Conquistadors of the Useless (40 page)

Himalayan history is full of examples of the heroic faithfulness of the Sherpas. Perhaps the most remarkable of all occurred during the 1934 Nanga Parbat expedition. Several German and Austrian climbers died of hunger, cold and exhaustion in the high camps. Their better-adapted Sherpas could no doubt have saved themselves by descending through the storm, but they stayed to look after their masters. Only when the last European succumbed did they try to escape from the trap, and only one succeeded. Notes found later on the remains of Welzenbach revealed the self-sacrifice of the others.

Contact with civilisation has nowadays corrupted a few of the Sherpas, but the vast majority retain their ancestral virtues. The days I have spent in the company of these narrow-eyed little men with their huge grins have been among the happiest of my life. We have fought together for goals more symbolic than real, and it may be that the point of it all partly escaped them, but this in no way affected their enthusiasm and willingness. We faced the cold and storm, yet even when fear turned their tanned faces grey they remained capable of courage and altruism. Burdens were accepted and dirty jobs carried out with speed and good humour. Together, too, we trekked the pleasant pathways of Nepal in sympathy with nature. Many and many a time my Sherpa has turned to me with shining eyes, as we came over a crest upon some new harmony of earth and sky, with a cry of: ‘Look, sahib, very nice!' Around camp fires we have yarned for hours about our respective worlds, and in the coppery light cast by a giant brazier we have danced and sung our native songs under the stars. For me as for many others the contact with the Sherpa porters is one of the main charms of a Himalayan expedition. They have their faults, certainly, among them carelessness and lack of attention to detail, but their good-heartedness, gaiety, tact and sense of poetry give a renewed flavour to life, and after a spell in their company dreams of a better world have always seemed to me suddenly less foolish.

The conquest of the Himalayas had already begun in a small way before 1914, and with the first Everest expeditions it became a major undertaking. All the developed nations wanted to take part in the enterprise, and every year men came from all over the globe to join the assault on the abode of the gods. The British were the most active. Apart from strenuous efforts to climb Everest, they attempted and climbed numerous lower peaks while the Germans and Austrians, politically barred from attacking the highest mountain in the world, tried hard to be the first up an eight-thousander. Their assaults on Kangchenjunga and Nanga Parbat are among the bloodiest and most heroic stories in the epic of Himalayan mountaineering. The Americans, Italians, French and Japanese also played their part. Altogether, more than a hundred full-scale expeditions visited the Himalayas between the two wars.

All these parties required native porters to carry their impedimenta to the foot of the mountain, and also to establish camps on it. Nearly all the Himalayan races proved excellent carriers up to the point where the actual climbing began, but as soon as real hardship and danger came into the picture the superiority of the Sherpas was overwhelming. Before long their employment became automatic, and up to 1939 all the major expeditions had recourse to their help. At least a hundred of them, based on Darjeeling, became professionals, and some thus acquired sufficient experience and technique to be able to lead roped parties almost like a guide. In years when the demand for porters exceeded the supply at Darjeeling runners would set off, covering the two hundred and fifty miles of switchback trails to Sola Khumba in ten days, and returning at once with reinforcements of brothers and cousins.

The Himalayan Club, founded by British people living in India, presently drew up regulations for high-altitude portering. It fixed the fees, formulated the contracts and made lists of names. Each Sherpa received a number and a testimonial book, and at the end of every expedition the leader entered it up with details of the mountains climbed or attempted and the man's conduct. Once the British left India the club lost much of its authority, but after the ascent of Everest in 1953 the Sherpa Tenzing, a most intelligent man, had sufficient influence to set up the ‘Sherpa Climber Association' along the lines of the various Alpine companies of guides. In spite of initial scepticism in some quarters, this has turned out a reasonably efficient organisation.

For some time now this scheme of things has been a good deal upset because some expedition leaders believe that Sherpas arriving direct from Sola Khumba are physically and morally superior to those recruited in Darjeeling. They assert that in learning to wash and cook and speak English, the city Sherpas have exchanged many of their ancestral virtues for European and Indian vices. Personally I find all this exaggerated. I have had occasion to employ both kinds without noting much difference. In my opinion Sherpas living in Darjeeling do not lose their qualities, even after a number of years, provided they were born and bred in Sola Khumbu. By contrast, however, those actually born at Darjeeling do not seem any better than the rest of the hill people, and have often acquired the vices of civilisation.

However that may be, there has recently been a growing tendency to engage Sherpas direct from Sola Khumbu, and despite a considerable demand for porters those living at Darjeeling have begun to find it difficult to get work. Some of them have even found it paid them to return to their native valley. Lately the situation has been further complicated by the Nepalese government, who, in an effort to profit from the touristic side of mountaineering, have tried to prohibit expeditions from recruiting any Sherpas not affiliated to an organisation it has set up in Kathmandu. Pakistan has forbidden the importation of Sherpa porters ever since independence, and Nepal is now by a long way their main field of action. From now on it seems clear that the best porters will have to leave Darjeeling and live in Nepalese territory.

But when I stood on the crest of the Siwaliks, that 7th April, 1950, with the splendour of Nepal spread out before me, I knew nothing of all this. There was only the desire to learn every secret of this unknown land, and as we marched along day by day I tried to fulfil it. Maurice Herzog has already told the story of our approach march in his incisive, brilliant style, and anyone wishing to know all about it should read his book
Annapurna
. Personally I found nothing particularly exciting about these sixteen days. The route had only been followed once before by Westerners, a group of American ornithologists, but to recount all its details would be to copy Herzog with less talent. Only one thing still needs to be remembered: we were late in the field, and any waste of time would abbreviate still further the already short period available for our assault before the onset of the monsoon.

This absolute necessity not to lose any time lent a certain feverishness to our progress, and when our coolies came out on strike we went through agonies. Most of my companions, after the initial strangeness had worn off, became bored with the short but physically tiring days' marches in the tremendous heat. They had come to climb one of the highest mountains in the world and they could not wait to get to grips with it: these two weeks in its waiting room were a slow torture. I was as keen as the rest of them, but perhaps more attuned to nature. Every step of our slow advance brought some new discovery to be engraved in memory by surprise and delight.

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.
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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.
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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?
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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.'