THE VALLEY OF FLOWERS - Arvind Gupta

210 Pages·2008·1.6 MB·English

THE VALLEY OF FLOWERS
FRANK SMYTHE

High in the Himalayan ranges of Garhwal, India, in the state of Uttaranchal
lies an enchanted valley. In 1931, Frank S. Smythe - mountaineer, explorer,
botanist, romantic and much else — chanced upon this valley with its
colourful fairy land of flowers. Entranced, he named it the Valley of
Flowers, He returned from England to visit it again in 1937.
This book is an absorbing account of Smythe's discovery subsequent visit.
Now world famous the Valley of Flowers – its glory, peace and mysterious
beauty unspoilt since Smythe's time - continues to lure adventurers.
Complete with maps, this is the most authentic account of the Valley of
Flowers.

Along with the Valley, Smythe also presents the gripping story of his
encounter and pursuit of the abominable snowman, and paints a vivid
picture of the brave porters who accompanied him, the people he met on his
travels, places around the valley his own and attempts at Himalayan peaks.

Written in the lively, sensitive, imaginative style associated with Smythe, this
rare book would be of great interest and value to mountaineers, explorers
,
botanists, gardeners, naturalists, photographers, travellers and give delight
to the lay reader.

AUTHOR’S NOTE
I WISH here to thank many kind friends for their help and generosity, and
especially my wife who was indefatigable in assisting me with the
preparations for the expedition. Some I have mentioned in the text; of others,
I must especially mention Messrs. Huntley & Palmer, who supplied and
shipped 80 Ibs. of their excellent biscuits ; Kodak Ltd., who supplied
photographic materials ; Messrs. A. Wander Ltd., who supplied “Ovaltine”
and “Ovaltine” choco-late. In India, I am indebted to Mr. Temple, the Purser
of the S.S. “ Corfu,” for the preservation of my botanical specimens ; to Mr.
C. E. Boreham of the Army and Navy Stores, Bombay, the generous,
efficient friend of previous Himalayan expeditions ; to Mr. Wears Taylor,
the Superintendent of Posts and Telegraphs at Naini Tal ; to the Forestry
Depart-ment, who kindly allowed me to use the Forest Bungalow at
Ranikhet; to the Cawnpore Woollen Mills, who supplied porters’ clothing at
a generous discount; and to Messrs. Spencer & Co. of Calcutta, who
supplied a quantity of excellent food at a very moderate price.

CHAPTER I
THE VALLEY OF FLOWERS
THIS is the story of four happy months spent amidst some of the noblest
and most beautiful mountains of the world. Its inception dates back to 1931.
In that year Kamet, a mountain 25,447 feet high, situated in the Garhwal
Himalayas, was climbed by a small expedition of six British mountaineers of
whom I was one. After the climb we descended to the village of Gamsali in
the Dhauli Valley, then crossed the Zaskar Range, which separates the upper
Dhauli and Alaknanda Valleys, by the Bhyundar Pass, 16,688 feet, with the
intention of exploring the mountainous region at the sources of the two
principal tributaries of the Ganges, the Alaknanda and Gangotri Rivers.
The monsoon had broken and the day we crossed the pass was wet, cold
and miserable. Below 16,000 feet rain was falling, but above that height
there was sleet or snow. A bitter wind drove at us, sheeting our clothing with
wet snow and chilling us to the bone, and as quickly as possible we
descended into the Bhyundar Valley, which bifurcates with the Alaknanda
Valley.
Within a few minutes we were out of the wind and in rain which became
gradually warmer as we lost height. Dense mist shrouded the mountainside
and we had paused, uncertain as to the route, when I heard R. L.
Holdsworth, who was a botanist as well as a climbing member of the
expedition, exclaim :“Look! “I followed the direction of his outstretched
hand. At first I could see nothing but rocks, then suddenly my wandering
gaze was arrested by a little splash of blue, and beyond it were other
splashes of blue, a blue so intense it seemed to light the hillside. As
Holdsworth wrote: “All of a sudden I realised that I was simply surrounded
by primulas. At once the day seemed to brighten perceptibly. Forgotten were
all pains and cold and lost porters. And what a primula it
was! Its leek-like habit proclaimed it a member of the nivalis section. All
over the little shelves and terraces it grew, often with its roots in running
water. At the most it stood six inches high, but its flowers were enormous
for its stature, and ample in number—sometimes as many as thirty to the
beautifully proportioned umbel, and in colour of the most heavenly French
blue, sweetly scented.”
In all my mountain wanderings I had not seen a more beautiful flower
than this primula; the fine rain-drops clung to its soft petals like galaxies of
seed-pearls and frosted its leaves with silver.
Lower, where we camped near a moraine, were androsaces, saxifrages,
sedums, yellow and red potentillas, geums, geraniums, asters, gentians, to
mention but a few plants, and it was impossible to rake a step without
crushing a flower.
Next day we descended to lush meadows. Here our camp was embowered
amidst flowers: snow-white drifts of anemones, golden, lily-like nomockaris,
mari-golds, globe flowers, delphiniums, violets, eritrwhiums, blue corydafa,
wild roses, flowering shrubs and rhododen-drons, many of them flowers
with homely sounding English names. The Bhyundar Valley was the most
beautiful valley that any of us had seen. We camped in it for two days and
we remembered it afterwards as the Valley of Flowers.
Often, in dark winter days, I wandered in spirit to these flowerful pastures
with their clear-running streams set against a frieze of silver birches and
shining snow peaks. Then once again I saw the slow passage of the breeze
through the flowers, and heard the eternal note of the glacier torrent coming
to the camp fire through the star-filled night.
After many years in London I went to live in the country, where I set to
work to make a garden out of a field of thistles, ragwort and dandelions. I
had looked on gardening as an old man’s hobby, and a dull and
unremunerative labour, but I came upon something that Karel Capek had
written:
“You must have a garden before you know what you are treading on.
Then, dear friend, you will see that not even clouds are so diverse, so
beautiful and terrible as the soil under your feet ... I tell you that to tame a
couple of rods of soil is a great victory. Now it lies there, workable, crumbly
and humid. . . . You are almost jealous of the vegetation which will take hold
of this noble and humane work which is called die soil.”
So I became a gardener. But I was profoundly ignorant. Two and a half
years ago I did not know the difference between a biennial and a perennial. I
am still ignorant, for there is no limit to ignorance or knowledge in
gardening. But I discovered one thing; that there is a freemasonry among
gardeners which places gardening on a pinnacle above jealousy and
suspicion. Perhaps this is because it is essentially a creative task and brings
out a fine quality of patience. You may hasten the growth of a constitution
but you cannot hasten the growth of an Alpine plant.
In 1937 the opportunity came to return to the Bhyundar Valley. I travelled
alone for several reasons, but it was arranged that Captain P. R. Oliver of the
South Waziristan Scouts should join me towards the end of July and that he
and I should spend two months mountaineering in the Garhwal Himalayas,
after which I should return to the valley to collect seeds, bulbs, tubers and
plants. Thus, I should have six weeks on my own before and during the
monsoon season, and to help me I engaged, through the kind offices of Mr.
W. J. Kydd of Darjeeling, four Tibetan porters of whom the Sirdar, Wangdi
Nurbu (or Ondi,) was an old friend of mine.
One reason for this small party was that, after four large and elaborately
organised Himalayan expeditions, I welcomed the opportunity of taking a
Himalayan holiday, a very different affair from an attempt to climb one of
the major peaks of the world and involving an entirely different scale of
values both human and material. The ascent of Mount Everest has become a
duty, perhaps a national duty, comparable with attempts to reach the Poles,
and is far removed from pleasurable mountaineering. Mountaineering in the
Garhwal and Kumaon Himalayas more nearly resembles moun-taineering in
Switzerland, for here are mountains and valleys like Swiss mountains and
valleys but built on a greater scale. But, unlike parts of Switzerland, the
country is unspoilt by commercialism. There are no railways, power lines,
roads and hotels to offend the eye and detract from the primitive beauty and
grandeur of the vistas, and there are peaks innumerable, unnamed and
unclimbed, of all shades of difficulty, and valleys that have never seen a
European, where a simple kindly peasant folk graze their flocks in the
summer months.
Then the flowers. From the hot valleys in the south, moist and humid
during the monsoon season, to the golden hills of Tibet with their dry, cold
winds, there is much to tempt the imagination of the gardener and the
botanist, yet, strangely enough, little collecting has been done since the years
between 1846 and 1849 when Sir Richard Strachey and J. E. Winterbottom
made their famous collection of specimens. It was left lo R. L. Holdsworth
in 1931 to point out the potentialities of this floral storehouse and in “Kamet
Conquered” he wrote : “There are many enthusiastic gardeners who, I feel
sure, would welcome these Himalayan high-alpines, and I write this in the
hope that some enter-prising philanthropist will go and get us seed or plants,
not merely of the easier, bigger species from compara-tively low down, but
of many a shy primula and gentian which haunts the more austere heights of
that wonderful world.”
It was my privilege to undertake this work and the reader, while
remembering and I hope generously, my ignorance, must judge for himself
whether the Bhyundar Valley deserves its title the Valley of Flowers. Others
will visit it, analyse it and probe it but, whatever their opinions, to me it will
remain the Valley of Flowers, a valley of peace and perfect beauty where the
human spirit may find repose.
On June 1st I arrived at Ranikhet from Naini Tal where I had stayed with
Sir Harry Haig, the Governor of the United Provinces, and Lady Haig. Sir
Harry was then President of the Himalayan Club and he very kindly
promised to do everything in his power to help me, whilst Lady Haig, who is
an enthusiastic gardener, has done much to beautify the already beautiful
surroundings of Government House at Naini Tal.
Ranikhet is a hill station situated at about 5,000 feet on a foothill ridge
which commands a view of the Central Himalayas, from the peaks of
western Nepal to the snows of Badrinath and- Tehri Garhwal, com-parable
in beauty, grandeur and extent to the celebrated view of Kangchenjunga
from Darjeeling. In a single sweep the eye ranges from east to west past
Nanda Kot, 22,530 feet, climbed in 1936 by a Japanese ex-pedition ; Nanda
Devi, 25,645 feet, the highest peak in British administered territory and thus
strictly speaking in the British Empire, which was climbed in 1936 by the
Anglo-American Expedition ; Trisul, 23,360 feet, climbed by Dr. T. G.
Longstaff in 1907, and which remained the highest summit to have been
reached until 1930 when the Jonsong Peak, 24,344 feet was climbed by the
International Kangchenjunga Expedi-tion ; then the great massif of Hathi
Parbat, 22,070 feet, and Gauri Parbat, 22,027 feet, with Nilgiri Parbat,
21,264 feet, behind and slightly to the west ; the Mana Peak, 23,860 feet,
and Kamet, 25,447 feet, nearly 100 miles distant; and so westwards to the
snows of Badrinath, 23,420 feet, with Nilkanta, 21,640 feet, one of the most
beautiful peaks in the Himalayas, standing alone, and the far snows of Tehri
Garhwal, where much interesting exploration remains to be done.
This vast wall of mountains is best seen in the clear atmosphere of
morning before the clouds, formed by the hot, moist air currents from the
valleys, have ob-scured it, and many a time I have risen early to look over
the foothills, dim and shadowy in the twilight, to the snows, hung like a
glowing curtain across the whole width of the northern sky, yet so remote it
seemed no human loot could tread their auroral steeps.
It is in these moments of awakening, when not a bird twits from the forest
and the sun steps from peak to peak slowly and in splendid strides that the
sage’s words ring true: “In a hundred ages of the Gods I could not tell thee
of the glories of Himachal.”
At Ranikhet I was joined by the four Tibetans from Darjeeling. I have
already mentioned Wangdi Nurbu. He will be familiar to some readers as the
man who fell into a crevasse on Kangchenjunga and remained in it for three
hours before he was found. He was badly knocked about and was sent down
to the base camp to be cared for by the doctor, but two days later insisted on
returning to the highest camp. Then, on Everest in 1933, he was taken ill
with double pneu-monia and was sent down to a lower valley in an
apparently dying condition, only to reappear at the base camp one month
later carrying a heavy load on his back and clamouring for work on the
mountain. Such is the spirit of the man. He is a little fellow all bone and
wiriness, who does not carry an ounce of superfluous flesh and has one of
the hardest countenances I have seen; he looks a “tough,” but in point of fact
he is sober and law abiding. He has less pro-nounced cheek-bones than
many Tibetans and his lips are thinner and firmer. His eyes are usually
slightly bloodshot in the whites, which gives them a ferocious, almost cruel
look, but Wangdi is not cruel ; he is merely hard, one of the hardest
men I know, and fit to enter a select coterie of Bhotia and Sherpa porters
which includes men such as “ Satan “ Chettan, who was killed on
Kangchenjunga, and Lewa, the Sirdar of the Kamet Expedition, not to
mention that pock-marked piece of granite, Lobsang, who distinguished
himself on Everest and Kangchenjunga, but who has, unhappily, since died.
Wangdi is illiterate, but in addition to his native language he can speak
fluent Urdu and Nepali. He is quick and jerky in action and in speech; it is as
though some fire burns within him which can never properly find a vent.
Like many of his race he is an excellent handy-man but failing his kukri
(curved Gurkha knife) prefers to use his teeth, and I have seen him place the
recalcitrant screw of a camera tripod between them and turn the tripod with
the screw as an axis until the latter was loosened, then calmly spit out such
pieces of his teeth as had been ground off in the process. East, but by no
means least, he is a fine climber. On Everest in 1936 he jumped
automatically into the lead of the porter columns on the North Col and was
never so happy as when exercising his magnificent strength and undoubted
skill.
Pasang, with his high cheek-bones and slanting eyes, is a true Tibetan
type. A tall stringy man with thin spindly legs, he somehow suggested
clumsiness, and undoubtedly he was clumsy on a mountain, particu-larly on
snow, so that when climbing with him I had always to be on my guard
against a slip. I think he must have been something of a fatalist, for
when-ever he did slip the first thing he did was to let go of his ice axe, the
one thing by which he might have stopped himself, and leave it to God or his
companions to decide whether nor not he should continue to slide into the
next world. But though this passivity was exasperating at times I liked
Pasang. He might give the impression of being a lout, but there was plenty
of common sense packed away behind his ungainly exterior, and he was to
be trusted on any other matter but climbing. His naive awkwardness, and I
can think of no better way of putting it, betokened a nature free from all
guile and he was ever ready and willing to do his best, however
uncomfortable the conditions in a rain-soaked camp or on a storm-lashed
mountainside. He was no leader and had none of the fire, vivacious-ness or
conscious toughness of Wangdi—where others went he was prepared to
follow—but there was some-thing solid and enduring about his character,
and the quick smile that unexpectedly illumined his normally solemn
countenance was a sure indication of kindliness.
Tewang was an old stager and one of the men who climbed to Camp V on
Everest in 1924. Hugh Ruttledge wrote of him in “Everest 1933 “that:
“Efficient, completely reliable, and never idle, he performed every office
from porter messman to nurse, in a manner beyond praise.” Undoubtedly he
was ageing, for he had become heavy, and it was apparent that he would be
of little use in difficult mountaineering and would have to be relegated to the
base camp as sheet-anchor of- the party. Age tells quickly on Tibetans,
perhaps because they wear themselves out when they are young, or it may be
that the height at which they live has something to do with a rapid
deterioration in their physique at a period when a European is in his prime.
He was of an even quieter disposition than Pasang and in all ways slower
than his companions; you could see this in his heavy face and lumbering
gait. I scarcely ever saw him smile, but there was a natural fatherliness about
him which would have chosen him automatically as a nurse, as it did in
1933, had there been any nursing to do.
Nurbu was the youngster of the party. He had been Major C. J. Morris’s
servant on Everest in 1936, and the training he had then received had stood
him in good stead, for he was the most efficient servant I have ever had. A
good-looking lad, with a round, boyish and remarkably smooth-skinned
face, he was invariably cheerful and quick to seize upon and remember
any-thing to do with his job. He had had little or no mountaineering
experience and came to me as a raw novice at the craft, but he was a natural
climber, neat and careful, particularly on rocks, on which he was cat-like in
his agility and, unlike many of his type, quick to learn the finer point* of
mountaineering, such as handling the rope and cutting steps in snow and ice.
Himalayan mountaineering will hear more of him in the future and I venture
the prophecy that he puts up a good showing on Everest in 1938.
Such were my companions—I cannot think of them as porters—and I
could scarcely have wished for better. They contributed generously and in
full measure to the pleasure and success of the happiest holiday of my life.
Three days at Ranikhet sufficed to complete my preparations, but I might
not have got away so expeditiously had it not been for the help given me by
Mrs. Evelyn Browne, whom many Himalayan mountaineers will remember
with gratitude, whilst my short stay was rendered additionally pleasant by
the kindness of Major Browne, the Secretary of the Club.
On June 4th my arrangements were completed and eleven Dotial porters,
of a race indigenous to southern Nepal, had arrived to carry my heavy
luggage to the base camp. So at last the dream of several years was on the
verge of practical fulfilment.

CHAPTER II
THE LOW FOOTHILLS
EVERYTHING was ready on the morning of June 5th, and the lorry which
was to convey me the first part of my journey was packed to capacity with
fifteen porters and some 1,000 Ibs. of luggage. This journey, of some fifty-
five miles from Ranikhet to the village of Garur, was along narrow roads,
the hairpin bends in which were innumerable and acute, and the driver drove
on the principle that no obstacle was to he encountered on the corners, and if
it was, Providence must decide the issue. Fortunately Providence was well
disposed and, apart from some hectic encounters with stray cows and
bullock carts, the drive was uneventful.
The foothills of the Himalayas provide the perfect introduction to the
“Snows” and their gentle forest-clad undulations lead the eye forwards to the
back-ground of gigantic peaks which distance serves to increase, not
diminish in beauty.