Heading for the Hills

I have never met the historian John Keay, but I feel I know him. We seem to have a lot in common – the same county of birth, the same Oxford college attended in the 1960s, a love of the hills and an early introduction to and continuing professional fascination with the Indian subcontinent. For him, these last came together in the two magnificent books on nineteenth-century explorers of the western Himalayas that launched his career in the 1970s.

When Men and Mountains Meet tells the first part of this story and was named after William Blake’s lines about great things being done which are not done ‘by jostling in the street’. I am sure we both believe that, whether of trudging up 3,000 feet in Scotland where John Keay lives, or of craning one’s neck to see how high 23,000 feet looks in the Karakorams. Keay goes further. ‘It is not even enough to have seen it,’ he writes. ‘With head throbbing, lungs pulling fiercely at the harsh liquid air and feet burning with blisters, one must feel it.’ Only then, he says, comes that ‘unburdening of the spirit’ which is ‘the peculiar reward for penetrating the greatest mountains’. This book and its sequel The Gilgit Game assemble a procession of the ‘rabid careerists and brooding romantics’ who trekked into this staggering tangle of mountains to the west of the main Himalayan range. Some were simple explorers. Others were horse-traders, botanists or missionaries. One of my favourites is an old-fashioned soldier of fortune called Colonel Alexander Gardiner, born in the United States of a Scottish father, who fought variously for rival Afghan factions and then for the Sikhs. Gardiner made stupendous journeys through the mountains and ended up dying in Kashmir, a death doubtless hastened by the fourteen severe wounds he had sustained in his career. There is a photograph of the old boy reproduced in the book. He has a curved sword in hand and wears jacket, trousers and turban of a showy matching tartan. The turban is crowned with heron feathers. The focus of John Keay’s two books is the evolving imperial game that British India played on its north-west frontier. The Khyber Pass was one of the great invasion routes of history, and for all the Victorians knew there were other access points hereabouts. Early on in the century there were worries that Napoleon might have a go, but it was Russian steps through central Asia that turned it into the Great Game and impelled some of the most extraordinary feats of exploration. As intrepid Russians pushed south, heroic Britons pushed north. ‘Bagging the Pamirs’ was a rather different proposition from ‘bagging Munros’ in the Scottish Highlands, yet surely only the Victorians could have arranged for a naval lieutenant, John Wood, to be the first Briton to stand on the roof of the world. I got to India at around the same time as John Keay, as South Asia correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. I found that ‘news’ was rather confined to the plains and allowed far too few ventures into the hills. There was the misery of a Pakistan earthquake, the drama of a coup in Kabul and the exoticism of a coronation in Kathmandu: otherwise it was capital city politics and ground-level wars and famines. Only with a move into television did I manage to penetrate the legendary region of which Keay was writing. Armed with his books as historical guides, I was looking at the late twentieth-century phase of the Great Game played out after the Russians crossed the Oxus at Christmas 1979 to support their Afghan communist allies against Muslim guerrillas. We thought that might be the endgame, but since then there has been Russian defeat, Taliban ascendancy, 9/11 and NATO occupation, with British soldiers now stuck in their foxholes in the wastes of Helmand. One early task was to assess the strategic fall-out of the Soviet invasion. This was an excuse to travel deep into the Karakorams and to film the prodigious highway the Chinese had just built through northern Pakistan as a response to the Russian roads built through Afghanistan. As John Keay would have done on his researches, we travelled by jeep from Gilgit to Hunza along the almost perpendicular valley of the Hunza river and so made much easier progress than those earlier British visitors. In The Gilgit Game Keay quotes the explorer John Biddulph, who described the Hunza road in 1876 as ‘a more difficult and dangerous piece of ground than I have ever traversed in a tolerably large experience of Himalayan sport’. Biddulph found himself ‘holding on by corners of rock, working along rocky shelves 3 or 4 inches wide, and round projecting knobs and corners where no four-footed animal less agile than a wild goat could find a path’. Fifteen years later, George Curzon described the Hunza road as still ‘one of the worst tracks in the world’, enabling him to lose ‘the personal physical accretions of an entire London season’. By jeep, by horse or on foot, the journey is surely worth it. Keay declares that Hunza provides ‘the loveliest view in the whole world’ and describes it on its ledge between gloomy chasm and sheer rock as ‘like some forbidden fairy-tale garden. Vines smother neat little houses, they wind their way up the loftiest poplars and cascade down from the topmost branches. The earth is strewn with mulberries and on every flat stone a carpet of yellow apricots lies drying in the dazzling sunlight.’ The first British soldier adventurers to get there had to deal with Ghazan Khan, the Mir of Hunza, ‘sixty, fat, blackish, ugly but with rather a merry eye’. He wanted the British to help him regain some fortresses in the valley whose strategic importance he described as being ‘as dear to him as the strings which secured his wives’ pyjamas’. Note the placing of the apostrophe. On my own trip to Hunza we took tea with a younger and, it is true, much better-looking Mir of Hunza. I remember his vivid blue eyes. I also recall my producer collecting as many photographs of him as he could find and sending them to his friends with the message ‘Wish you were Mir.’ John Keay’s love affair with the mountains has continued. In 2000 he published The Great Arc, on the mapping of India and the naming of Mount Everest. The book is a witty narrative of the ups and downs of scientific exploration, which are every bit as arduous as the physical variety. Starting in Madras and proceeding to the west, then to the south and finally to the north, these surveyors took upwards of half a century to map Britain’s greatest imperial possession. First as Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India and then as Surveyor-General, George Everest was in charge of the latter half of this endeavour, and was by Keay’s account a quite appalling little man – egotistical, ill-tempered and bullying. Though he spent years crashing around in the jungles of central India, it is recorded that Everest never once encountered a tiger, a fact that led his staff to credit him with supernatural powers – ‘either that’, says Keay, ‘or tigers know from whom to keep their distance’. The book contains important pub-quiz data. Everest is not pronounced as we pronounce it, but as ‘Eve-rest’, as in Christmas Eve. The staff at the Survey of India offices will sternly tell you as much to this day. And, importantly, George Everest never caught sight of the mountain named after him. Indeed you cannot see it from India, or at least not from the bits of India Everest got to. He would have seen Nanda Devi, at 25,645 feet the highest in India, but he actually took little interest in measuring these peaks. ‘For those who had pursued the subject,’ writes Keay, ‘often with inferior instruments and speculative observations, he felt only contempt.’ I got closer to these mountains once again when the BBC World Service Trust sent to me to India for four years in 1999. Apart from The Great Arc, John Keay published another Indian book while I was there, and I fell on that one, too. This was his India: A History, a superb account which manages to make even the Harappan civilization of a few millennia bc into a page-turner. Here was an historian who had really got out and about over the decades – he calls it field work – and it shows. I confess I had fallen fast asleep over the work of several of his scholarly predecessors, British and Indian. But it was Everest – or rather Sir George – who drew me back to the hills. My favourite weekends in the ferocious Delhi summer involved boarding a Friday night sleeper which deposited me shortly after dawn at some chilly railhead at the bottom of the Himalayan foothills. For the former British hill station of Mussoorie, the terminus is Dehra Dun, and then a taxi ride up the hairpin bends to the town. From there you need to take a leaf from John Keay’s book and walk out on the ridges to the west until you come to a saddle with glorious views south to the plains and north to the snows. There, ruined and decayed but still standing, is a spacious, rather squat Georgian bungalow called Hathipaon (Elephant’s Foot) House. It was built by a British colonel in the 1820s, and bought by the then Captain Everest in the 1830s. Like all mavericks, Everest wanted to be as far away as possible from the office, in his case about 1,000 miles distant in Calcutta. When I visited Hathipaon, the veranda was occupied by a group of teenage Tibetans bunking off school and bopping away to a tinny tape-recorder. Less agreeably, John Keay found a buffalo herdsman and his boy crouching over a fire in the middle of the drawing-room ‘while their lumbering beasts splashed shit in the hallway’. The Indian landscape is strewn with the ruins of civilizations that have come and gone, so we might conclude that the era of true Himalayan adventure has faded into the remotest history. Yet the links endure. We recently visited our old friend Annette, the widow of an Indian Army cavalry officer who was energetically preparing to move from her mansion flat in Chelsea. We were taken on a little tour: in the bedroom, a beautiful rug with a motif of blue peonies (her husband had served in Gilgit in the 1930s and ‘got it off the back of a yak in Chinese Turkestan’) and in the hall six small watercolours by George Hayward whose murder in Dardistan in 1869 (‘the dastardly Dards’) provoked imperial outrage, further steps towards subduing this frontier and an heroic poem by Sir Henry Newbolt (‘He Fell Among Thieves’). George Hayward is one of the key figures in John Keay’s early books. He strode about the mountains disguised as a Pathan warrior. ‘Look at the photograph of Hayward,’ Keay commands. ‘Bearded, strung about with sword and shield and resting on a spear as if it were a shepherd’s crook, he looks like some wild evangelist.’ He relished danger and in a letter to a rival actually foretold his own death: ‘I shall wander about the wilds of Central Asia, still possessed with an insane desire to try the effects of cold steel across my throat . . .’ The pictures he painted of barren, rocky hills were certainly not great art. They had turned up in the bazaar in Bombay in the 1960s and our friend Annette was now giving them to the Royal Geographical Society. That was quite appropriate since it was the RGS that had put Hayward and so many of the others up to their adventures in the first place.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 15 © Peter Gill 2007