Chapter 4: The Axis Mundi Appears (mid-nineteenth century)
Since the sacred mountain is an axis mundi connecting earth with heaven, it in a sense touches heaven and hence marks the highest point in the world; consequently the territory that surrounds it ... is held to be the highest among countries.
-- (M. Eliade [1959. p.38])
Method in the Mountains
In 1869 Nina Mazuchelli, English despite her Italian-sounding name, became the first Western woman to see the famed Mount Everest. 'It was', she exclaimed, 'the dream of my childhood to see this nearest point of Heaven and Earth ... As I stand in these vast solitudes I do so with bent knee and bowed head as becomes one who is in the felt presence of the Invisible.' [1] Mount Everest had been declared the highest mountain on the globe some seventeen years previously, during the course of a decade that was a watershed in the British relationship to Tibet.
It began with the publication in English of Huc and Gabet's account of their famous journey to Lhasa in 1846. For the first time a widespread and well-informed public had access to an eyewitness account of this elusive and mysterious city. The first edition immediately sold out. [2] Joseph Hooker's Himalayan Journals, which described his extensive botanical journeys through Sikkim and up to the Tibetan border, was similarly an instant success when first published in 1854. [3] Between 1846 and 1847 the western Himalayas were subjected to an exhaustive survey by the three members of the commission established to define Tibet's boundary with the British 'protected' territories of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. Alexander Cunningham, Thomas Thomson and Henry Strachey compiled extensive reports that covered the culture, geology, geography, botany and history of this region. Cunningham's Ladak, published in 1853, is still used as a basic reference. [4]
Between 1854 and 1858 the Schlagintweit brothers journeyed extensively through the Himalayas and Central Asia gathering information that would eventually result in the publication of Buddhism in Tibet, the first overview study of its kind. [5] A major survey of the Himalayan peaks was undertaken between 1846 and 1855. [6] The Himalayas were hence no longer unknown territory, nor was British understanding of this mountain region fragmented and unsystematized. The tireless Brian Hodgson, from his bases in Kathmandu and Darjeeling, had, since early in the century, produced paper after paper documenting and classifying everything Himalayan: from the geography to the religions, from the racial characteristics of the hill tribes to their languages. His systematization of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon provided a cornerstone that still supports Western understanding of that religion. [7]
In 1849 Hodgson wrote:
I had been for several years a traveler in the Himalayas, before I could get rid of that tyranny of the senses which so strongly impresses all beholders of this stupendous scenery with the conviction that the mighty maze is quite without a plan. [8]
Tibet and the Himalayas were a part of this search for an imaginative coherence, a plan. The great German scholar Max Muller subsequently praised Hodgson for producing a 'rational grammar' of the mountain chaos. [9] Hodgson applied the same energy to classifying what he called the 'babel' of the hill tribes and fitting them into a schema of cultural evolution. The mid-century seemed obsessed with 'blank spots' or 'gaps' on the map. [10] People wanted a world in which everything fitted and had its place, but the plan seemed constantly in danger of being overwhelmed by the plenitude of new discoveries.
These comprehensive studies were the culmination of nearly a century of Himalayan and Tibetan exploration by the British and allowed, in their turn, the compilation of several complete regional studies of Tibet. In addition to Schlagintweit's comprehensive work on Tibetan Buddhism, H. Prinsep's Tibet, Tartary and Mongolia (Their Social and Political Condition, the Religion of Boodh As There Existing, Compiled from the reports of Ancient and Modern Travelers) was published in 1852. Much shorter, but of a similar intention, was Dr. C.H. Gutzlaff's 'Tibet and Sefan', published in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1851. [11] These works were of a totally different order to the summary statements about Tibet compiled by Warren Hastings or by others earlier in the century.
The publication in 1859 of R. Latham's massive two-volume Descriptive Ethnology shows just how successful Britain had been in gathering and classifying an astonishing amount of ethnographic material from around the entire globe. [12] This was British imperialism at its most confident. The Great Exhibition of 1851, at the Crystal Palace in London, symbolized the calm assurance of British global identity. Prince Albert opened it with the words:
Nobody who has paid attention to the peculiar features of the present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end, to which, indeed, all history points -- the realization of the unity of mankind. [13]
Nineteenth-century nationalism provided idealized images of coherence, unification and identity which belied intense internal social fragmentation and conflict. Hooker and other global travelers played a crucial part in the creation of the Great Exhibition. [14] It expressed so well all the cultural contradictions, spiritual hopes and imperial assumptions that underlay British global identity. The globe was presented as a supermarket of fascinating images. Travel and exploration gave these global images a cohesion that was both sensual and visual. British travelers, whether journeying for science or sport, increasingly saw themselves as citizens of the globe.
The Imaginal Transformation of Tibet: from Fascination to Expectation
In the mid-nineteenth century, however, Tibet was overshadowed by events elsewhere on the globe, especially in the Arctic and in Africa. The search for Franklin's ill-fated Arctic expedition, and then for the source of the Nile, dominated British interests in exploration, adventure and geographical research. [15] How did it happen, then, that by the last quarter of the century curiosity about Tibet became transformed into a fascination bordering on compulsion; that a sober concern for scientific observation became attenuated into an attitude of intense spiritual expectation? Of course, even in mid-century one can detect signs of this final transformation. Hooker, for example, could scarcely disguise his excitement when actually standing inside Tibet, even if he was there for only four days. Gutzlaff, perhaps, summed up the general mid-century feeling:
Tibet, situated on the highest plateau of Asia, and encompassed by the most stupendous mountains of the globe, is a wonderful country ... It is ... a territory where extremes meet, and where everything is extraordinary. The inhabitants, not satisfied with their strange country, have strongly contributed to enhance the wonderful by their curious mode of life and creed. [16]
Yet his fascination with what he called 'this magic land' was not unequivocal. About its religion he wrote: 'In mockery of common sense, a preposterous superstition has been established.' He complained about 'the maintenance of innumerable priestly drones', of a 'priest-ridden' country. How different was such an evaluation from Turner's, some sixty years earlier, with its appreciation of the mutual reciprocity of sacred and secular activities. [17] Gutzlaff observed, with some frustration, that 'Tibet remains impervious to civilization and progress.' Yet by the end of the century, this archaic timelessness would be precisely the quality that the West would seek to protect.
But we need to step back from the Himalayas and Tibet, to take note of other events of the 1850s. The uprising of 1857 known as the Indian Mutiny resulted in the final demise of the British East India Company. India came firmly under the control of the British government. The rebellion was a turning point in British imperialism on the subcontinent. A fundamental sense of security was destroyed and the British in India, from that moment, always felt vulnerable to foreign 'trouble making'; were always fearful about the loyalty of their Indian subjects. With the resumption of rivalry with imperial Russia in the 1870s after a mid-century lull, such an erosion of confidence was crucial for Britain's relationship with the Himalayas and Tibet. As we shall see in the next chapter, more than anything else the intensification of the 'Great Game' proved critical for the final imaginative transformation of Tibet into a fully formed sacred place.
Even further removed from the Himalayas than the Indian Mutiny was the publication of two books within a few years of each other. So widespread was their influence that the imaginative transformation of Tibet into a deeply meaningful place is incomprehensible without taking them into account. 1859 saw the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species. The Himalayas had played a direct and critical part in the development of Darwin's revolutionary ideas through his close collaboration with Joseph Hooker. Indeed, Hooker's Himalayan Journals were dedicated to Darwin, and Hooker took Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle as a model for his own travel journals. [18] Whilst Hooker's botanizing in the Himalayas contributed to the genesis of evolutionary theory, the rapid acceptance of this theory, especially in the form of social evolution, would in its turn influence the whole shape of Tibetan imaginings.
The other book was no less significant, but easier to overlook. Volume 4 of John Ruskin's Modern Painters was published in 1854; it systematized the quintessence of advanced Victorian ideas about mountain landscape aesthetics. This book emerged at the very apex of British enthusiasm for mountains, often called the 'Golden Age' of Alpine exploration. Its impact was therefore decisive; its influence profound. [19] During this time, climbing was described as an activity that was half-spiritual, half-sport. Like Darwin, Ruskin must be considered as a founder of the modern relationship to the natural world, but his theme was the imaginative experience of natural beauty -- the aesthetics of ecology, not abstract classification. In Volume 4 he tried to establish the rules for an entirely new way of seeing and relating to the landscapes of the world.
Perhaps even more important for the final transformation of Tibet was the sudden collapse of mid-Victorian confidence after 1865. The carefully orchestrated mid-century synthesis, the 'best of all possible worlds', seemed to peak and then, just as quickly, to vanish. An era of spiritual doubt and social anxiety took its place. [20] It is instructive in this regard to compare Gutzlaff's comprehensive study of Tibet, written in 1851, with Andrew Wilson's popular account The Abode of Snow, written in 1875 at the very end of this period. For Gutzlaff, as we have seen, Tibet was indeed a 'magical land', yet hardly one that evoked Western inspiration. Wilson, on the other hand, prefaced his otherwise fairly sober account with a remarkable series of associations. The true 'Abode of Snow', he wrote, was not the Himalayas, nor even the Arctic, but the Antarctic. He argued that as the ice accumulates around the South Pole, a point must be reached when:
the balance of the earth must be suddenly destroyed, and this orb shall almost instantaneously turn traversely to its axis, moving the great oceans, and so producing one of those cyclical catastrophes which ... have before now interfered with the development and the civilization of the human race. [21]
The mid-century global confidence no longer rested on firm ground. Globalism, which had brought the promise of a secure imperial identity only twenty-five years earlier, now seemed to have brought its own anxieties. Wilson continued:
How near such a catastrophe may be, and whether when it occurs, a few just men (and it is to be hoped, women also) will certainly be left in the upper valleys of the Himalayas, I am unable to say; but it is well to know that there is an elevated and habitable region of the earth which is likely to be left underpopulated ... Whether humanity will lose or gain by having to begin again from the simple starting point of 'Om mani padme haun', is also a subject on which I feel a little uncertain. [22]
This was an extraordinary fantasy; one which prefigured the desperate hopes of many twentieth-century Tibetophiles and their images of Shangri-La. Tibet was linked here not just to a concern about Western identity and aspirations but to the very survival and continuance of civilization, even of humanity itself. Like a Himalayan Ararat, Tibet was imagined to rise above the global catastrophe and 'the jewel in the lotus' to seed the civilization of the future. For Wilson, this famous Tibetan mantra seemed to contain the beautiful and mysterious quintessence of 'many hundreds of human generations'. [23]
With Wilson's fantasies in The Abode of Snow, we have reached the final limit of imaginative preparation. As the fin-de-siecle uncertainty intensified, Tibet would be summoned to play its part in the West's spiritual search. The cosmic sympathy expressed by Nina Mazuchelli for Mount Everest would be displaced on to Lhasa. This city, with the Potala palace at its 'centre', would become an axis mundi, an opening to the transcendent at the very centre of the world. Tibet would then echo Eliade's assertion that 'an entire country ...[can] well present an imago mundi'. [24]
Imaginative Resonance
There are moments during the process of imaginative creation when seemingly diverse fantasies start to beat in time and then swell into a single resonance. A great chord is struck and held for a while. Both participants and listeners seem overcome with the primordial, archetypal purity of the sound. Everything then becomes a signifier for this great imaginative chord. At this moment the sacred place is truly born; its imaginative history begins. It then has its own coherence and logic. In the case of Tibet such a moment occurred about three-quarters of the way through the nineteenth century. The harmony of the great chord was then inexorably stamped upon Western fantasies about Tibet. Its presence continued to linger and echo well into the twentieth century, long after the conditions for its birth had dissipated and the separate fantasies had moved on.
A complete realignment of fantasies took place. Old images and themes either acquired new meaning or were repositioned and hence became imbued with fresh, and often more potent, significance. These various imaginative themes on Tibet had had nearly a century to attune themselves to each other. The arrival of new, additional ones precipitated the final transformation. If Ruskin's new way of perceiving and experiencing landscape, Darwin's evolutionary theory, Himalayan mountaineering, photography and tourism were the catalysts, then the last, intensely competitive, phase of the 'Great Game' provided the necessary energy for the alchemical reaction. The process occurred in three stages. First there had to be a build-up of meaningful fantasies, of both intimate associations and compendious facts. These disparate themes then needed to realign themselves, to establish a correspondence with each other. Finally this cohesive set of fantasies had to organize themselves around a common core, condense themselves into a common image which would then become transferred to -- and focused upon -- Lhasa.
An Empirical Imagination
So often in these travel accounts the moment of entering Tibet reveals, most consistently, the depth-imagination at work. As Wilson laboriously ascended a pass into Tibet, he remarked that it was, at 16,000 feet, 'above the height of Mont Blanc': [25] simple fact, yet pregnant with meaning for the Alpine-loving British travelers. We have also come a long way from the vague Romantic generalizations so common earlier in the century. For example, Wilson enthused about a view 'that was savage and grand beyond description'. Yet describe it he does, and in such a way as to reveal a casual familiarity with sophisticated mountain details:
A mountain rose ... almost sheer up from the Sutlej, or from 9,000 feet to the height of 22,183 feet, in gigantic walls, towers, and aiguilles of cream colored granite and quartz, which had all the appearance of marble ... In appearance it was something like Milan Cathedral divested of its loftiest spire, and magnified many million times ... Here and there the white rock was streaked with snow, and it was capped by an enormous citadel with small beds of neve; but there was very little snow upon the gigantic mass of rock because the furious winds which forever beat and howl around it allow but little snow to find a resting place. [26]
In this passage, Wilson achieves a blend of empirical accuracy and imaginative eloquence that expresses so well the new way of perceiving landscape championed by Ruskin. Ruskin stamped his influence upon the entire Victorian era. Whether he was addressing landscape, morality, painting, sculpture, architecture, economics, politics or science, his method was always the same: sharp analytical eye and a controlled imagination were combined to produce a critical aesthetic appreciation and critique of the environment in which he lived. By 1875, when Wilson was traveling through the Himalayas, Ruskin was already a national institution. [27]
Ruskin was highly critical of both vague reverie and mere geographical accuracy. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was the latter in particular that had the most status. Hooker, for example, wrote:
I have been precise in my details, because the vagueness with which terms are usually applied to the apparent altitude and steepness of mountains, is apt to give false impressions. It is essential to attend to such points where scenery of real interest and importance is to be described. [28]
These are sentiments with which Ruskin would have been in total agreement, yet at the same time he would consider that they told only half the story. Ruskin insisted that the imagination, too, was both indispensable for a 'true' description and also subject to a rigor and discipline no less demanding than scientific observation. He was concerned with what he called the branches of 'scenic knowledge', in which precision of description was matched by intensity of feeling. [29]
Ruskin was therefore engaged upon two fronts. Certainly the language of Thomson's Western Himalayas and Tibet (1852), acclaimed as 'one of the most substantial books on Himalayan exploration of the 19th century', would have been antithetical to his project. [30] The only adjective Thomson seemed to know was 'remarkable' -- 'a very remarkable outburst of granite'; 'a very long and remarkable bend of the river': etc. [31] This work exactly fitted the prevailing mid-century mood: scientific exploration and no-nonsense observation. Thomson's friend and fellow-traveler, Hooker, despaired of exploration without science, and his journals have been acclaimed as classics in the field of scientific travel, [32] but the greatness of these volumes lies precisely in his ability to blend empirical observation with moments of reverie. His attention to light and sound, for example yielded passages of lyrical beauty:
As the sun declined, the snow at our feet reflected the most delicate peach-bloom hue; and looking West from the top of the pass, the scenery was gorgeous beyond description, for the sun was just plunging into a sea of mist, in a blaze of the ruddiest coppery hue. [33]
The landscape, he continued, was bathed 'in the most wonderful and indescribable changing tints'. He was reminded of Turner's paintings. In these he had 'recognized similar effects ... such are the fleeting hues over the ice, in his "Whalers", and the ruddy fire in his "Wind, Steam and Rain", which one almost fears to touch. Dissolving views give some idea of the magic creation and dispersion of the colors ...'. It was no coincidence that Ruskin was the great champion of Turner's empirical accuracy and astute observational powers, as well as his ability to interpret the experience of the landscape.
1. Mountaineering
Ruskin's new way of looking had been precipitated by the increasing familiarity with mountain-forms: not in terms of distant views, but through a close engagement with them. As we have seen, mountaineering was now in its 'Golden Age'. By mid-century, generations had grappled directly with mountains -- seeing them, as it were, from the inside; listening to them. Vague, detached descriptions could no longer suffice among lovers of mountain scenery; they were now connoisseurs. Himalayan travel was no exception to this demand for specific details. By this time the imaginative world of mountaineering had made its mark on the Himalayas: there were disputes about altitude records, general competitiveness, and a sharing of experiences. [34]
Whilst Himalayan climbing was still in its infancy, Alpine exploration had come of age and its history had begun to be compiled: it had its own meticulous chronicler in W. Coolidge. [35] Details became extremely important. Vagueness and inaccuracies were simply not tolerated. Alpine precision was often invoked in an attempt to bring rigour to Himalayan experiences. For example, at one point Hooker compares Himalayan and Alpine peaks in much the same manner as a wine taster would assess different vintages:
The appearance of Mont Cervin, from the Riffelberg, much reminded me of that of Junnoo, from the Choonjerma pass, the former bearing the same relation to Monte Rosa that the latter does to Kinchinjunga. Junnoo, though incomparably the more stupendous mass, is not nearly so remarkable in outline, so sharp, or so peaked as is Mont Cervin: it is a very much grander, but far less picturesque object. The whiteness of the sides of Junnoo adds also greatly to its apparent altitude; while the strong relief in which the black cliffs of Mont Cervin protrude through its snowy mantle greatly diminishes both its apparent height and distance. [36]
One could not be much more specific. Here is a developed art of mountain landscape aesthetics and perception within which the Himalayas were being contextualized.
2. Photography
The other catalyst for this new way of viewing, this empirical imagination, was the development of photography. When Wilson arrived at Dankar, the capital of Spiti, in 1875, he exclaimed: 'Its appearance is so extraordinary, that I shall not attempt any description of it until able to present my readers with a copy of its photograph.' [37]
Since the 1840s, British photographers had been touring the Empire in search of the extraordinary and the picturesque. In 1861 Samuel Bourne became the first to take a camera into the high Himalayas. Hampered by an immense quantity of bulky, unwieldy and fragile photographic material, he was constantly frustrated by the sheer scale of the scenery.
The scenery in some places was grand and impressive. Huge mountains, frequently clothed with forests of pine, towered aloft on every hand ... And yet, with all its ponderous magnificence and grandeur, strange to say this scenery was not well adapted for pictures -- at least for photography ... The character of the Himalayan scenery in general is not picturesque. I have not yet seen Switzerland except in some of M. Bisson's and Mr. England's photographs; but judging from these ... I should say that is far more pleasing and picturesque than any part I have yet seen of the Himalayas. [38]
The age of photography has truly arrived when Bourne judges the Himalayas by comparing their photogenic qualities with photographs of the Swiss Alps. Himalayan views would continue to elude photographers until Smythe's sensitive work in the early twentieth century, combined with the associated technical breakthrough in portable cameras. In general, photography would be used for recording architectural details, ethnographic objects and people for classification, or for postcard views. As John Berger comments:
All over the world during the nineteenth century, European travelers, soldiers, colonial administrators, adventurers, took photographs of the 'natives', their customs, their architecture, their richness, their poverty, their women's breasts, their head-dresses; and these images, besides provoking amazement, were presented and read as proof of the justice of the imperial division of the world. The division between those who organized and rationalized and surveyed, and those who were surveyed. [39]
The Himalayas were therefore drawn into a global photomontage that was demanded and created by scientists and public alike. A photograph was treated as 'a visual fact, a discrete bit of information within a materialistic, encyclopaedic view of the world'. [40] Photographs gave the illusion of power: scientific, administrative, aesthetic, voyeuristic.
The very power of photographic 'realism' posed the new landscape aesthetics with a puzzle. As early as 1839 the issue of visual accuracy, precision and fidelity was raised:
Travelers may perhaps soon be able to procure M. Daguerre's apparatus, and bring back views of the finest monuments and of the most beautiful scenery of the whole world. They will see how far their pencils and brushes are from the truth. [41]
Ruskin, too, was unsure of the relation between the new, supposed realism of photography and the specific character of landscape. For him, photographs seemed to lack 'veracity' and a kind of imaginative truth:
Even in the most accurate and finished topography, a slight exaggeration may be permitted; for many of the most important facts in nature are so subtle, that they must be slightly exaggerated, in order to be made noticeable when ... removed from the associating circumstances which enhanced their influence, or directed attention to them in nature. [42]
Bourne would have agreed. He observed that panoramic views in the Himalayas were generally unsatisfactory as photographic subjects. An artist, he mused, can foreshorten perspective, exaggerate and emphasize dominant characteristics in order to produce a result that is more aesthetically accurate, if less topographically literal. [43]
Ruskin's attempt to resolve the tension between empirical literalism and imaginative interpretation was crucial for the late-Victorian appreciation of landscape. However at odds the two positions were, or however tenuous was their attempted synthesis, if Tibet was ever to be a vital place in the British imagination both forms of perception were needed. Without empirical accuracy any description would have been discredited, given the prevailing scientific Weltanschauung. But without interpretation, any place would be imaginatively irrelevant. Also, for the axis mundi to appear in Tibet in the late nineteenth century, that land had to be of sufficient character to attract inexorably both ways of viewing in equal measure. So, for example, even Thomson, that traveler so dedicated to facts, was forced to exclaim from time to time over the wonderful view. The activity of photography, perhaps more than the actual photographs themselves, seemed to symbolize this meeting of science and imagination. As Samuel Bourne writes:
It was impossible to gaze on this tumultuous sea of mountains without being deeply affected with their terrible majesty and awful grandeur ... and it must be set down to the credit of photography that it teaches the mind to see the beauty and power of such scenes as these and renders it more susceptible of their sweet and elevating impressions. For my own part, I must say that before I commenced photography I did not see half the beauties in nature that I do now ... [44]
In this passage, science, technology and the cultivation of the natural sublime dovetail delightfully. In the Himalayas it seemed impossible to remain aloof and objective. The immense landscape always stimulated the imagination.
The Need for a Context: Intimate and Global
The resolution between empirical accuracy and imaginative interpretation was only one aspect of the new way of perceiving landscape championed by Ruskin. He also realized that it was essential for any landscape to belong to a social and historical context. Landscape needs such associations; without them there is only meaninglessness and placelessness. [45] In 1871 Leslie Stephen wrote:
The snowy ranges of California or the more than Alpine heights of the Caucasus may doubtless be beautiful, but to my imagination at least, they seem to be unpleasantly bare and dull, because they are deprived of all those intricate associations which somehow warm the bleak ranges of Switzerland. [46]
If the Himalayas -- and ultimately Tibet -- were to become sacred places for the British, they had to be an intimate part of British identity. Without this connection these wild landscapes could never provide the location for an axis mundi. Such a fundamental reference point must belong, in the most intimate way, to a culture, to its sense of itself, to its quest for meaning. The sacred has the paradoxical quality of being both remote and yet also close to the heart.
By 1847 the Himalayas had acquired at least one crucial quality: they were felt to belong to Britain. Thomson called them 'our northern Indian mountains'. [47] Over the next quarter of a century, the process of drawing these mountains deeply into the British imagination was undertaken in earnest. It occurred on many levels, but always through the twin processes of familiarization and globalization. As we have seen, by mid-century Britain had already adopted a global identity. The Himalayas then took their position within a worldwide mosaic of imaginatively significant places. Familiarization moved in the opposite direction. By naming and making intimate comparisons (of fauna, flora, landscape, culture), sentiments could be transferred from Britain to the Himalayas, and vice versa. Gradually the landscape became familiar and known. A network of associations was established between the British Isles and its imperial perimeter. Finally, Himalayan and Tibetan exploration was of sufficient vintage to have acquired its own history. Particular places began to echo with generations of travelers' tales. Names, dates and events started to recur. The Himalayas and Tibet therefore became firmly integrated into the stories the British told about themselves.
1. Familiarization
Hooker, for example, on his famous journey of 1848-9, constantly compared details of Himalayan scenery with their Alpine equivalent. [48] As we have seen, this practice was also common among earlier travelers but by mid-century it was of a totally different order in terms of exactitide and familiarity. So upon his entry into Tibet, Hooker observed:
The mean height of Palung Plains is 16,000 feet: they are covered with transported blocks, and I have no doubt their surface has been much modified by glacial action. I was forcibly reminded of them by the slopes of the Wengern Alp, but those of Palung are far more level. The ice-clad cliffs of Kinchinjhow rise before the spectator, just as those of the Jungfrau, Monch and Eigher Alp do from that magnificent point of view. [49]
But the Swiss Alps were not the only point of comparison; even more familiar was the landscape of Britain itself. Hooker brought the plants of the Himalayas and Tibet into close association with the flora of 'our British moors' and 'our English gardens'. Comparisons were made with British insects, caterpillars and butterflies, ferns, sedges and strawberries. [50] Given the mid-Victorian enthusiasm for botanizing and gardens, such associations would have helped to draw these alien regions of Asia closer to the Victorian bosom. [51] The extensive transportation of exotic plants from the colonial outposts back to Britain also enhanced this familiarization process. As one writer commented at the time: 'Many of the plants [rhododendrons] ... to be found in English gardens are due to the seeds gathered by Sir Joseph Hooker.' The naming of fauna and flora also played its part in giving the Himalayas an intimate place in British fantasies: 'A beautiful yellow poppy-like plant grew in clefts at 10,000 feet; it has flowered in England, from seeds which I sent home, and bears the name of Cathcartia ...'. In a footnote Hooker tells us: 'The name was given in honor of the memory of my friend, the late J.F. Cathcart, Esq. of the Bengal Civil Service ...'. [52] Such small-scale naming was perhaps more important than the largely unsuccessful attempts to change the names of the major Himalayan peaks. Of these only Everest has proved enduring. As Gaston Bachelard has stressed in his Poetics of Space, it is generally the corners and intimate spaces that evoke meaning, soul and a sense of belonging. [53]
Wilder fancy also played its part in moving the Himalayas and Tibet into a circle of familiar associations. Each era seemed to use its own imaginative criteria by which to establish archaic, almost mythic, connections. Turner in 1783, related Tibet and Ancient Egypt through a common lion symbolism. Sir Richard Temple, writing about a hundred years later, made the same imaginative connection between Tibet and Ancient Egypt, but now, appropriately for the industrious Victorian era, through reflections upon a common system of labor. Even the sober Hooker paused en route to reflect upon the relationship between these two cultures:
The similarly proportioned gloomy portals of Egyptian fanes naturally invite comparison; but the Tibetan temples lack the sublimity of those; and the uncomfortable creeping sensation produced by the many sleepless eyes of Boodh's numerous incarnations is very different from the awe with which we contemplate the outspread wings of the Egyptian symbol, and feel as in the presence of him who says, 'I am Osiris the Great: no man hath dared to lift my veil'. [54]
Comparison has continued to be made between Tibet and Egypt right up to the present. In Hooker's day, Ancient Egypt was considered to be the exemplary home of archaic mystery, alongside which Tibet was thought inferior. However, by the time of Madam Blavatsky, some forty years later, an equality would be imagined between these two places and their religions. In our own era, Tibetan religion has emerged from the shadows of its Egyptian counterpart and is often considered its superior. [55]
Apart from Ancient Egypt, Tibet has evoked other cultural comparisons. In the twentieth century attempts have been made to relate Tibetans with Australian Aboriginals, North American Indians, Aztecs, Gnostics, and so on. [56] In 1875, the word Tartar and its possible connection with tartan drew Wilson's fancy. During a series of ingenious associations, he wrote:
It struck me forcibly before I left Zanskar that there must be some unknown relationship between the people of that province and the Scottish Highlanders. The sound of their varieties of language, the brooches which fasten their plaids, the varieties of tartan ... even the features of the people, strongly reminded me of the Scotch Highlanders. [57]
Such reflections as these drew the Himalayas and Tibet deep into the mythological regions of the British psyche.
The Himalayas and the Tibetan borderland also provided the locations for numerous spiritual experiences. The scientist Hooker, for example, exclaimed:
In such scenes ... the mind wanders from the real to the ideal, the larger and brighter lamps of heaven lead us to imagine that we have risen from the surface of our globe and are floating through the regions of space ... [58]
Wilson, too, whilst admiring what he called 'the most picturesque, weird, astounding and perplexing' mountains of Zanskar, experienced a profound spiritual questioning. 'What am I?' he asked. And in reply he quoted the Buddhist hymn, "all is transitory, all is misery, all is void, all is without substance"'. [59] Such experiences as these were to recur time and again, imbuing the region with yet another kind of intimacy, that of the spirit. The Himalayas and Tibet would become a veritable repository of singular spiritual experiences for generations of British travelers.
2. Globalization
The Himalayas and Tibet were also part of a wider, more global contextualizing. By mid-century the whole surface of the earth had become a market, a playground and a laboratory for the British. Hooker, for example, having already been to the Antarctic, wanted to visit a temperate zone and had to choose between India and the Andes (imperial connections swayed the final choice); Lambert, in his journal of 1877, presents cogent arguments as to why the Himalayas was the best place to visit for a shooting trip, rather than Europe, Africa, America or elsewhere in Asia. Similarly, Markham selected the Himalayas as a change after having previously hunted in Canada. [60] The Himalayas were clearly just one -- albeit very attractive -- place within Britain's global map.
This global referencing of the Himalayan region extended to its fauna and flora. Hooker commented: 'there were few mosses; but crustaceous lichens were numerous, and nearly all of them of Scotch, Alpine, European, and Arctic kinds ... I recognized many as natives of the wild mountains of Cape Horn, and the rocks of the stormy Antarctic ocean'. [61] Geologically too, the Sikkim Himalayas reminded Hooker of 'the West coasts of Scotland and Norway, of South Chili, and Fuegia, of New Zealand and Tasmania'. Vegetation was described as 'European and North American', or' dry Asiatic and Siberian', or 'humid Malayan'. [62]
As Himalayan travel accounts took their place within the wider story of global exploration, the martyrs of this tradition were created. Tales of explorers' hardships and deaths were utterly essential for the Victorian British. Burnes, Moorcroft, Hayward, Dr Stolicza, Adolph Schlagintweit and Csoma de Koros were names that would constantly recur as the Himalayan tradition established itself. Stories such as the arrest and ill-treatment of Hooker and Campbell had importance not only for Sikkim and Darjeeling but also for Britain's more global presence and authority. The blood of Europeans was already mingling with the pristine Himalayan snow. An essential heroic darkness was beginning to be drawn into British imaginative associations with the region.
Light and Colour: the Wilderness Redeemed
As the Victorian era progressed, a disenchantment with mountain Romanticism began. Poetry, literature and art began to turn away from the earlier transcendent vision. Instead, more concern is shown towards the urban social problems that accompanied industrialization. The earlier Romantic landscape tradition increasingly came to be considered irrelevant, even indulgent, by the new generation among whom sobriety, reason and morality were more esteemed. [63] Tourism had also played its part in diluting the spontaneity and freshness of the mountain experience.
By the 1870s the Victorian crisis in confidence was reflected in the changed view of wild landscape. A profound ambivalence now characterized attitudes towards such places. For some, wildernesses were barbaric wastelands that should be avoided; for others they were places of sanctuary and healing. Some viewed wildernesses as mere distractions from pressing social reforms; others looked to them as sources of primal energy which alone could shatter rigid social conventions. [64]
The Himalayas played a unique part in the changing attitude to wild landscape. In Britain the sprawling urban centres, with their gross problems, occupied centre-stage, pushing mountains and the natural sublime to the periphery of concern. At the fringe of Empire, however, such concern for social injustice was muted by the prevailing racist and imperialist ideologies. This allowed the Romantic landscape tradition to linger on and indeed never to be really lost in the Himalayas. As we have seen, even in the heyday of scientific travel these vast mountains continued to evoke lyricism and mystery. It was therefore in these and other similar regions that a genuine aesthetics of wilderness was forged late in the century.
The contextualization of the Himalayas within British history and the close attention given to empirical details combined to bring meaning to this mountain wilderness. For example, when Hooker reached the top of the Donkia Pass into Tibet he was confronted by a 'featureless' landscape: without houses, trees or even snow. Yet he still discovered something of interest:
I found one flowering plant on the summit; the tufted alsinaceous one ... [and] at 18,300 feet 1 found on one stone only a fine lichen, the 'tripe de roche' of Arctic Voyagers and the food of the Canadian hunters; it is also abundant on the Scotch Alps. [65]
As anyone who has traveled in apparently featureless landscapes will testify, it is the patient attention to such details that reveals their beauty. Paradoxically, the vast spaces often support minute, retiring life-forms and encourage an appreciation of subtlety. Also, by mid- century a study of comparative wildernesses was developing. As the passage from Hooker shows, the wild, empty and barren parts of the world could be related through the most minimal of evidence. Connoisseurs of wilderness were emerging; individuals familiar with the lonely spaces of the planet to be found in the Arctic and Antarctic, North and South America, Australia, Asia, Africa, the oceans, and on the mountain summits. Regular engagement with wilderness provoked the development of a new aesthetic.
Of course, explorers and travelers continued to refer to such places as 'dreary', 'desolate' 'sterile'. [66] Yet even in these instances a kind of balance point was often reached and evaluation would then topple over into a different world of appreciation. Thomson, for instance, at one point is forced to exclaim:
I find it extremely difficult to describe in an adequate manner the extreme desolation of the most barren parts of Tibet, where no luxuriant forest or bright green herbage softens the nakedness of the mountains, but everywhere the same precipices, heaps of rocks, and barren monotonous desert meets the eye. The prospect before me was certainly most wonderful. I had nowhere before seen a country so utterly waste. [67]
The 'waste' was so absolute that it had become 'wonderful'. Wilson, also, gives us numerous examples of this decisive shift in aesthetic balance once the extreme edge of the earlier Romantic paradigm had been reached. A revolution was taking place in the 'scenic sciences' of the West. [68] When Wilson wrote: I was entering the wildest and sublimest region of the earth', he had reached the limit of one aesthetic paradigm. Subsequently he reported:
The view over the Spiti ranges ... was very extensive and striking; for though it was a land of desolation on which we gazed, it was under an intensely dark-blue sky; it was beautifully colored with snow and cloud, and variegated rock ... [69]
He called it 'that beautiful yet awful scene', and then referred to 'the wild sterility of these Tartar plains,' 'the sublime and terrific character of the scenery'. [70] In this passage can be seen a crucial movement in the emergence of a wilderness aesthetic: a subtle appreciation of colors and light, rather than an exclusive reliance on bold, varied physical forms, or on striking panoramas. In another place Wilson recounts:
The color of these precipice walls was of the richest and most varied kind. The predominant tints were green, purple, orange, brown, black and whitish yellow ... In certain lights the precipices appeared almost as if they were of chalcedony and jasper. The dark-brown manganese-like cliffs looked exceedingly beautiful. [71]
Travelers were attracted by two qualities of this light that was to be found in the Himalayas and in the Tibetan wilderness: its clarity and the subtlety of its changing colors. So Hooker writes:
The transparency of the pale blue atmosphere of these lofty regions can hardly be described, nor the clearness and precision with which the most distant objects are projected against the sky. [72]
Such comments had, of course, been made before, but with less frequency and without a context. Far from being incidental features, they were now increasingly sought out by travelers in the Himalayas and Tibet. The light and color became part of the region's attraction. The colors never seemed fixed:' ... floods of light shot across the misty ocean, bathing the landscape in the most wonderful and indescribably changing tints.' [73] Even the most reserved of travelers could scarcely restrain their enthusiasm for the colors and light. Sir Richard Temple, on a tour through Nepal in 1876, was forced to exclaim:
Emerald, azure, turquoise -- all these phases combined can give you no impression of the indescribable beauty of the color ... To a spectator on the hills themselves, their color would be of the dullest and most opaque yellow ochre; but the effect of distance in this clear atmosphere is to throw a sort of etherealized pink-purple over the mountains which has the most lovely effect. [74]
In these regions there was, as Hooker wrote, both 'desolation and grandeur'. [75] Attention to details of light and color helped to sustain paradox and overcome monotony:
The deep dark blue of the heavens above contrasted with the perfect and dazzling whiteness of the earthly scene around. The uniformity of color in this exquisite scene excited no sense of monotony. [76]
It is no coincidence that at the moment of Hooker's most intense aesthetic experience he should reach towards Turner's paintings for assistance. It was Turner who, as Ruskin insisted, was most responsible for first capturing both the empirical and imaginative 'truth' of light and colors in landscape. [77]
A Million Pairs of Lungs: Mountain Air and Tourism
As the Europeans climbed the summits, they discovered not only splendid views but also mountain air. As we saw in chapter 2, curiosity about the air was a feature of mountain exploration right from the beginning. Speculations about the air are an important guide to the depth-imagination because, like the gods, the purest mountain air is to be found at the summits and, like them, it has an elusive insubstantiality.
By mid-century, mountain air was unequivocally equated with good health. Wilson was only one of the many who took to the higher Himalayas for health reasons. The hill-stations of Darjeeling, Simla and Dharmsala, among others, were testaments to the efficacy of mountain air:
I believe that children's faces afford as good an index as any to the healthfulness of a climate, and in no part of the world is there a more active, rosy, and bright young community, than at Dorjiling. It is incredible what a few weeks of that mountain air will do for the India-born children of European parents. [78]
Yet at work within such a seemingly innocent equation as that established between mountain air and health is a more complex metaphor. For Ruskin, mountains, air and clouds, formed a marvelous unity. 'The second great use of mountains', he writes, 'is to maintain a constant change in the currents and nature of the air.' Elsewhere he insists that 'our whole happiness and power of energetic action depend upon our being able to breathe and live in the cloud.' Above all, he is adamant that the clouds associated with mountains are superior to those found in the lowlands. [79] As Tyndall, the well-known Victorian mountaineer, commented: 'There is assuredly morality in the oxygen of the mountains.' [80] The pollution of such air was therefore more than simply a matter of physical well-being: it struck a moral and psychological chord. For Ruskin the pollution of his beloved mountain air echoed his disenchantment with nature and provided a bitter criticism of capitalist exploitation.
Leslie Stephen wrote in 1871: 'The Alps ... are places of refuge where we may escape from ourselves and from our neighbors. There we can breathe air that has not passed through a million pair of lungs'. [81] Clearly, for Stephen, the pure air of the mountains symbolized the antithesis both of the crowded urban centres of the British Isles and of the upsurge in popular tourism that was threatening the exclusiveness of the Alps. In the Himalayas also, the purity of the air acted as a metaphor for escape. Even in those immense mountains, tourism had become familiar by the final quarter of the century. As Wilson complained in 1871:
... go almost where he may, the lover of peace and solitude will soon have reason to complain that the country round him is becoming 'altogether too crowded'. As for the enterprising and exploring traveler ... his case is even worse. Kafiristan, Chinese Tibet, and the very centre of Africa, indeed remain for him, but, wherever he may go, he cannot escape the painful conviction that his task will ere long be trodden ground. [82]
Cook's Tours began in 1841 and was a revolution unwelcomed by the earlier breed of upper-class travelers. Within a generation or two, lamented Wilson, 'it will be only a question of money and choice ... as to having a cruise upon the lakes of Central Africa, or going to reason with the Grand Lama of Tibet upon the subject of polyandry'. [83] Traveler's Angst drove explorers deeper into the rapidly shrinking uncharted lands of Central Asia or up ever higher and more inaccessible peaks. Steamships, railways and efficient roads caused a dramatic change in travel throughout the whole world, and the Himalayas were no exception. Already by mid-century a road had been constructed between Simla and the Tibetan border: 'the great Hindusthan and Tibet road', as it was called. Further east, 'a regularly engineered road' led from Darjeeling to the Jeylap-la Pass, 'on the future highroad between India and China via Tibet'. [84] With measured irony, Wilson continued: 'Nowadays, old ladies of seventy, who had scarcely ever left Britain before, are to be met with on the spurs of the Himaliya.' [85]
Wilson, in fact, bowed to the inevitable and the profitable, so before turning his attention to the 'untrod' higher mountain regions he gave detailed advice to prospective Himalayan tourists: preparations, routes, itineraries. But he carefully reserved the higher sense of aesthetics for the educated classes. Mountain splendors, he wrote, 'to the undeveloped mind of Tommy Atkins ... soon become exceedingly tiresome'. [86] It was as if he was reassuring both himself and his readers that the exclusiveness of the mountains was unlikely to be troubled by the curiosity of the masses.
At times, Wilson's book reads like a travel brochure:
Whether the traveler be in search of health, or sport, or sublime scenery, there is no other place from which he can have such convenient access as Simla to the interior of the Himalayas, and to the dry elevated plains of Central Asia. [87]
The Tibetan border, Kashmir and the capital of Ladakh at Leh were all within easy reach of Simla. 'Indeed,' exclaimed Wilson enthusiastically, 'now that the Russians have established a post-office at Kashgar, it would be quite possible, and tolerably safe, to walk from Simla to St. Petersburg, or to the mouth of the Amur on the Pacific coast.' [88] As the Himalayas became increasingly familiar and well trodden, the land to the north, protected by both its terrain and its policy of exclusion, became more attractive. A kind of empathic relationship began to be established between the mountain peaks, with their pure, uncontaminated air, and the exclusive solitudes of the Tibetan plateau. As the century progressed, this relationship would reach a pitch of intensity. By then travel in the lower reaches of the Himalayas had become almost routine. As one aristocratic traveler wrote, rather wearily, in 1889: 'The subject of Himalayan travel and sport is now so old a story that an attempt to create further interest in it is an almost hopeless undertaking.' [89]