Yeti

They followed the footprints for a mile. His diary notes tersely: ‘Sixteen inches apart and about 6–8 inches in diameter. Blokes say it is hairy like a monkey.’

On The Times letters page, Shipton chipped in with his own sighting. ‘With two Sherpas I was crossing the Bireh Ganga glacier when we came upon tracks made in crisp snow which resembled nothing so much as those of an elephant. I have followed elephant spoor often and could have sworn we were following one then but for the comparative scarcity of these beasts in the Central Himalaya.’

If you are attuned to the Shipton–Tilman dynamic, you might begin to hear the gentle sound of the piss being taken. Then – and here’s a point relevant to Ernst Schäfer’s accusation – Tilman chimed into suggest a search expedition: ‘I notice regretfully that the correspondence appears to be failing and that a zoologist (Huxley) has been afforded space to drive yet another nail into the coffin of our abominable friend having first poisoned him with another dose of Latin. Difficult though it is, the confounding of scientific sceptics is always desirable, and I commend the suggestion that a scientific expedition should be sent out. To further this an Abominable Snowman Committee, on the lines of the Mount Everest Committee, might be formed, drawn from the Alpine Club and the Natural History Museum.’

Were Tilman and Shipton hinting that more public money might be raised to pay for their expeditions, this time to pursue the Abominable Snowman?

Despite including seven strong climbers, Tilman’s 1938 Everest expedition got no higher than the Norton and Somervell high point of 28,000 feet. Food became a point of contention among the team members; in the name of austerity Tilman had refused the gift of a crate of champagne from a well-wisher, and listed porridge and soup as luxuries. Noel Odell, in particular, objected to the ration of two pounds per day of flour and lentils after enjoying quails in aspic and chocolates on the 1924 Everest expedition. He blamed the parsimonious diet for the recurrent illness and weakness of the party. Bill Tilman gave a typically sarcastic response to this in Appendix A of his expedition book: ‘I must confess I was surprised to hear any criticism of the food, except from Odell, who has not yet finished criticising the food we ate on Nanda Devi in 1936 and who, in spite of his half-starved condition, succeeded in getting to the top.’14

However, Odell did have a point: once again, the British had failed on Everest. Little did they know that their youngest Sherpa, 24-year-old Tenzing Norgay, would finally manage to climb the mountain in 1953 with Edmund Hillary. He was described by the leader as young, keen, strong and very likeable. Shipton had employed him on the 1935 Everest reconnaissance expedition, catching his flashing smile in the employment lines. Nor could they suspect that a British woman, Rebecca Stephens, would climb Everest in 1993; a 13-year-old boy, Jordan Romero, would climb it in 2010; or an 80-year-old Japanese man, Yuichiro Miura, in 2013. Surely, they wouldn’t believe that 234 people would reach the top in a single day in 2012. One of the greatest mysteries about mountains is how they appear to lose their difficulty. As British mountaineer and author Albert Mummery said: ‘It has frequently been noticed that all mountains appear doomed to pass through the three stages: An inaccessible peak – The most difficult ascent in the Alps – An easy day for a lady.’15 This is not a topic for this book, but it has been addressed at length in at least one other.16

Once again, the weather was bad that year so they retreated to the Rongbuk monastery, where they had already noticed that someone had demolished the monument to those who died in 1924 (the carved stone panels on this had been executed by Howard Somervell, the polymath, in an Arts and Crafts style). Tilman and the other climbers questioned the lamas:

Odell, who as a member of the 1924 expedition was particularly interested, then asked who had destroyed the big cairn erected at the Base Camp … The abbot disclaimed all responsibility on the part of the monastery and suggested that the culprits were the ‘Abominable Snowmen’. This reply staggered me, for though I had an open mind on the matter I was not prepared to hear it treated so lightly in that of all places. I was shocked to think that this apparently jesting reply, accompanied as it was by a chuckle from the abbot and a loud laugh from the assembled monks, indicated a disbelief in the ‘Abominable Snowman’ … Further questioning showed clearly that no jest was intended, and we were told that at least five of these strange creatures lived up near the snout of the glacier and were often heard at night.17

Another explanation could be that the monument, which might have been considered to sacrilegiously resemble a Tibetan religious chorten, had indeed been demolished by the lamas.18

There was more to see in the Rongbuk monastery. In the innermost shrine, they were shown a piece of rock with ‘the very clear impress of a large human foot’. Odell, a geologist of some standing, could not provide an explanation. Another mysterious footprint!

Tilman’s book of the expedition, Mount Everest 1938, was not published until ten years later, after the war. In it he discusses the Abominable Snowman at length: ‘Since no book on Mount Everest is complete without appendices, I have collected all the available evidence, old and new, and relegated it to the decent obscurity of Appendix B.’ As well as being obscure, Appendix B19 is now extremely hard to find (having been unaccountably left out of the otherwise excellent Diadem edition of his collected Mountain-Travel books). It is written in a suspiciously jocular manner – ‘Nothing like a little judicious levity’ – but Tilman manages to make the case for the Abominable Snowman whilst undermining him and at the same time hinting that he doesn’t take the whole phenomenon entirely seriously. In fact, this is a masterpiece of sustained comic irony, a difficult rhetorical trick to pull off but one that Tilman manages, time and time again.

He firstly deals with the genesis of the Western yeti, thanks to Howard-Bury’s missing exclamation marks, then suggests that the journalist Henry Newman may have had one explan-ation of the phenomenon:

… in Tibet there is no capital punishment, and men found guilty of grave crimes are simply turned out of their villages and monastery. They live in caves like wild animals, and in order to obtain food become expert thieves and robbers. Also in parts of Tibet and the Himalaya many caves are inhabited by ascetics and others striving to obtain magical powers by cutting themselves off from mankind and refusing to wash.

In other words, was the yeti phenomenon merely wild Tibetans trying to make ends meet? Henry Newman had translated the porters’ name for the wild men as ‘metch kangmi’, kangmi meaning snowman and metch meaning disgusting, or abominable, but it appears that the word ‘metch’ actually means someone wearing tattered or disgusting clothes. This fitted better with the idea of exiled wild men wearing the remnants of their original clothing, attacking travellers; or indeed, hermits wearing rotting rags. This seems a possible origin for the story.

Tilman points out that snow is an unsatisfactory medium for footprints. A foot changes shape as the body’s weight comes onto it and the resulting print can look nothing like the foot that made it. And the effect of intense high-altitude sun is first to collapse the sides of the print by melting, then to enlarge the whole thing, ending with a vague circular shape. An explanation for bare footprints in snow was provided by one of Tilman’s correspondents:

In 1930 on the summit of a 17,000 ft pass in Ladakh, Capt. Henniker met a man completely naked except for a loincloth. It was bitterly cold and snowing gently. When he expressed some natural astonishment, he was met with the reply in perfect English: ‘Good morning, Sir, and a Happy Christmas to you’ (it was actually July). The hardy traveller was an MA of an English university (Cambridge, one suspects) and was on a pilgrimage for the good of his soul. He explained that one soon got used to the cold and that many Hindus did the same thing.20

Tilman then records the series of letters to The Times which had produced more eyewitnesses. One of them was from Ronald Kaulback, who on a journey to the Upper Salween in 1936 reported seeing at 16,000 feet five sets of tracks which looked exactly as though made by a bare-footed man. Two of his porters thought they had been made by snow leopards, but two claimed they were made by mountain men, which they described as like a man, white-skinned, with long hair on head, arms and shoulders. There were no bears recorded in that area. This letter produced another witness, Wing-Commander Beaumont, who had seen similar tracks near the source of the Ganges (however, bare-footed pilgrims are known to visit this sacred site). These letters in turn produced a volley from the zoologists, who suggested langurs might produce such footprints. Or giant pandas. Kaulback responded drily that he had seen and heard of no monkeys despite exploring the area for five months, and as for giant pandas there were no bamboo shoots, ‘a sine qua non for pandas without which they languish and die’.

At this point, Tilman summarises the evidence: ‘So far then we have as candidates for the authorship of queer tracks seen on three several occasions, snow leopards, outlaws, bears, pandas, ascetics, langurs, or X the unknown quantity (which we may as well call the ‘Abominable Snowman’) roughly in that order of probability.’

But Tilman is equivocal about the actual existence of the Abominable Snowman: ‘… everything turns upon the interpretation of footprints. And if fingerprints can hang a man, as they frequently do, surely footprints may be allowed to establish the existence of one.’ However, despite his taciturnity, Tilman did have a tongue and at times it was in his cheek. His dark humour was sometimes misunderstood. Earlier in the same book, Mount Everest, 1938, he discusses the idea of dropping expedition stores onto the slopes of Everest: ‘There is a good case for dropping bombs on civilians because so few of them can be described as inoffensive, but mountains can claim the rights of “open towns” and our self-respect should restrain us from dropping on them tents, tins, or possibly men.’ One American reviewer complained of Tilman’s complete lack of humour.

Tilman the satirist (and admirer of Jonathan Swift) reserves his ammunition for the irascible and scientific Frank Smythe, who had clearly irritated him on and off the slopes. He details his careful measuring of the prints ‘with the calm scientific diligence of a Sherlock Holmes’ and the way his photographs were carefully submitted to the ‘Zoological pundits’, who pronounced them to be made by a bear. ‘Whereupon, Mr Smythe, triumphantly flourishing his Sherpa’s affidavit, announced to his expectant audience that “a superstition of the Himalaya is now explained, at all events to Europeans”. In short, delenda est homo niveus disgustans;21 moreover, any tracks seen in the snow in the past, the present, or the future, may safely be ascribed to bears. As a non sequitur this bears comparison with the classic example: “No wonder they call this Stony Stratford, I was never so bitten by fleas in my life.”’22

He makes a good point: Smythe’s tracks were almost certainly those of the bear, but mystery footprints come in all shapes and sizes. Because his Sherpas had identified undisputed bear tracks as those of a wild man, Smythe had leaped to the conclusion that all mysterious tracks were made by bears. It was not his facts that were suspect but his inferences.

Tilman then produces his one-legged, carnivorous, hopping bird, weighing perhaps a ton, which he thought might explain the circular footprints he had seen. Perhaps pulling another leg, he suggests that a more likely explanation was that Abominable Snowmen had developed a primitive kind of snowshoe, despite these being unknown to the natives of the Himalayas.

Why was Tilman so anti-science? This is something that comes up again and again, and you can see the same tendency in the Bigfoot believers. Perhaps he wanted a space left for mystery in the Himalayas. In all of his writings about the yeti, Tilman adopted an anti-science ‘unbecoming levity’; as one interviewer found, ‘… it was obvious that he also belongs to the school which considers that the mystery of the yeti should be left uninvestigated; that once the unknown becomes known and the glamour dispelled, the interest evaporated.’23

This is an odd position. Tilman spent his exploring lifetime attempting to know the unknown among high mountains and cold seas. Was the glamour dispelled once the blanks on the maps and charts were filled in? In line with his generation, Tilman attended church and was a believer. However, he doesn’t seem to have ever been a lover. Unknowns that become knowns in these circumstances might be too disillusioning. Maybe he just preferred the yeti to be left as a mystery.

Towards the end of Appendix B, Tilman describes how on his return march from Everest in 1938 he took a side trip and bumped into Ernst Schäfer’s SS Tibet expedition. Over a few glasses of kümmel24 he begged the Auschwitz anthropologist Bruno Beger to look into the mystery of Homo odious and quite possibly asked him not to upset the applecart. This may have prompted Schäfer’s curt dismissal in his letter to Messner. I also suspect that Schäfer may have mixed him up with Smythe.

Tilman ends Appendix B with an account of what happened next. He and two Sherpas set out to make the first crossing of the Zemu Gap, a 19,000-foot col near Kangchenjunga. They noticed a single track of booted footprints ahead of them that Tilman disappointedly noted went over the col (thus making it a pass). Enquiring in Darjeeling, they could find no climbers boasting of the ascent: ‘men who climb in the Himalaya, though they may be strong, are not often silent.’ Further enquires elicited a response from John Hunt, the future leader of the successful 1953 Everest expedition, who said he had also seen tracks the previous year, and not only were there tracks, but actual steps had been cut in the far side of the pass.25

Tilman suggests that the maker of the tracks had picked up a pair of discarded climbing boots from the old German base camp near Kangchenjunga, and used them to cross the Zemu Gap. ‘I have hinted that the subject of our inquiry may not be as “dumb” as we think, and we are not to assume that a Snowman has not wit enough to keep his feet dry if they happen to be the shape that fits into boots.’

Tilman’s conclusion is that something has made the strange footprints he enumerates, including the strange Rongbuk stone footprint, and that something might as well be the Abominable Snowman. There is a dubious logic about this. He concludes with a veiled threat, which we may quail at: ‘I think he would be a bold and in some ways an impious sceptic who after balancing the evidence does not decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.’

So, covered with footprints, we end Appendix B perhaps more confused than when we began it, but with a vague feeling that we’ve been hoodwinked.

My next bookish proposition has been virtually unknown to the reading public since it first appeared in 1956. ‘For most people, it appears … the funniest book they have never heard of,’ wrote Bill Bryson, in a lavish preface that puts it on a par with The Diary of a Nobody (which Evelyn Waugh, in his turn, described as ‘the funniest book in the world’). This cult book is so loved by the mountaineering tendency that it has been taken around the world by climbers and Antarctic scientists, and inspired the names of a mountain in the Masson range in Antarctica, the northeast ridge of Pikes Peak, Colorado, and (perhaps more usefully) the famous bar and restaurant in Kathmandu, Nepal. It also presents solid evidence of the ‘Atrocious Snowman’.

The Ascent of Rum Doodle is a lethal parody of the stiff-upper-lipped, tight-arsed English school of expedition literature in which the sadder of us are steeped. It is the story of a group of utter incompetents who set out to climb the world’s highest mountain, the 40,500-foot Rum Doodle, a mountain ‘celebrated but rarely seen’ (a ‘rum do’ means a strange event). It is claimed by Bryson and others that The Ascent of Rum Doodle is based on Bill Tilman’s The Ascent of Nanda Devi, but I don’t think that is entirely correct. There is already quite enough self-parody in that book: when they reach the summit, Tilman writes, ‘we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands on it’. No, I suggest that more likely texts to be satirised are Noel Odell’s Everest, 1925, Ralph Barker’s The Last Blue Mountain, and John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest; robust, militaristic accounts redounding to the credit of the writers. However, I could be wrong; you might also detect something in Rum Doodle of the underlying squabbles of Tilman’s book Mount Everest 1938 (‘we were forced to breakfast on lentils and pemmican.’)

The writer was W. E. Bowman, who seemed to have so much knowledge of high-altitude climbing that many readers assumed the name was a pseudonym for Tilman. Bowman was in fact a civil engineer who spent his time hill-walking, painting, reading rather too many expedition books and writing (unpublished) books on the Theory of Relativity. He only saw high mountains once, on a trip to Switzerland. As Bill Bryson recounts, the book did not fare well at first. One reviewer from Good Housekeeping admitted that she had got quite far in, before realising it wasn’t entirely serious. Thirty years after its publication in hardback, Arrow Books issued a paperback edition, which has to be some kind of a record. Bowman’s characters are all immediately recognisable to anyone who has been on a Himalayan expedition. They are:

Burley, the expedition leader, the strong thrusting and unsympathetic climber type.

Binder, the narrator (a Bounder, perhaps?)

Prone, the doctor, who spends the whole time lying down suffering from various appalling diseases.

Shute, the photographer, who accidentally exposes all his film stock to daylight.

Wish, the scientist, who wants to take a three-ton pneumatic geologist’s hammer, and who while testing his altitude measuring equipment during the voyage to Yogistan discovers that the ship is 153 feet above sea level.

Then there is the language expert Constant (consonant?), who manages to infuriate the leader of the 30,000 Yogistani porters by informing him that he lusted after his wife.

However, my favourite is Jungle, the navigator, who gets lost on the way to the initial expedition meeting and sends telegrams from London requesting more money when the team are on the way to the mountain. (If you think this is far-fetched, I was on one expedition to Sikkim when my leader failed to apply for the correct Indian visa and was leading the party from London while we were herding yaks up the slopes of Kangchenjunga. We also ended up climbing the wrong mountain, but that is a shameful memory I try to repress.)

There are various bungling adventures which parody events in the source books. The members wander in the fog, coming across their own footprints and re-encountering each other until they realise that Jungle’s compass is locked on north and they are walking in circles. They have the obligatory fall into a crevasse, a mainstay of expedition books, except that the rescue team remain at the bottom demanding further supplies of ‘medicinal’ champagne. There is even a curious homo-erotic passage which I think may refer to Gerald and Rupert’s naked wrestling match in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. The narrator Binder and Constant are lying close together in a high-altitude tent:

I awoke suddenly under the impression that a prehistoric monster had crept into the tent and was about to do me an injury. I seized the nearest solid object – which happened to be a climbing boot – and hit the monster as hard as I could. It was Constant, of course. I asked if I had woken him; and if he said what I thought he said he is not the man I thought he is … Constant flung himself on me. Still dazed by sleep and terror I fought back madly, and we were wrestling all over the tent … we were locked in a complicated embrace, half in and half out of our sleeping bags, with ropes and clothing wrapped around us … ‘This can’t go on,’ said Constant.26

In an attempt to escape the dreadful cooking of the cook, Pong, the team ascend the mountain:

We were naturally all agog to catch sight of the Atrocious Snowman, about whom so much has been written. This creature was first seen by Thudd in 1928 near the summit of Raw Deedle. He describes it as a man-like creature about seven feet [tall] covered with blue fur and having three ears. It emitted a thin whistle and ran off with incredible rapidity. The next reported encounter took place during the 1931 Bavarian reconnaissance expedition to Hi Hurdle. On this occasion it was seen by three members at a height of 25,000 feet. Their impressions are largely contradictory, but all agree that the thing wore trousers. In 1933 Orgrind and Stretcher found footprints on a snow slope above the Trundling La, and the following year Moodles heard grunts at 30,000 feet. Nothing further was reported until 1946, when Brewbody was fortunate enough to see the creature at close quarters. It was, he said, completely bare of either fur or hair, and resembled a human being of normal stature. It wore a loincloth and was talking to itself in Rudistani with a strong Birmingham accent. When it caught sight of Brewbody it sprang to the top of a crag and disappeared.

The Rum Doodle team continue upwards, and the most desirous to see the Atrocious Snowman is the scientist Wish:

… who may have nourished secret dreams of adding Eoanthropus wishi to mankind’s family tree. Wish spent much time examining any mark which might prove to be a footprint; but although he heard grunts, whistles, sighs and gurgles, and even, on one occasion, muttering, he found no direct evidence. His enthusiasm weakened appreciably after he had spent a whole rest day tracking footprints for miles across a treacherous mountain-side, only to find that he was following a trail laid for him by a porter at Burley’s instigation.

This was a fairly accurate assessment of the evidence gathered so far for the Abominable Snowman/yeti.

In the end, surmounting a South Col (in Hunt’s book, not Mount Everest, 1938), our narrator finds that the members have climbed the wrong mountain, North Rum Doodle, only 35,000 feet, and the author Bowman finally parodies all those overblown descriptions of Mount Everest. ‘I looked up at the summit of Rum Doodle, so serene in its inviolate purity, and I had a fancy that the goddess of the mountain was looking down with scorn upon her slopes, daring them to do their utmost, daring the whole world …’

However, they soon see that their porters have climbed the correct mountain by mistake.

There is a last, serious, point to make about the prevailing English tight-lipped manner, so brilliantly captured later by the actor, John Cleese. It seems to contain a deeply suppressed rage at the universe which may have come partly from Victorian repression, partly from the horror of seeing your friends blown into bits in front of you during the war. Ways to feel better might be to conquer virgin mountains or capture mystery beasts; or, in Bowman’s case, just to rip the piss out of it all.