Boardman The Shining Mountain

The first ascent of the West Wall of Changabang
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-906148-76-8
Verlag: Vertebrate Digital
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

'It's a preposterous plan. Still, if you do get up it, I think it'll be the hardest thing that's been done in the Himalayas.' So spoke Chris Bonington when Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker presented him with their plan to tackle the unclimbed West Wall of Changabang - the Shining Mountain - in 1976. Bonington's was one of the more positive responses; most felt the climb impossibly hard, especially for a two-man, lightweight expedition. This was, after all, perhaps the most fearsome and technically challenging granite wall in the Garhwal Himalaya and an ascent - particularly one in a lightweight style - would be more significant than anything done on Everest at the time. The idea had been Joe Tasker's. He had photographed the sheer, shining, white granite sweep of Changabang's West Wall on a previous expedition and asked Pete to return with him the following year. Tasker contributes a second voice throughout Boardman's story, which starts with acclimatisation, sleeping in a Salford frozen food store, and progresses through three nights of hell, marooned in hammocks during a storm, to moments of exultation at the variety and intricacy of the superb, if punishingly difficult, climbing. It is a story of how climbing a mountain can become an all-consuming goal, of the tensions inevitable in forty days of isolation on a two-man expedition; as well as a record of the moment of joy upon reaching the summit ridge against all odds. First published in 1978, The Shining Mountain is Peter Boardman's first book. It is a very personal and honest story that is also amusing, lucidly descriptive, very exciting, and never anything but immensely readable. It was awarded the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize for literature in 1979, winning wide acclaim. His second book, Sacred Summits, was published shortly after his death in 1982. Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker died on Everest in 1982, whilst attempting a new and unclimbed line. Both men were superb mountaineers and talented writers. Their literary legacy lives on through the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, established by family and friends in 1983 and presented annually to the author or co-authors of an original work which has made an outstanding contribution to mountain literature. For more information about the Boardman Tasker Prize, visit: www.boardmantasker.com

Autoren/Hrsg.

Boardman, Peter

Leseproben

CHAPTER TWO
The Rim of the Sanctuary
22nd August-7th September The humidity and crowds of monsoon August in Delhi sap your will to think and move. Joe and I were lying sweltering on grubby bunk beds in a doss house down Janpath Lane. Above us, a large fan hung from the cracked ceiling, swinging limply like a wounded bird. The manager of the place was unctuous and creepy – he didn’t seem to trust us, so we didn’t feel we could trust him. We wanted to move out as soon as possible. Joe had stayed in a similar place on his way to and from Dunagiri the year before. The previous time I had been in Delhi had been with the Everest expedition, when we had stopped there for two days on the way back from Nepal. Joe and I were trying to climb Changabang on a budget of about £1,400, whereas the Everest Expedition had been sponsored by Barclays Bank International to a sum of £113,000. Then we had stayed in a five-star hotel, which cost 150 rupees each person per night. This time our accommodation was costing us seven rupees a night. A girl came in wearing Indian clothes, talking in a London accent and scratching her backside. She had been living in a leaf hut in Malari with her boyfriend, surviving by rolling marihuana and selling it to westerners. She had come to Delhi for a gamma globulin injection against hepatitis. ‘I’ve brought my own needle,’ she said. She had a slight figure and coughed heavily. Occasionally, during conversation, she would pause and rush to the toilet. ‘It’s O.K.,’ she said, ‘I’m just being sick. I took too much opium in Old Delhi last night.’ She must have been about eighteen years old. We walked through the streets. It was hot and muggy and sweat poured off us. A deep breath gave no ventilation. Everywhere were great placards and slogans, for India was at the height of the Emergency. Their English language tricked us into half-familiarity and emphasised our remoteness from the problems of the sub-continent. ‘Plant a tree’, ‘Only two children’, ‘Root out corruption’, ‘There is no substitute for hard work’, ‘Savings will help you’. Across the back of one crowded bus was written ‘Talk less, work more’. Yes, I longed for action. For weeks now, in the preparation of our expedition, we’d had to tell people what we were planning to do and explain how we were going to do it. But deep inside, this had all felt hollow. I did not really believe that we were going to do the route at all. I wanted to stop talking and start some action. Joe had some friends, Tony and Rosemary Beaumont, who lived near London. Tony Beaumont was one of the directors of an international company, Guest Keen & Nettlefolds, which had a sister company, Guest Keen Williams, with an office in New Delhi. This branch had helped Joe the previous year, and it had been friends of the Beaumonts in India who had presented our request for permission to climb Changabang to the Indian Mountaineering Foundation in person. Having raced in the Monte Carlo Rally, and taken part in ocean races themselves, the Beaumonts were in sympathy with the spirit of our project and we were indebted to them. So we went in to the office in Parliament Street, to renew acquaintances. J. D. Kapoor was there, beaming a welcome. Walking off the teeming monsoon streets into an air-conditioned office was like walking back into western reality, from the foreign into the familiar. J. D. accepted us immediately. He pressed a buzzer and refreshing drinks appeared. ‘How can I help you?’ he said. It was a happy, friendly office and they helped us a lot, since there was a great deal of expertise there to assist us short circuit the bureaucratic networks of the Indian customs and excise. However, it still took us two days of trailing around long, impotent corridors of Kafkaesque bureaucracy to obtain the final papers that would release our air-freighted equipment from the airport. Everyone was always very polite and friendly, and presented us with cups of tea, but everywhere they would patiently explain away delays by saying that they were ‘just adhering to the system’. If we complained they would just turn their eyes upwards helplessly and explain, ‘But it was you British who taught us these procedures.’ Perhaps my long hair and Joe’s curly mop, and our denim jeans and plimsolls, did not give us the best appearance for obtaining co-operation from officialdom. One day we waited for two hours in the Customs office for a document to receive interminable counter-signatures. Above our heads hung a framed quote by Jawaharlal Nehru: ‘I am not interested in excuses for delay, I am interested only in a thing done.’ Modern India has many faces. It has its ghettoes for the rich as well as for the poor. One of the attractions for me about going on an expedition is that it brings a sense of purpose to travel and tourism. It is the experiences below the snow line, with the people of the country as much as the climbing, that one remembers on returning to the West. You see all the sides of a country if you are trying to get something done, or if you are actually trying to organise something complicated in it. You learn a lot if you have to try to arrange insurance, buy enormous quantities of food, move large amounts of gear by local transport and hire porters who speak only a Himalayan dialect. All this brings you into close contact with the country – a contact that is often closer than that of some of the people who live there. We collected some gear that a friend had left with an upper-class Indian family. The woman of the house talked with the airs of a Kensington lady Tory, with the blinkered aloofness of aristocracy. I felt uncomfortable talking to her, because Joe was in one of his off-hand moods. He had switched off, and it looked rude. I murmured a few platitudes and eventually we escaped past the servants and guard dogs, out of the colony of rich houses, into a taxi and back to the streets. We also borrowed some equipment that was mouldering away in a cupboard in the flat of an Englishman employed by a bank. When we went to collect it, we talked to this lone Englishman – he was about our age. He was losing interest in life in the heat and sweat, and was full of complaints about his flat. It seemed palatial to us. Servants were cheap and his salary was just spending money. His social life was confined to the insular English community in the capital. Occasionally, Indians asked him around for a meal, he said, but sooner or later they brought the conversation around to the possibility of a loan. He seemed to live an antiseptic life, away from the living warmth, smells and hospitality of village India. It was always back on the pavements that the culture shock, the abruptness with which the aeroplane had transported us from the West, hit us. This was the real India – muggy, smelly, with small children pulling at my clothes, and pointing pathetically at their small baby brothers and sisters. Many impressions, memories, smells, sights and feelings of my previous trips to Nepal and Afghanistan returned; as if they had lain dormant, forgotten, during the rush of life in England. Now everything flooded back and started to feel real–as though I had never been away or had been living two lives. We went to a tea room and ordered a meal. It was the cheapest place in Connaght Circus and we had peered at the kitchen behind the curtain. ‘We’d better stay off meat here,’ said Joe. Glasses of water came in. ‘Cholera cocktails,’ said Joe. We reeled off all the stock jokes of Europeans on the loose in Asia. We seemed to be at a stopping place of the Hippy trail across India. Or, perhaps, the end of the trail for some. There were a few Australians and New Zealanders here – sporting stronger currency, but mainly Europeans and Indians sat at the tables. On the floor crouched an Indian, dressed in brown, sweeping a large wet rag across the floor. He moved it quickly around tables and people’s legs. I watched him, fascinated. He seemed completely oblivious to life in the tea room above him. His vision went no further than the rag in front of him. I wondered what he was thinking about. Then a European approached us and started chatting. I talked to him. Joe looked suspicious. He was an Austrian and spoke very good English. Slowly, he spun out a long sob story about how he had ended up in New Delhi. His Embassy would not help him – they were besieged by such cases. All he needed was the train fare to Benares – he was pleading with us, as fellow Europeans, to help him. I was taken in, and was about to offer him some money, which we could not really afford to do. I have a fear of confronting people – a cowardice, perhaps. But Joe said to the Austrian: ‘No, I’ve got absolutely no sympathy for you. There are millions of people in India who need help and money more than you, and I think it’s pathetic for a European to come out here and end up in a state like you. What do you think the Indians think of us, when we come begging towards them. If I had any money, I’d rather give it to an Indian who really was in need.’ The next problem, after the equipment had been extricated from Customs, was to find our liaison officer. The Garhwal Himalaya, the area in which Changabang lies, had been closed to foreigners for fifteen years owing to border troubles with China, and a dispute over grazing grounds on the Niti Pass, to the north of the Garhwal, had been one of the many issues that had started the cold war in 1954. Since the area was re-opened in March, 1974, expeditions other than those involving Indian mountaineers have only been allowed into the area if accompanied by a...