Imaginary Mountains

Stephen Alter

On those few occasions when the air is clear enough to see Nanda Devi, from the ridge above my home in Mussoorie, it is the last snow peak visible to the east. The distinctive, pyramidal shape of this mountain, observed from a south-westerly angle, has always reminded me of the sail on a boat. Amidst the waves and troughs of intervening blue ranges, Nanda Devi’s white triangle, with a smaller jib to its left, looks as if it has set course for an unknown destination somewhere far beyond the horizon.

In his book, The Ascent of Nanda Devi, Bill Tilman concludes his account of the first successful expedition to the summit, with lines from Kipling’s poem, 'A Song in Storm':

The game is more than the players of the game,

And the ship is more than the crew.¹

Tilman was not a particularly sentimental man but having been the first person to set foot atop Nanda Devi, with his crewmate Noel Odell, he can be forgiven a couple lines of hyperbole. More importantly, towards the end of his life, after climbing many high peaks in the Himalaya and elsewhere, Tilman turned to sailing and bought a 45-foot Bristol Channel pilot cutter called Mischief. Jim Perrin, Tilman’s friend and biographer, writes that Tilman sailed 114,000 miles on extended voyages across the Atlantic until his boat was holed on the rocks off Jan Mayen Island in the Arctic, in 1968. Tilman, who was seventy at the time, was born in 1898 and lived a life that was never dull and which often mercilessly teased death to its face. Perrin concludes: “Taken in sum with his service record in both wars and the climbs and mountain travelling between 1930 and 1950, his was one of the great adventurous lives—perhaps the most adventurous life—of the twentieth century…”² At the age of 79, Tilman signed on as a crew member aboard Simon Richardson’s yacht, En Avant, and set sail for Antarctica. Somewhere near the Falkland Islands, in November 1977, the boat disappeared with all its crew, including Bill Tilman. No trace of them was ever found.

I’ve often wondered whether, on those long voyages across tempestuous oceans, Tilman imagined the mountains he climbed in his youth. As the waves tossed his beloved Mischief about and the salt spray froze on his beard, did he remember the nights he had spent at high camps, with the wind flailing his canvas tent until it threatened to come apart at the seams? And in those final moments, probably in a storm, as he and the other crew members desperately struggled with the rigging in a gale, knowing that their boat was about to go down, did he picture Nanda Devi, even for a fraction of a second, before the last white-capped comber swamped their yacht?

Being neither a mountaineer nor a sailor, I can only imagine the adventures Tilman had through a vicarious lens. Over the years, I have approached Nanda Devi from different directions, both physically and philosophically. In Uttarakhand, where I live, she is the presiding goddess, not just a mountain but a deity that commands our devotion and respect. From the meadows above Auli, I have looked up at her huge mainsail unfurled against the dawn, and from the foothills of Kumaon, I have watched the sunset gild her southern slopes. The mythology and folklore that surrounds Nanda Devi is rich and evocative. She is known as the “bliss-giving goddess,” the mother who protects those who offer her obeisance and punishes those who don’t. At the village of Lata stands a temple in her honour where all of the expeditions to the mountain offered prayers for success. An annual pilgrimage in her honour ascends the high meadows of Bedni Bugiyal during the monsoon and from there to Roop Kund, a lake full of mysterious human skeletons that some believe are victims of the goddess’s wrath. Every twelve years this pilgrimage is observed as the Nanda Devi Raj Jat Yatra, attended by thousands of devotees who follow a four-horned ram through the mist and across the ridge above Roop Kund into a glacial valley beyond. Throughout Garhwal and Kumaon, hymns are sung in praise of the goddess, celebrating her benevolence and placating her fearsome temper.

One of Nanda Devi’s most ardent admirers is my mentor and neighbour in Mussoorie, Bill Aitken. In 1980, he retraced Tilman and Eric Shipton’s route into the Nanda Devi Sanctuary, a remote bowllike cirque out of which the mountain rises, encircled by a ring of subsidiary peaks. For many years this high valley was considered inaccessible, until the two British climbers breached its defenses. Following in their footsteps, forty-four years later, Aitken braved flooded torrents and the terrifying, vertiginous Ramani Slabs to reach the inner sanctum of the goddess. In his account of this quest, The Nanda Devi Affair, he describes how the sacred mountain revealed itself when the monsoon clouds parted: “She sailed majestically against the brief blue of eternity and I could not take my eyes off this stunning apparition. Everything I desired had come to fruition. There was a feeling of utter fulfilment and a song of thankfulness welled up from that core of contentment that follows the union of heaven and earth; the perfect end to all our striving.”³

In the same book, Aitken notes that Tilman’s first ascent of Nanda Devi, on 29 August, 1936, coincided with devastating floods in the region. This natural disaster was interpreted by many people in Garhwal as a violent consequence of the sacrilege of climbers’ boots polluting Nanda’s sacred summit. Being a devout believer in the powers of the goddess, Aitken goes on to suggest that she followed Tilman to the South Atlantic and stirred up the storm that sank his boat.

Human imagination is an expression of our dreams and desires, as well as a reflection of alternate realities that each of us perceive within the privacy of our thoughts. Mountains have a way of exciting our minds in unpredictable and irresistible ways. We recognize the sacred and the sublime atop high places. Though I am not a believer, I do know that when I stand at the edge of a cliff and look out upon a panorama of mountains, the beauty of those magnificent summits arouses feelings of awe and wonder, but when I look down at the precipice a few inches beyond the toes of my boots, I am filled with a sense of terror and an acute awareness of my own mortality. This is as close to a religious experience as an atheist like me can get.

Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination, explores our complex relationship with summits, ridgelines and glaciers, in a detailed and provocative account of the evolution of European mountaineering. He describes how Dr. Johnson and his faithful biographer, James Boswell, trekked over crags in Scotland while other 18^th and early 19^th century travellers crossed the Alps blindfolded, lest they be overcome with fear. Including a narrative of his own personal climbing experiences, Macfarlane recounts the many ways in which mountains take shape in our minds.

What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans – a mountain of the mind. And the way people behave towards mountain has little or nothing to do with the actual objects of rock and ice themselves. Mountains are only contingencies of geology. They do not kill deliberately, nor do they deliberately please: any emotional properties which they possess are vested in them by human imaginations.⁴

Whether it is the simple metaphor of a sailboat or frightening acts of retribution assigned to the goddess, Nanda Devi exerts a profound effect on anyone who observes her. It is not just the height of the mountain or its physical dimensions that inspire us but the way in which she connects the earth to the sky with her beguiling profile and contours. Once you have looked at Nanda Devi it is impossible to erase that vision, even if you close your eyes. Yet this image, preserved and remembered in our minds, is nothing more than an illusory approximation of the mountain that actually exists, in and of itself.

One of the great Himalayan pioneers, Dr. Tom Longstaff, tried unsuccessfully to enter the Nanda Devi Sanctuary before moving on to the nearby summit of Trishul. His autobiography is titled, This My Voyage. In the preface, he writes as good a justification of mountain travel as any I have read and distills the essence of our itinerant imaginings.

Since happiness is most often met by those who have learned to live in every moment of the present, none has such prodigal opportunities of attaining that art as the traveller. Every day as he moves or halts there is something new to enjoy. At every evening’s camp is the charm of taking possession of some new home. Attainment of a set objective is but a secondary matter as the traveller should not anticipate the journey’s end. So long as he loses consciousness of self and is aware in all his senses of the present scene, almost any part of the world is as good as another. Mountain or desert, it is all one. We shall have realized ourselves as being a tiny portion of the universe; not lords of it. We shall agree with Collingwood—“Whatever nature depends on, it does not depend on the human mind.”⁵

Mountain mindscapes that we create out of memory and imagination reflect our aspirations and longings, as well as our fears. For some, Nanda Devi may be the bliss-giving goddess, while for others she is an unattainable summit. Both the sanctuary and the main peak have been closed to climbers since 1983, when the Government of India banned access to Nanda Devi, primarily to protect the fragile environment, which had been badly degraded and polluted by various expeditions, as well as shepherds and their flocks. Today, the mountain can only be seen at a distance.

On those rare mornings when Nanda Devi is visible from Mussoorie, the imaginary mountain that exists in my mind merges with the peak that appears on the eastern horizon, silhouetted against a dawn sky. Its distinctive profile—a jagged shard of the earth’s crust chiseled and shaped by erosion over millions of years—rises above any metaphors or myths that we might contrive, though the mountain’s presence marks a delicate fault line between reality and illusion.

Summary

Stephen Alter explores the ways in which the human imagination influences our perception of mountains. He uses Nanda Devi as a perfect example of how humanity has interpreted the mystery of an unreachable yet seeable summit to shape our religions and culture.

 

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