Nanda Devi Book

It's the best and most frightening thing I've ever done in my life – total exposure. I thought I was going to die several times.

John Shipton, son of the legendary Himalayan explorer Eric Shipton, shared this report after following in his father's footsteps up the sheer walls of a box canyon that led to Nanda Devi's forbidden Inner Sanctuary. In the early 1930s, the elder Shipton along with Bill Tilman had discovered the vertiginous route in their quest to reconnoiter Nanda Devi, the highest peak in India. Tilman claimed the summit in 1936, but border tensions with China, worsened by bizarre CIA-sponsored plots to imbed a monitoring device in the summit of the mountain, led the Indian government to close the Sanctuary to civilian explorers. By 2000, Nanda Devi had not seen an expedition for over twenty years. So when John Shipton offered adventure writer Hugh Thomson a chance to join a select group of mountaineers allowed one brief visit to the valley – reputed to be as beautiful as it was inaccessible – Thomson immediately clamped on his best boots. The chance to visit this Shangri La would probably never come again.

Thomson found the hike up the Rishi Ganges gorge strenuous enough, even though the company was excellent – Steve Berry, George Band, "Bull" Kumar, and Ian McNaught-Davis are some of the most respected mountaineers of the 20th century. But Shipton's report of climbing the 3,000 foot face of a box canyon with little or no protection (i.e., ropes), sliding from ledge to ledge, clambering up narrow chimneys, and gripping stoney cold outcroppings with numb fingers all inspired in Thomsom some very convincing meditations on the fear that climbing induces. If only he managed to sustain Shipton's timbre of fear and trembling, tempered now and then by passages of adrenaline-stoked euphoria, this book would be a mountaineering classic. Alas, after a few pages of genuine hair-raising adventure, Thomson passes on to yet another tale of the glory days of mountaineering past in the shadows of Nanda Devi, and my heartbeat settles into its old, sombre rhythm.

Nevertheless, it's hard to find fault with Thomson's reluctance to capture every exciting detail of this trek. He was brought along on this expedition as a skilled pen chosen to record the Great Ones' last tramp through the Abode of Snow into the forbidden vales. I had the feeling a certain points that this book was more the work of a wedding photographer than a writer of thumping adventures. It's all polished and polite and everyone gets his name mentioned, in full, the appropriate number of times ... but it's not always very exciting, and you sort of wish that some one would take a topple from time to time just so something would happen. The only real disaster, it turns out, was the loss of a cosmetic bag, dropped by a porter and dashed open on the rocks. Vae mihi!

By far the greatest disappointment, though, were the pictures of the Inner Sanctuary. After 100 pages of stories about the Miltonic beauty of the valley surrounding Nanda Devi, we naturally anticipate views of lush meadows, herds of bharal grazing contentedly, carpets of rare mountain flowers, perhaps a snow leopard slinking along an outcropping. What we get, though, in Thomson's sole picture of the valley, is a cloudy shot of a stone wall looming threateningly over a tiny camp squatting in the dust. Thomson doesn't even tell us about the misery he must have felt as he anticipated his descent down the box canyon (going up is always easier). This is one of those books whose abrupt ending leaves you wondering at first if the binder didn't forget to stitch in the last signature.

Read Nanda Devi: A Journey to the Last Sanctuary (2004) for its stories of the glories of expeditions past. It's certainly inspired in me an interest to read more about and by Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman. But if you came looking for a glimpse into the hidden Sanctuary, you'll be disappointed. Thomson's pulled back the veil and poked in his head, but he's not eager to share what's he's seen; he seems more than content to obscure his revelation behind the shrouds of other men's tales.