A Mountain in Tibet by Charles Allen

Author:Charles Allen [ALLEN, CHARLES]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2013-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

It was Hedin’s contention that Webber’s party never crossed this second range and that it would have been impossible for them to have reached the watershed of the Brahmaputra within three days of leaving Taklakar. Sven Hedin devotes six pages of his monumental Southern Tibet (published in eight enormous volumes in 1917) to demolishing Webber’s story point by point: ‘There are no dates, no distances, no directions, no co-ordinates, no camps, so the reader is completely lost.’ He concludes: ‘If Webber has proved anything it is that he has never been at the source of that river [the Brahmaputra]. The fact is, as I have proved above, that Webber never had the faintest idea where the source or sources was situated.’

Webber’s map made him an easy target for Hedin’s ridicule. He identifies the sources of the Sutlej as ‘Sources of the Indus’ and the sources of the Karnali as ‘Sources of the Ganges’. How seriously, Hedin asks, can we take a man who can make such grotesque errors? He suggests that we should regard Webber’s story as a romance or a ‘phantom picture from the time of the Jesuits’. A less committed reader might feel that since Webber’s story and sketch map were put together from memory nearly forty years after the event they deserve to be read with caution rather than scepticism. If Webber talks of three days to reach the Dakeo pass when in all likelihood it needed five or six it seems more reasonable to interpret this as a failure of memory rather than an attempt to construct a romance.

Webber tells us that the four sahibs hunted in pairs, the two older men – Smyth and Drummond – moving ahead and further afield while he and Hodgson stayed closer to their camp. However, on one occasion the younger men crossed ‘another lofty divide’ and found themselves looking down on the holy lake: ‘Far beneath us, some miles away, lay the most brilliantly beautiful blue sea, the celebrated Manasarovar Lake, as it proved, which we had promised not to approach.’

From their vantage point Webber and Hodgson sat and munched biscuits, listened to the familiar sounds of skylarks and, ‘as a record of our tramp’, sketched the view:

The foreground was flat, rolling hills and ridges sloping gradually towards the lake, all bare and tinted in most crude colours – reds and pink and orange – while hundreds of miles to the north and west in the violet distance there stretched range after range of low, jagged hills, all alike and succeeding one another in endless succession. Conspicuous, and towering above them all, was the snowcapped summit of the sacred Kailas.

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