On 17th July we left Moraine Camp with our whole caravan, and marched up the glacier to join the guide and porters at Base Camp. For more than a mile we followed the steep, torn, and bouldercovered left or west bank, and then descended to the glacier, where for another mile we picked our tortuous way over, up and down, in and out of, its rock-smothered ravines, hillocks, and ridges, to the smooth white ice, over which we passed without difficulty, till the crevassed red section adjoining the mountain-side had to be crossed, where care was necessary. A short, sharp scramble of 400 feet up the spur brought us to the camp. Two tent-terraces had been levelled off for us on the slanting hillside, upon which our tents were soon pitched, while the porters and servants established their quarters as the nature of the ground warranted.
The coolies of the sportsman, who had visited this spot the preceding summer, had constructed several rude, stone shelter-huts near-by, in which our coolies immediately made themselves at home. In a short time, everything was arranged, and we devoted ourselves to preparations for the further moves to be made from here. All were now keen for snow work. The nine small Mummery tents were unpacked and examined. A gross of long wooden pegs to anchor them was made from wood brought from the nala below. Ice axes were tested and polished, and thick clothing was stowed in our clothes-bags in place of thinner garments heretofore worn. Extra mountain boots were brought out and oiled, and those already in use re-nailed and repaired where necessary. The sound of pounding was heard for hours, for the porters were expert cobblers as well as cooks.
The camp was well above the wood-line. Nothing, not even a shrub, grew that could be used for fuel. Twenty coolies were sent down daily to the nala below the glacier to fetch wood for fire and tent-pegs, and soon a large amount was accumulated ready for use. Grass, plants, and flowers, however, covered the whole slope, to the great delight of the goats and sheep, which roamed about at will, nibbling eagerly throughout the day, and to the satisfaction of the servants and coolies, who used two varieties of a soft, thick-stemmed plant as a salad, and revelled in the wild onions as seasoning for their food. Forget-me-nots, purple asters with brilliant orange centres, edelweiss, crimson orchids, and many other flowers grew in profusion about our tents, and we had all the pleasure of a garden without the trouble of cultivating it. In the Himalaya, where edelweiss grows like a weed, there is no occasion to commit suicide by falling over a precipice in attempting to pluck it, as so many incautious persons do each season in the Alps.
Whether the sportsman referred to found any large game here we did not learn. We saw no foxes, bears, ibex, nor other large animals, nor their traces, though in Baltistan at similar altitudes we had met with bears and seen hundreds of ibex feeding on high slopes. Eagles often circled above, and a large one, after keen espionage, succeeded in himself at home, walked around with as lordly an air, and crew as lustily as if he had been the most beautiful bird in existence. Here, as elsewhere throughout the journey, his ringing voice awoke the mountain-echoes at the earliest glimmering of dawn, and continued at intervals till night had drawn its deep shadows about the camp. It cheered us whenever we left to make reconnaissances, and was the first sound to greet us on our return. Our Kashmiri khansamah said of him, “He talks all the time.”
He did not appear to be disturbed by the rapid diminution in the number of his companions, and when, at last, the number was reduced to one, his demeanour remained unchanged, and he devoted himself to looking after her welfare with the same assiduity as he had displayed when there were a dozen. The hen made a nest in the khansamah’s tent and went in daily to lay an egg, during which time the cock waited patiently outside till she reappeared. He won our respect on account of his dauntless courage under all the maltreatment he had been subjected to on the march, thus furnishing us with an excellent example in the face of discouragements that had threatened the success of the expedition. We came to regard him as our bird of good omen, and could not bring ourselves to devote him to the fate for which he was purchased.
The hen was also spared to be a companion for him. The camp commanded a grand and unobstructed view of the wild, steep front of Z1 directly opposite, over 22,000 feet in altitude, after the Nun Kun the highest and most imposing massif in the region, clad in a shaggy mail of ice, portions of which every now and again broke away and plunged downward to the glacier in resounding avalanches of deadly magnitude. From an upper plateau at about 20,000 feet two snow-cones rise, which would probably be climbable they could be reached, and the view from them would be of great topographical interest. Unfortunately, as in the case of many alluring Himalayan peaks, the approach to them was cut off by the inaccessible, avalanche-swept precipices before us, and careful examination failed to disclose any route that promised a safe or successful ascent. Extending east from Z1 is another ice-covered wall ending in a handsome pointed peak, beneath which an eastern branch-glacier descends to the Shafat in a much broken icefall covered with séracs. We named it Ice-Fall Branch. One day was spent investigating the mazes of the ice-fall. We went down from the camp to the glacier, crossed the red section where it first takes definite shape, off the point of the spur, and after this a depression covered with short moraines and much detritus in slabs, through the centre of which a good-sized stream ran from the glacier above, and then mounted to higher ice, beyond which lay the foot of the icefall. Here we soon became involved in a labyrinth of séracs separated by crevasses and chasms, up which we found our way to a height of 15,675 feet. Here the view of the broken ice-cliffs above, below, and on each side, was most impressive, and beyond these we could see north down the whole length of the Shafat glacier and nala to Gulmatunga, and west up the Shafat glacier to its head at the ridge, and also the southern line of Nun Kun peaks, the slopes of three of which form the northern reservoir of the Shafat.
The Shafat glacier was also descended, and a reconnaissance made up its lower, west branch with a view to finding a passage from its northern head through the mountains to Suru, but steep, ice-covered walls prevented any passage in that direction. On another day we ascended the Shafat glacier to the ridge forming its western boundary. Crossing the end of the spur below the camp we descended to the glacier on its west side, reaching the ice after traversing a depressed, debris-covered space and climbing over a lateral moraine. The ascent of the glacier, with gradients varying from 30°to 50°, was not difficult. Care, however, was necessary to avoid crevasses, which cut its middle portions in various directions. We reached the ridge on the south side of the glacier at the extremity of the arête projecting from Z1, the top of the ridge being at an altitude of 16,911 feet. This is composed of a great accumulation of slabs and laminated rocks lying, apparently, on a more solid rock foundation. We named it the Fariabad Col. Between this and the extremity of the ridge projecting from the Nun Kun is an interval of several hundred feet, through which we ascended to a glacier west of the ridge, which, falling from the two westerly of the five southern Nun Kun peaks almost due south, nearly at a right angle with the course of the Shafat, descends to the Z1 nala a short distance above its junction with the head of the Fariabad nala. This we named the Fariabad glacier. It contributes a small quantity of ice to the Shafat glacier through the opening. We reached a point on it 17,336 feet in altitude directly west of the opening, where we were stopped by impassable crevasses.
A reconnaissance was also made of the north reservoir of the Shafat on the side of the Nun Kun massif to an altitude of over 19,000 feet, which disclosed some of the difficulties of climbing on this side. From these investigations an excellent idea was obtained of Z1, of the eastern branch-glacier and its ice-fall, of the Shafat glacier and its basin, and of the Fariabad glacier; but from no point could we see the conformation of the highest part of the Nun Kun massif, lying behind the five southern peaks crowning the wall above Base Camp, nor could the relation of the highest south-western peak to its neighbours be determined, nor were the two northern peaks next in altitude visible, except the extreme tip of the second-highest at the north-east end, which was visible from the ice-fall under ZI.
Large portions of the névé-surfaces of the upper third of the Shafat glacier, at altitudes of from 16,000 to 18,500 feet, were thickly covered with nieve penitente, giving the glacier in places the appearance of a sea of crested snow-waves. The pinnacles varied in height from eight inches to three feet, and had the shape of wedges and of pyramids flattened at the sides, many with curlingfluted crests all turned in the same direction. They were arranged in parallel lines running in the same direction as the slope they stood on, the long diameter of each pinnacle being parallel to the long diameters of others in the system and coincident with the direction of the lines.
They were composed of granular névé, hard frozen in the morning, but softening somewhat under the heat of the sun. The central portion of each, even when softened by the sun, was much denser than the outer surface, offering, even in the case of the smallest, decided resistance to the thrust of an ice-axe, when the surface and the névé between them could be scraped away with the fingers. The névé between them sloped at angles of 30°to 40°. Later they were also found on two snow-peaks several miles farther west at altitudes of from 18,500 to 20,500 feet. On these peaks they were larger and on the highest were composed of ice, this transformation being due to the water resulting from the melting caused by the fierce heat of the sun sinking into the névé of the pinnacles and freezing as soon as the sun set. This was the first time in five seasons of Himalayan exploration that we had met with them, and we are not aware that their existence in the Himalaya has been mentioned by any other observer. More will be said of this formation later on.
Excerpted with permission from High Altitude Heroines: Four Early Explorers in the High Himalayas, Alexandra David Néel, Fanny Bullock Workman, Henrietta Sands Merrick, and Lilian A Star, Speaking Tiger Books.
