Valley of Flowers (eBook)

Frank Smythe (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015
Vertebrate Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-910240-32-8 (ISBN)

Infos

In his delightful The Valley of Flowers, mountaineer Frank Smythe takes you on a botanical expedition to the Garhwal Himalaya. Alongside the author, scale the steep craggy mountains and bathe in crystal clear pools; breathe in the scented foothills of the Himalaya and their carpets of peonies, roses, rhododendrons and gentian. Experience 'the keen, biting air of the heights and the soft, scented air of the valleys'. Climber and adventurer Smythe journeys through the Himalaya's Byundar Pass, climbs the Mana Peak, descends into the Byundar Valley, and comes terrifyingly close to an encounter with The Abominable Snowman. The Valley of Flowers is a pleasurable escape for any climber, walker, mountain lover or gardener, or indeed anyone who needs reminding of the beauty and serenity of the natural world.

Frank Smythe was an outstanding climber. In a short life - he died aged forty-nine - he was at the centre of high-altitude mountaineering development in its early years. In the late 1920s he pioneered two important routes up the Brenva Face of Mont Blanc, followed in the 1930s by a sequence of major Himalayan expeditions: he joined the attempt on Kangchenjunga in 1930, led the successful Kamet bid in 1931 and was a key player in the Everest attempts of 1933, 1936 and 1938. In 1937, he made fine ascents in the Garhwal in a rapid lightweight style that was very modern in concept. Smythe was the author of twenty-seven books, all immensely popular. The erudite mountain writers of his era each offer something different. Bill Tilman excelled in his dry humorous observations. Eric Shipton enthused about the mountain landscape and its exploration. Smythe gives us wonderful detail in the climbing. His tense descriptions of moments of difficulty, danger, relief and elation are compelling - and we are not spared the discomfort, fatigue and dogged struggle. He also writes movingly about nature's more beautiful and tender face - there is no keener observer of cloud, light and colour, the onset of a thunderstorm, or a sublime valley transformed by wild flowers. There is also a strong feeling of history in his books: the superior attitudes of colonialism that, as the years rolled on, gave way to a more mellow stance and a genuine respect for his Indian and Sherpa companions. Today, his books make compelling reading: well-written and gripping tales that offer fascinating windows into the history of climbing and exploration. They are essential reading for all those interested in mountaineering and the danger and drama of those early expeditions.

Textauszug

– CHAPTER 1 –

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 raindrops 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 take 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 nomocharis, marigolds, globe flowers, delphiniums, violets, eritrichiums, blue corydalis, wild roses, flowering shrubs and rhododendrons, 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 campfire 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 the 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 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 mountaineering 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 to 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 enterprising philanthropist will go and get us seed or plants, not merely of the easier, bigger species from comparatively 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.

I arrived at Ranikhet on June 1 after a stay in Naini Tal 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, comparable 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 expedition; 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 Jonsong Peak, 24,344 feet, was climbed by the International Kangchenjunga Expedition; 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 ; 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...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 25.8.2015
• Reihe/Serie: Frank Smythe: The Pioneering Mountaineer
• Reihe/Serie: Frank Smythe: The Pioneering Mountaineer
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Sport
• Themenwelt: Reisen ► Reiseführer
• Schlagworte: Adventure Story • alpine climbing • books about exploration • Chris Bonington • classic climbing • climbing book • Eric Shipton • first himalayan climbers • frank smythe camp six • f s smythe • history of mountaineering • mountaineering book • Mountains • sport biography • the Alps • tony smythe
• ISBN-10: 1-910240-32-X / 191024032X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-910240-32-8 / 9781910240328