Marsh Marigold Often, in dark winter days, I wandered in spirit to these flowerful pastures with their clear-running streams set against a frieze of silver birches and shining snow peaks. Then once again I saw the slow passage of the breeze through the flowers and heard the eternal note of the glacier torrent coming to the camp fire through the star-filled night. After many years in London I went to live in the country, where I set to work to make a garden out of a field of thistles, ragwort and dandelions. I had looked on gardening as an old man's hobby and a dull and unremunerative labour, but I came upon something that Karel Capek had written: `You must have a garden before you know what you are treading on. Then, dear friend, you will see that not even clouds are so diverse, so beautiful and terrible as the soil under your feet . . . I tell you that to tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory. Now it lies there, workable, crumbly and humid. . . . You are almost jealous of the vegetation which will take hold of this noble and humane work which is called the soil.'

So I became a gardener. But I was profoundly ignorant. Two and a half years ago I did not know the difference between a biennial and a perennial. I am still ignorant, for there is no limit to ignorance or knowledge in gardening. But I discovered one thing; that there is a freemasonry among gardeners which places gardening on a pinnacle above jealousy and suspicion. Perhaps this is because it is essentially a creative task and brings out a fine quality of patience. You may hasten the growth of a constitution but you cannot hasten the growth of an Alpine plant.

In 1937 the opportunity came to return to the Bhyundar Valley. I travelled alone for several reasons, but it was arranged that Captain P. R. Oliver of the South Waziristan Scouts should join me towards the end of July and that he and I should spend two months mountaineering in the Garhwal Himalayas, after which I should return to the valley to collect seeds, bulbs, tubers and plants. Thus, I should have six weeks on my own before and during the monsoon season and to help me I engaged, through the kind offices of Mr W. J. Kydd of Darjeeling, four Tibetan porters of whom the Sirdar, Wangdi Nurbu (or Ondi), was an old friend of mine.

One reason for this small party was that after four large and elaborately organized Himalayan expeditions, I welcomed the opportunity of taking a Himalayan holiday, a very different affair from an attempt to climb one of the major peaks of the world and involving an entirely different scale of values both human and material. The ascent of Mount Everest has become a duty, perhaps a national duty, comparable with attempts to reach the Poles and is far removed from pleasurable mountaineering. Mountaineering in the Garhwal and Kumaon Himalayas more nearly resembles mountaineering in Switzerland, for here are mountains and valleys like Swiss mountains and valleys but built on a greater scale. But unlike parts of Switzerland, the country is unspoilt by commercialism. There are no railways, power lines, roads and hotels to offend the eye and detract from the primitive beauty and grandeur of the vistas and there are peaks innumerable, unnamed and unclimbed, of all shades of difficulty and valleys that have never seen a European, where a simple kindly peasant folk graze their flocks in the summer months.

Then the flowers. From the hot valleys in the south, moist and humid during the monsoon season, to the golden hills of Tibet with their dry, cold winds, there is much to tempt the imagination of the gardener and the botanist, yet, strangely enough, little collecting has been done since the years between 1846 and 1849 when Sir Richard Strachey and J. E. Winterbottom made their famous collection of specimens. It was left to R. L. Holdsworth in 1931 to point out the potentialities of this floral storehouse and in Kamet Conquered he wrote: `There are many enthusiastic gardeners who, I feel sure, would welcome these Himalayan high-alpines and I write this in the hope that some enterprising philanthropist will go and get us seed or plants, not merely of the easier, bigger species from comparatively low down, but of many a shy primula and gentian which haunts the more austere heights of that wonderful world.'

It was my privilege to undertake this work and the reader, while remembering and I hope generously, my ignorance, must judge for himself whether the Bhyundar Valley deserves its title of the Valley of Flowers. Others will visit it, analyse it and probe it but, whatever their opinions, to me it will remain the Valley of Flowers, a valley of peace and perfect beauty where the human spirit may find repose.

THE LOW FOOTHILLS

Everything was ready on the morning of June 5th and the lorry which was to convey me on the first part of my journey was packed to capacity with fifteen porters and some 1,000 lbs of luggage. This journey of some fifty-five miles from Ranikhet to the village of Garur was along narrow roads, the hairpin bends in which were innumerable and acute, and the driver drove on the principle that no obstacle was to be encountered on the corners and if it was, Providence must decide the issue.

Fortunately Providence was well disposed and apart from some hectic encounters with stray cows and bullock carts, the drive was uneventful.

The foothills of the Himalayas provide the perfect introduction to the `Snows' and their gentle forest-clad undulations lead the eye forwards to the background of gigantic peaks which distance serves to increase, not diminish, in beauty.

After following for some miles the clear-running Kosi River and passing numerous villages and government resin-collecting stations, the road climbed over a high ridge, where I saw several tree rhododendrons and the distant snows of Trisul and Nanda Devi, then wound sinuously down to the level floor of the wide Sarju Valley.

Garur, the terminus of the motor road, is a sordid little place, like any native place to which `civilization' has penetrated, disguised in the form of motorcars. Flies swarmed over the offal in the street, beggars whined for alms and from one of the single-storey hovels a cheap gramophone wheezed drearily. There is no doubt that the farthest-flung tentacles of civilization debase, not improve, human conditions. However, like Mr Gandhi, I might damn motorcars, but I had not hesitated to employ one. I turned my back gladly on the place with its smells, the immemorial and `romantic' smells of the East, which are compounded quite simply of the effluvium from an inadequate drainage system and unwashed human bodies mingling in the present instance with a reek of oil and petrol and set off on the first stage of my march. For the next few months I should neither see, hear, nor smell a motorcar or aeroplane; it was a stimulating thought.

Beyond Garur, the path crosses the Sarju River by a well built suspension bridge, then, after sundry ups and downs, begins a long climb to the Gwaldam dak bungalow. It was a hot march-the temperature cannot have been much less than 100 degrees in the shade-and the Dotials poured with sweat. How they managed to carry their 80 Ib loads I do not know. I felt a slave-driver, but it is possible I estimated their efforts by my own incapacities, for I had left Ranikhet with a temperature of 101 degrees and a feverish chill. This may have been unwise, but I am convinced that the best way of ridding myself of a chill is to walk it off and sweat it out; I certainly must have accomplished the latter as I was fat and flabby after many months of sedentary living.

The foothills of the Central Himalayas are poor in flowers owing to forests of chir (Pinus longifolia), which cover the ground in a carpet of needles, thus preventing the growth of plants or the germination of seed. Yet these forests have a charm of their own . . . Furthermore, trees are well spaced and owing to the absence of dogging undergrowth or lank grass, the country resembles a well-kept parkland. . . . In normal circumstances it is an enjoyable walk to Gwaldam, but that day it was a matter of setting my teeth and plugging on with a bursting head, aching limbs and a thirst which I satisfied recklessly at every spring. So, at last, after ten miles' walk and an ascent of some 4000 feet I emerged from the forest on to the ridge where the bungalow stands overlooking the haze-filled depths of the Pindar Valley to the remote gleam of the Himalayan snows. Two Englishmen were encamped near the bungalow, Mr G.W.H. Davidson, the headmaster of Colvin Taluqdars College, Lucknow, who had with him one of his Indian pupils and Major Matthews of the Royal Engineers and their kindness and hospitality had much to do with my rapid recovery from my chill, for I went to bed with an excellent dinner and a considerable quantity of whisky inside me and woke miraculously better next morning.

From Gwaldam a forest path descends steeply into the Pindar Valley. We were away early, soon after the sun had fired the snows and an hour later had descended 3,000 feet to the Pindar River. About halfway to the village of Tharali I met with another Englishman, Corporal Hamilton, a member of a party of soldiers of the East Surrey Regiment who were at this time attempting the ascent of kamet. Unfortunately, he had damaged his arm, which had become poisoned. As I had with me a comprehensive medical kit I was able to disinfect and bind up the wound, which had already been treated by an Indian doctor. The expedition in which he took part is one of the most remarkable in the annals of Himalayan mountaineering. The soldiers, who were led by Corporal Ralph Ridley, after an expedition the previous summer to the Arwa Valley glacier system, boldly decided to attempt Kamet in 1937.

Their organization was admirable and they failed primarily through lack of sufficient porterage after overcoming the greatest difficulties of the route and reaching a height of 23,700 feet. At the same time to attempt a major peak, even though it has been climbed before, is unwise without adequate mountaineering experience; there are peaks of all heights and shades of difficulty in the Himalayas where the novice may learn the craft. Nature is intolerant of ignorance and he who attempts the greater peaks of the Himalayas without having acquired that delicacy and acuteness of perception, that instinctive feeling for his task, will sooner or later blunder to disaster. This is not meant to detract from the merit of an expedition which was conspicuous for the initiative and self reliance displayed, but merely to point out the advisability of preliminary preparation in mountaineering. It is to be hoped that future mountaineering expeditions will receive the encouragement of the High Command.

Tharali huddles at the foot of a knoll thrusting forwards into the Pindar River, which narrows considerably at this point. The village was devastated by a flood in the summer of 1936. Twenty inches of rain fell in one day and the Pindar River, unable to charge its surplus waters through the narrow portion of the valley, rose and flooded the village, destroying a number of houses and drowning forty of the inhabitants. The usual camping ground is a strip of sun-scorched turf by the river, but I preferred the partial shade of some pines on the knoll near the village school, which sports large notices over every approach to the effect that all are welcome; ineffective propaganda to judge from the absence of pupils, but perhaps it was a holiday. The afternoon was the hottest I ever remember.

My tent, which was only six and a half feet long by four feet wide, was intolerable, so I lay outside it on a mattress in the scanty shade of the pines, plagued by innumerable flies. Evening brought little relief and the sun set in a furnace-like glare. The night was breathless but I managed to sleep, only to be awakened shortly before midnight by flickering lightning and reverberating concussions of thunder. The storm was confined to the hills and passed after an hour, leaving a dull red glow in the sky, presumably the reflection of a forest fired by lightning. I breakfasted early and was away at five o'clock, anxious to break the back of the long march to Subtal, which entails some twelve miles of walking and 5,000 feet of ascent.

The storm had done nothing to clear the air and the forests were charged with damp enervating heat, so that it was a relief to emerge from them after two hours' uphill walking on to more open slopes, where the village of Dungri perches below a basinlike rim of hills. The air here was cooler and men and women were working energetically in the terraced fields or scratching shallow furrows with primitive wooden ploughs drawn by oxen or buffaloes. The men greeted me in a friendly way and the children gazed at me curiously, impudently or shyly in the manner of children the world over, but the nose-beringed women I met with on the path hastened by with averted faces. At one hamlet a man ran out of a house, saluted with military precision and offered to carry my rucksack. Doubtless, like many another in this country, he had served with the Garhwal or Kumaon Rifles.

Forests of chir, open country artificially deforested, then rhododendrons, deciduous trees, spruces and firs is the natural upward order of growth in the lower foothills, where crops flourish best in the temperate zone from 4,000 to 8,000 feet. I entered the cool forest above Dungri and seating myself on a mossy bank ate my lunch of biscuits and potatoes. I was far ahead of the porters; the forest was profoundly silent and great clouds were slowly building up in a sky of steely oxidized blue. Not even in the Sikkim forests have I seen finer tree rhododendrons and there was one moss-clad giant which cannot have been less than five feet in diameter. For how many centuries had these trees endured? Long before the wooden ships of `The Company' sailed to India they must have established themselves on the knees of the Himalayas.

Beyond my luncheon place I had a glimpse of a brown bear as it leapt from the path-a little fellow who was gone in a flash.

After this the path mounted at a restful angle and passing over a brow descended to a stream issuing from a rocky rift. There was a deep pool and I stripped and bathed, gasping at first in the ice-cold water, then dried myself on a flat rock in the sun. While I was engaged in this a small boy passed and catching sight of me bolted precipitately up the path, halted to eye me with fearful curiosity. Probably he had never seen a European before and at all events anyone who bathed and in ice-cold water, was indubitably mad. The camping ground at Subtal, the name given to an extensive pasture, is a sparsely wooded ridge which rises on either hand to hills densely forested in spruce and the Himalayan oak, which is a narrow spreading tree as compared with the English oak. To the north the ridge falls away into a branch valley of the Nandakini Valley, through which the western glaciers of Trisul pour their waters into the Alaknanda River.

It was not yet midday, but the sky was thick with gathering storm clouds and the earth lay still and silent beneath a weight of lurid haze. The porters were long in arriving, but it was a marvel that they should arrive at all considering the weight of their loads, the distance and the climb. If my mathematics are not too rusty, the energy required to lift a human body plus an extra 80 lbs of weight through nearly a mile of height comes to well over 1,000,000 foot pounds, of which the load amounts to about 400,000 foot pounds. In terms of the load alone it is equivalent to shovelling about 75 tons of coal into a furnace.

Meanwhile, a party of traders with a dozen ponies had halted close by and lit a fire after carefully stacking their merchandise under a tarpaulin. Presently one of them, seeing that I was alone, asked me if I would care for some food. It was a generous thought, but I had no need to deplete their probably slender supplies. This was only one instance of the kindliness of the people of this country and it seemed to me that the human atmosphere of Garhwal and Kumaon was very different to what it had been in 1931. Is Mr Gandhi's creed of non-violence bearing the fruits of sympathy, tolerance and understanding or is a more positive and less vacillating British rule responsible? Whatever it is, one thing is certain: only through co-operation, friendship and mutual respect between the British and Indian races is any real and lasting benefit for either to be achieved in India in that distant future when education and evolution will have emancipated the Indian peoples from their strangling social and religious prejudices.

The early afternoon darkened gradually and in the close sultry atmosphere flies attacked me venomously. The haze deepened until it was difficult to perceive where the hills ended and the clouds began. A rust-coloured light invested the forest, then faded as the last oases of blue sky were swallowed up by chaotic and enormous thunderclouds and the far north where the Himalayas lay began to shudder with long muffled reverberations of thunder.

At two o'clock the porters straggled into camp, soaked with sweat and very tired. As the Darjeeling men pitched the tents, one for me and one for themselves, heavy drops of rain were splashing into the forest and the thunder was rumbling continuously as though a column of tanks and guns was crossing a hollow-sounding bridge.

Soon lightning was flickering and stabbing through a blue wall of advancing rain, smeared dull white with hail and the thunder was tearing overhead like a giant rending endless strips of calico. Then above the thunder I heard a dull roar, rising in strength and pitch every instant and almost before I had time to realize its meaning the thin-topped spruces a hundred yards distant bent tike whip-lashes and a terrific squall of wind and hail, rifted by mauve swords of lightning and fearful explosions of thunder, burst in wild fury on the camp. This first blast of the storm did not last long and half an hour later, the rain stopped and the wind died into a damp calm, smelling of wet earth and vegetation. Though the storm had retreated from the immediate vicinity of Subtal the thunder continued, coming from every direction and without pause in a single tremendous sound that grew and ebbed and grew again in concussions that seemed to shake the hills to their foundations.

The storm was working up for another climax when Nurbu brought me my supper, which Tewang had artfully cooked in the shelter of a hollow tree. Afterwards I lay in my sleeping-bag and watched through the entrance of the tent the finest display of lightning I have ever seen. The whole sky was continuously blazing with mauve fire and it was possible to read uninterruptedly from a book. Slowly the lightning grew in brilliance, if that were possible and the thunder in volume. This was no ordinary storm, even in a district where storms are frequent and I wished I had moved the tents after the first storm, though with the ridges on either side of the camp there did not seem any likelihood of danger. There was no time to do anything now and at nine o'clock the storm was upon us in a hurricane of wind, hail and rain, punctuated every second by blinding lightning and terrible explosions of thunder.

Lightning when it strikes close to the observer does not make the noise we conventionally term `thunder', or even the rending, tearing noise already mentioned, but a single violent explosion, a BANG like a powerful bomb. I have no hesitation in admitting that I was thoroughly scared and as I lay in my sleeping-bag I could have sworn that streams of fire flickered along the ridge of the tent and down the lateral guy-rope.

The worst was over within half an hour and I went outside to see how the ‘Dotials’ had fared, for I half feared that one or other of the trees beneath which they were sheltering had been struck. To my great relief they were all safe, though even the irrepressible Wangdi, who together with Pasang, Nurbu and Tewang had been in the other tent, seemed a trifle shaken by the experience. This was the last of the storm so far as it concerned us, but long afterwards the sky flamed with lightning and thunder serenaded the ranges. I am not exaggerating when I state that I do not remember a second's pause in the sound of the thunder during a total period of eight hours. The sky next morning was cloudless, but dense haze concealed the view I had hoped to obtain of the snows.

We were away as the sun touched the camp and descended through cool and fragrant forests, alive with the song of birds, to cultivated slopes and small villages; then into a wooded valley, with a stream of clear running water. Here at about 7,000 feet on an open slope I saw the first of a little iris (I. kumaonenesis), which I knew I would meet with later on the Kuari Pass and in the Bhyundar Valley. I also came upon hundreds of the largest cobwebs I have ever seen. For a mile, the trees and shrubs had suspended between them vast nets, wet and shining after the rain, with the spider waiting for his breakfast in the centre of each. So strong were the webs that stout twigs to which they were affixed were bent at right angles, whilst the largest was stretched between two trees fully twelve feet apart and had as its spinner a spider about six inches in width from tip to tip of its hairy legs.

At the village of Ghat which is situated in the deep Nandakini Valley, a single-room ‘dak’ bungalow destitute of furniture did not attract me and I preferred to camp by the river. The tent had scarcely been pitched when thunder began to growl again and a mass of inky clouds advanced quickly down the valley. A few minutes later I was astonished to see a writhing column of spray appear round a bend of the river and descend on the camp. Next moment up went my tent, wrenching the metal tent-pegs away as though they were matches and swept along the ground towards the river. Yelling to the men I threw myself on it and a few moments later was joined by Wangdi, Nurbu and Pasang, all shouting with laughter, evidently convinced that a whirlwind was a huge joke.

Later the weather improved and I supped in the calm of a perfect evening. I had no official cook. Experience had taught me that official cooks are to be avoided in the Himalayas as they are almost invariably dirty and are born`twisters' and `scroungers'; worst of all they are impervious to insult, sarcasm or righteous anger and like their European prototypes, resent the best intentioned suggestions and advice. Furthermore, they are set in their habits and their habits are vile and lastly, they are invariably bad cooks, or so my experience goes, and are largely responsible for the stomach troubles that beset Himalayan expeditions.

Therefore, I had left it to the men to decide between themselves as to which of them should cook for me, and Tewang had elected himself or been elected to the post. To write that he was a good cook, which implies the exercise of imagination and a fertility of invention, would be to overstate his abilities. He was simply a plain cook, so plain that his cooking would have palled at an early date on an appetite less voracious than mine. His most artistic culinary delight was rissoles and he would produce these with one of his rare smiles creasing his broad face and an exaggerate pride worthy of a conjurer who has out-Maskelyned his own professors. But he cooked what he did cook well and I seldom had cause to reproach him on this score. So having seen that he was clean, that doubtful water was boiled and that dish-cloths were used in preference to the tail of a shirt, I left him to his own devices.

The ‘Dotials’ were averse to proceeding to Joshimath via the Kuari Pass. As they justly pointed out the route from Ghat via Nanda Prayag and the Alaknanda Valley is considerably easier. I had, however, no intention of proceeding by that route, which is very hot and at times fever-ridden, in preference to the cool, healthful and beautifull high-level route via the Kauri Pass and when I pointed out the disadvantage of the former route, their objections soon resolved themselves into good-humoured grumblings.

From Ghat the path crosses the Nandakini River by a strongly built suspension bridge, then zig-zags up a steep and arid hillside. Some 2,500 feet up this, perched on a grassy spur, is a small village, the inhabitants of which greeted me cheerfully. Their lives are spent, like the lives of most people of this country, in agricultural pursuits. A spring and summer of intense activity, devoted to the task of levelling their little fields on the steep hillsides, removing innumerable stones and building them into walls so that the monsoon rains do not wash the precious soil into the valley, turning the thin soil with wooden ox-drawn ploughs, sowing, reaping and threshing, is followed by a winter of comparative inactivity.

Scarcely less strenuous is the work of the shepherds deputed to drive the flocks to the upper pastures which are so few and scanty that owners must take it in turns to graze them. Theirs is the life of the mountain peasant the world over a struggle against adverse forces, yet forces that once tamed will yield, if not bountifully, at least enough to maintain a fit and hardy race. A dull, monotonous life perhaps, a minute cycle of work and rest, but running through it all the never-ending thread of human propagation and continuity. These dour peasants may be outwardly insensible to their tremendous environment, but the vast hills that everlastingly mock their puny efforts, the deep valleys with their rush of glacial waters bearing onwards to the far-distant plains, the remote glimmer of the high snows have become a part of them, and deep in their inmost selves must rest a love, respect and reverence for their unrelenting taskmasters, the Himalayas.

From the village, the path mounted an open hillside to a ridge clothed with oaks and tree rhododendrons. I lunched in a glade which commanded a view between the trees of Trisul, a vast barrier of shining snow at the head of the deeply-cut Nandakini Valley, whose ribbon-like stream thousands of feet beneath me twisted and turned between bare shoulders of the hills. The air was fresh and only the whirring and humming of insects fell on a profound stillness. All around me grew a pale mauve daisy, whilst on the slope below was a catmint with rosette-like silvery foliage and blue flowers, some of which were already in seed. Presently the porters appeared. They were singing, and their simple little song, echoing through the silent glades of the forest, somehow partook of the beauty and majesty of the surroundings; complicated music would be out of place where everything is simple and sublime.

Beyond the glade, the path traversed a forest-clad hillside, then emerged on to open slopes terraced with fields where the little village of Ramni perches. Our camping place was on turf close-cropped by the village animals, but not eaten so short as to destroy the brilliant blue flowers of a tiny gentian (G.capitata). In 1931 we had been pestered by flies at Ramni, but on this occasion a mosquito net over the entrance of my tent enabled me to escape their hateful attentions.

It was a hot afternoon, but the evening was delightfully cool; the flies disappeared and with no midges or mosquitoes to take their place, I ate my supper in peace beneath the accumulating stars.

From Frank Smythe, The valley of Flowers ( 1938 c. )