18 Summit Fever

18

 

Summit Fever

 

Sunrise on the Kalindi glacier, high in the mountains of Garhwal: six men prepare to leave camp, shouldering rucksacks as the white summits flare into light above valleys still sunk in blue shadow. Yesterday they prepared a trail of steps, kicked into soft snow, and after last night’s frost these are now firm, like a staircase, crusty with ice whose crystals dazzle with refracted light as the men plod north-east. Above them is the Kalindi khal, a snowy pass almost six thousand metres above sea level linking the sacred Gangotri region behind them with the Arwa valley that cuts east towards the village of Ghastoli, a day’s walk north of the pilgrim town of Badrinath. At the crest of the pass, the group pauses. In front of them is a new horizon of spectacular mountains, including, to the north-east, the sentinel summit of Kamet, looking down on the forgotten world of the Guge kingdom and the bone-dry expanse of western Tibet. It is 15 August 1947.

There can have been few better places to welcome India’s independence

day, in this throne room of the mountain gods, at least until monsoon clouds rolled up the valley and snow started falling. The night before, as the clock ticked toward midnight and these men took shelter from the bitter cold inside their tents, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, had delivered his ‘tryst with destiny’ speech in the central hall of the Indian parliament.

It is a fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star rises, the star of freedom in the east, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materialises.

That vision held immense implications for the people of the Himalaya.

One of the six standing on the Kalindi pass that independence morning

would meet Nehru six years later in his own tryst with destiny. Tenzing Norgay was now thirty-three years of age, recently a widower with two young daughters, Pem Pem and Nima, living back in Darjeeling. He carried their pictures with him in a frame. Tenzing had marked time through the war as an orderly for the Indian army in Chitral, far to the north-west. Now he was back working for a climbing expedition as a ‘Sherpa’ (the ethnic identity of Sherpa had by the 1940s become confused with the job description of a high-altitude porter). This trip would prove pivotal in his long journey to the summit of Everest with Edmund Hillary six years later. The expedition leader, not present on the pass that day, was the Swiss mountain guide André Roch. Among the most successful Himalayan climbers before the war, he had climbed in the Karakoram with Günter and Hettie Dyhrenfurth. Now, after the war, Roch was returning to the Himalaya at the age of forty to start again. A glaciologist, on rest days he would spend his afternoons painting landscapes. Among his team was René Dittert, a good-natured, self-effacing Genevois and an integral member of the Androsace Club, which included many of the best Swiss mountaineers. These two would both be part of the first Swiss attempt on Everest five years later, when Tenzing and Raymond Lambert came close to the top. Roch had just made Tenzing sirdar, leader of the expedition’s small team of Sherpas, after the man he first selected was injured. The other Sherpas seemed indifferent to reaching summits, but not Tenzing. There was, as one of the climbers put it, ‘a gleam of determination in Tenzing’s eyes’. André Roch judged him ‘our best man’. It was Tenzing who had led the way on the first ascent of a seven thousand-metre peak called Kedarnath, with highly trained and fit Swiss guides in his wake.

Tenzing found working for the Swiss a warmer experience than he had

the pre-war British expeditions to Everest. After their ascent of Kedarnath, there had been a party. One of the expedition recalled how that evening,

when we all came down to base camp, and we all sat down, he sat down with us and drank a glass of wine. This was something unheard of. Shipton and Tilman wouldn’t have thought it odd but I can think of plenty of English climbers who would have done.

That expedition member was Trevor Braham, not Swiss but British, born in Calcutta in 1922. It was Braham that Tenzing and a team of five Sherpas was accompanying to the Kalindi pass that independence morning, where three turned back to camp, leaving Braham and two of the Sherpas to continue downhill towards Badrinath.

Braham had accepted a general invitation from the Swiss to the

Himalayan Club for one of their number to join the Gangotri expedition: a gesture of goodwill. In the 1920s and 1930s the club had been first port of call for anyone exploring the mountains. Now, hollowed out by the war, it had stalled. Chaos and austerity in Europe had slowed the stream of climbers to a trickle. Braham, educated at St Joseph’s in Darjeeling, where his parents escaped the hot summer months in Calcutta, had only been climbing for a short while and only in Sikkim; his nine-week trip to Garhwal in the company of leading European alpinists was a test and an education.

That day, 15 August 1947, Braham was returning home ahead of the

main group, wanting to visit the Bhyundar valley, Frank Smythe’s valley of flowers. Sixty years later he could still recall the scent of freshly cut pine filling the air as he rattled down the trail to Badrinath, new wooden homes going up as men returned from military service. When he reached the temple, two days’ walking from the Kalindi pass, bunting for India’s independence day was still up and the mood was still buoyant. Yet on the train to Delhi, the horror of Partition was evident. He shared a compartment with a Sikh,

such a quiet man; we talked a lot. Then we stopped at a station. He got out and was transformed into some kind of fierce warrior. He shouted: ‘Kill them! I’ve seen what they’ve done to our people.’

At Delhi there were corpses laid out on the platform and the police tried to confiscate Braham’s ice axe.

Much of the violence was focussed on the Punjab, but it spilled over into

the Himalaya. On their return to the small town of Joshimath, the Swiss were put on an army truck back to Delhi for their safety, leaving the Sherpas to fend for themselves. After a fortnight spent hanging around, Tenzing and his crew got a lift to Dehra Dun, where civil order was unravelling. One young Sikh recalled how the town’s Muslim enclave was torched and the next day watching the bodies of fifteen Muslim girls being loaded onto a truck. Tenzing had a good friend in Dehra Dun, Jack Gibson, headmaster of the Doon School, who had hired him for a climbing holiday just after the war. Gibson had established a small refugee camp within the school grounds for Muslims escaping the chaos, and the Sherpas stayed in this oasis of peace until Gibson could find them transport home.

Not all foreigners were as lucky as the Swiss. Theos Bernard was an

American traveller and yoga celebrity who grew up in Tombstone, Arizona in a family obsessed with eastern religions: his uncle was Pierre Bernard, ‘Oom the Magnificent’, who was an early American proponent of yoga and a spiritual snake-oil merchant. Like Oom, Theos was a relentless self-promoter. Before the war he had travelled in Tibet, upsetting monks with his intrusive photography. Back home he appeared on the cover of Family Circle magazine dressed in tailor-made monk’s robes next to a Hollywood starlet and wrote about his experiences in his travel memoir Penthouse of the Gods. He had spent the war studying for a doctorate on Hatha yoga and after the war travelled to Spiti on the hunt for lost manuscripts. Caught with Muslim porters on his way to Kye monastery during the violence of partition, Theos Bernard and his third wife Helen were murdered, their bodies presumed thrown in the Spiti river.

The impact of independence was felt in every Himalayan nation, not just

India. On 15 August, as Trevor Braham was saying goodbye to Tenzing Norgay on the Kalindi pass, a Nepali political leader, among the most admired the country has seen, was being freed from a Kathmandu jail, a shrewd attempt to quell spiralling public discontent against the Rana dynasty. Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, known simply as B P, had been born in Benares in India in 1914. His father was a bahun, a hill Brahmin called Krishna Prasad, who had migrated from his home east of Kathmandu to the then small village of Biratnagar near the Indian border. He prospered, both as a businessman and a government tax collector; he had two wives who between them had five surviving sons and four daughters, the makings of a political dynasty. Three of the sons would be prime ministers of Nepal. Krishna Prasad Koirala had seen the poverty around him and began to take action, opening a school at his own expense, but even these mild attempts at social reform earned him the displeasure of the Rana regime and he fled to Benares. The Ranas confiscated his properties and the extended family and retinue was plunged into poverty. Krishna Prasad joined the Indian National Congress, on the basis that nothing in Nepal would change until the Ranas lost their protective ally, the British Raj. One of B P’s earliest memories was seeing his father receiving garlands in the early 1920s from his Nepali political supporters in Benares. When Gandhi called for a campaign of civil disobedience in 1929, B P responded by standing up at his school desk and saying: ‘I leave my school.’ Three years later he was arrested on suspicion of helping ‘terrorists’ conspiring against British authority and imprisoned for the first time in his young life. It would not be the last.

Krishna Prasad had gone into exile during the First World War, when

Chandra Shamsher, the close ally of Curzon, was Nepal’s prime minister. Uncharacteristically for the sprawling Rana family, Chandra was an austere man, teetotal and monogamous and not prone to smiling. (It was said that when he did, it boded ill for those he smiled at.) He gave substantial assistance to the British war effort, sending some fifty-five thousand recruits for the Indian army’s Gurkha regiments and releasing eighteen thousand troops from the Nepal army for garrison duties in India. Taking into account Nepali subjects in other Indian military or policing roles, the country’s contribution had been around a hundred thousand men, with ten thousand fatalities, from a total population of five million.

In June 1915, during the disastrous invasion of Gallipoli in modern-day

Turkey by Allied troops, Himalayan explorer Charlie Bruce had been reunited with his old battalion, the 1/5th Gurkhas, and an old friend from his climbing days, Subardar Major Harkabir Thapa. (In the summer of 1899, Harkabir had bewildered local people on the Isle of Skye with his speed in the mountains, running barefoot to the summit of Glamaig, and doing it again when they didn’t believe his time.) It was Bruce’s task to show his old comrades their route of advance for a planned attack on the heights of Achi Baba, overlooking the Gallipoli peninsula. Bruce knew this was asking ‘the impossible with quite inadequate means’. It was, he recalled, ‘a practical certainty that I was saying goodbye to my best friends’. Seven officers and 129 men lost their lives on the day of the attack. Harkabir Thapa was wounded but survived.

This level of sacrifice couldn’t help but galvanise Nepali society. Before

the war, recruitment into the Gurkha regiments stood at around a thousand men a year. After it tens of thousands of Nepali soldiers who had seen the world outside returned home, or else preferred Nepali communities inside British India, where work was easier to find and political debate was giving way to direct action. The new king Tribhuvan was not content to be a mere figurehead for the Ranas. Having ascended to the throne in 1911 aged eight, as he grew to adulthood in the 1920s he began exploring routes back to power. Even some younger members of the Rana family saw the need for change, a group that became far more engaged when Chandra tried to limit the immense cost of this sprawling family by classifying them into three streams: ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’. Those in the ‘C’ bracket were cut loose from the Rana payroll to agitate on the periphery. Many of them had studied in India and could see how Nepal was being left further and further behind.

Chandra’s loyalty to the Raj did have its rewards. Before the war the

British had begun to regard Nepal more as a princely state than a fully independent nation. In 1923, the Raj had formally recognised Nepali independence. The British also doubled Chandra’s subsidy, money he used to resume Nepal’s token development programme, building suspension bridges and beginning work on a road and ropeway that linked Birgunj on the Indian border to the Kathmandu valley 130 kilometres to the north. He outlawed the practice of sati, widows immolating themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands, and attempted to deal with the far more widespread curse of slavery: more than sixty thousand slaves were freed thanks to this initiative. Yet these were really only expediencies in the face of pressure from outside Nepal. Chandra’s main interest was maintaining his family’s grip on power, even at the expense of ordinary Nepalis, supposedly telling George V that the British were in trouble in India because they had made the mistake of educating ordinary Indians.

The most important reform Chandra agreed with the British was the right

to import goods from third countries without paying duty taxes to the Raj. Up to this point, the Nepal economy had run a surplus, selling rice to India. Now, thanks to this deal, there was a flood of cheap imports, particularly from Japan, where rapid industrialisation was undercutting the cost of British goods. (After the war, this duty-free privilege encouraged widespread smuggling back across the border into India, with a wink from politicians and sometimes their active involvement.) This new trade deal prompted a consumer boom that quickly soaked up the savings of ex-servicemen. Domestic textile production collapsed. Chandra of course charged duty of his own on this glut of imports, further enriching the Rana dynasty, which now enjoyed a moment of flamboyant excess. The politician Pashupati Rana, born in 1941 and a great-grandson of Chandra, recalled the extravagant fashions his mother’s generation wore:

block-printed Dhaka layered with fine muslin, velvet embroidered with heavy pure gold thread interspersed with pearls, exquisitely worked saris with beautiful borders, diamonds and jewelled tiaras.

It was a life of boggling luxury. Pashupati recalled hundreds of servants at his father’s home: ‘as a child I had four maid-servants and a wet-nurse to look after me indoors and four men-servants to attend to me out of doors.’

As a revenue collector, a position the Ranas auctioned off to the highest

bidder, Krishna Prasad Koirala had been acutely aware of his position in a society of such dire inequality. The story of precisely why he was forced into exile is a famous one, recounted by his son and political heir B P Koirala:

It was winter and [a] large number of his men, very poor and in rags, were migrating to India in search of employment. He asked one of them for his clothes and himself fished the rags out of the man’s bag. And he had them sent to the Prime Minister with a covering letter saying that this was the usual clothing that ‘your subject wears in winter and compare this with what you are wearing. I hope it will not be interpreted as disrespect on my part to have sent these dirty rags to Your Highness.’

Chandra was already suspicious of Krishna Prasad; bringing rebellious Bengalis to the safety of Nepal to teach in a school for ordinary people was verging on sedition itself. This package of rags was the last straw. The Koirala clan fled arrest into the arms of India’s independence movement, planting seeds that would bear fruit after the war.

When Chandra died in 1929, his brother Bhim Shamsher had taken over,

who survived just long enough to demand the British do something about the growing bands of anti-Rana Nepalis living in India. After him came Juddha Shamsher, the last of the seventeen sons of Dhir, Jang Bahadur’s youngest brother, to rule as maharaja. Juddha was far more autocratic, a competent and energetic military man who performed well in the devastating earthquake that shook Kathmandu almost to pieces in 1934. Politics however baffled him. There was a constant drip of corrosive anti-Rana stories in Indian newspapers and gossip in Kathmandu’s bazaars that king Tribhuvan would soon take back power. Even the army became dissatisfied. In 1936, an activist called Shukra Raj Shastri organised public meetings, which quickly landed him in jail. Shastri was part of a renaissance in Newari culture, the first stirrings of a political consciousness among Nepal’s ethnic minorities. An opposition party took shape, called the Praja Parishad or People’s Council, and when it called for an uprising the Rana regime arrested scores of activists and executed four of them, including Shastri, who was still in jail following his earlier conviction. The freedom movement had its first martyrs.

By then the world was at war again. Juddha showed the same

commitment to the British as Chandra had but many Ranas were dismayed as German forces swept across Western Europe. British India’s once impressive façade was also crumbling. In August 1942, Indian National Congress party activists cut the telegraph wires linking Nepal with the outside world, tore up railway tracks and burned police stations and post offices, cutting the British off from their ally in Kathmandu. It took weeks for the Indian authorities to restore links with the city, providing a moment of clarity for Juddha’s government. The slow response showed Nepal exactly where it stood in the eyes of the British, despite the country’s loyal sacrifice. (Of 282 Victoria Crosses awarded during the Second World War, thirteen went to Gurkha regiments.) Wanting more from the relationship, Juddha requested British help in building factories that would compete on favourable terms with those in India. The British preferred a plan to fund hydroelectric plants to raise Nepali living standards.

Neither party could do much to protect Nepal from Indian inflation. The

collapse of the Indian rupee during the war cut the value of Gurkha pensions, a significant benefit to the Nepali economy, by a third. In Indian hill stations like Darjeeling, the spiralling cost of living ate into the savings of those least able to cope, including Tenzing Norgay, who recalled relying on his second wife Ang Lhamu working as an ayah, or nanny, to keep their heads above water: ‘there seemed to be no ups – only downs.’ He bought a couple of horses to carry tourists, mostly visiting American troops, up Tiger Hill for its spectacular view of Kangchenjunga. As Nepali soldiers flooded home, bringing with them millions of Indian rupees, there was a currency crisis: Nepal simply didn’t have enough coins in circulation to exchange all that Indian paper money. The government in Delhi wasn’t prepared to sell silver on acceptable terms so a Nepali diplomat in London toured the capital’s silver dealers and bought a million ounces on the open market, enough to stabilise the currency.

Ordinary Nepalis were resilient and resourceful but growing numbers

wanted change: their children had no schools and their ageing parents no health care. The Nepali state, meaning the Rana family, didn’t have the technical capacity or sufficient political will to develop the country. Juddha Shamsher, a father of twenty sons and twenty daughters, feared he was nearing his end and retired in late 1945 to go on pilgrimage. His replacement was Padma Shamsher Rana, the son of Juddha’s elder brother Bhir, a low-key pragmatist who clashed with the sons of Juddha and Chandra, particularly Chandra’s outspoken eldest son Mohan. This political vulnerability hampered Padma’s sensible programme of reform: more schools, more electricity and more roads, including a start on an east–west highway. Yet development had to materialise promptly to save the Rana dynasty and the winds of history were already against them. Nepal needed heavy equipment to build roads but Britain, exhausted and almost bankrupt from war, was slow to deliver it. Padma showed real acumen in looking elsewhere. If the British were broke and quitting India, then the Rana dynasty needed to make new and preferably rich friends. Japan had provided Nepal with a taste of consumerism before the war but now lay in ruins. America was clearly the new power. And so Padma instructed Nepali leaders attending the Allies’ victory parade in London in June 1946 to continue on to Washington for talks with Harry Truman. Nepal, with an eye on American development aid, invited the United States to establish diplomatic relations.

On the day the American mission arrived in the spring of 1947 a Gandhi-

style satyagraha, or peaceful demonstration, began nationwide, organised by a new political party called the Nepali National Congress. This had coalesced from Nepali communities based in the Indian cities of Benares and Calcutta, with the tacit approval of the king. Tribhuvan, who had a history of heart disease, had used his health as an excuse to visit Calcutta, where he held talks with opposition leaders. By the time the Americans arrived, B P Koirala was already under arrest for helping to organise a strike at a jute mill in Biratnagar to demand fairer wages, and was now being force-marched back to Kathmandu. There he was jailed, attracting sympathy and support from the Indian independence movement’s most famous leaders, including Gandhi, who wrote to Padma demanding his release.

Again, Padma showed himself an adroit politician. Anxious not to

encourage an equivalent movement within Nepal, he promised a new constitution and invited Indian constitutional lawyers to help write it. He announced an independent judiciary, the introduction of female education and municipal elections. Although autocratic, the Ranas could present themselves as conservative Hindu champions of the pahadis, the dominant Brahmin–Chhetri caste of the middle hills. This was enough to persuade Nehru that there need not be a coup in Nepal to bring change, at least under Padma’s leadership. And on the day India became independent, Padma ordered the release of B P Koirala, who immediately went back to India and exile.

The people Padma most needed to convince of the need for reform, but

couldn’t, were his own extended family. His cousin Mohan saw in Padma’s constitutional reform an end to Rana dominance. One or other of them would have to go and Padma blinked first, resigning his position in early 1948, soon after Nepal’s new constitution was promulgated. On taking power, Mohan didn’t revoke it, but it remained largely inoperative. Instead, he cracked down on freedom of speech and assembly, and banned the Nepali National Congress, earning the contempt of ordinary Nepalis who had liked their taste of freedom. Banning the Nepali Congress also proved a tactical disaster in his dealings with Nehru, who played on Mohan’s fear of how India might respond in order to screw concessions out of Nepal’s government: on trade and the use of Nepali troops now serving in the Indian army. And when that was accomplished, Nehru offered his support to a skilfully managed coup that levered the Ranas out of power.

Tribhuvan’s position, meanwhile, had become increasingly difficult. The

focus for opposition hopes, the king remained under the Rana family’s tight control. Early one morning in November 1950, he left the palace with most of his family for a hunting trip, his sons at the wheel of their motorcade. As it passed the Indian embassy, they simply turned through the open gates, which were locked behind them. Tribhuvan’s young grandson Gyanendra had been left behind to reassure the Ranas nothing was afoot, so Mohan had the child declared king and allowed Tribhuvan to fly into exile in India. The British were prepared to continue their support for Mohan, partly because the Nepali Congress were hostile to Gurkha recruitment, but it was Nehru and not Britain who was now calling the shots. He could turn armed Nepali insurgents on and off at will and used the threat of insurrection to build pressure against Mohan, who finally capitulated in early 1951. Tribhuvan returned at the head of a new government that Nehru had carefully calibrated to include some of the old regime alongside his allies in the Nepali Congress. A century after Jang Bahadur murdered his way to power, the nation seemed poised on the slipway of democracy.

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What Mohan hadn’t done as he tried in vain to turn back the tide of reform was to return Nepal to its former isolation. Apart from British diplomats, few Europeans had visited Nepal in the first half of the twentieth century, fewer than visited the supposedly exclusive Tibet. Family members living abroad brought back news of India’s burgeoning independence movement, but otherwise ordinary Nepalis continued their lives as they had for centuries. A few journalists were allowed in. Penelope Chetwode wrote an article titled The Sequestered Kingdom for National Geographic in 1935. Chetwode, still only twenty-five and recently married to the poet John Betjeman, was the only daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode and not someone likely to challenge Nepal’s unusually static status quo. Likewise Edward Alexander Powell, an American adventure-travel journalist who applied for a visa on a whim in 1927 while staying in Calcutta and got lucky. His book was The Last Home of Mystery: Adventures in Nepal. Like Chetwode he portrayed the Ranas as ‘distinctly progressive’, while overlooking the fact that attempts at modernisation were for the benefit of Nepal’s rulers, not its people.

The European most capable of burrowing under the surface of Nepal at

this time was the Italian scholar Giuseppe Tucci, who spent four months in the Kathmandu valley in the summer of 1929, the first Italian to do so since the missionaries of the eighteenth century. There was no greater European scholar of the Himalaya before the war. Few adventurers travelled as far or wide, but this brilliant, cynical and ambitious opportunist never hesitated to apply political expediency if it took him closer to his academic goals: the past was his kingdom, not the present, and the Ranas would have nothing to fear from Tucci. He was born in 1894, the son of a tax officer in the provincial backwater of Macerata, whose most famous son was the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci. At the age of seventeen Tucci published his first paper, on Latin inscriptions in the countryside around his hometown, in a prestigious German archaeological journal and barely stopped writing for the rest of his life. At university in Rome he came under the influence of the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile and by extension Gentile’s patron Mussolini, and developed a lasting passion for Chinese philosophy, in particular Taoism and the semi-mythical teacher Laozi. His interest in Buddhism, he once told an Indian journalist, was born in an earlier life. The joke neatly sidestepped a paradox: no European scholar before Tucci came as close to unravelling the myriad complexities of Tibetan Buddhism, but Tucci took for himself only its core philosophy: the use of detachment as a protection, a transparent bubble, against the mediocre or tiresome. For a while, fascism held the same appeal. Tucci was, in the early 1920s, friendly with the fascist intellectual Julius Evola, author of Revolt against the Modern World: they met at the Italian branch of the Theosophical Society. Long after the war and in his early sixties, Tucci could still write that, ‘In Tibet man had not yet disintegrated: he still sank his roots fully into the collective subconscious, which knows no difference between past and present.’ He was, like so many Westerners in the Himalaya, a ‘seeker’.

In late 1925 Tucci and his Sanskrit professor Carlo Formichi arrived in

India at the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first and so far only winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, who had been touring the world seeking support for his experimental Visva-Bharati college in the sleepy Bengali town of Shantiniketan, dedicated to outdoor learning and Indian nationalism. Formichi had been Tagore’s interpreter when he visited Italy earlier that year and had written to Mussolini begging financial support for an Italian teacher to accompany Tagore home for a return visit. Il Duce hadn’t given India much political thought until that point, but looking to counter negative publicity about a fascist Italy in the rest of Europe, he saw an opening. He ordered an extravagant library of Italian literature be sent to Visva-Bharati and paid the fare for a teacher: Giuseppe Tucci. When Tagore returned to Italy a year later, the poet was bamboozled by Mussolini’s blunt charm, telling Formichi: ‘There is such a massive vigour in that head that it reminds one of Michael Angelo’s chisel.’ Flattered by his warm reception, he told an Italian newspaper: ‘Let me dream that from the fire-bath the immortal soul of Italy will come out clothed in quenchless light.’ Tagore’s more liberal European friends were aghast, and once out of Italy the poet soon backtracked. There would be no more generous gifts from Mussolini, although the dictator later welcomed a semi-admiring Gandhi to Rome.

The months in between Tagore’s visits to Italy were a delicious interlude

for Tucci, reading and studying in the warm seclusion of Shantiniketan, walking with Formichi in the gardens of Tagore’s college. Formichi was full of admiration for the younger man.

In addition to Sanskrit and the literary dialects of India, he knows Chinese, Tibetan, and has delved into the study of Iranian and the languages of Central Asia.

He was, Formichi said, the ‘future prince of Oriental scholarship’, and he regarded him as a son. Tucci, when he was famous, would keep a cool distance from Formichi, describing himself as an ‘auto-didact’ who as a young scholar had felt stifled in Italy’s dreary academic scene. Sharing credit was never easy for him. Never much of a photographer, he relied on his companions for making a visual record, including his second wife Giulia Nuvolini, whom he took to India in 1925. Her photos were rarely credited. Such ingratitude was typical of Tucci, according to his student Pio Filippani-Ronconi, himself a fascist of the Gentile school. Filippani saw Tucci as by turns charming and cruel, a man who could swiftly calculate the use of another person.

That charm was nowhere better applied than in his dealings with British

colonial officials in the Himalaya. His first trek there had been with Tagore in the hills beyond Darjeeling, but he soon focussed his interest on western Tibet and the second diffusion of Buddhism that had taken place there between the tenth and eleventh centuries. He earned his keep teaching in Dacca, Calcutta and Benares, and made research trips to Ladakh and Zanskar, learning the system of permissions he would need for more extensive explorations in Tibet. Returning to Italy in 1931 as professor of Chinese in the Oriental Institute of Naples, he organised two long expeditions to western Tibet of immense ambition that took him to those places he had identified as crucial to his studies of the second diffusion: the monasteries of Tabo, in the Spiti valley, and nearby Nako, built in a similar style, as well as Tholing, across the modern border in the west Tibet region of Ngari, and the nearby citadel of Tsaparang. In western Tibet in particular, he felt as though a vast spiritual enterprise had crumbled away almost to dust and squalor and showed no compunction in removing whatever he could from the crumbling monuments he found, including an entire wall painting.

This didn’t go unnoticed. The Anglo-Greek mountaineer and Buddhist

Marco Pallis was another exceptional traveller, and his passion for the Himalaya wasn’t confined to its past. He and his companions spent months travelling in Ladakh wearing the chuba, the long sheepskin coat beloved of Tibetan nomads, as a deliberate reversal of the attitude among most British that Western dress maintained a safe distance from the natives. Pallis had climbed near Nako and when he became aware of what Tucci was doing, Pallis wrote to the authorities about it. Tucci rather disingenuously suggested the Indian authorities should have a museum for such antiquities and would keep his collection safe and sound until they did. He wasn’t the only academic to bring Himalayan treasures home with him.

Tucci made two more journeys before the war, this time to central Tibet,

the second, in 1939, being the more productive, in which he visited the monastery at Sakya and made a detailed record of everything that would be ruined in the Cultural Revolution. On his first visit, in 1937, he took with him the photographer, anthropologist, writer and mountaineer Fosco Maraini, whose warm character glows like coals from his travel books on the Himalaya and Japan. He liked Tibetans for the way they lived and contemplated writing a book, which he would call Secret Tibet.

The secret will be, not the strange things that it will reveal, but the normal things in it – real people, flesh and blood, love, desire, repentance, pride and cowardice.

The images Maraini brought back from his first Tibet expedition were among the best to emerge from Tibet before the war and stand as an enticing historical record. Maraini had been born in Florence in 1912 to a half-Englishwoman, Cornelia ‘Yoï’ Crosse, joking that his exposure to bad food thanks to her was excellent preparation for expedition life. His father was the sculptor Antonio Maraini, whose career flourished under Mussolini. When he signed the whole family up as fascists, Fosco tore up his party card in front of his father. Tucci, on the other hand, went to Japan as Mussolini’s representative in 1937. Maraini would spend two years in a Japanese concentration camp during the war, along with his wife, the beautiful Sicilian Topazia Alliata, and their three daughters, having refused to support the Republic of Salò, Mussolini’s rump of a fascist state.

After the war, despite Tucci’s support for Mussolini, which cost him his

chair at Rome University, he wasted no time in attempting a return to Tibet, in 1946 writing to the government of India’s representative in Lhasa Hugh Richardson to request permission. Tucci could shed allegiances like a snake does its skin. ‘To the vanity, inconsistency and double-dealing of politicians, I have opposed the saints and the heroes, the poets and scientists,’ he wrote. It speaks to Tucci’s charm that he was one of very few Europeans the British welcomed in Tibet. Technically, Britain and Italy were still at war, but Richardson offered circumspect support. The Chinese had recently funded a library in Lhasa, and the British, to keep up, had done likewise. Richardson suggested Tucci send some copies of his latest book to important officials in the city to prepare the ground.

Tucci’s journey took place in 1948, by which time a peace treaty had

been signed with Italy and the violence of Partition was over, but the visas for his travelling companions, including Fosco Maraini, were delayed. Tucci went on ahead, taking with him Tenzing Norgay as his factotum. Tucci admired Tenzing’s efficiency and with his fluent Tibetan could discuss anything with the climber, from obscure Tibetan saints to his friend, the new Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Tucci promised Tenzing an introduction. In Lhasa they met the Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Peter Aufschnaiter, who had been detained in 1939 following another German attempt on Nanga Parbat. Having escaped their prisoner-of-war camp at Dehra Dun towards the end of the war, they had crossed into Tibet and to avoid detection reached Lhasa via a bitter winter crossing of the Chang Tang. Harrer, whose first wife Hanna Charlotte was the daughter of geologist Alfred Wegener, was astonished to hear Tucci agreeing with their Tibetan hosts that the world was flat, but Tucci would argue black was white to get what or where he wanted. He visited the three great monasteries of Lhasa – Drepung, Sera and Ganden – and sat with Eric Bailey’s old friend Tsarong Shap-pe, looking through the veteran politician’s personal library. There were long conversations with the fourteenth Dalai Lama, now a teenager taking an active interest in the outside world. Civil war in China and the rise of Mao Zedong were preoccupying Tibet’s cautious and conservative political leadership. It was dawning on them, too slowly and too late, that what the rest of the world knew and thought about Tibet would have implications for the country’s survival as an independent entity. Tucci’s record of Tibet’s treasures came just as they reached the brink of destruction.

*

For decades, Western writers – missionaries, explorers and mystics – had said pretty much what they liked about life in Tibet, sometimes without even going there. In the late 1940s, as Mao’s communists fought toward the founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949, there was an urgent need to raise public interest in contemporary Tibet, both at home and abroad, to help defend Tibet’s integrity from Mao’s likely ambitions there. Following the lead of his mentor Charles Bell, the Sikkim political officer Basil Gould fostered the notion of an independent Tibet by subsidising the only newspaper yet published in Tibetan, the Melong or Mirror, edited not at Lhasa but in neighbouring Sikkim by a Tibetan-speaking Christian called Gergan ‘Khunu’ Tharchin. (He was nicknamed ‘Khunu’ after the corner of Spiti he was born in. A convert of Moravian missionaries, Tharchin was a teacher in the early part of his career, developing connections that permeated the Himalaya.) Foreign coverage was more difficult, not least because communists in China were trying to get their line across as well. The British resident in Lhasa Hugh Richardson had been posted during the war to Chongqing as liaison officer with Chiang Kai-shek’s national government, where China’s communists also had a liaison officer, Zhou Enlai. Richardson would have been aware of Enlai’s ability to charm foreign correspondents into parroting the party line. One of these was the British journalist Stuart Gelder, a leftist who had been a minor figure in the Bloomsbury group and whose pro-communist sympathies would in 1962 get him access to Tibet, just as the process of collectivisation was at its height. In Chongqing Richardson had recruited an enterprising Canadian-born journalist called Archibald Trojan Steele to Tibet’s cause. Steele had scooped the world with his reporting on the Nanjing Massacre in 1938. Richardson arranged for him to travel to Lhasa to interview the young Dalai Lama in 1944 for the Chicago Daily News, an assignment Archie Steele regarded forever after as the most exciting of his long career. Even so, when Steele asked an official why there were no newspapers in Lhasa, he was told: ‘nothing ever happens in this country’. By the end of the decade, that attitude had given way to near desperate urgency, as Mao’s intentions for Tibet became clearer.

The prospect of China’s inevitable invasion gripped the handful of

Europeans living in Tibet. Peter Aufschnaiter wrote to his old friend the Munich climber Paul Bauer that

my fate hangs once more in the balance, after I had begun to settle very strongly for staying here forever, because somehow I prefer life here to anywhere else. A fixed job in Europe or any other part of the world no longer interests me in the least. This half-wild country is just right, and as I wrote to you before, no European willingly leaves it. How terrible that is, you can picture for yourself, because the Tibetans do not know starvation and live better than their neighbours.

Although Aufschnaiter had arrived in Tibet with Heinrich Harrer, they were different sorts of men. He had mastered Tibetan before he left his prison camp at Dehra Dun, something Harrer relied on heavily as they travelled to Lhasa. Later, Harrer wrote his bestseller Seven Years in Tibet and achieved a large measure of fame. Aufschnaiter preferred to live simply and continue his work in the Himalaya. As an agricultural scientist, he was in a good position to do so, working on seed stocks and Tibet’s first irrigation project, although he never underestimated the knowledge and resilience of the people he worked for. His skills were unusually diverse: he produced a town plan of Lhasa and worked on the electricity project that General Electric wanted to build. He was also a deeply astute observer of Tibetan culture, calibrating the difference between Lhasa’s Buddhism and the more culturally fluid version that permeated the Himalaya. Giuseppe Tucci for one was impressed by Aufschnaiter’s discoveries of early Buddhist art. His guiding inspiration was the eleventh-century teacher and poet Milarepa, another lover of nature and solitude.

In October 1950, little more than a year after declaring the People’s

Republic of China, Mao sent troops into Tibet. Aufschnaiter clung on as long as he could. He spent the next year in southern Tibet, mapping the Kyirong region close to the immense peak of Shisha Pangma and trekking up the East Rongbuk glacier to the slopes of Everest. Eventually, the proximity of the Chinese became too perilous. Communist officials sent word he would be welcome to stay and continue his development work but, sensing what was to come, Aufschnaiter preferred to leave: he wanted the life of a Tibetan estate owner, not an apparatchik with propaganda value. In January 1952, he joined a Kyirong friend and landowner making a pilgrimage to Bodhgaya in India, descending the Trisuli valley towards Kathmandu.

At this precise moment one of Nepal’s more famous agitators was going

in the opposite direction, fleeing up valley towards Tibet, although so far as we know the two men never actually encountered one another. Kunwar Inderjit ‘K I’ Singh was a doctor and Nepali Congress fighter who made his name (‘Robin Hood of the Himalaya’) doling out grants of land he’d confiscated in the western terai. In February 1951, as Tribhuvan returned from asylum in India at the head of the first post-Rana government, Singh had refused to lay down his arms, and the new cabinet summoned the Indian army to arrest him. It was not a propitious start to Tribhuvan’s reign and some ordinary Nepalis questioned what kind of change had just occurred. This was compounded when Tribhuvan had the task of appointing a replacement for Mohan Shamsher as prime minister later that year in November. He ignored the popular choice, B P Koirala, preferring instead B P’s older half-brother Matrika Prasad ‘M P’ Koirala, a conservative figure whom the Indians trusted more. In early 1952, as Aufschnaiter was preparing to leave Tibet, a radical Nepali Congress militia called the Raksha Dal, fed up with Nepal’s direction of travel, staged a revolt in Kathmandu. Hot-headed activists drove around Kathmandu announcing the dictatorship of the proletariat and sprang K I Singh from jail. Singh was invited to lead this coup attempt but promptly declined and set off instead for the People’s Republic of China, now just across the Tibetan border, destroying the bridge at Shabru so no pursuing Indians could nab him again.

In this world of rapid change, the future suddenly seemed up for grabs.

At Trisuli Bazar, Aufschnaiter heard talk among local Newars about re-establishing their former kingdom, turning back the clock to the days of the Malla kings. Minorities in Nepal could already see how Brahmin hill-men, the pahadis, were getting a grip on power. For two centuries, the Shahs and then the Ranas had treated the terai like a colony; it looked like the new government might do the same. When Aufschnaiter got to Kathmandu he stayed for a few days in a grimy lodge in the district of Asan Tol, right in the heart of the city, a place used by Kyirong people passing through.

Almost immediately he was interrogated by Indian soldiers, who grilled him for information about Chinese troop deployments. Having brokered the change of government the year before, India was exerting immense influence in Nepal. The British ambassador at the time noted how often Tribhuvan was in India, which was denting his popularity, and reported that the Indian ambassador to Nepal had direct lines to both Tribhuvan and B P Koirala.

India’s great anxiety was security. In late 1950, Nehru made a speech to

the Indian Parliament pointing out that ‘we have had from immemorial times a magnificent frontier, that is to say the Himalayas.’ Part of that ‘magnificent frontier’ now lay in theoretically independent states. Nehru’s government had already signed a treaty with Bhutan, effectively continuing colonial India’s control of Bhutan’s foreign policy under the terms of the Treaty of Punakha, signed with the British in 1910. Now he warned that

as much as we appreciate the independence of Nepal, we cannot risk our own security by anything going wrong in Nepal which either permits that barrier to be crossed or otherwise weakens our frontier.

At the heart of Nehru’s concerns was uncertainty about what China would do. As far as India was concerned, the Himalayan frontier had been settled during the colonial era, including the McMahon Line separating north-east India from Tibet, signed off at the Simla Convention in 1914. China had refused to recognise these borders and India was anxious what Mao would do when the People’s Liberation Army reached them. To that end, the Indian army sent small detachments of troops with radios to remote points within Nepal to monitor the border. (The young journalist James – later Jan – Morris, would later use one of these radio posts, located at Namche Bazar in the Everest region, to report that Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary had reached the summit.) Concern about China may also explain why India was so reluctant to allow Peter Aufschnaiter to remain in Nepal, despite the patronage of his friend Kaiser Shamsher Rana and the fact he was needed by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, then setting up shop in Kathmandu. Instead, Aufschnaiter wound up in Delhi, drawing maps of Tibet. Nepal had little choice in any of this and Nepali politicians grew increasingly resentful at Delhi’s taking them for granted.

Maharaja Krishna Rasgotra, later India’s high commissioner in London,

began his diplomatic career in Nepal at this time, working on aid projects in the terai. He noted the cynical way M P Koirala’s party workers manipulated Indian aid efforts for political ends, telling local people that the aid was either American, or else part of an Indian plot to alienate the terai from Nepal: ‘simple, credulous folk, who had nothing but goodwill for India, were being misled by a government that Nehru had gone out of his way to help.’ In the summer of 1954, a delegation of Indian politicians on a goodwill mission was met at Kathmandu’s airfield by anti-Indian protestors throwing stones. Nehru was furious and wrote an aggrieved letter to M P Koirala:

We go all out to help the Nepal government, financially and otherwise, and yet our people are subjected to insults there and intrigues against India continue.

Koirala, who had by then split from Nepali Congress to form his own party, blamed the Rana family for the trouble. Indian diplomats weren’t fooled. Nehru had found M P Koirala a big disappointment, someone who asked for advice and then ignored it, while encouraging his party workers to stir up anti-Indian sentiment.

For their part, Nepali politicians were in a quandary. Nepal’s isolation

had ended and the modern world was crashing in. The country had been administered as a fiefdom under the Ranas, without any of the institutions a democracy needed. Nepal’s leaders had to fill that gap while maintaining whatever sense of national identity the Rana dynasty had fostered. They were constantly promising things they didn’t know how to deliver and were struggling with each other for ascendancy, with parties fracturing accordingly. Needing technical help for everything from healthcare to schools to policing, they also needed some kind of counterweight against their enormous neighbour to the south, before it overwhelmed them.

Once again, the obvious candidate was America. Harry Truman used

American aid as a way to turn the world’s poor away from communism, and the State Department saw strategic interest in the Himalaya. The Delhi embassy’s chargé d’affaires George Merrell had argued as early as 1947 that Tibet might make a handy rocket-launching pad against the Soviets. Tribhuvan had signed an agreement for technical assistance with the US while he was still in exile in Delhi but he died suddenly in 1955, aged only forty-eight, while receiving medical treatment in Switzerland, the family having a history of weak hearts. It was his autocratic son Mahendra who fully realised the potential. Far less sympathetic to democratic experiments, Mahendra saw opportunity in playing the aid budgets of competing powers against each other. His greatest coup was a no-strings grant from China of $126 million, at a time when Mao was proving the miracle of communism by handing over the people’s wealth. Along with the money coming from America, Nepal literally had more cash than it was able to spend. In 1959, Mahendra would quash Nepal’s first democratically elected government when it tried to institute a taxation system that included Nepal’s elite families: ‘Why,’ the king wondered, ‘should we pay taxes when we can always get more money from the Americans?’

*

Throughout these long and tortuous political upheavals, Nepal’s competing factions had all courted foreign support. While getting visas was still difficult, for those with the right credentials – at first diplomats and scientists, then mountaineers and more general tourists – access to its ‘sequestered kingdom’, so long denied, was suddenly possible. At George Merrell’s suggestion, the ornithologist Sidney Dillon Ripley, who later ran the Smithsonian to great effect, got permission for expeditions in the pre-monsoon of 1947 and the post-monsoon of 1948 to start cataloguing Nepal’s birds. Ripley had worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor of the CIA, during the war and while stationed in Asia had cultivated a relationship with the last viceroy of India, Lord Mountbatten. The joke about Ripley was that while spies often used science as a cover, he used intelligence work to continue his birdwatching. Even if his mission was innocent, there was no shortage of spies at work in the Himalaya. The Smithsonian, the national museum and archive of the USA, later acknowledged that one of its researchers had done work on the side for the CIA interviewing Tibetan refugees. The Welsh mountaineer Sydney Wignall, planning an expedition to far western Nepal in 1955, recounted decades later how he had been approached by a member of Indian intelligence (‘Call me Singh’) to spy on Chinese troop deployments in the old strategic border town of Taklakot and survived an uncomfortable return journey in winter across the Himalaya after they were caught and imprisoned.

Mountaineers were not initially welcome in Nepal and only allowed in if

accompanied by scientists. In this way, Bill Tilman spent almost four months in the summer of 1949 exploring the Langtang massif north of Kathmandu, the border crossing at Rasuwagadhi, where the Qing army had once invaded, the rugged peaks of Ganesh and finally the Jugal massif to the east. With him was the climber Peter Lloyd, who had shared the adventure of Nanda Devi, and two men of science, Hamish Scott, an undergraduate geologist and former Scottish rugby international, and the botanist and botanical writer Oleg Polunin, brother of the environmentalist Nicholas, who wrote a plant collector’s addendum to Tilman’s 1952 book Nepal Himalaya. Tilman hired his old friend Tenzing Norgay to manage arrangements and heard all about Tenzing’s adventures with Tucci the year before:

he told me they had brought away forty maunds [around a tonne] of books. Tensing [sic], who gets on well with everyone and handles the local people well has a charming smile, great steadiness on a mountain, and a deft hand for omelettes which he turns out nicely sloppy and firm.

Tilman entered into the spirit of things, deciding he would collect beetles – in fact any beetles, although happily one of these turned out to be new to science. Yet the complexity of sometimes competing interests wasn’t to his liking. ‘The killing of two birds with one stone, however desirable, is seldom achieved intentionally and never by aiming consciously at both.’

The improvement in Nepal’s diplomatic ties with western countries was

beyond exciting for mountaineers around the world. There are fourteen mountains over eight thousand metres in the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges and eight of them are either partly or wholly in Nepal. While a number of climbers had gone above that altitude, no summit had been reached before 1950 and all the Nepali peaks had been off limits. By 1960 only one remained unclimbed. Seven of the eight in Nepal had been polished off by 1956: a mountain-climbing feeding frenzy. A number of Himalayan climbers both before and after the war had expressed the hope that climbers from many nations could come together to climb these giants. It didn’t happen. An international team was responsible for only one of the eight-thousanders, Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest. Individuals could not afford to climb these mountains – it took national sporting organisations to raise the finance and deal with the diplomatic difficulties of getting official permission – and the opportunities for European countries rebuilding national prestige after the war were too important to waste.

The French were the first to profit from the new openness. When Tilman

got back to Kathmandu in 1949, he buttonholed the maharaja Mohan Shamsher, pointed to the Annapurna massif on a map of west Nepal and asked for Mohan’s permission to go there; but by the time permission had been granted, a French expedition was already in the field that would eclipse anything Tilman’s expedition could do: a dazzling ascent of Annapurna, one of the great achievements in exploratory mountaineering as the first and only eight-thousander to be climbed first try. There were two obvious reasons for this: French mountaineering had arguably the strongest cadre of young alpinists in its history, men like Louis Lachenal, Lionel Terray and Gaston Rébuffat; and all the important French national climbing organisations, including the Club Alpin Français, were run by the same man, a domineering autocrat called Lucien Devies who drove the project with relentless energy.

The third advantage the French held, something largely ignored since,

was diplomatic. Working in the French embassy in Delhi was a young alpinist and resistance hero called Francis de Noyelle. Knowing that France had just appointed Daniel Levi to be its first ambassador in Kathmandu, de Noyelle asked Levi to help put the case to Mohan Shamsher’s government for the first attempt on a Nepali eight-thousander to be French. Noyelle’s reward for his success was to be made liaison officer on the expedition; in later life de Noyelle also served as ambassador to Nepal. Permission was granted for two mountains, Dhaulagiri and Annapurna, which rise five kilometres and more on either side of the Kali Gandaki gorge. Dhaulagiri, in expedition member Lionel Terray’s phrase, proved ‘fiendishly difficult’ and so they turned their attention to Annapurna, so far unseen. Just getting a view of it would prove surprisingly elusive. By mid May and with time running out before the monsoon, the team still hadn’t made much progress, so Maurice Herzog, their intensely ambitious leader, called a council of war at their base camp in the village of Tukche. Working at extraordinary speed, the climbers first tried the peak’s north-west spur before coming to a dead end. Then in rapid order they pushed a route and a series of camps up the north face. Eric Shipton’s old friend Ang Tharkay had led the Sherpas and in a spirit of equality was offered a place on the summit team, which he politely declined. Terray and Herzog had proved the strongest and best acclimatised, but when the supply chain stalled, Terray gave up his chance for the summit to bring supplies to a high camp. Fellow member Louis Lachenal took his place at their top camp for the push on the summit.

Lachenal and Herzog were wearing leather boots that offered insufficient

insulation and Lachenal, who earned his living as a mountain guide, was anxious about his feet. What would Herzog do, he asked, if he turned around? ‘I should go on by myself,’ he told Lachenal. ‘Then I’ll follow you,’ Lachenal replied. They reached the top at 2 p.m. on 3 June, although whether they were at the very top of Annapurna has proved a matter of controversy in recent years. The descent would become an unquestionable nightmare as Herzog lost his gloves and suffered appalling frostbite. It would take six weeks for Herzog to make it home, suffering agonies in his hands, by which time his blackened feet were riddled with maggots. Yet the image of him on the summit holding the tricolour sold more copies of Paris Match than any in its history: they called him ‘our number one hero’. The French president Vincent Auriol was at the premiere of the expedition film and when it ended Herzog held up his ruined hands to acknowledge the applause. The book Herzog wrote sold eleven million copies, far more than any other mountaineering book in history. By the end of the decade he was a government minister married to the daughter of the duc de Brissac. Lachenal also suffered badly but his life after Annapurna was more troubled, and he died aged thirty-four falling into a crevasse while skiing the Vallée Blanche above Chamonix.

The success of the French concentrated minds among other climbing

nations. The Swiss also had a strong cadre of experienced mountaineers, like the climbers who had taken Tenzing Norgay to Garhwal, André Roch and René Dittert, who had more experience of the Himalaya than the French. The Swiss had their own diplomatic secret weapon as well, the travel writer Ella Maillart who was in Kathmandu and able to press the case for the Swiss to be given permission ahead of the British for a first try at Everest.They also had an organisation, the Schweizerische Stiftung für Alpine Forschung, capable of supporting not one but two attempts on Everest in 1952, before and after the monsoon. On their first attempt, the Swiss solved what was widely regarded as the critical problem of reaching the upper slopes of Everest from the south side: the Icefall. This jumble of vast ice blocks is the consequence of the Khumbu glacier flowing over a steep drop and fracturing, presenting climbers with what amounts to a lethal maze. A number of climbers had speculated that there might not be a route through it and if there was, had doubted whether the risk was worth it. Once above this barrier, the climbers reached the Western Cwm, the vast hanging valley that George Mallory had looked down into during the reconnaissance from the north side in 1921. The Swiss climbed the steep slope above this to reach the South Col, giving access to the last eight hundred metres. During the spring attempt, Raymond Lambert and Tenzing Norgay attempted to reach the summit from a camp on the south-east ridge above the South Col but their oxygen equipment was barely worth its weight and after five hours they gained only two hundred metres; they were still three hundred metres below the top, at roughly the same height Edward Norton reached on the 1924 Everest expedition, the previous known high point.

The Himalayan Committee that replaced the Mount Everest Committee

had been aghast when M P Koirala’s government preferred the Swiss; it was a clear signal that British influence had faded, along with the Ranas. It was also true that the British weren’t quite ready. While the Swiss were on Everest, Eric Shipton led an expedition to the nearby peak of Cho Oyu, sixth highest in the world. Although unsuccessful, the team did important research work under the maverick eye of physiologist Griffith Pugh. It also galvanised the Himalayan Committee into a moment of ruthless pragmatism, sacking Eric Shipton as leader of the planned 1953 Everest attempt and replacing him with John Hunt, dubbed ‘Thruster John’ for his ambition and drive. Politically Hunt was to the left of most of his predecessors, a bit more social democrat than imperial adventurer, in tune with Britain’s Commonwealth era. The choice of the successful summit team, the New Zealander Ed Hillary and Tenzing Norgay from the locality itself, reflected that.

Once M P Koirala’s government had granted its permission, a small army

of porters – hundreds of them – left Kathmandu in stages with supplies and equipment for the dozen foreign climbers and twenty-eight Sherpas Hunt had planned to hire. Hillary and Norgay had not climbed together, just the two of them, until the expedition reached the Western Cwm, Hillary having led the route through the Icefall. Both men had their eyes on the summit and Hillary calculated that Hunt might not want to see the expedition’s two Kiwis, himself and George Lowe, partnered for the top. Hillary was curious about Tenzing, who at that stage had more experience of the mountain than anyone else.

Although not perhaps technically outstanding in ice-craft, he was very strong and determined and an excellent acclimatizer. Best of all, as far as I was concerned, he was prepared to go fast and hard.

He soon had reason to thank Tenzing. Racing down to base camp from the Western Cwm, as much for a bet with George Lowe as anything, Hillary went into a crevasse. As the New Zealander attempted to brace himself between its walls, Tenzing whipped the rope around his ice axe behind his boot and held his partner in exemplary fashion. Again and again, the two men went out of their way to illustrate their strength at altitude; it was clear from events that Hunt regarded the pair as his best card in beating Everest’s formidable hand. When progress to the South Col stalled and the expedition seemed in jeopardy, Hunt sent the pair up to boost morale and get things moving. The fact that Hunt’s team was able to lift far more supplies of oxygen, fuel, equipment and supplies than the Swiss to the South Col was the key difference.

The British pair of Charles Evans and Tom Bourdillon had first crack on

26 May, using an experimental ‘closed’ oxygen apparatus that was more efficient and effective than the ‘open’ system but prone to breakdown. Although they made rapid progress, when they paused to change cylinders, Evans’ set began acting up and it was already one o’clock when they reached the mountain’s south summit, the highest anyone had ever been on Everest. To push on would have been reckless, so they turned around and descended safely. Thanks to the immense supply effort to the South Col, a second summit attempt now began, with Hillary and Tenzing using the more reliable ‘open’ oxygen gear. A team of support climbers helped the pair establish an intermediary camp between the South Col and the summit, increasing their chance of success. Leaving camp at 6.30 a.m. on 29 May, and despite snow conditions that left Hillary anxious with worry, they reached the top in good order five hours later. ‘My first sensation was one of relief,’ Hillary wrote, ‘relief that the long grind was over.’ That soon gave way to satisfaction. ‘I turned and looked at Tenzing. Even beneath his oxygen mask and the icicles hanging from his hair, I could see his infectious grin of sheer delight.’ Hillary offered his hand, but that wasn’t enough for Tenzing, who threw an arm around Hillary’s shoulders and the two ‘thumped each other on the back in mutual congratulations’.

Thanks to Hunt’s leadership, Pugh’s science, strong logistics and two

highly ambitious climbers, Everest was finally climbed, the news arriving just in time for the coronation of Elizabeth II. As in France, the nature and scale of the achievement somehow matched a new mood of hope in Europe that followed post-war austerity. In the Himalaya, the political consequences of Tenzing Norgay being one of the successful pair were huge, and hugely complicated. A humbly born Asian had become globally famous almost overnight. Some Indian journalists called for the mountain to be renamed in his honour. In Darjeeling, when All India Radio broadcast news of Tenzing’s success, his friend Rabindrinath Mitra had pictures of him put up all over town. Mitra was a Bengali born in Calcutta but from a local family who had taken over a failing tea plantation and started a Nepali-language newspaper Sathi, meaning ‘friend’. He had run articles on the Sherpa community, feeling their contribution to mountaineering had been overlooked. He also encouraged them to organise for themselves and stop relying on the colonial-era Himalayan Club. It was Mitra who gave Tenzing an Indian flag to take to the summit. Stories began appearing in the Indian press, quoting ‘sources close to the expedition’, that Tenzing had reached the summit first and led Hillary to the top. This idea hadn’t come from Tenzing; he was still walking back from the mountain, but the notion chimed in postcolonial India. Inder Malhotra, then a young journalist but later editor of The Times of India, recalled:

The idea that white man is the leading one, oh no rubbish, this time, we have done it, our people have done it, Tenzing has done it and why should this credit be misappropriated by others. This was the feeling.

The problem was, who were ‘our people’? Tenzing had been born in Tibet, spent time in Khumbu and lived in Darjeeling for the last twenty years. In that time an empire had crumbled and new nations risen. Nepal, deeply sensitised to Indian interference, was no less keen to claim Tenzing as one of ‘our people’. Nepal’s newspaper Gorkhapatra picked up the Indian story that Tenzing had reached the summit first. Dharma Raj Thapa, a poet who worked as a radio producer in Nepal, was with Mitra in Darjeeling when they heard the news and set to work on a lyric that began ‘Hamro Tenzing Sherpa le’, ‘our Sherpa Tenzing’, later going to Calcutta to record it to music. The song was a huge hit and it carried the same message, that Tenzing had guided Hillary, only this time it wasn’t an expression of Indian nationalism but Nepali nationalism. The publisher Kamal Mani Dixit, a student in 1953, recalled ‘Wherever Nepalese were, they were singing this song. Nepalese songs on 78 rpm records were new. The idea of Nepalese nationality was new.’ More than that, Tenzing had been born poor and yet almost overnight had become globally famous. In a place as hierarchical as Kathmandu, where caste and class defined you, that was truly revolutionary. ‘For those of poor birth,’ Dixit said, ‘Tenzing’s success was a big impetus. At one time he was more popular than King Tribhuvan.’ The mood in Kathmandu when the expedition returned was, as Jan Morris put it, ‘a cross between a circus and a hustings’. Tenzing would leave the city on Tribhuvan’s own private aircraft and into the embrace of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru.

From the very first, Panditji was like a father to me [Tenzing said]. He was warm and kind, and, unlike so many others, was not thinking of what use he could make of me.

If that was naïve, Nehru did take a genuine personal interest in Tenzing, whose success reflected what Nehru hoped for his country: that ordinary people could thrive. The glow of Nehru’s attention would give Tenzing an Indian passport and a sense of mission – ‘If Nehru had told me I was Indian,’ Ed Hillary said, ‘I would have believed him’ – but when Tenzing next came to Kathmandu, in the late 1950s, his reception was cooler.

The immense global coverage of the 1953 Everest expedition and the

avalanche of articles, books and films that followed it fixed in the public mind that how this mountain had been climbed was how all mountains must be climbed: with fixed camps and huge teams. On the day the newly titled Sir John Hunt and his team arrived in London, the Austrian climber Hermann Buhl reached the summit of Nanga Parbat. Buhl had toasted the British success with a can of Munich beer when he heard about it almost three weeks later, camped at six thousand metres on Nanga Parbat’s Rakhiot face. The expedition leader was Karl Herrligkoffer, half-brother of Willy Merkl, whose own expedition in 1934 had ended in such disaster. Herrligkoffer, in the mould of Paul Bauer, despised the ‘zeal of individuals’, and preferred ‘the collaborative expedition that didn’t reach the summit’. On the other hand, he wasn’t much of a climber, while Hermann Buhl was one of the best in the world. When Herrligkoffer ordered Buhl to descend following a poor weather forecast, Buhl ignored him, making a bravura dash for the summit from his top camp, some four thousand feet below, twice the height Hillary and Tenzing had needed to cover, fuelled by Panzerschokolade, the chocolate methamphetamine used by the German military in the Second World War. (Buhl was far from the only climber to rely on speed to keep him going on a tough ascent. It was on the British equipment list in 1953.) After a forty-one hour round-trip he was back at his top camp in a state of frostbitten exhaustion but triumphant. Herrligkoffer never forgave him and the two ended up mired in legal proceedings. Buhl would make another lightweight first ascent of an eight-thousander in 1957, Broad Peak in the Karakoram, but died soon after, stepping through a cornice on the summit ridge of a nearby peak on yet another alpine-style climb.

This golden era of mountain climbing added lustre to the Himalaya as a

fashionable and exotic tourist destination. The man who drove that fashion more than anyone was a Russian emigré called Boris Lissanevitch. Previously a dancer with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes whose career came to end with Daighilev’s death in 1929, Lissanevitch met his first wife Kira Stcherbatcheva in Monte Carlo, and the pair earned their living dancing the tango in smart hotels and clubs from Shanghai to Bombay. When the marriage failed, Boris became the inspiration, manager and frontman of the 300 Club in Calcutta, an exclusive ‘mixed’ venue where Europeans and Indians could get a drink together at any time of day or night, assuming they could afford it. The club was a favourite of King Tribhuvan, and in 1951, after restrictive licensing laws killed his business, Boris took up the king’s invitation to move to Kathmandu. With his new Danish wife Inger Pheiffer and backing from Tribhuvan’s alcoholic younger son Basundhara, he opened Nepal’s first successful European-style hotel in the wing of a royal palace. The Royal Hotel was considered the only place in town for diplomats, spies, aid workers, mountain climbers, yeti hunters, celebrity guests – from the movie stars Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant to the economist and diplomat Kenneth Galbraith – and the trickle of wealthy tourists Boris managed to attract through his contacts at the travel agency Thomas Cook. The hotel was, as one visitor put it, ‘an exhibit hall of some Victorian museum’, its lobby full of stuffed crocodiles, chandeliers and gilt-framed oil paintings of Rana princes, a kind of Raj fantasy of tiger shoots and derring-do. Inger’s mother, who lived at the Royal, kept a pet red panda – called Pandaji – given to her by regular guest Ed Hillary. The standard was often ropey. Guests would spot enormous rats in their rooms and there was a pig living in the kitchen. But stays were always memorable.

Among Nepalis, there was scepticism and disquiet at the prospect of

tourism. Ritual pollution from contact with foreigners made interaction awkward at first for those from higher castes and many in Nepal’s elite couldn’t understand why foreigners would want to come anyway. What was so special about a few old temples? With his patron King Tribhuvan undergoing treatment in Switzerland, Boris sought permission from the crown prince Mahendra to bring in as many rich Americans as he could fit in a Dakota aircraft to stay at his new hotel. Mahendra indulged him but couldn’t see much in the idea until he watched the Americans vacuuming up every trinket on offer in the hotel’s gift shop. When Tribhuvan died in March 1955, Mahendra told Boris he wanted him to organise his coronation the following year. This became a shop front for Nepal, both as a tourism destination and a development aid project. Hundreds of foreign dignitaries were invited and scores of western reporters. The journalist Lowell Thomas was among them, arriving in a convoy of jeeps along Kathmandu’s first road to the outside world. His enormous cameras were set up in front of the royal dais and Thomas could be heard shouting instructions – ‘Hold it, king!’ – to Mahendra during the ceremony.

Another of the foreign reporters was the Eurasian novelist Han Suyin,

born Rosalie Matilde Kuanghu Chou in the Chinese province of Henan; her novel A Many-Splendoured Thing had appeared as a Hollywood blockbuster the year before. Han Suyin captured fragments of Kathmandu’s coming-out party and the boozy world of Boris Lissanevitch in her barely fictionalised story The Mountain is Young. (‘They do say that there is a thing called mountain exhilaration,’ she wrote, ‘that when in the high places a strange elation seizes one; akin to ecstasy or madness.’) It was in Kathmandu that she met her third husband, an Indian army colonel called Vincent Ratnaswamy, providing the novel’s love story. Han Suyin had studied in Brussels before the war and was a friend of the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, who in 1956 was casting around for a new location for his fictional reporter Tintin’s next adventure. Their friendship may have been an influence on his choice of the Himalaya, although Hergé had used Tibet as a setting for Tintin as early as the 1940s. The new story appeared under the title Tintin in Tibet, which had tested well with the publisher’s sales force, but it takes place as much in Nepal as Tibet and features drawings of Kathmandu’s temples that are both charming and accurate. The story also features a yeti, the mythical abominable snowman, then at the height of its fame. The self-styled cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans was Hergé’s ‘expert’ advisor on this creature, and he talked too with the French mountaineer Maurice Herzog, who claimed to have seen the creature’s footprints.

But the deeper inspiration for Tintin in Tibet was the psychological

torment Hergé was experiencing as he wrote the story, torn between two women, searching for an exotic dream-world of innocence and hope. That would be the version of the Himalaya the new King Mahendra would peddle as he ruthlessly put Boris Lissanevitch out of business and invested himself in the tourism business, even as he crushed Nepal’s first attempt at democracy.

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