months after the decision to go had been taken. Just as Lachenal had predicted we had all the essentials, even if some of the details didn't bear too much looking into.

Owing to the impossibility of sending our food and equipment in advance by sea a freighter aeroplane now had to be chartered, so that the team and its gear ended up travelling together. The plane was a D.C.4 which could only transport us by short stages, landing at Rome, Cairo – where we saw the Pyramids by moonlight – Bahrein and Delhi, thus sparing us too sudden a transition from one civilisation to another.

Nature has endowed me with an unusual capacity for remembering the details of events, and after ten years I can still recall almost every moment of that journey, even down to our excited conversations. Most of the time I spent glued to the porthole, avid for new sights. The weather was perfect and we flew relatively low so that even the caravans of the Bedouin could be clearly seen on the vast tawny levels of Arabia, from which occasionally rose spikes of jet-black rock. The human figures looked like ants in the immensity of the sands, evoking images from my boyhood reading, like a mad pageant against the yellow screen of the desert: Mahomet, Lawrence of Arabia, Monfreid the smuggler of the Red Sea, and Ibn Saud, the last conqueror.

Flying over the north of India brought astonishment. With a mind full of Kipling I had imagined the luxurious verdure of vast tropical forests, but for hours on end we passed over a baked yellow soil finely divided into squares, where the only trace of greenery was the occasional isolated tree. It took me some time to realise we were not flying over a desert, but an over-populated country. The great grill of tiny squares that stretched to the horizon was composed of millions of fields burnt by the pre-monsoon heat. At irregular intervals the monotony of the land would be broken up by clusters of small domes, looking rather like bunches of fruit. These were the villages near which men toiled, stunned by the heat and crushed by poverty, to wrest their living from the exhausted earth.

At Delhi we were received with the greatest kindness by the whole staff of the French embassy, including the ambassador himself, M. Daniel Levi, and his first secretary, M. Christian Bayle. In our hurry to embark we had rather neglected the Chinese torture of the customs regulations. Herzog's chronic optimism had led him to overlook many details on the theory that everything would work out somehow, but as soon as we got off the plane it became obvious that the officials of the young Republic of India, glorying in their new-found powers, were burning with zeal. It was almost as though they wished to illustrate Napoleon's dictum: ‘Put gold braid on a fool and you have a tyrant'. Every little functionary had become a despot eager to exercise his arbitrary authority.

There was no need for anything more to be done to our baggage than to seal it and send it on to the Nepalese frontier. Unfortunately our case was virtually without precedent, so that no regulations had been drawn up to cover it. But customs men, like adjutants, live by the book, and they wanted to examine and levy duty on every separate item. This would have been fatal: apart from the enormous expense, every day before the monsoon counted, and a week wasted in this way on top of all our other delays would have greatly reduced our chances of success. Were we to be kept from our mountain by a mere mountain of paper? Were all our efforts and our enthusiasm to come to nothing in such a way as this?

Happily for us our ambassador threw himself into the struggle with the big guns of diplomacy. He went straight for the seat of authority without a moment's hesitation, and all the obstacles began to dissolve.

While Herzog, Noyelle, Ichac and Oudot were battling with these unforeseen difficulties the rest of us, all unsuspecting, were making our first contacts with life in India. It was different from anything I had ever imagined. Behind the immediate attraction of the picturesque, or the monuments of a refined and splendid past, I felt the profound gulf separating us from these men whose very processes of thought were so different from our own. Quite soon the superficial charm of the exotic began to fade before the obvious and heart-rending poverty of the people.

Misery and famine have been part of the fabric of Indian life for thousands of years, and at this time the country had just emerged from what, by any reckoning, had been the greatest upheaval in its history. No sooner was it freed from the colonial yoke of England than the north-western and eastern portions, thousands of miles apart and with nothing in common but their faith, had seceded in order to create that economic absurdity, the nation of Pakistan. This new state had driven the majority of Hindus over its borders into India, and India had acted in the same way to tens of millions of Muhammedans. Whole populations had been deported. Over a million people were murdered during the months of anarchy that followed, and no one will ever know how many died of starvation.

At the time of our visit the slums of Old Delhi and the refugee camps on its outskirts presented a spectacle to melt the hardest heart. It was as though a whole nation had just emerged from Buchenwald and Auschwitz, covered in nothing but vermin and foul rags. At every step one encountered living corpses, their eyes, full of utter misery, looming huge over their hollow cheeks. Many of them had legs so thin that there seemed nothing but skin drawn tightly over the bone. It appeared impossible that anyone could actually walk on such sticks, and one expected to see them snap off at any moment. The sick lay moaning in every patch of shade, stretching out their hands as they dragged themselves towards us, their eyes full of unfathomable distress. Sometimes a heap of rags would not move. At first I thought them asleep, but the swarms of flies soon disillusioned me. These were the dead. No one but the road-sweeper took any notice.

After a few more stifling days in New Delhi we finally made our escape. Public transport was still disorganised after the recent troubles, and it was decided that Rébuffat and I should accompany the baggage by rail while the others flew on to Lucknow. To make sure of its safe arrival we practically sat on it. Travelling in a goods wagon is not too comfortable at the best of times, and the heat and dust of this journey across the Ganges valley made it an ordeal. The train trundled slowly along, giving us plenty of time to admire the scenery, but unfortunately this was far from refreshing. It was, in fact, desperately monotonous. Such charm as the countryside could ever have possessed had long since been scorched out of it, and our depression was only increased by the glum apathy of the wretched population. By the time we got to Lucknow we were dusty, tired and bored stiff.

Another train journey, this time with the others and on padded seats, took us close to the Nepalese border, whence there remained a twenty-five mile trip across the execrable tracks of the marshy Terai plain in buses which could only have been designed by Heath Robinson. The next stage was jungle, genuine virgin forest inhabited by tigers and rhinoceros, and then, without any warning at all, high grassy hills rose before us like islands out of the sea or the first ripples of a storm of stone whose waves reached heaven. Our dream was coming true at last, and here, appropriately, the road came to an end. Henceforward our own feet were to be the only mode of transport, and men the only beasts of burden for our six tons of baggage.

The main body of the party now halted at the village of Butwal in order to recruit two hundred porters and to repack the loads for carrying. Lachenal and I were sent on ahead as scouts. The first afternoon lay through the thick belt of tropical forest which covers the western slopes of the Siwalik foothills like a layer of wadding between two different worlds. Night caught us still in the forest, but after marching on through the darkness for some time we came to a poor tea-merchant's shack where we were able to find shelter.

In order to avoid marching in the heat of the day we set off again at dawn. The light was as yet barely filtering through the underbrush and the great trees were dim, tormented shapes. The carefully flagged path was one of the five or six lines of communication between India and Nepal. The eight million or so men living behind the Siwaliks have virtually no other links with the modern world than these narrow serpentines of mud and stone. By the same token it was, of course, also the beginning of one of those astonishing Tibetan trade routes by which intrepid merchants traffic into China through narrow gorges and over cols nearly twenty thousand feet high.

During the dry season these tracks can be as crowded as the busiest Paris street. Gangs of porters bent under enormous loads are constantly coming and going, the half-naked men showing their bulging calf and thigh muscles, the women hiding their legs under long coloured skirts, Their merchandise includes bales of cloth, spices, sugar and knick-knacks on the upward journey into Nepal, and on the return rice, com, pottery, wool and hides.