House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal
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House of Snow: An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal
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Overview
'If you want a book in English that tells you about Nepalese thinking, and gives a taste of the country's contemporary literature, you could hardly do better than House of Snow' Daily Telegraph
'One of the finest books I have read this year' Nudge Books
'A well-curated sliver of works that highlight the richness and variety of Nepal's literary contribution' Kathmandu Post
In 2015, Sagarmatha frowned. Tectonic plates moved. A deadly earthquake devastated Nepal. In the wake of disaster, House of Snow brings together over 50 excerpts of fiction and non-fiction celebrating the breathtaking landscapes and rich cultural heritage of this fascinating country.
Here are explorers and mountaineers, poets and political journalists, national treasures and international celebrities. Featuring a diverse cast of writers such as Michael Palin and Jon Krakauer, Lakshmiprasad Devko?a and Lil Bahadur Chettri – all hand-picked by well-known authors and scholars of Nepali literature including Samrat Upadhyay, Michael Hutt, Isabella Tree and Thomas Bell. House of Snow is the biggest, most comprehensive and most beautiful collection of writing about Nepal in print.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781784974572 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/11/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 592 |
| Sales rank: | 248,892 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Samrat Upadhyay is a Nepali fiction author and Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana University.
Thomas Bell is a non-fiction author and journalist. He covered the civil war in Nepal for the Daily Telegraph and The Economist.
Isabella Tree is a travel writer, biographer and journalist. Her book Living Goddess was published by Penguin.
Michael Hutt is Professor of Nepali and Himalayan Studies at SOAS.
Ellen Parnavelas is the author of the popular roller derby blog secretdiaryofarookierollergirl.wordpress.com. She plays for London Rollergirls Recreational League and her blog attracts over 3,000 viewers a month. Ellen has worked in illustrated publishing for several years and is currently editing a number of fashion titles. She has an MA in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex and her articles have previously been published in music and lifestyle magazine Big Cheese and UK roller derby magazine Inside Line.
Read an Excerpt
House of Snow
An Anthology of the Greatest Writing About Nepal
By Ranulph Fiennes
Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © 2016 Ranulph Fiennes DouglasAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78497-458-9
CHAPTER 1
NEPAL HIMALAYA
H.W. Tilman
Major Harold William "Bill" Tilman (1898–1977) was an English mountaineer and explorer, renowned for his Himalayan climbs and sailing voyages. He was involved in two of the early Everest expeditions in the 1930s.
THE LANGTANG
The upper Langtang is a fine, open valley, rich in flowers and grass, and flanked by great mountains. It is a grazier's paradise. At 11,000 ft. one might expect to find a few rough shelters occupied only in the summer, but at Langtang there is a settlement of some thirty families rich in cows, yaks and sheep. These are, besides, like young Osric, spacious in the possession of dirt; for their fields are no mere pocket-handkerchief terraces clinging to the hillside but flat stone-walled fields of an acre or more growing wheat, buckwheat, potatoes, turnips, and a tall, strong-growing beardless barley called "kuru".
The grazing extends from the valley bottom to the slopes above and far up the moraines and ablation valleys of both the main and the tributary glaciers; and dotted about are rich alps with stone shelters, called "kharka", where the herdsmen live and make the butter. Considerable quantities of this are exported to Tibet. In the Langtang gompa I saw 25 man-loads of butter sewn up in skins which a lama had bought for his monastery at Kyerong, and which, he told me, represented a year's supply. Besides being drunk in innumerable cups of tea, butter plays an important part in religious ceremony. In well-run monasteries butter lamps burn continually before the images and at certain festivals pounds of butter are moulded into elaborate decorations for the altars. I noticed the Langtang lama placing a dab of it on people's heads as a blessing, while a little is always placed on the edge of the cup or plate offered to a guest.
The valley has religious traditions. Like many out-of-the-way places it was originally the home of the gods, those happy beings, to whom, with their ready means of locomotion, remoteness was of little account. But at a more recent date the beauties of the valley were revealed to mortals in a way reminiscent of that other story – "Saul he went to look for donkeys, and, by God, he found a kingdom". In this case the missing animal was, of course, a yak which its owner, a very holy man, tracked up the Langtang. The spoor was not difficult to follow, for at the Syabrubensi and at Syarpagaon the beast left on a rock the imprint of a foot which is visible to this day. The lama caught his yak at a place called Langsisa, seven or eight miles above Langtang village where, having fulfilled its appointed task, it promptly died. The lama, with less regard for sentiment than for money's worth unfeelingly skinned it and spread the skin on a rock to dry; but the yak had the last laugh; for the skin stuck and remains there to this day, as a big reddish coloured rock at Langsisa plainly testifies.
Near Langsisa there are two other rocks of greater note. A couple of miles up a valley to the east, standing some hundreds of feet above the glacier, are two big rock gendarmes which are said to represent two Buddhist saints, Shakya Muni and Guru Rumbruche. Tibetan lamas come as far as Langsisa to worship them. Since the etymology of many English placenames is still, as it were, anybody's guess, I have little hesitation in offering the following derivations. "Lang" is Tibetan for cow or yak, "tang", or more correctly "dhang", means to follow. Langsisa means the place where the yak died.
A valley with such traditions is, of course, a sanctuary; within it no animal may be slaughtered. According to the lieutenant, the observance of this ban on slaughter, which dated back for hundreds of years, had been neglected and the present headman, Nima Lama, took it upon himself to visit Katmandu to have the matter put right. The original decree, having been looked up and verified, was formally confirmed, and the fine for any breach of the rule was fixed at Rs. 100. Our wish to shoot small birds for specimens had to be met by the issue of a special licence; but apart from two sheep thoughtfully slaughtered for us by a bear of non-Buddhist tendencies, we had no meat while in the valley.
The people of Langtang are very like Tibetans, engagingly cheery, tough and dirty; but they have sufficient regard for appearances to wash their faces occasionally and were scrupulous to remove those lice which strayed to the outside of their garments. They themselves say their ancestry was a mixture of Tibetans from around Kyerong and Tamangs from Helmu – the district to the south of the valley. They now call themselves Lama-Tamang. (It should be noted that "lama" is the name for a class of Gurungs, one of the Nepal tribes from which many of the so-called Gurkhas are drawn.) They conversed very readily with our Sherpas in what was presumably some sort of Tibetan dialect. According to Tensing their speech is like that of the people of Lachen in north Sikkim.
We had arrived on 5 June, and since the monsoon might be expected to break at any time we immediately began the survey of the middle valley so that we could have fixed points to work from when we reached the frontier ridge at the head of the valley. The triangulated peak of Langtang Lirung, only two miles to the north, could not be seen from the village, and a tiny triangle of white, sometimes visible over the rock wall behind our camp, might or might not have been the tip of a 21,500 ft. peak to the west of it. Accordingly we started next day with six Langtang men carrying three weeks' food, leaving behind Polunin and the escort. With him we also left a Sherpa, a lad called Phutarkay who had been with me on Rakaposhi two years before, who as well as looking after his master had already learnt to press and handle specimens. On the march few strange plants escaped his keen eyes.
Tensing, who combined the roles of sirdar and cook, was widely travelled and an experienced mountaineer whom I had last met on Everest in 1938 when he carried a load to Camp VI. Having spent the war years with an officer of the Chitral Scouts he had further enlarged his mountaineering and ski-ing experience. Since then he had been to Lhasa with an Italian Tibetan scholar, for whom he had purchased whole libraries – he told me they had brought away forty maunds of books. Tensing, who gets on with everyone and handles the local people well, has a charming smile, great steadiness on a mountain, and a deft hand for omlettes which he turns out nicely sloppy but firm. With paragons such as this one can afford to be blind to minor faults. Neither of the others, Da Namgyal and Angtharkay, had had any experience, but the former soon learnt what was expected of him either in camp or on a mountain. Angtharkay, who is not to be confused with his wellknown namesake, who is probably the best Sherpa porter ever known, was a little old for the job and a little "dumb". In fact I suspected that he had not long come down from his tree. He came to us with a pigtail which I was sorry to see him remove, but it had to make way for the heavy Balaclava helmet which he wore even in the hottest valleys. I have a liking for men with pigtails because the first three Sherpas with whom I ever travelled all wore their hair long and were all first-rate men. Nowadays, among the Sherpas, long hair and pig-tails are outmoded, but not long ago they indicated a good type of unsophisticated man who had not been spoilt by long residence outside Nepal. Angtharkay, unsophisticated enough for anyone, unfortunately lacked mother-wit. He had the air of an earnest buffoon which neither the striped heliotrope pyjama trousers he wore one day, nor the long woollen pants he affected the next, did anything to diminish.
Half a mile above Langtang was another hamlet with large fields of wheat and kuru, still very green, a big chorten, and the longest mani wall I have ever seen – nearly three hundred yards of it. These walls or "mendongs", which are seven or eight feet high, must be passed on the left. On each side are flat stones with carved Buddhas or religious texts for the benefit of passers-by on either hand; and the equally well-worn paths on both sides of the wall show that the rule is observed. In the main Trisuli valley Buddhism, or at any rate the observance of this particular tenet, seemed to be weakening, for one of the paths round each mani wall tended to fall into disuse. In Timure village, only a day's march from the Tibetan border, some abandoned scoffer had had the hardihood to carry his miserable maize field right up to a mendong, thus abolishing the path on one side.
Having crossed a stream issuing from the snout of the Lirung glacier we camped a short four miles up from Langtang village. The grass flat, white with anemones, where we camped, lay tucked under the juniper-covered moraine of the glacier. Hard by were the gompa of Kyangjin Ghyang, some stone huts and turnip fields, and beyond a wide meadow stretched for a mile or more up the north side of the valley. The Lirung peak, from which the glacier came, and several others, overlooked it, but across the river the south containing wall was comparatively low. It can be crossed by the Gangja La (19,000 ft.) over which lies a direct route to the Helmu district and thence to Katmandu. On that side, the north-facing slope, birch trees and rhododendrons maintained a gallant struggle against the height, which, by altimeter, was 13,500 ft.
Naturally, for two of us the Lirung peak had a powerful appeal. At Katmandu we had admired its graceful lines with longing eyes. It had looked eminently climbable then, as indeed most mountains do when looked at from far off, but now we were forced to admit that its south side, defended by a great cirque, was quite impregnable. However, at the moment, climbing took second place. Neither of us was ready for serious work. Indeed, as the result of some months spent in Australia, Lloyd had become a little gross, a fault which an insufficiently arduous approach march had done nothing to rectify. Moreover, in our cautious eyes, not one of the few Langtang peaks we had seen invited immediate assault, and in new country the urge to explore is hardly to be withstood. Around a corner of the valley a few miles up, the whole Langtang glacier system waited to be unravelled, and at its head lay the untrodden frontier ridge and the unknown country beyond. During the monsoon, we hoped, we might still climb, but the survey work must be done now or never. Our first three weeks, which were moderately fine, proved to be the only fine weeks we were to have.
We spent nearly a week at this gompa camp. Lloyd wished to occupy stations on both sides of the valley before moving up, while I had made the exciting discovery of a way on to what we took to be the frontier ridge to the north. Having walked up the left moraine of the Lirung glacier, Tensing and I turned right-handed up steep grass and gravel slopes until we came to a sort of glacier shelf lying along the foot of the ridge upon which Lirung and its neighbouring 22,000 ft. peak stood. We judged the lowest point to be under 20,000 ft. A little tarn at the foot of the ice offered a convenient and tempting camp site at about 17,000 ft. Going back we made a wide detour over a bleak upland valley of more gravel than grass, where we found a scented cream and mauve primula (P. macrophylla) already in flower though old snow still lay about. On the way we took in a great rounded bump of over 17,000 ft., its grass summit incongruously crowded with long bamboo poles and tattered prayer flags.
On the assumption that this ridge would prove to be the frontier ridge upon which we should have a most valuable station, we stocked the tarn camp and occupied it, intending to spend a full week. Early next morning, having gained the glacier shelf, we plodded eastwards on good hard snow to a point below the most accessible part of the ridge. Warned by gathering clouds, Lloyd decided to get busy while he could, so at about 19,000 ft. he put up the machine, as he called the theodolite, and began taking rounds of angles and photographing the fine confusion of peaks and valleys spreading eastward. Meanwhile Tensing and I pushed on up good snow to the ridge and traversed along it to a small summit. Having expected to see much from here, we were proportionately cast down at seeing so little. Another ridge, the frontier and the watershed, intervened to the north, and between the two lay a high glacier bay from which the ice curled over like a breaking wave before falling abruptly to some hidden arm of the Langtang glacier below. To the north-east, behind a tangle of peaks, rose a lump of a mountain with a long, flattish summit and a western face of more rock than snow. We thought it neither high nor distant enough to be Gosainthan which, according to the map, was over twelve miles away. It so happened that we never saw this mountain again, but Lloyd's survey data show that it was, in fact, Gosainthan.
Under a threatening sky we trudged back to camp through snow which was already soft and wet. A night of rain fulfilled the threat of morning and when we turned out at 4 a.m. it was still falling. Since the frontier ridge could not be reached there was no point in staying, but before going down we wanted to put the theodolite on the small summit reached the day before. What with the drizzle and the waterlogged snow Lloyd soon turned back, leaving Tensing and me to struggle obstinately and rather aimlessly towards a notch in the ridge. Although the snow was too wet for them, a pair of snowshoes I had with me seemed to make for easier progress. Later I wore them a lot and tried to convince myself that those behind, who had no such aids, benefited from the huge steps I made. Having reached the rocks below the notch and found them very loose, we contented ourselves with collecting a few inexpensive rock presents for Scott and a couple of hibernating moths for myself. As a lepidopterous insect a moth has something in common with beetles, and I thought that anything that contrived to live at 19,000 ft. deserved an honorable place in any insect museum.
On returning from this damp excursion I went on to Langtang to check the food, where I was astonished by the swift growth resulting from the recent rain – by the many new flowers, the masses of white erica which had suddenly blossomed, and the dwarf rhododendron whose resinous fragrance filled the air. Kyangjin, too, had suddenly come to life. The long bamboo poles of the gompa and the roofs of the now occupied stone huts carried small flags of red and yellow, and the long, grass flat was thick with yaks and horses. Kyangjin is the first stage on the summer grazing itinerary which the yaks graze down before moving successively higher with the advance of summer, the sheep following humbly in their wake eating what is left. The horses roamed at will. They, we were told, were the property of the Government – the reason, perhaps, for their moderate condition.
Our friend Nima Lama had come up, bringing with him an adequate supply of beer, the better to fumigate the gompa and to confront and exorcise any evilly disposed spirits which might have occupied it during the winter months. Tensing had a private chat with Nima Lama, obtaining from him some confidential information which he unhesitatingly passed on to me. Having warned him on no account to let the sahibs know of it, Nima had told him that there was a pass into Tibet at the head of the valley. Neither he nor any living man had seen it, much less used it, for it had been closed at the time of the second Nepal–Tibet war (1854) – whether by man's edict or by some natural cataclysm was not made clear. It is difficult to imagine any shorter or easier way to Tibet than that by the Trisuli valley, but the oldest inhabitant well remembered people coming by the pass, bringing their yaks with them. Now I admire the yak, but his reputation for crossing passes, like that of Himalayan climbers, is apt to be enhanced by time and distance. Still, some weight must be accorded to tradition, and we resumed our journey to the valley head much encouraged by the story of this ancient pass.
We started with a scratch team, two men, three women and a boy, on a fine sunny day. The Langtang has not only the austere beauty of ice mountains accentuated by the friendly smile of flowery meadows alive with cattle – but it has the charm of reticence and the witchery of the unexpected – a quality which Mr Milestone considered more desirable in a garden landscape than the beautiful or the picturesque. A gentle but continuous bend tantalizes its admirers, draws them on impatiently to see beyond the next corner, maintaining for them the thrill of discovery almost to the end. So far we had seen no more than two miles up the valley where the bend began, a place marked by a magnificent peak which we soon acknowledged to be the loveliest gem of the valley. On account of the snow fluting traced like the ribs of a fan upon its western face we called it the Fluted Peak. It is a few feet under 21,000 ft., but it stands alone, smiling down upon the valley with a face of glistening purity framed between clean-cut snow ridges of slender symmetry.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from House of Snow by Ranulph Fiennes. Copyright © 2016 Ranulph Fiennes Douglas. Excerpted by permission of Head of Zeus Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Foreword Sir Ranulph Fiennes vii
Introduction Ed Douglas ix
Nepal Himalaya H.W. Tilman 1
Mad Lakshmiprasad Devkota 14
Mountains Painted with Turmeric Lil Bahadur Chettri 19
Schoolhouse in the Clouds Sir Edmund Hillary 25
Tiger for Breakfast Michel Peissel 43
Kathmandu Your Kathmandu Kamal P. Malla 52
Poems Bhupi Sherchan 65
The Waiting Land Dervla Murphy 69
Narendra Dai Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala 112
Time, You Are Always the Winner Banira Giri 123
Against a Peacock Sky Monica Connell 126
Dukha During the World War Pratyoush Onta 138
So Close to Heaven Barbara Crossette 151
Chomolungma Sings the Blues Ed Douglas 167
Into Thin Air Jon Krakauer 178
Music of the Fireflies Khagendra Sangroula 184
The Tutor of History Manjushree Thapa 202
Trap Maya Thakuri 207
The Scream Dhruba Sapkota 216
Chhinar Sanat Regmi 223
Letter from Kathmandu Isabel Hilton 231
Massacre at the Palace Jonathan Gregson 261
Himalaya Michael Palin 280
Forget Kathmandu Manjushree Thapa 285
From Goddess to Mortal Rashmila Shakya Scott Berry 305
The End of the World Sushma Joshi 319
Buddha's Orphans Samrat Upadhyay 335
Snake Lake Jeff Greenwald 350
Karnali Blues Buddhisagar Chapain 353
Nothing to Declare Rabi Thapa 359
Wandering Souls, Wondering Families Weena Pun 372
The Greatest Tibetan Ever Born Tsering Lama 380
The Royal Procession Smriti Ravindra 391
Aftershocks and Let the Rain Come Down Samyak Shertok 407
Pep Talk Muna Gurung 417
Flames and Fables Prabhat Gautam 423
Chamomile Byanjana Thapa 433
The Letter Rajani Thapa 439
Battles of the New Republic Prashant Jha 445
The Living Goddess Isabella Tree 460
The Vanishing Act Prawin Adhikari 471
Candy Nayan Raj Pandey 482
Three Springs Jemima Diki Sherpa 485
The Bullet and the Ballot Box Aditya Adhikari 493
Kathmandu Thomas Bell 505
Poems Itisha Giri 518
Cracked Earth Niranjan Kunwar 522
Ram Vharosh is Searching for His Face Shrawan Mukarung 528
The Kabhra Tree at the Chautari Swopmil Smirti 533
The Deeper Catastrophe Shradha Ghale 537
Poems 1976-2015 Wayne Amtzis 554
Extended Copyright 564
