A Personal Memoir
Trisul stands at 7,120 metres in the Kumaon Himalaya, a pyramid of rock and ice on the western rim of the Nanda Devi sanctuary. In 1978, I was a law student in my second or third year, and by a stroke of government bureaucracy and personal luck, I was assigned as Indian Liaison Officer to an Austrian Alpine Club expedition led by Marcus Schmuck.
The liaison officer requirement had an interesting origin. Some years earlier, a foreign mountaineering expedition — widely believed to have CIA connections — had used the cover of a Himalayan climb to cross into Chinese territory without authorisation. The Indian government, not amused, thereafter insisted that every foreign expedition operating in the Indian Himalaya must carry an Indian liaison officer. In theory, the liaison officer was there to keep an eye on things. In practice, for a young law student who had already done the Lahul-Zanskar crossing and climbed to 5,000 metres, it was simply a magnificent excuse to go back to the mountains.
Marcus Schmuck was not just any expedition leader. He was one of the great Himalayan mountaineers of his generation — the man who, in 1957, had made the first ascent of Broad Peak alongside Hermann Buhl. He was experienced, fair, and a good man. He was also, in at least one moment on that expedition, blind in a way that troubled me.
I will come to that. But first, the IMF office.
Marcus came to meet his liaison officer at the IMF office near Raisina Hill — a modest World War Two barracks, not the most glorious setting for the beginning of a Himalayan expedition. He had been told that the liaison officer’s services came at no charge to the expedition, but that all gear and expenses for the trip were to be borne by his team. He had come prepared. He set a small bag on the table, in the middle of the room, in full view of ten clerks and officials going about their business, and began to pull out clothing, one item at a time. One sweater. Two warm shorts. One pair of trousers. This, apparently, was the full kit allocation for the Indian liaison officer.
It was humiliating. Like watching a man hand out alms to a charity worker. The clerks watched. I watched. Marcus seemed entirely unaware of the theatre of it.
But the sweater — navy blue, with armbands of yellow and blue — was beautiful. I have it still.
We began at Joshimath, in the Garhwal Himalaya, where the road ends and the mountains begin in earnest. The approach to the base camp of Trisul takes six days, and they are six days that reward every step. The route climbs through thick forests, drops into gorges, and rises again into the high country, and all around you, steadily growing as you walk toward them, stand the giants — Changabang, the Bhagirathi peaks, and above everything else, Nanda Devi, the Goddess of Bliss, at 7,816 metres the highest peak entirely within India. The scenery is gorgeous in a way that the word gorgeous does not adequately cover. You are walking into one of the most sacred and spectacular landscapes on earth, and you know it with every step.
The entry into the Rishi Ganga gorge is not gentle. You can either climb a high ridge to bypass it, or go through the gorge itself — which requires building a bridge. Not a bridge for people alone, but a rigged line capable of ferrying the entire expedition’s equipment across the river. The logistics of a large mountaineering expedition in remote terrain are considerable, and the Austrians handled them with the efficiency you would expect of an Alpine Club operation.
It was on a section of steep rock on this approach that I first saw the other side of Marcus Schmuck.
He had fixed ropes on a difficult traverse so that the team members could cross safely. One by one the Austrians went across, clipping onto the fixed line, moving with the assurance of experienced climbers. When the last team member had crossed, Marcus removed the ropes.
The porters had not yet crossed.
These were young men, many of them, carrying forty kilograms of expedition equipment on their backs, sweating in the heat of the lower elevations, negotiating terrain that was genuinely dangerous without a fixed line. I watched them standing at the top of the traverse, scared, and I said something to Marcus. I made it clear this was not acceptable.
He looked at me and said: not my responsibility.
I have thought about that moment many times since. Marcus Schmuck was a good man and a great mountaineer, and in every other respect he ran that expedition with fairness and care. But in that moment he drew a line between the team and the people carrying the team’s equipment up the mountain, and he drew it without hesitation. It was a line I could not accept then, and cannot accept now.
Marcus was not with us the day we reached the snow bridge.
We were moving toward camp three, a long column winding up through the high snowfields, when I came around a bend and found fifteen expedition members standing in a tight huddle, completely still. Nobody was moving. I asked what had happened.
The lead climber, they said, had gone ahead and tapped his ice axe into the snow. Instead of the solid thud of compacted neve, he had heard a vast hollow echo. Somewhere beneath the surface ahead of us, a crevasse was waiting.
The fifteen Austrians looked at me. Then one of them said it with a straight face: you are not supposed to be here. You are the liaison officer. You cannot climb. But now — you can do something for us. Cross the bridge.
There was a logic to this that I found difficult to argue with, and a certain comedy to it that I found difficult to appreciate in the moment. Fifteen experienced Tyrolean guides and mountaineers, men who had spent their lives in the Alps and the greater ranges, standing in a huddle and nominating the Indian law student to go first across the potentially lethal snow bridge — on the grounds that he was not officially supposed to be there anyway.
I said: rope me up.
They roped me up. I crossed. I could feel the snow shifting slightly underfoot, that particular softness that tells you there is nothing solid beneath, and I kept moving with the steady deliberate pace you use when you do not want to think too hard about what you are doing. I reached the other side. I turned around.
Fifteen Austrians crossed behind me.
When Marcus arrived and heard what had happened, he was furious. He apologised to me directly. They should never have done that, he said. He was right. But I had crossed, and the mountain was still in front of us, and there was nothing to do but keep going.
The night before the summit push I slept in a tent at camp three, squeezed in with three others like sardines in a tin. One of the larger Austrians decided, in the night, to become amorous. I will not elaborate. I moved to the other side of the tent in a state of profound irritation and lay there in the dark, too uncomfortable to sleep properly, listening to the wind on the canvas.
The next morning, Marcus and Peter and two others left early — the route-opening team, breaking trail up the final slopes of Trisul. Around an hour later the main group of fifteen set off behind them. I got up lazily, made my preparations without hurrying, and started climbing perhaps an hour after the second party.
From below, the slope of Trisul in the morning light is one of the most beautiful things I have seen on any mountain — a vast white incline, clean as a page, rising to a sky of impossible blue. The climbers ahead of me were small dark figures moving slowly upward, like ants on a hill of vanilla ice cream.
I was, that day, exceptionally well acclimatised. My legs were strong, my lungs easy, and I began to move through the main group at a pace that surprised me. One by one the Tyrolean climbers fell behind. After a few hours I had overtaken all fifteen.
Then one of the Austrians decided he was not going to let an Indian liaison officer simply walk past him on his own mountain. He began to close the gap. I could hear him behind me, working hard, getting closer. I watched him for a while over my shoulder, and then I stopped.
I took off my rucksack and set it in the snow. I took out my water bottle, had a long drink, and looked back down the slope at him with an expression of complete leisure. The message was clear: catch me now.
I caught up with Marcus and the route-opening team and we moved together to the summit ridge. Ahead of us, perhaps two hundred metres along the ridge, was the summit of Trisul. I looked at it. I had been climbing for hours. I was tired and satisfied and the mountain felt complete.
I turned around and started down.
I had been descending for some time when I met Tony English coming up. Tony was a British helicopter pilot, the slowest member of the expedition, still making his way to the top with the quiet determination of a man who was going to finish what he started regardless of how long it took. He looked at me.
Did you stand at the last possible point, he asked.
I said: I could see the summit from where I was. What is the big deal?
He said: no. You cannot say you climbed it.
I looked at him for a moment. Then I turned around and climbed back up with him, all the way to the final point, where the ridge ends and there is nothing above you but sky, and on a clear day you can see the whole of the Kumaon Himalaya laid out below, and Nanda Devi standing over everything, enormous and serene.
We took photographs. Tony took his gloves off to handle the camera. It was a mistake.
By the time we reached camp three, his fingers were turning blue. He took off his gloves and his socks. They were black. Three people got frostbite on the Trisul expedition that year, but Tony’s was the worst.
He wept. Not from the pain, though the pain must have been considerable, but from fear. He said to me: a helicopter pilot is like a bus driver. If I cannot use my hands, I cannot work. He had built his life around flying, and sitting there at camp three on Trisul with blackened hands, he thought he had just lost it.
On his return to England, Tony spent a year in the RAF hospital. The surgeons removed the tips of several of his fingers and toes.
A year after that, he invited me to his home in Norwich. We went out to the airfield together. He asked me to hop in.
We flew across the North Sea — low, fast, purposeful — and then he dropped the helicopter out of the sky like a stone, straight down, landing in the middle of a field on target, exactly where he was supposed to be. He had fulfilled his dream. He had kept his job.
I have thought about Tony English many times since. He went back up that slope with me so I could stand where I was supposed to stand. A year later, with less of his hands than he had started with, he put a helicopter exactly where he wanted it over the North Sea. Some people are simply not defeated by mountains. They just take longer to prove it.
We came down off the mountain and walked back out through the forests to Joshimath. The six days in reverse, the giants receding behind us as we descended, Nanda Devi the last to disappear.
People are rarely one thing on a mountain. Marcus Schmuck had handed out clothing like alms in a government office near Raisina Hill, and had removed the fixed ropes before the porters could cross, and had been furious on my behalf at the snow bridge, and had led us all safely up and down a 7,000-metre peak in the Kumaon Himalaya. The mountain had shown me all of it — the generosity and the blindness, the authority and the occasional failure of imagination that authority can breed.
The snow bridge had held. Tony English had made sure I stood where I was supposed to stand. And the navy blue sweater with the yellow and blue armbands — the one pulled out of a bag in front of ten clerks like a charity handout — is still in my cupboard.
Some things you keep. Some things keep you.
— P.S.B.