H.W. Tilman. The Seven Mountain-Travel Books

“We argued and debated our future course of action with the earnestness due to its importance, and, like the tribe of whom Gibbon [in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire] writes, we took counsel together when drunk to give our resolutions fire and when sober to give them moderation.”  (Snow on the Equator, p. 97)

“At the height of the pilgrim season the scene in the one narrow street of Badrinath brings back memories of Kim.  Wealthy babus in ‘jhampans’, or dandies, carried by four sweating coolies, the more economically minded in long cylindrical baskets carried by only one; old men and women of all classes arriving on foot travel-stained and weary, clutching their pilgrim’s staff; all welcomed by a roll of drums nicely proportioned in length and loudness to the probable state of the pilgrim’s purse; naked fakirs smeared with ashes, long-haired saddhus, blind and deformed beggars thrusting their wooden bowls under the nose of every shopkeeper in the bazaar, getting here a little flour or a handful of rice, there some spices or salt, and nowhere a refusal; all these jostle each other in the narrow stone-flagged street between the open-fronted shops where yak-tails and Manchester cottons, musk and cheap photographs lie huddled together; and over all, aloof, watchful, stand the snows of Himachal where the gods live.”  (The Ascent of Nanda Devi, p. 171)

 “If bread is the staff of life, to the Turkoman melons are life itself, and here they are in prodigious quantity and variety – green and golden spheres, sliced half-moons of cream and scarlet – major planets among a galaxy of peaches, nectarines, apricots, rosy deceitful pomegranates, and white and purple grapes.  Against this rich back-cloth are set piles of more homely massive onions, mountains of grated onion, stately leeks, radishes as big as turnips, pyramids of eggs, hills of rice, and towers of bread.”  (Two Mountains and a River, p. 611)

“Although at Shambu-nath a smaller but similar stupa, with the same grave, all-seeing eyes, occupies a commanding position, its effect is less striking.  The eyes are too far above the earth-bound mortals of the valley, so that their searching admonitory gaze is directed to the four quarters in vain.  I felt I could live in the village at the foot of Shabu-nath and sin at ease.  The temple stands a mile west of Katmandu on a wooded hill which is climbed by several hundreds of stone steps.  The whole hill, the temple itself, and the neighbouring houses of its attendants, are the home and playground of a far too numerous colony of Rhesus monkeys, which pay even less attention than their human brothers to the unspoken question of those eyes.  Instead of studying the medley of architecture, I stood fascinated by the antics of these amusing but disgusting beasts as they clambered upon and defiled the dieties, and played hide-and-seek among the prayer wheels.  As a climber I could only regret that if we are descended from apes, monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, or a blend of all four, we have not inherited their prehensile toes.  I stood spellbound by the ease with which they climbed the holdless walls of the adjacent houses to poke their long arms through the carefully barred windows reaching for anything within.  Living in one of those houses must be an everlasting nightmare, what with the eyes of the stupa just about level with the upper window, the sad, unblinking eyes of some damned monkey on the sill outside, and the hairy arms groping within.”  (Nepal Himalaya, pp. 757-58)

“That the majority of our porters were women would surprise no one who had studied life in the Langtang.  In addition to their household work the women do the digging, the weeding, carry much to the fields, and harvest the crop.  Except for a few who are up the hill tending the cattle, the men sit about and weave mats.  In a more perfect world, no doubt, they will just sit.”  (Nepal Himalaya p. 775)

“At Calcutta I had made some enquiries as to whether a war which had seen the invention of atomic bombs and self-heating soups had not also given birth to something of more general benefit such as a leech repellent.  My surmise was correct.”  (Nepal Himalaya p. 778)

 “Poised high above the Naur river, the village [of Naurgaon] surprised us by its comfortable and prosperous air.  The houses, as usual, appeared to grow out of the brown, stony hillside, while below lay terrace upon terrace of young barley of the liveliest green where a swarm of women and children were busy weeding.  We camped short of the village by a brook, its grassy bank fragrant with thyme, where the headman soon found us.  This man, whose every word confirmed the shiftiness of his eyes, amused me by his anxiety to play down the obvious well-being of his village.  Like Justice Shallow, fearing a call was about to be made upon it, he deprecated his goodly heritage: ‘Barren, barren, barren; beggars all, beggars all, Sir John.’”  (Nepal Himalaya p. 843; quoting Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV 5.3)

“This little green patch betokening human activity shone like a good deed in a naughty world – a word of shocking sterility, harsh colour and violent shapes.”  (Nepal Himalaya p. 854; quoting Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice 5.1)

(Having survived WWI, H.W. “Bill” Tilman joined a number of fellow refugees, including George Mallory, Eric Shipton, and Robert Graves, in spending much of the remainder of their lives travelling abroad – as far from home as possible.  Tilman started out growing coffee in Kenya and climbing pretty much everything on the continent, after which he bicycled across the waist of Africa in order to catch a freighter back home  (Snow on the Equator [1937]).  In the 1930s he joined several Himalayan expeditions, penetrating the Nanda Devi sanctuary with Eric Shipton in 1934; two years later leading an Anglo-American expedition up the 25,643 ft Nanda Devi – the tallest mountain to be climbed by man until 1950 (The Ascent of Nanda Devi [1937]), and reconnoitering Mount Everest, reaching 27,200 feet without oxygen in 1938.  During WWII, after action in North Africa and Dunkirk, he was dropped behind enemy lines to fight with Albanian and Italian partisans, which naturally provided him with opportunities to climb in the Italian Alps as well (When Men and Mountains Meet [1946]).  After the war, he took up sailing, seeking out still more distant mountains, all of which is accounted for in a second massive anthology called Eight Sailing/Mountain-Exploration Books.  He died at sea en route to the Falklands, his ship foundering with all hands in 1977.

Tilman took good care of me while I went trekking in Nepal during the Fall of 2011.  In an age of Goretex, nylon tents, freeze-dried dinners, ultra-light headlamps, “smart wool,” GPS devices, cell phones, and more, it’s sobering and wonderful to imagine a rag-tag bunch of climbers wandering on hobnailed boots through the unmapped Himalayas for months on end, surviving pretty much on pemmican, sardines, courage, and imagination.  He writes wonderfully, quoting Gibbon, Shakespeare, Johnson and others with ease, drawing such exquisite, detailed pictures of people, places, and hair-raising adventures, that you cannot help but sweat and shiver in his company, sharing his exhaustion and exhilaration at every turn.  I held a first edition of The Ascent of Nanda Devi in my hands at Pilgrim Book House in Katmandu, but I couldn’t afford it.  I’ve been kicking myself ever since.

But I’ll let Jim Perrin -- an English rock climber and travel writer, author of the superbly written, eccentric Travels with the Flea, and author as well of the introduction to this anthology -- have the last word, because his comments on the effects of WWI on Tilman and his generation are memorable:

“The general run of his humour is towards irony, and Tilman’s irony, which frequently has about it something of a Switftian saeva indignatio, is a way of coping with a world the moral stability of which was thoroughly eroded throughout his lifetime, and shattered by the effects and implications of two world wars.

            Tilman went to war a month before his eighteenth birthday.  He was wounded in the thigh shortly afterwards, but was back in action in time to see the start of the Battle of the Somme.  In the next six months over a million soldiers were to die, 420,000 of them British, and dying as much through the fault of a cold-eyed, antediluvian British High Command as by German machine-gun fire.  Tilman was a first-hand witness to this slaughter channelled between two bitter winters.  Thirty years after the event, he wrote:

… after the first war, when one took stock, shame mingled with satisfaction at finding oneself still alive.  One felt a bit like the Ancient Mariner; so many better men, a few of them friends, were dead:

            And a thousand thousand slimy things

            Lived on; and so did I….

            The experience of the Great War coloured Tilman’s later attitude in two important ways.  Firstly, it put him out of all patience with whiners, complainers, and malingerers – how could a man who had seen death and suffering at first hand so early in his life have fellow-feeling for such people?  Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it put him out of all patience with England.  The dreams of soldiers who spent their days in muddy trenches, waterlogged craters or out in the winter snow, are probably accurately expressed in Max Plowman’s poem When It’s Over, which I heard Tilman quote on several occasions.  There are the aspirations of the lotus-eater:

            I shall lie on the beach

            Of a shore where the rippling waves just sigh,

            And listen and dream and sleep and die.

Or, more constructively, those of the soldier who will

            … get out and across the sea,

            Where land’s cheap, and a man can thrive.

            Which is what Tilman did in 1919, joining that astonishing exodus from England which was to make travel-writing the characteristic literary genre of the twenties and thirties.”  (Jim Perrin, “Introduction” to H.W. Tilman: The Seven Mountain-Travel Books, pp. 9-10)