When men meet mountains

From Bengal tigers to leeches and truth quests, here’s what the greats recall from their time in the hills.

It may be an amusing story but, if true, it is unlikely to have amused the postmaster. Mark Twain, travelling in Darjeeling as part of his travels round the globe (1897) writes, “After awhile we stopped at a little coop of a station just within the curtain of the sombre jungle, a place with a deep and dense forest of great trees and scrubs and vines all about it. The Royal Bengal tiger is in great force there, and is very bold and unconventional. From this lonely little station a message once went to the railway manager in Calcutta: ‘Tiger eating station-master on front porch; telegraph instructions’.”

This Mark Twain extract is part of an anthology titled Himalaya: Adventures, Meditations, Life, edited by Ruskin Bond and Namita Gokhale. What I felt was much less amusing was Twain’s account of his first hunt in which he killed 13 tigers. Thank god there are no pictures of memsahibs, ranis and ranas standing with one triumphant foot on a gorgeous animal.

Of course the greats were all there. Here is Edmund Hillary describing the moment he and Tenzing reached the summit: “It seemed difficult at first to grasp that we had got there… 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. I held out my hand and in silence we shook in good Anglo-Saxon fashion. But this was not enough for Tenzing and impulsively, he threw his arm around my shoulders and we thumped each other on the back in mutual congratulations.”

Tenzing’s own contribution is about an earlier expedition in which his father accompanied Hillary.

I remember when I was teaching at Loreto College in Darjeeling, someone had organised a welcome for Tenzing by lining the streets with students, etc. So I was privileged to see Tenzing with his legendary grin.

Later, at a reception in the mountaineering institute, he proved himself to be, given his achievements, one of the most affable and unpretentious men I have met.

Aleister Crowley in Mutiny On Kanchenjunga gives us the expected clichés: “India being the last hope of the unmarriageable shabby-genteel, Darjeeling is lousy with young ladies whose only idea of getting a husband is to practise the piano.” (Admission: I practised the piano but it never got me anywhere.)

“One can certainly travel the neighbourhood of Kanchenjunga with delightful comfort… Unpleasant features of the journey are two: one, the rain, and the other, the leeches. The leeches of the district are a most peculiar tribe. For some reason they can only live within a well-defined belt. The terra is the haunt of some of the most tenacious of animals… but the leech has cleared them out completely. A single leech will kill a pony. It works its way up into the nostril and the pony simply bleeds to death.”

One surprise was an essay by Rabindranath Tagore who writes about his vacation in Dalhousie in My Reminiscences. Talking about his father he says, “He allowed me to wonder about the mountains at my will. So in the quest for truth he left me to select my path. He was not deterred of my making mistakes… He was not alarmed at the prospect of my encountering sorrow. He held up astandard, not a disciplinary rod.”