Conquistadors of the Useless (38 page)

There are also Gurkha mercenaries coming home on leave or setting out, like the Swiss mountaineers of mediaeval times, to sell their prodigious strength and courage to foreign armies. Some serve the British, others, more numerous, the Indians. Often their wives will be tramping along with them, carrying young children on their backs. During the last war many Gurkhas served in the Far East, North Africa and Italy, and it is by no means unusual to be greeted with a few words of French or Italian.

Every so often a merchant or a dignitary will come along, sheltered by an umbrella and dressed in a sort of black frock-coat and tight white trousers, carrying his shoes in his hand, presumably so as not to wear them out. Again, they are sometimes followed by their wives, but these travel on litters like great ladies of the eighteenth century, richly ornamented and draped in bright saris.

More rarely one sees Tibetan caravaneers, great raw-boned men whose long plaited hair and worn finery contrast strangely with the rest of the crowd.

At that hour of the morning the way was almost deserted, only a few isolated porters jogging down towards the plains under their fardels. We went on quickly towards the crest of the ridge which, as we left the trees behind, was touched by the first rays of early sunlight. Somewhere in the shadows arrowheads of gold were beginning to form, and I hurried still more not to miss the vision for which we had come so far. Then the miracle happened. Folded in light mist hill after hill rolled away into the distance from beneath my feet, and over this green ocean sparkled the vast icebergs of the Himalayas. Never in my remotest dreams had I imagined such beauty could exist on earth. Time effaces all our memories, but the feelings of that moment are branded in me while I live. Looking back today I see more, that it was not only the revelation of my dreams of youth, but the beginning of an experience which has influenced me more than almost any other – the discovery of Nepal, a world outside our time.

Since the day my dazzled eyes first saw that country I have had the fortune to visit it on four distinct occasions,
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spending there almost a year of my life. About half this time was in the no man's land of the high peaks, but the rest was spent in the inhabited valleys. In 1950, by a happy conjunction of circumstances, Nepal was still almost untouched by Western influences, and even today it has hardly changed, apart from the capital, Kathmandu, and a few frontier towns. During my four visits I have covered over twelve hundred miles of hill and valley on foot, coming into close contact with the people and sometimes sharing their daily life. The poetry of their simple ways and their calm and joyous philosophy have sunk deep into my mind, affecting my own attitudes.

I have loved nature and rural life from the first moment I can remember, to the extent that, as I have related above, I became a peasant myself and would have remained one but for circumstances I could not control. On reaching India, my head full of travellers' tales and avid for experience, I had expected new forms of beauty and poetry; but the drabness of the scenery, the filth and appalling misery of the people, had turned out anything but exalting. But what I had missed in India I now found in Nepal. I was almost spellbound by this vast garden made by men out of nature in her most generous mood. There was enchantment in the clear colours of the fields and flowers, in the sounds of birds and streams, in the burgeoning of every form of life.

Evidence of human presence is everywhere, but here, for once, man has not destroyed the harmony of nature so much as completed and embellished it, as though it had first penetrated his own mind. The elegant yellow-thatched houses, shaded by banana trees, are scattered all over the hills, their bright ochre or white-washed walls emphasising the surrounding green.

The millions of peasants live a life of biblical charm. Their simple, almost puritanical manners lend them a calm dignity from which it is difficult to withhold the word noble. They all work tirelessly in the fields for their living, the men dressed in white loincloths, the women in gay robes, and the fertile soil often repays them with two abundant harvests a year. By contrast with India famines are rare and most people get plenty to eat.

The sugar-loaf hills have been almost completely cleared, only a few clumps of trees remaining here and there. The steep slopes have been transformed by the ceaseless labour of generations into innumerable terraces where rice and maize grow abundantly, or barley in the higher places. The horizontal lines of these terraces winding along the hillsides, adding design to the green of the young shoots or the harvest gold, give a peculiar quality of elegance to the scenery. Even on my longest and most tiring marches I have never known the charm of this country and its inhabitants to grow stale. That I think with unabated enthusiasm of returning there in the near future is quite as much due to this atmosphere of a golden age as to the splendour of its great mountains.

When I saw Nepal for the first time that radiant morning, I knew practically nothing about it. Subsequently I learnt its geography by pacing out its ridges and valleys, or by chatting with the Sherpas in the evening, after a hard day, around the fire. It is quite impossible to understand a Himalayan expedition without some basic knowledge of these things, and yet the authors of expedition books never take the trouble to deal with them. A frequent fault is to quote names and facts at the reader as though he were already an expert. But how many readers actually know anything about the Himalayas? How many, for example, know the background of the Sherpas?

It would seem that Nepal, like India, was originally inhabited by a negroid people called the Dravidians. Most of these were destroyed or absorbed by successive waves of conquerors, apart from a few pockets of which the most notable was in the Terai marshes on the southern border. Subsequently the country was invaded by tribes of Mongoloid stock whose descendants still occupy the larger part. Thus the Kathmandu valley, the richest and most populous of all, is inhabited by the Newars, a people remarkable for their manual dexterity, their artistic endowment and their commercial talents. In the south and east are the Raïs and the Limbus, a peaceful race of farmers. The Gurungs and the Magars, in the west and centre, probably arrived at a more recent date. These various Asiatic stocks form the majority of the caste on which the country's social structure is based. Castes in Nepal, however, are rather different from castes in India, whence they were imported. In the first place they are much more liberal, and in the second they tend to follow ethnic lines more closely. In many cases they are synonymous with tribes, retaining their own customs and even languages.

The historians tell us that the Indo-European minority did not settle in the valleys north-west of Kathmandu until around the year A.D. 1000. They were Rajputs from the Indian province of Rajastan, a traditionally warlike people. In Nepal they became known as the Khas caste, from which the present royal family is drawn. After the Muslim invasions of Rajastan around 1350 remnants of the Rajput armies settled in large numbers among the Nepalese hills, especially in the centre and west. Some authorities suggest that interbreeding between these newcomers (for the most part either of the Kshatriya warrior caste or Brahmins) and the local women gave rise to several of the Nepalese castes, notably the Chetris.

In my opinion this theory is to be treated with some reserve. It is more than possible that the Rajputs were not the only Indo-Europeans to settle in Nepal. During the first Makalu expedition, for example, we were surprised to meet a Chetri settlement in the upper Arun valley not twenty miles from Tibet. These aquiline six-footers with their ample beards, auburn hair and light brown eyes were of purely Aryan appearance, and contrasted almost comically with their Rai's neighbours, who were small and Mongoloid. The two communities had lived side by side for generations, spoke the same tongue, and their habits differed only in certain matters of religious observance. Yet the impalpable barriers of taboo had prevented any intermixture whatever, and each lived on their own territory.

I doubt whether these Chetris or a nearby community of Brahmins were in fact descended from the Rajputs. In any event their military and religious prerogatives had long since vanished, and they had become simple peasants farming even poorer and steeper land than the neighbouring Rais. I have quite often encountered such Aryan outposts in various parts of eastern Nepal, calling themselves Chetri or Brahmin yet hardly differing at all from their neighbours in their customs. They have all seemed far more distinctively Aryan than the Khas or Chetri administrators and rulers one meets in Kathmandu. To sum up, Nepal is nowadays a patchwork of three different ethnic groups, sometimes in a pure state, sometimes mixed. These are divided into some thirty principal tribes and castes, themselves split up into innumerable subsections.

The history of such a country is necessarily complex. The ruggedness, both of its terrain and its fighting men, have kept it free of its powerful neighbours; Indian, Chinese and even British armies have made incursions, but none of them has been able to establish itself. Not until comparatively recently, however, has the kingdom been united within anything like its present boundaries. The number of principalities of which it was composed has varied widely across the centuries, the Kathmandu valley alone having contained no less than three. Their wars and intrigues and dynasties form an entanglement which even specialist historians have trouble in penetrating. Suffice it here to note that on several occasions enlightened rulers succeeded in imposing peace for considerable periods of time, during which civilisation went ahead by leaps and bounds. Literature and the visual arts attained a high degree of refinement, particularly in the area around Kathmandu, as many fine monuments remain to witness.

Around 1750 the country was split up into nearly fifty separate principalities. One of these was the small kingdom of Gorkha, eight days' march from the capital. Its inhabitants, the Gurkhas, were famous for their bravery in war, and thanks to this quality their ambitious King Prithivi Nakayan was able to conquer all the surrounding territories in turn. By a combination of unusual courage and running he eventually gained control of the Kathmandu valley in a series of bitterly contested wars, then went on to unite the country in approximately the form we know it today.

A century went by, and the royal family became decadent. The Prime Minister Jung Bahabur Rana took advantage of this state of affairs to seize power, giving himself the hereditary tide of Maharajah. The King was retained as the theoretical monarch on account of his religious influence, but Jung Bahabur was the real ruler, rather like the mayors of the palace in mediaeval France. Historians agree that, by virtue of his courage, intelligence and energy, his government was beneficent. He brought a multitude of tribes to a sense of nationhood, and by a series of military and economic treaties with the British he went a long way towards remedying the country's traditional backwardness. His successors remained in power for a century, but shortly after our expedition in 1950 a revolution displaced the Maharajah and put the King at the head of a slightly more democratic government. In 1959 a still more democratic constitution was promulgated, though the King retains more power than in a western constitutional monarchy. These changes are undoubtedly responsible for Nepal's swift evolution towards a modern way of life.

Thanks to a well-maintained succession of enlightened and powerful leaders, Nepal has developed remarkably in the last two hundred years. The hill country has become populated to such an extent that today eight and a half million people live in a country roughly five hundred miles long by a hundred and twenty-five wide, of which almost half consists of high and sterile mountains.

Excellent cobbled ways resembling Roman roads have been laid between the more important towns, thanks to which places like Pokhra and Palpa-Tensing have become prosperous centres with well-built, meticulously clean, and often artistic houses. Kathmandu is now a fine, spacious city, with getting on for two hundred thousand inhabitants. The varied architecture of its temples, differing widely according to date and going back in some cases over a thousand years, endow it with a strong aesthetic attraction.

The visitor who remains in Nepal for any length of time presently realises that in certain respects unity is still on the surface. The national language, Gurkhali or Nepali, which resembles Hindi, is learnt by the majority of the population, but five others are also current, to say nothing of dialects. Again, the Gurkhas have done their best to impose orthodox Hinduism, the faith of their Rajput ancestors, but this is far from being the only religion.

Buddha was the son of a petty king on the borders of India and Nepal, and it is known that fifteen hundred years ago most of the hill people were followers of his teaching. Nowadays Buddhism has virtually disappeared from India, but it is still very common in Nepal, though not in the pure form which has survived in Burma and Ceylon. Up in the valleys bordering on Tibet, where it is the sole form of religion, it has been strongly influenced by ancient animistic beliefs. In the rest of the country it is tinged with Hinduism in varying degrees – just as Nepalese Hinduism is tinged with Buddhism.

Tibor Sekelj writes: ‘In most parts of the country the two religions are mixed. They coexist not only in the same town but in the same temple, and even in the minds and hearts of the people.' Later he goes on to add: ‘It is often difficult to know which religion a man basically belongs to.' To understand such a state of affairs one must clear one's mind of all European preconceptions. To an Occidental religion is something defined and even codified, implying strict regulations, but to consider Oriental religion in this spirit can only lead to error.

Hinduism grew up bit by bit across the centuries, absorbing in its course legends, customs and gods from various other faiths. ‘It is not a religion in the normal sense. Whereas most other sects have laid down certain dogmas and moral codes for their believers, Hinduism does more than this. It is the whole Indian tradition, literature and way of life as blessed and sanctioned by the Brahmin intelligentsia … The simplest acts like washing, eating and dressing, as well as natural phenomena like rain, the phases of the moon and the flowering of trees, are all animated by religious belief.'