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128 The Plates Must Speak 129 Chapter 7 A LONG STORY BUT NOT FOR A GEOLO GIST Two weeks later back home in Cambridge England came the news of a second major earthquake centred on Kodari the very spot where our trek should have ended But there was good news from Ang Tsering who reported that his lodge and that of his parents next door suffered only minor damage There was no immediate news of the others I rented a van and drove five large tarpaulins down to a freight carrier near Heathrow where they were placed on flights to Kathmandu I mailed Ram Hari Thapa at Summit Book House to expect them One could only pray that Nepal would recover somehow from this latest natural catastrophe I use the word latest advisedly Nepal and indeed the entire Himalayan mountain chain has been plagued by earthquakes since time immemorial Local scholarship has identified earthquakes strong enough to level Kathmandu and kill thousands in the following years 1223 1255 1344 1505 1808 1833 1866 and 1934 The 1833 and 1934 earthquakes are particularly well documented Dr Archibald Campbell had just arrived as Brian Hodgson s surgeon assistant in Kathmandu when the 1833 earthquake hit Hodgson will be remembered from the previous section A Different Type of Reality and Campbell appears again in A Nepalese Story 24 On the 26th of August last about 6 o clock pm a smart shock of earthquake was experienced throughout the valley and the neighbouring hills The shock was preceded by a rumbling noise from the eastward The motion of the earth was undulatory as of a large raft floating on the ocean and the direction of the swell was from north east towards south west The shock lasted about 1 minute At 10 45 pm of the same day another shock of equal duration and of the same character occurred and at 10 58 a third and most violent one commenced at first it was a gentle motion of the earth accompanied by a slight rumbling noise soon however it increased to a fearful degree the earth heaved as a ship at sea the trees waved from their roots and houses moved to and fro far from the perpendicular Horses and other cattle terrified broke from their stalls and it was difficult to walk Prehistoric elephant fossils from the Siwaliks Two Victorian fossil hunters Hugh Falconer and Proby Thomas Cautley met in Saharanpur in north India around 1830 and embarked on an extraordinary fossil hunting campaign in the Siwalik foothills of the Himalayas They unearthed a complete menagerie of prehistoric mammals proving that the foothills had been formed in comparatively recent times Etching from Fauna Antiqua Sivelensis being the Fossil Zoology of the Sewalik Hills in the North of India by Hugh Falconer and Proby Thomas Cautley 1846 Courtesy of the Zoological Department University of Cambridge 24 A Campbell Esq Account of the Earthquake at Kathmandu Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal November 1833

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The Plates Must Speak 130 without staggering as a landsman does on ship board This shock lasted for about three minutes in its fullest force nor the goodwill that motivates such giving Any money that survives Nepal s notorious culture of corruption will no doubt focus on the Kathmandu Valley leaving little for the hinterland In the Dhading district near the epicentre of the earthquake midway between Kathmandu and Pokhara there was such destruction that villagers lived communally in whatever shelter they could muster It took three months for aid to reach them The amount provided per family was one sack of rice some lentils and dried fruit a single blanket eight corrugated roof sections and 15 000 rupees about US 220 For at least a year that s all the villagers received Buildings in the mountain villages will likely be reconstructed the same way as before using dry stone walls that will crumble as soon as the earth shakes again The exodus of cheap male labour to the Gulf will likely accelerate Nepalese orphans and single women who lost their homes will remain vulnerable to people traffickers whose activities were noted to be on the increase soon after the quake hit Continuing political turmoil in Nepal and a months long frontier blockade with India preventing fuel being delivered to the landlocked country also didn t help If only earthquakes could be predicted Geologists and their geophysicist cousins try their best but the earth is large and complex They now understand why such strong earthquakes occur up and down the Himalayan chain and can even suggest whether the most recent one for example was violent enough to release the accumulated strain in the earth or whether we should expect another one in the near future meaning within the next one hundred years or so But predicting earthquakes with enough precision to save people and property is another matter Frustratingly it is not as though the geologists don t know what s going on The Himalayas are a geologist s wonderland the highest and youngest mountain range in the world The peaks are still growing and the valleys are being cut ever deeper by huge rivers draining the snow capped peaks and their attendant glaciers It has taken constant exploration and field Campbell enumerated the numbers killed and houses damaged village by village in the Kathmandu valley even noting that in one case a woman felt obliged to commit Sati the Hindu practice of a wife s self immolation on her husband s death because her husband had been killed in the quake A little later he reported the curious fact that while it was known that the shock was felt in the south as far as Calcutta it had not been noticed immediately north of the Himalayas in Tibet He learned this from a Nepalese deputation that happened to be returning to Kathmandu from Peking They were on the Tibetan plain just north of the Himalayas when the quake struck and could report to Campbell on arrival in Kathmandu that they had felt nothing The 1934 earthquake was extensively documented by a member of the ruling elite Major General Brahma Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana who was in charge of Kathmandu s hospital 25 From reports up and down the Kathmandu valley he estimated 8 519 dead and 207 704 buildings destroyed but the number countrywide must have been far higher The earthquake was also given a thorough scientific inspection by geologists from British India of which more later There was no shortage of local explanations for the catastrophe According to one astrologers had warned of impending disaster because seven planets had come into alignment Another had it that because one year before an aeroplane had flown over the summit of Mt Everest for the first time Lord Shiva who resided atop the mountain had decided to seek retribution Whatever the people s beliefs photographs taken at the time show Kathmandu s Durbar Square and the environs as badly damaged as that which we witnessed following our trek This confirmed that every historic temple and building must have been reconstructed post 1934 which may bode well for a second bout of reconstruction now anticipated by UNESCO and the Nepalese Government Reconstruction after the 2015 quake will take time but huge amounts of foreign aid governmental and private have been promised for more on this see 25 A Nepalese Story The fate of those most affected Brahma Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana 1934 however risks not being touched by these donations 1934 Earthquake damage in 1934 Durbar Square Patan The entire Himalayan range has been subject to earthquakes since time immemorial and tremors strong enough to level Kathmandu have been recorded since 1223 ce The 1934 earthquake was on a similar scale to the recent ones in 2015 and was extensively documented by a member of the ruling Rana family and a team of geologists from the Geological Survey of India 131

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The Plates Must Speak 132 Proby Cautley 1802 1871 canal builder and fossil hunter Hugh Falconer 1808 1865 botanist and geologist Cautley joined the East India Company in 1820 and after a conventional military career was tasked with repairing and constructing canals in the drought ridden region between the rivers Jumna and Ganges In 1836 he was named Superintendent General of Canals Courtesy of Roorkee University now Indian Institute of Technology Uttarakhand Trained as a botanist and geologist Falconer was posted to the botanic gardens at Saharanpur in the Himalayan foothills where he joined Proby Cautley in an extraordinary campaign of fossil hunting The two men unearthed a complete zoo of prehistoric mammals and sea creatures dating from the time the Himalayas were forming Photograph by Ernest Edwards 1865 National Portrait Gallery London observation since the middle of the 19th century and a stunning renaissance in geology in the 1960s to unravel the mystery of how these mountains formed Even as earthquake prediction remains primitive Himalayan geology at least in the big picture is now well understood We were later told that where we stood in Khumjung when the earthquake hit the ground moved up one metre while the height of the Kathmandu Valley dropped by an equivalent amount This may have been an exaggeration but it brought to mind the idea that one had simply been standing on one of those motorized trap doors when the stage manager suddenly decides to move it up or down But then logic as always takes over This event the geologists were quick to assure us was simply India giving Asia a bit of a nudge In the natural course of geological time it was explained vast plates of the earth s crust move around and crash into each other Every now and then something has to give I worked a lifetime as an engineer in the business of exploring for oil and grew to admire the geologist as a sort of latter day shaman Somehow this profession with little real need of the numeracy so dear to engineers seems able to rewind the earth s history through hundreds of millions of years and recreate long lost landscapes and oceans that elude ordinary mortals But it takes time and a lot of hard work in the Himalayas especially so Geology is no desk bound activity Follow a seasoned geologist into the field and you will see what a struggle it is Physically demanding it requires years of experience looking at rocks and landscapes it demands intellect and intuition in equal parts and most important it helps to be able to imagine things happening infinitely slower than during our normal human lifespan If you sped up the earth s entire history into a one hour movie homo sapiens would only appear eight milliseconds before the credits VICTORIAN OBSESSIONS Unravelling the geology of the Himalayas began in the mid 19th century and it s tempting to wonder why anyone bothered But that is to ignore the Victorians obsession with every nook and cranny of the natural world In Victorian times specialization was unknown 133 so naturalists they liked to call themselves natural historians turned their hand to anything and everything jumping between rocks fossils flora and fauna One such was Hugh Falconer born in 1808 near Inverness Falconer studied botany and geology at the University of Aberdeen and soon discovered a passion for what we now call palaeontology while studying a fossil collection at the Geological Society of London s premises in Covent Garden In 1830 he embarked for India to take up a position at the museum of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta But for whatever reason he didn t stay long there and soon moved to the botanic gardens in Saharanpur This was a district capital situated north of Delhi and near the foothills of the Himalaya Also living at Saharanpur at that time was a certain Proby Cautley who had been drafted into the East India Company as a second lieutenant twenty years earlier Cautley had spent his early life in India following a conventional military career but was now assisting the repair of the Doab canal system This had been constructed centuries earlier by the Mughal Emperors to irrigate vast tracts of farm land between the Ganges and the Jumna and help obviate terrible famines that afflicted the area How Falconer and Cautley met is unknown but they must have frequented the same social circles in Saharanpur and it probably didn t take long for Falconer to learn that Cautley besides being a committed canal builder also harboured a passion for fossils By 1832 the two men had joined forces and were embarking on a five year fossil hunting extravaganza in the Siwalik foothills of the Himalayas just to their north The name Siwalik derives from a Sanskrit word meaning the tresses of Shiva one of three central Hindu deities Their finds occasionally facilitated by blasting rock outcrops with explosive were spectacular enough to acquire instant fame in the close knit world of Victorian natural history Of course neither Faulkner nor Cautley nor any geologist on the planet of that era had the remotest idea of how old rocks and fossils actually were Their baseline was simply an evolving sequence of strata whose physical juxtaposition indicated a relative notion of age The principle was simple any given stratum was assumed to be younger than the stratum it sat on By

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The Plates Must Speak 134 the mid 19th century geologists had observed enough strata up and down Europe and Great Britain to put a generic sequence together and start naming things Thus from the youngest to the oldest the geological periods began to assume their now time honoured nomenclature Quaternary Tertiary Cretaceous Jurassic Triassic Permian Carboniferous Devonian Silurian Ordovician Cambrian and the impossibly ancient pre Cambrian What the two fossil hunters discovered was a complete zoo of extinct mammals that lived and died as the foothills were forming Prehistoric elephant rhinoceros hippopotamus pig and giraffe all of them in several evolutionary variations describe only part of the collection Also found was the first ever fossil ape not to mention fish crocodiles and a giant tortoise By the mid 19th century palaeontologists were beginning to understand that mammals evolved during the relatively young Tertiary Period so Falconer and Cautley must have quickly surmised that the Himalayas whose detritus was presumed to have formed the foothills cannot have been much older The fish and other aquatic finds pointed to an even more interesting possibility that perhaps at one time there had been an ocean just to the south of the mountains At any rate the diversity of the fossil finds suggested a period of rapid evolution While Cautley remained at heart the engineer his magnum opus would be the planning and building of the 350 mile long Ganges canal Falconer spent the rest of his life committed to natural history alternating between India and England as his health dictated In India he was known to capture live animals to compare anatomy with the fossils that Cautley and he had found earlier In the British Museum in London he studied and catalogued five tons of fossil bones that he had shipped from India In time Falconer became a leading member of the London scientific community championing his friend Charles Darwin and in turn being feted by Charles Lyell the foremost geologist of the day Falconer and Cautley s discoveries would have been well known to the next and arguably the greatest 19th century natural historian ever to step on the shores of the Indian subcontinent Joseph Dalton Hooker Armed with a luxuriant pair of side whiskers Hooker was the epitome of the erudite Victorian as well versed in botany geography palaeontology and geology as was possible in the 19th century and tough with it Born in Suffolk he was educated at the University of Glasgow partly at the hands of his father who was professor of botany there On the strength of some medical studies he joined James Clark Ross s four year voyage to Antarctica as assistant surgeon an expedition that would successfully locate the South Magnetic Pole and circumnavigate the entire continent for the first time Aged just twenty two when the expedition set off in 1839 Hooker was the youngest member of the crew and it was his job to collect plant and geological specimens from the many remote islands visited as they sailed round the continent It cannot have been an easy ride By the time the expedition returned Hooker s father had been appointed Director of Kew Gardens but Hooker himself failed to secure a professorship he coveted in Edinburgh So instead he took a job at the Geological Society of London developing the relatively new discipline of palaeobotany The London social scene must have suited him well because in short order he met and became engaged to Frances Henslow the daughter of Charles Darwin s botany tutor Marriage would have to wait however because young Hooker was already hatching a new plan He had persuaded his father to underwrite a plant collecting expedition to the Himalayas For this jaunt Hooker would need any kind of help on offer Falconer now established as the superintendent of the Calcutta botanical gardens provided a base camp on the subcontinent and plenty of moral support In the mountains however he would be mostly travelling alone accompanied by whatever retinue he could muster Having arrived in Calcutta and liaised with Falconer the plan was to proceed to Darjeeling in the foothills and penetrate the Himalayas through the Kingdom of Sikkim to the north Hooker reached Darjeeling in April 1848 as the monsoon began to break He was courteously hosted by Brian Hodgson the eccentric and legendary naturalist diplomat retired in Darjeeling after a lonely sojourn of twenty three years in Kathmandu latterly as the British Resident It must have been a fine meeting of minds the young Hooker eager for discovery and Hodgson seventeen years his senior ready to impart a lifetime s accumulation of Himalayan natural history 135 Joseph Dalton Hooker 1817 1911 the celebrated Victorian naturalist Apprenticed to James Clark Ross s Antarctic expedition at the age of twentytwo Hooker had an impeccable Victorian pedigree for a budding naturalist His father was Director of Kew Gardens and Hooker himself became a close friend of Charles Darwin and married the daughter of Darwin s botany tutor Photograph taken in the 1860s by Henry Joseph Whitlock National Portrait Gallery London

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The Plates Must Speak 138 I carried myself a small barometer a large knife and digger for plants note book telescope compass and other instruments whilst two or three Lepcha lads who accompanied me as satellites carried a botanising box thermometers sextant and artificial horizon measuring tape azimuth compass and stand geological hammer bottles and boxes for insects sketch book c arranged in compartments of strong canvas bags The Nepal officer always kept near me with one of his men rendering innumerable little services Other sepoys were distributed amongst the remainder of the party one went ahead to prepare camping ground and one brought up the rear and lore Hooker enthused 26 To be welcomed to the Himalaya by such a person and to be allowed the most unreserved intercourse and the advantage of all his information and library exercised a material influence on the progress I made in my studies and on my travels Hooker remained Hodgson s guest for six months until he eventually set off for the mountains But it would be Dr Archibald Campbell Hodgson s exsubordinate from their Kathmandu days and now the East India Company s agent for Sikkim who would have to deal with the politics For there was a hitch The Chogyal or King of Sikkim aided and abetted by his prime minister the Dewan categorically refused Hooker entry or any other foreigner for that matter It was a typically low moment in the simmering relationship between the overbearing East India Company and their temperamental Himalayan neighbour Hooker had to look elsewhere One alternative was eastern Nepal but Nepal more than matched Sikkim for its dislike of foreign interlopers Campbell lobbied the British Residency in Kathmandu and Jung Bahadur Rana the all powerful Nepalese Prime Minister was eventually persuaded to make an extraordinary exception and allow Hooker to become the first foreigner to visit the eastern part of Nepal Campbell helped organize the porters and saw Hooker on his way Hooker described his retinue as he set off in the autumn of 1848 27 My party mustered fifty six persons My tent and equipments for which I was greatly indebted to Mr Hodgson instruments bed box of clothes books and papers required a man for each Seven more carried my papers for drying plants and other scientific stores The Nepalese guard had two coolies of their own My interpreter the coolie Sirdar or headman and my chief plant collector a Lepcha had a man each Mr Hodgson s bird and animal shooter collector and stuffer with their ammunition and indispensables had four more there were besides three Lepcha lads to climb trees and change the plant papers who had long been in my service in that capacity and the party was completed by fourteen Bhotan coolies laden with food consisting chiefly of rice with ghee oil capsicum salt and flour His route tracked westwards into eastern Nepal until he hit the Tambur river which he then followed northwards to its source and then further to a rather vaguely defined frontier with Tibet The country he travelled in lies between two extraordinary mountain ranges Kangchenjunga and its assorted satellites to the right that provide the famously breathtaking vista from Darjeeling and a group of giants to the left that were unmapped unnamed and unvisited We can track his itinerary in some detail from his exquisitely illustrated Himalayan Journals published in 1854 Every day Hooker was methodically observing and recording the Frontispiece from The Rhododendrons of SikkimHimalaya Hooker s masterwork The Rhododendrons of SikkimHimalaya was assembled by his father from manuscripts sketches and plant samples sent home via Falconer in Calcutta The lavishly illustrated book was published in 1849 while Hooker was still in the field It launched a rhododendron craze this particular variety first flowered in Britain in a hothouse on the Earl of Rosslyn s estate in 1853 Hand coloured lithograph of Rhododendron Dalhousiae by Walter Hood Fitch based on a watercolour sketch by Joseph Dalton Hooker Royal Botanic Gardens Kew 26 27 Joseph Dalton Hooker Himalayan Journals 1854 Ibid 139

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140 A stranded gneiss block with granite bands on the Kinchinjhow sic glacier As the supreme exemplar of the Victorian naturalist Hooker observed and recorded natural phenomena with an astonishing diligence This of course included Himalayan flora and fauna but also all manner of geological phenomena such as rocks moraines glaciers and mountain topography Woodcut from Himalayan Journals by Joseph Dalton Hooker 1854 The Plates Must Speak natural life about him and every day his caravan would gently climb higher into the Himalayas On one of the passes he crossed he would proudly record a height of 16 764 feet indicated by his pocket barometer Hooker is best known for his discovery of twenty five hitherto unknown varieties of rhododendrons which he pressed collected the seeds thereof and painted in a series of watercolours All this along with countless other collectibles was carried back to Darjeeling even as he progressed northwards transported to Falconer in Calcutta and then shipped to Hooker senior at Kew Gardens His father had the plants redrawn he personally edited his son s manuscripts and less than a year later while his son was still tramping through Nepal and Sikkim published the first of three volumes of probably the most famous and most beautiful botanical book the world had ever seen The Rhododendrons of Sikkim Himalaya The seeds were grown and distributed to nurseries around Britain triggering a rhododendron craze in Europe and North America Nevertheless Hooker was also looking at the landscape and rocks Field geology today assumes the existence of a map to guide and plot the geologist s field data In contrast Hooker had to make his own map which one finds carefully tucked in at the back of his Journals It was an extraordinary effort for one man with only the most basic of surveying equipment His map which covered a large tract of eastern Nepal as well as most of Sikkim was highly praised by the Survey of India and later used for a Tibetan border survey in 1903 The first thing that surprised Hooker was the magnitude of ancient moraines in his path situated several thousands of feet below the glaciers he could see higher up He conjectured that these moraines must have been fashioned and deposited by an ancient glacial ocean a reasonable if incorrect guess given that his only previous experience of glaciers was from the Antarctic voyage with Ross Elsewhere his journals are replete with engravings of the high mountain scenery and observations about the gneisses granites and granitic intrusions he found in the central Himalaya Even if he failed to connect the geological dots these disparate observations were important He was it must be remembered one of the very first outsiders to traverse the entire mountain 141 range from south to north and reports on the landscape he encountered were valuable to others more geology centric Retracing his steps southwards in a wide loop Hooker crossed a pass known locally as Choonjerma and was particularly struck by views of very distant mountains in Nepal making a rough sketch of them 28 A little to the north of west I discerned the most lofty group of mountains in Nepal which I believe are on the west flank of the great valley through which the Arun river enters Nepal from Tibet they were very distant and subtended so small an angle that I could not measure them with the sextant and artificial horizon their height judging from the quantity of snow must be prodigious Recently Australian film maker Peter Donaldson has retraced Hooker s travels and identified a small peak in the background of his sketch as Mount Everest Unwittingly Hooker s rough sketch had provided the first ever image of the world s highest mountain Coincidentally just a few months later the Survey of India finally got sightings of the same peak one they had been labelling XV and computed it to be the highest known at 29 002 feet They would neither announce the discovery nor name the peak for another six years Hooker suffered more adventures before leaving the Himalaya Sensing improved relations with the Dewan Hooker set off again northwards this time in Sikkim proper and for much of the journey Campbell went with him Arriving in the north east corner of the country the two men crossed the Donkia Pass and discovered one of the highest lakes known at that time the Tso Lhamo at 17 490 feet Right next to it in a marsh they picked up several types of sea shells Overcome at the beauty of the scene somewhat giddy from the altitude and incredulous to find marine remnants at such height Hooker s diary displays a rare moment of emotional release With the pleasant sound of the waters rippling at my feet I yielded for a few moments to those emotions of gratified ambition which being unalloyed by selfish considerations for the future become springs of 28 Ibid

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142 The Plates Must Speak happiness during the remainder of one s life Returning south they again fell foul of the Dewan and were briefly imprisoned The two men were released after intervention and threats from the East India Company and Hooker eventually returned to the safety of Brian Hodgson in Darjeeling and then Hugh Falconer in Calcutta He made one more expedition to the foothills in Assam with his friend and fellow botanist Thomas Thomson recently returned from exploring the furthest reaches of Ladakh we will meet Thomson again in Controlling the Margins He then sailed for England this time with the firm intention of marrying Frances Henslow Hooker continued to travel to the Middle East and the United States but once settled in London became Darwin s closest friend and confidant At the celebrated debate in Oxford in 1860 it was Hooker together with Thomas Huxley who defended the theory of evolution before a crowd of sceptics Hooker eventually took over the directorship of Kew Gardens on his father s death Tso Lhamo lake and Tibet beyond from the Donkia Pass In 1849 Hooker and his companion in Sikkim Dr Archibald Campbell reached the Donkia Pass in north east Sikkim close to the Tibetan border elevation 18 500 ft They were astonished to find sea shells in the nearby Tso Lhamo lake Coloured mezzotint by W L Walton from Himalayan Journals by Joseph Dalton Hooker 1854 Geological Society of London 143

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