Experience of the attempt or the garnish of success? (Page from the Past).

Eric Shipton was one of the finest mountaineers of the twentieth century. He charted the route for two historic ascents in the Himalayas but never made it to the top himself. The summits of Mount Everest and Nanda Devi eluded him, though he knew more about these two peaks than anyone else of his time.

Next year, we shall be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the first ascent of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. The route followed by the successful team was first reconnoitred in 1951 by Shipton. Until then, expeditions to Everest approached the mountain from the north through Tibet, as Nepal was closed to foreigners. The Tibetan side is steeper than the Nepal side, with a formidable barrier to the summit in the form of the great Rongbuk glacier.

It was somewhere here, on the North-east ridge, that in 1924 George Mallory and his companion Irvine lost their lives. After 1950, this option was closed due to the political changes in Tibet. Fortunately, Nepal was then thrown open to foreigners. The British, who claimed Mount Everest as their mountain, lost no time in preparing for a reconnaissance expedition. Shipton was the natural choice for the leader, as he had been on all the Everest expeditions since the thirties. Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, joined the team at the last moment; Shipton was to mark him out later as a strong candidate for the summit party whenever the final climb was made.

The task before the team was to find an alternative approach to Everest from the southern side. It was an arduous one, but at the end, Shipton was able to establish that there was a feasible route to the summit and that the gradient was less steep than on the northern side. However, to reach the South Col, i.e. the pass between Everest and its neighbour Lhotse, one had to cross a treacherous icefall--a "frozen cataract" of broken ice, with chasms and crevasses 2,000 feet deep, formed by a sudden bend in the Khumbu glacier flowing down the flanks of the Everest group. Though they actually managed to force their way up the icefall, considered to be a feat in mountaineering history, Shipton decided, in deference to the wishes of the chief sherpas, not to push any further but to wait till the following spring. He wrote: "Angtarkay and Passang were still convinced that it would be madness in the present (weather) conditions to try to carry loads through it (the icefall) and unfair to ask the Sherpas to do so. Ther e was nothing for it but to submit, hoping that we would get another chance in spring." It is quite clear that he expected to be back there in spring.

The 1951 reconnaissance created quite a stir in mountaineering circles and the Swiss were quick to grab the opportunity and make a bid for the summit. Two of their attempts failed. The British then decided not to waste any more time. In 1952, Shipton took out another expedition, the main purpose of which was the training and preparation for the final climb the next year, of which, it was presumed, he would be the leader.

However, when the expedition of 1953 was announced, there was a surprise in store for mountaineers. The Himalayan Committee selected Brigadier John Hunt, a stranger to Mount Everest, as the leader. Why this odd choice? It appeared as if the Committee members were determined to push this expedition through to coincide with the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Hunt, with his military experience, was expected, like the Duke of York, "to march his men to the top of the hill and march them down again", and present to the Queen the biggest trophy in mountaineering history.

Shipton took it in stride, and like a true sportsman did not harbour ill feeling. But those who admired him were deeply disappointed. That he had all along nursed a hope of some day climbing Everest is clear from his autobiography: "It soon became apparent that Mount Everest was the most immediate barrier to the enchanting plans that had begun to crowd upon my imagination. Having once taken a share in the attempts to climb the mountain, it was hard to stand aside."

The 1953 expedition was a success. James Morris, correspondent for The Times, managed to get the news across and the story was splashed all over the front page of newspapers along with the news of the Queen's Coronation. Hunt's sense of timing had turned out to be perfect and the weather gods had been kind. The world went berserk with joy, though a needless controversy was dragged in as to which of the two, Hillary or Tenzing, was the first to set foot on the summit. In the midst of the high drama and excitement that it generated, the members of the expedition did not forget their immense debt to Shipton. Wrote Hunt: "After supper, we brought out the expedition rum and toasted the Patron of the expedition, HRH the Duke of Edinburgh ... We also drank the health of Eric Shipton, who, among many others, had done so much to bring about this event."

Shipton was far ahead of his time. He subscribed to certain views that have found echoes in the warnings of modern environmentalists: of the dangers of dumping non-degradable matter; of the benefits of small expeditions without much "bandobast" (preparations); and the need for conserving our natural resources. They did make him seem out of step with the age of big expeditions, but he had the courage to express them repeatedly in his writings: "To my mind, a large measure of the charm of mountaineering lies in its simplicity; a rope, an ice-axe, dark glasses, and nailed boots are all the special equipment that is needed; the rest lies in the physical, mental and aesthetic contact of the climber with his mountains. The simpler the approach, the easier it is to achieve a synthesis. At least this is the only way in which I can explain the feeling I have so often experienced on large and luxuriously equipped Himalayan expeditions--a feeling of having lost touch with the essence of life I was subconsciously seeking ."

He was a votary of small expeditions consisting of two or three members carrying some basic necessities. He believed in living off the land and eating the simple food of the peasants: sattoo or tsampa (roasted barley flour), which is extremely nourishing and useful on long marches; locally available fruits, vegetables (particularly wild rhubarb, for which he had a fancy); and lentils and eggs (for which he had a passion). Meat could be dispensed with, he said, as it is heavy and deteriorates soon.

Toughening the human body against all physical odds was an article of faith with him and, to quote Geoffrey Winthrop Young, he would carry it to an extreme, even if it meant "competing with the local bears for the seasonal bamboo shoot to avert starvation". He abhorred the idea of an army marching up to "attack" and "conquer" a mountain. He was also critical of the way some mountaineers treated sherpas as mere load carriers and never got to know them as individuals.

There was a sense of deja vu about the Everest episode, as this had happened to Shipton once before. In 1934, he did a reconnaissance of the Nanda Devi basin in the Central Himalayas, which he described as "that remarkable geographical phenomenon", isolated by a formidable mountain barrier and the stupendous gorge of the Rishi Ganga flowing from the glaciers of the peak. Nobody had been able to penetrate the region lying at the base of this 25,600-foot peak.

While planning it, Shipton was anxious about finding the right companion. "At first, it looked as if it might be difficult to find someone who would fall in line with my apparently heretical ideas of extreme frugality", he wrote. But he managed to find just such a man in Bill Tilman, his companion of the Ruwenzori mountains in Central Africa. Together they entered the annals of mountaineering history by opening up a route through the awesome gorge into the "sanctuary". But, as in 1953, luck was against Shipton. When the expedition to Nanda Devi was planned in 1936, he was engaged elsewhere and could not join them. But he had the satisfaction of knowing that Tilman enjoyed the ultimate triumph of the ascent. "Yes, I felt a pang of envy. But it was grand to hear that Tilman had reached the summit", he wrote, describing the expedition as the finest achievement in Himalayan mountaineering prior to 1950 and a "brilliant example of a light expedition".

Shipton's fascination for unexplored territory was to stay with him all his life. One of his books, appropriately titled "Blank on the Map", is an account of such an exploration among some of the world's largest glaciers in the Karakoram range--a large blank he discovered while poring over a map of the high Himalaya. His compulsive urge to climb took him further afield. The mountains of Central Asia (which he explored while serving as Consul-General in Kashgar), Ptolemy's "Mountains of the Moon" in Central Africa, and the glaciated valleys of Patagonia in South America were just some of the ranges explored by this maverick mountaineer outside of the Alps and the Himalayas.

Success and failure were but an attitude of mind for Shipton. Some years before the Everest ascent, he wrote: "How much of the pleasure of mountaineering lies in the varied experience of the attempt; how much depends upon the garnish of success? It is a philosophical question. ... The men who eventually reach the top of Everest will not know the mountain as Mallory knew it."

Indira Menon, who has been interested in mountains since childhood, is a freelance writer and an armchair mountaineer.