Yeti: An Abominable History. Graham Hoyland
completely unlike what they had seen earlier. The first set of prints he reported as circular, with no toes. Tilman speculates on the nature of the creature: ‘A one-legged, carnivorous bird, weighing perhaps a ton, might make similar tracks, but it seems unnecessary to search for a new species when we have a perfectly satisfactory one at hand in the form of the Abominable Snowman – new perhaps to science but old in legend.’
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