News from the silent mountain

SPEAKING VOLUMES

In 1965, the CIA dreamed up one of its more harebrained schemes. China had detonated its first atomic bomb in 1964, just after Narinder 'Bull' Kumar led an Indian team to a successful ascent of Nanda Devi, the second highest peak in India.

Those two apparently disparate events would end up being closely linked. The CIA decided to plant a spying device on the heights of Nanda Devi, because of its proximity to the Tibetan border. As Hugh Thomson writes in Nanda Devi: A Journey to the Last Sanctuary, this set off a series of unfortunate events.

The attempt to plant a plutonium-powered nuclear spying device in autumn 1965 was carried out by a team of Indian and American climbers, but bad weather forced the team to abandon the device more than halfway up the mountain. The Indian climbers were sent back in spring 1966 to complete the mission""but the device was lost, buried under a landslide. More attempts were made""one involved trying to wash off the debris covering the device by using fire hoses and water from a mountain stream. It's left to the reader to imagine just how comical this attempt to locate a lost nuclear device while hauling rubber hoses up one of the toughest peaks in the world must have been.

A 1967 expedition managed to locate the device and install it near the summit. Unfortunately, it stopped transmitting in 1968. Another team was pressed into service. Thomson writes: "What [they] found was chilling: the heat of the nuclear generator had caused it to sink far down into the ice dome on the summit of Nanda Kot. The ice had then re-formed over the top again..."

In 1978, a sketchy but accurate version of the Nanda Devi story broke, setting off an uproar in Parliament. Mountaineers within the Sanctuary at the time were arrested by the Indian government in an exercise that seems somewhat pointless now. From 1982, the Sanctuary was closed off to all visitors. Thomson was a member of the only team of mountaineers and travellers to be allowed into the Sanctuary in a twenty-year period, for a brief point in 2000.

Two things make Nanda Devi stand out from the crowd of mountaineering books. One is Thomson's admiration for mountaineers like Eric Shipton, who, in 1934, was the first to find a way (along with Bill Tilman) through the circle of 20,000 ft peaks that formed an apparently impenetrable fortification around Nanda Devi. Shipton's 1936 account of that expedition is a classic. And Shipton's philosophy informs Hugh Thomson's own view of mountaineering, making this book very different from the usual narratives where summitting is everything, and where the "conquest" of the mountain is more important than the climb.

Thomson is clear that the goal of the 2000 expedition to the Nanda Devi Sanctuary was to explore territory that was "beautiful and forbidden", not to climb the mountain itself. Shipton laid the trail for the mountaineers who were willing to attempt the austere challenge Nanda Devi set, so different from the harsh but well-known slopes of Everest, but he never summitted. Writing of Shipton's 1934 ascent, Thomson says: "The fact that he never stood on the summit does not matter; indeed, it is a testament in itself. Shipton was a wanderer in the best traditions of German romanticism...not obsessed by the need to plant a flag on the top." The scrambling, commercial, brutally unco-operative expeditions that Jon Krakauer deplored in his classic book of a year of disaster on Everest, Into Thin Air, are far removed from Thomson's vision of travel.

This is what makes this small book so unusual. It focuses on a place that has become truly impenetrable, truly a last sanctuary. It is not the story of a climb, but of the spirit of the climbers who at one time represented the best of mountaineering. And a book dedicated to Nanda Devi, when the market is glutted with Everest chronicles, should be of particular interest to Indian readers. It helps that Thomson is a generous, unselfconscious writer, willing to share what he has learned.

The most memorable of his stories, for many, is the explanation of why the Nanda Devi sanctuary has been closed for so long, with its chilling footnote. As Thomson recounts, the CIA never managed to bring its nuclear device back home. "The buried plutonium-238 sits somewhere under the rocks of Nanda Devi. Plutonium-238 remains radioactive for between 300 and 500 years. The outer shell [of the device] will corrode long before that, releasing radioactive materials close to one of the sources of the Ganges. For once, the phrase 'time bomb' seems appropriate."

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