Charles Granville Bruce

“ In fact, they say that their women are often better carriers than the men. Numbers of them live half the year in the plains, where they own large herds of cattle, and come up to the hills only for the summer months. Their general character is like their general appearance and physique — mean and unattractive. It is a pity a better race does not own such a charming country. My many trips through Lower Garhwal and the glorious views of the main Himalaya obtained from many points of vantage had determined me some day to travel in this most beautiful section of the Himalaya. ”

“ The villages and houses are of their own construction, and they are undoubtedly clever people; yet one cannot help feeling that perhaps another dose of Goorkha rule, from which they were relieved after the treaty of Segowlie, which terminated the Goorkha War of 1814-15-16, would do them a world of good. I speak feelingly.
Most delightfully were we entertained on our way, and I myself more than once by Mr. Norman Troup and Captain Troup at their estate of Kousanie. Mr. Troup probably knows more of the Garhwal shikar valleys than any sportsman of the present time. ”

“ It is very hard, when travelling in the valleys in this region, to take in the scale. In the west, in the great valleys of the Indus, or in Gilgit, the whole country is on a tremendous scale. In places the main valleys open out into great wide spaces, only to be closed in again by immense buttresses. The rivers are large. There is room for the formation of vast glaciers. When marching, one finds that a large shoulder of a mountain, which appeared quite near in the morning, is apparently just as far away at mid-day. But in Garhwal it is otherwise. ”

“ Garhwal is, like the Gilgit district, crushed into half the space structurally, but with the lower slopes, or rather the slopes affected by the annual rainfall and many snowfalls, well clothed in forest and undergrowth. Take, for instance, the Rishi Valley, up which one has to pass to attack Mount Trissul and the north side of Mount Nanda Devi. Anything more precipitous or broken cannot be imagined. The scale is Himalayan only (by which I mean, of course, the great system of Himalaya and Hindu Koosh) . It is a hopeless valley. ”

“ The boot, in some form, is a necessity. All forms of native foot-gear, excellently adapted as they are for shikar purposes, are quite inadequate for mountaineering. The Kashmiri grass shoe is excellent in its way, but I have worn out as many as three pairs in one day, over rocky and stony ground, and it is distinctly bad in steep, hard snow, and on ice quite useless. The “shavel” of Garhwal is far worse, though probably it gives a still better hold on rock even than the grass shoe.
The final rise to our pass was a terrible fag, and also farther than we expected. ”

“ Here, wherever a tree can grow, there is one. The birch forest is very fine, and in places there is quite a respectable amount of fir and pine. Even on the one or two tiny alps there is sufficient grass to make it worth while driving flocks on to them for short periods. For those who are fond of sport, mixed with rock-climbing of a very high order, the Rishi would be an excellent headquarters for tahr shooting, and there are also a great number of small burhel, though large heads appear to be very few and far between. ”

“ We had our special outfits, the best of clothing, sleeping-bags, thermos bottles and boots, and light tents, and even then we all suffered considerably from cold. How could the wretchedly-clad local man be expected to lie out at 18,000 feet in the snow on May the 20th, and, even if he survived, be worth anything the next day? I have on many occasions seen natives sleep in the snow with the one blanket that they carried with them as their only coverlet, but not at such a height nor so early in the year. ”

“ As mountaineers, to help in a high climbing expedition, few are of much use. This is due, not to want of capacity by any means, but to want of clothing and food. Their clothes are wretched; their blankets worse. They are in fact generally clothed in little more than a blanket, which does for day and night covering, and their legs and feet are bare. Their accustomed food is low forms of grain, a little milk, and less meat. In their own country, when they are out after game, or even working for their own benefit, they are accustomed to very difficult ground. ”

“ Further, one has so many special stores and such a special outfit that to move us took no less than 160 porters. In well-populated Kumaon there was no particular difficulty, but in Garhwal, especially by the short cut that we took to the Dhaoli Valley, villages were few and far between.
Our journey through the heart of Kumaon, although it took place towards the end of April, when the weather was getting rather too warm, was most interesting. The country is charming, hilly and well-wooded, with wonderfully fertile valleys and very neat and well-kept cottages. ”

“ I have also been on expeditions in which our numerous coolies slept packed together in a tent with no more cover, and lived on the lightest food; but such exposure would take it out of the strongest and best-nourished man. ”

“ Nash’s estate, is situated high above the Pindari river, on the borders of Kumaon and Garhwal.
Once across the Pindari, one is in Garhwal and in another country. First it becomes immediately more mountainous, as it is on the southern slopes of the great Trissul-Nanda Devi group; and, further, it is inhabited by a different and much more simple people. But though much pleasanter, they are also less industrious. The Kumaoni undoubtedly likes bettering himself, but these people are very primitive. ”

“ They do not wish to become better off, but are satisfied with a sufficiency of food and clothing, and indeed they must be very easily satisfied, for even in the highest villages they were very badly clothed, and nowhere did the people look fat and well-liking, and that, too, in a country where Italian or Tyrolese or Swiss peasants would make a fine living, and one on which the peasants of the Dauphiné Alps would look as a land flowing with milk and honey. ”

“ To any one who has seen Hunza, in comparing Garhwal to other parts of the Himalaya or Hindu Koosh, the thought of famine in this district seems foolish. But everything runs to waste, especially grass. Water-cuts seem hardly employed anywhere (this, of course, is on our itinerary, i.e. via Pindari, Pana, Ramini, and the Kuari Pass to Tapoban) , and the coarsest grains only are grown. There is no industry and no forethought. This seems to be the character of the Garhwali peasant. ”

“ On the western borders of Nepal lies the British district of Kumaon, and joined to it and overlapping its northern boundary the district of British Garhwal, the river Sarda fixing the boundary between Kumaon and the western districts of the Nepal kingdom. Lower Kumaon is a very charming district of sub-Himalayan hill country; the lowest slopes of these foot-hills abut on the plains of India, and many merge into the great Terai, or forest belt, which is almost continuous from the Duns of Dehra and Sirhind to the Brahmaputra. ”

“ Indeed these foot-hills are clothed in sub-tropical jungle, which, though not so luxurious as in the more humid climate of the eastern Himalaya, are still very fine. The main routes from the plains into Kumaon lead either through the picturesque hill station of Naini Talor still more directly to the old capital of Almora. The country is all interesting, and the people evidently well-to-do. Their villages and cottages, though not particularly trim from a European standpoint, are generally neat and well-built and often very picturesquely situated ”

“ Mumm relates, would require a whole season, and a party who were content with a modicum of exploring and a maximum of climbing would find all they could do in many seasons in the Rishi and Dunagiri plus Bagini valleys, especially as they could vary their work with tahr and burhel shooting. North come the groups topped by the Ghori Parbat and Hathi Parbat peaks, and the Kosa glacier basin and many other glaciers of greater and less size, connecting north with the main chain and the Kamet group, and forming a bewildering maze of mountains. ”

“ In fact when I creep into my Mummery tent and take my boots off and pull on a pair of special long sleeping-socks over my dry stockings, and put on a dry shirt and pull down my Balaclava cap, and then creep into my swan’s-down sleeping-bag, and finally have a nice hot pull out of my thermos bottle, I have often wondered myself why the coolies should complain of feeling unwell in the morning. ”

“ In fact, the general cleanliness of the villages is rather exceptional for any part of the Himalaya. I wish one could say as much for the average Kumaoni peasant. As a rule he is a well-born Hindu, generally of Rajput or Brahman extraction. He has none of the virtues of the hillman in general; he is even of slight build and of poor physique, though active. ”

“ They are wholesale poachers of the most hopeless kind. They often kill the tahr in winter in the following fashion. The tahr is a goat with a fine body and a poor head, but a wonderful climber. He lives in even more precipitous ground than the markhor of the west Their method of killing him is as follows: Having driven the tahr into deep nullahs, with most precipitous sides, out of which there are certain well-known tahr runs, they proceed to cover these runs where the ground is most difficult with mats made of split bamboo, which have been previously well drenched in water. ”

“ One most extraordinary trait is that they appear to have no sporting instincts. Even men posing as shikaris were actually useless, though they could show the ground. In fact, we only met one man, Ram Sing by name, who could be classed with a third-rate Gilgit shikari or a second-rate Kashmiri. ”

“ The descent was very steep in places, with verglas-covered rocks, and when one is carrying a load of at least 50 lbs., and sometimes has to trust to fixed ropes, one is apt to get warm, not to speak of the extra warmth of funk produced by a falling stone taking one’s paggri neatly off one’s head. ”

“ There is a story that in old days these porters would contract to carry the old people up, being paid beforehand, and, on arrival at a convenient cliff, tip them over and return for another load. Even now, when there is a Government mule-track to Badrinath, there are plenty of convenient cliffs. In old days the road must have been very bad. ”

“ The great trouble in the old days of travel was that sportsmen and explorers had to trust to paint and pencil to illustrate their books. General MʻIntyre’s delightful book on sport, The Hindu Kôh, is entirely illustrated by sketches which really convey very little of the true character of the mountains ”

“ For indeed a protracted expedition for mountaineering is quite a different thing from a shooting expedition. To begin with, we were six Europeans and nine Goorkhas, riflemen of my regiment (the 5th Goorkha Rifles) , and in this poor, or rather let me say non-productive, district, such a number travelling together are hard to arrange for. ”

“ That they should have any caste prejudices at all is an anomaly, and only shows the extent to which they have become mixed with the Garhwalis, Kumaonis, and others with whom they have been brought in contact. ”