COLOUR IN TIBET
In order to bring before the reader a vivid picture of Tibet, and
especially of the region around Mount Everest, a comparison between
Tibet and other better-known countries is almost inevitable. The
Expedition of 1922 took with them no official artist, or no doubt he
would have been deputed to write this section of the book; there were,
however, two people who tried to paint pictures of the country, Major
Norton and myself; and though I realise how inadequate our efforts were,
perhaps those of an official artist might have been almost as bad.
However, as one who looks on the world with an eye for its beauty,
although lacking the ability to transfer that beauty to canvas, one may
perhaps be pardoned for endeavouring to describe certain general
impressions of the scenery encountered by the Expedition.
In the course of our journey we passed through a great variety of
landscape; in Sikkim, for instance, we found a land of steep slopes and
dense forests, while Tibet is almost a desert country. We experienced
the clear air of the winter, and the mists and storm-clouds of the
monsoon. While we were on the rolling plains of the Tibetan Plateau,
only a few miles away were the snow-covered summits of the highest
mountains in the world.
Sikkim is a country of deep valleys and of luxurious vegetation; the air
is generally damp and the skies cloudy, and there is often a beautiful
blue haze that gives atmosphere to the distance. Sikkim is not unlike
the Italian side of the Alps, in many ways. True, its scale is larger,
and it possesses some of the most beautiful and impressive peaks in the
world (for no Alpine peak can vie with Siniolchum or Pandim for sheer
beauty of form and surface), but on the whole the scenery of Sikkim is
of the same general build as the valleys and peaks of Northern Italy. In
this sense Sikkim did not offer to the new-comer anything entirely
different from what he had seen before. But Tibet and Everest certainly
did; and the difference between Sikkim and Tibet is twofold—first, Tibet
is almost uniformly over 13,000 feet above sea-level, and therefore
bears no trees at all; second, Tibet is almost free from rainfall and
is, in consequence, a desert country. One’s eye travelled, for mile
after mile, over red-brown sand and red-brown limestone hills, finally
to rest on the blue and white of the distant snows. The air, before the
monsoon commences, is almost always clear—clear to an extent unimagined
by a European, clearer even than the air of an Alpine winter. So peaks
and ridges 30 or 40 miles away are often almost in the same visual plane
as the foreground of the landscape. In some extensive views, such as we
had from the hills above Tinki Dzong, one came to look upon hills 30
miles away as the middle distance of one’s picture, while the background
was formed of mountains a hundred miles from the point of view. It is
this lack of atmosphere which makes pictorial representation of these
Tibetan scenes so very difficult; the pictures I made on the course of
the Expedition have all had one criticism from many different
people—“there is no atmosphere.” Many as are the demerits of these
pictures, this is the one merit they have; and if they had an
“atmosphere” they would cease to be truthful. In the Alps one has often
seen mountains with extreme clearness at a great distance, but I never
remember having viewed an Alpine landscape in which there was
practically no effect of distance, and practicably no blueness of the
more distant shadows. Yet that is precisely what obtains in Tibet before
the month of June. And then, with startling suddenness, comes the
monsoon, with its damp air; for some months the landscape is entirely
altered, and also much beautified. The blue haze of the monsoon converts
the distant shadows from their crude purple-brown to the most
magnificent and sometimes brilliant blue. Once or twice one looked in
vain on one’s palette for a blue of sufficient brilliance and intensity
to reproduce the colour of the shadows 20 or 30 miles away. Then the
monsoon brings clouds and rain-storms, all of which tend to give variety
to the scene, and to endue the distant peaks with that effect of mystery
which renders them so alluring and so beautiful.
As far as the scenery among the higher mountains is concerned, the
comparison of photographs of the Everest group of peaks with those of
the Alps will give one more idea of the differences between the two
districts than can a mere verbal description, save in the matter of
scale and colour. In colour, the Alps are more varied and the rock is,
as a rule, a darker brown; the snow-shadows are more blue and the
outlines less clear; while Alpine foregrounds so often contain trees
which are totally absent from the foregrounds of Tibet. There both rocks
and stones, scree and valley-bed are of a light reddish-brown, almost
uniform in tone from near foreground to extreme distance; Makalu, for
example, is a colossal rock-pyramid of quite a light ochre colour; the
rocks of Everest are of a light amber brown relieved in the
neighbourhood of 27,000 feet by a lighter yellowish band of quartzite.
The snow of the range on its northern side resembles that of Alpine
peaks, but on the southern face the festoons and grooves of ice, so well
known to many from photographs of Himalayan mountains, decorate the much
steeper and more uncompromising slopes. Most of the higher peaks are
swept by continual gusts of wind which whirl clouds of snow from the
topmost ridges into the sky.
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