T HE S HINING MOUNTAIN
in India in 1936. I had the strange feeling that I had read it before. Then I realised that the book I had read before was Eric Shipton’s Nanda Devi, in which he described the adventures that he and Tilman had met the year before, when they first penetrated the high ring of peaks that guard Nanda Devi and reached the Sanctuary at its foot. They were the first human beings to reach there, and the story had a Shangri La quality to it, touching far back into the promised land of my subconscious. I had read the book when I was thirteen. Tilman’s book jerked my memory and I re-read the book, in parti cular the passages where Shipton makes his first steps into the inner Sanctuary of the Nanda Devi Basin: At each step I experienced that subtle thrill which anyone of imagination must feel when treading hitherto unexplored country. Each corner held some thrilling secret to be revealed for the trouble of looking. My most blissful dream as a child was to be in some such valley, free to wander where I liked, and discover for myself some hitherto unrevealed glory of Nature. Now, the reality was no less wonderful than that half-forgotten dream. The words bumped around inside my head like a bell which had only just stopped ringing. Here was a subtle relationship between real place and mental landscape. I was becoming a willing victim of the spell of the Garhwal. The mountaineer of today cannot hope to capture that feeling. Today’s frontiers are not of promised lands, of uncrossed passes and mysterious valleys beyond. Numbers of ascents of many mountains in the Himalayas are now into their teens. Today, the exploring mountaineer must look at the unclimbed faces and ridges and bring the equipment, techniques and attitudes developed over the past forty years, rather than the long axe and the plane table. There are so many ways, so much documentation, that only the mountaineer’s inner self remains the uncharted. 10