The Autobiography Of The Transparent Ironist : Chapter 3

(This is Chapter 3 of my autobiography My Experiments With Irony : I return here to my favourite theme of my Gothic fascination with the forgotten age of the British Empire in India.)

I arrived in Calcutta by the coal-steamer from Southampton in the midst of the sultry Bengal summer of 1826, and was immediately sent to Barrackpore to join the expedition of Sir Thomas Crawley Everest who was then setting out on a journey to the unexplored Himalayas. We moved out in the first week of July as the torrential monsoon showers began to pour down upon us from the deep heavens : an enormously long chain of mules, pack-horses, natives, guides, and British officers. We had been travelling for two months when we finally reached the silent unspoilt plateau of Sikkim in early September. It was my first time in the Himalayas, and I was exhilarated by the sight of the golden peaks in the distance.

One morning as we were rising higher into the mountains, we came across a band of natives who were singing and dancing around a wildly-dressed woman. She was wearing a necklace of what looked like bleached human finger-bones, her hair was smooth, long, and black, and she was whirling round and round in a delirious frenzy. Sir Everest ordered me to go ahead and clear the way for our company, and I took two of my men and began to move towards her. When I was very close to the natives, I got down from my horse and stood beside it, silently watching her mesmerising movements. She suddenly stopped in the middle of her terrible dance, and saw me mutely staring at her. She came closer to me, looked into my eyes, and gave out a most horrible laugh that echoed and reechoed through the placid mountains. She unfolded her hands, and I saw some sweet-smelling white powder on her black palms.

She came closer to me, and said in the broken Hindusthani that I had been struggling to learn at the London School of Oriental Languages : 'Eat this, you white man, and taste the bliss that you have never known in your distant island. This is the holy food of the sacred Mother. Eat it, and she shall become yours, and you shall become hers!' And she spread out the sugar evenly on her right palm, and held it up to my nose. I inhaled the sweet fumes, and began to feel that the primordial mountains were revolving around me in a cosmic dance. The shaky ground beneath my tired feet was slowly slipping away from me, and I felt myself slowly dissolving into the ancient womb of creation. I wildly threw out my hands but I could not find anything solid to hold on to.

At that moment, I heard the frantic galloping of a horse behind me, and I was rudely shaken out of my gentle descent into sweet oblivion. I turned round and saw Sir Everest charging at the native woman, his white sabre flashing in his right hand. He sliced the cold air with it and struck her on her right shoulder, and immediately a stream of thick red blood poured out from her. There was a sudden uproar from the natives who had been silently watching me, and they now rushed towards the woman who had fallen to the ground in a pool of shining blood. I could see that she was in great agony, and yet she screamed at Sir Everest : 'You white man, you shall see the Horror! Yes, the Horror of the sacred Mother shall forever haunt you!'

The days passed, and we ascended yet higher into the rarified reaches of the Himalayas where no European had ever journeyed to. The geographers in our company were busy charting the rugged terrain, and the engineers from the Royal Corps were already planning to build roads through the mountains to Tibet. Sir Everest's behaviour, however, became more and more whimsical, he was now easily irritated with his juniour officers, and he would sometimes ramble off into the wrong direction muttering something to himself. One morning, he shocked us by declaring that he would go alone into the Himalayas leaving us behind at that point, and though we protested vigorously with him he would not listen to any of us. So he left us that misty morning on his horse in his shining red uniform, his black revolvers sticking out from the sides, and his green cap turned round the wrong way. We waited for him for two weeks at that spot hoping that he would return soon, but that was the last I ever saw of Sir Thomas Crawley Everest.

Or, at least, that was what I believed for the next twenty years of my life. I came back with the failed expedition to Calcutta Presidency within a month and was promoted after five years in the army to become Lieutenant Thomas Manley Hopkinson. I returned to England after an honourable ten years' service in India, got married to my childhood sweetheart, and settled down in the picturesque countryside of Dorset.

In 1846 I had to travel to London to meet an old friend who was a doctor with the Admiralty, and when we were having lunch I was casually asked by him if I had ever heard of someone called Sir Thomas Crawley Everest. Seeing how shocked I was on hearing that name, he surmised that I had somehow come into contact with Sir Everest in Bengal, and he took me to the newly built hospital in St George's Fields beside the Thames. There on the second floor was a wizened old man, his crisp hair whitened with age, his dry skin wrinkled with time, and his bushy eyebrow weighed down with approaching death. When I introduced myself to him, he remained still for a moment on his brown chair. Then he slowly rose to his feet, turned towards me and started walking even as spasms of pain shook his frail body. When he was close to me, his withered face underwent a most horrendous contortion, and he screamed out in violent agony : 'The Horror! the Horror!'