Copyright

William Collins

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First published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

This William Collins paperback edition published in 2019

Copyright © Graham Hoyland, 2018

Photographs © Individual copyright holders

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Jacket design by Jack Smyth

Graham Hoyland asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780008279523

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008279516

Version: 2019-05-01

Praise for Yeti

‘Illuminating and entertaining’ The Times

‘A thorough and highly enjoyable round-up of current “cryptid credibility” written by someone with much Himalayan experience’ Literary Review

Praise for Graham Hoyland

‘A towering work full of twists and turns’ Independent

‘Great book, great vision’ Brian Blessed

‘This richly enjoyable book will entertain you on one page, enrage you on the next and make you get your walking boots on the third. I think it’s the most effective advertisement for the countryside I’ve ever encountered’ Daily Mail

A Times Book of the Week

Dedication

To the seekers after truth

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Footnotes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

About the Author

Also by Graham Hoyland

About the Publisher

Introduction
October 2016

The footprints in the snow were large, bigger than a human’s, with clearly defined toes. There was no sign of claw-marks. These prints looked as though they had been made only minutes before we arrived. I shivered and glanced around the deserted valley. We were the first Westerners ever to see this place, and we really hadn’t meant to come here.

Our expedition was in trouble. We had been trying to reach Gangkar Punsum, the world’s highest unclimbed mountain. This lies on the Tibetan border in Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom to the east of Kathmandu which is rarely visited by Westerners. The weather had been the worst in living memory, with rain or snow on every single day since leaving Thimpu, the capital. On day three, our packhorses were attacked by wild bees, and then our leader had suffered a back injury and was now lying in a crude shelter in the jungle four days behind, tended by our doctor. Our problem was that the high pass we had just crossed was now closed to our yaks by heavy snow. We couldn’t retreat that way, and the passes towards the mountain were closed too. We were trapped, and the 25 yaks only carried supplies for three weeks. We had to get out before winter set in. As the five remaining Westerners, we could have attempted to re-cross the pass, leaving the yaks behind, but as acting leader I was unhappy about splitting the party even further. We had to stay with our tents and food. We also had a whole yak-herder family with us, including a young mother nursing an 8-month-old baby, so it was clear that we had to sink or swim together.

I asked our yak-herder Namgay Tsering for advice, and it was then that he told me of a lost valley that might provide a route back to civilisation, with two higher but easier passes that the yaks could just about manage in the snowy conditions. So the next morning we set off, guided by Pem Dem, the 20-year-old mother, with her baby Thinley. The yaks were being gathered up and loaded and would follow up behind us. After a few hours, we walked up into the Lost Valley and Pem Dem sat down in the swirling snow to breastfeed her baby. It was only then that I noticed the solitary yak standing in the snow a few yards away. It seemed distressed. These animals are sometimes abandoned by the yak-herders when they are too old to carry heavy loads. This poor creature bellowed when it scented our baggage yaks coming up the valley behind. The significance of this animal was soon to be revealed.

Mother Pem Dem and son Thinley: the witnesses.

After feeding her baby, Pem Dem slung him onto her back again and we set off towards the Wangchum La pass at the head of the valley. We were all anxious about tackling this: at 16,400 feet it was the highest we had climbed so far, some 650 feet higher than Mont Blanc. It had never before been seen or crossed by Westerners. A few minutes later, just as the first bunch of baggage yaks stampeded past us, I spotted Sonam, our deaf-mute kitchen boy, pointing at the snow to the left of our path.

There they were: two footprints, spaced quite far apart, larger than human size. The left one was very clear, and my flesh crawled as I saw how the toes had curled into the snow for grip. The prints were larger than my own size-ten feet. My mind raced. I had to record this evidence and establish its authenticity in around twenty minutes. Any longer and I would be endangering our party. While I filmed the footprints and took a snow sample, Predrag Jovanovic, our resident particle physicist, scouted ahead and behind the prints, which crossed our path at right angles, away from the solitary yak. He reported that in one direction the baggage yaks had obliterated all traces, and in the other our own footprints had done the same.

Had we disturbed a stalking creature? Was some large predator lurking behind one of the huge boulders that were scattered around the Lost Valley? I stood up and uneasily gazed up at the large boulders on the snow-covered hillside above me. Was there something up there that I couldn’t see but the old yak could smell? I crouched down again and took scrapings of dirty snow within the footprints for DNA testing. I didn’t want to try to remove the whole footprint, as there was a chance that we might have to retreat from the pass. In that case we could camp, re-examine the print and scout around for further signs.

I knew that anyone hearing our story would assume these footprints had been faked, and this was foremost in my mind too, and so I hastened forwards to the rest of the party. Had they seen the prints? Had they seen anyone bending down? The answer was a flat no. Everyone was too intent on getting to the pass, and anyway I had everyone in view just in front of me. No one had even hesitated. We set off again. I was frustrated that I had no time to record the prints in more detail, but at least I was fairly sure that there was no fakery: Pem Dem was too busy with her baby and with route-finding, and I was watching everyone else closely for signs of fatigue. Sonam, although obviously an intelligent and helpful man, was impossible to question, being deaf and unable to speak.

In the event we crossed the Wangchum La, becoming the first Westerners to do so and leaving the Lost Valley behind us. We then camped below the Saga La, climbed it the next day and were eventually reunited with our leader who was now recovered. Later in the expedition, two of us stood on the summit of a previously unclimbed mountain and gazed over hundreds of square miles of country previously unseen by Western eyes. There was plenty of terrain here for the snow leopards whose tracks we saw regularly, so why not a larger predator? We saw blue sheep and musk deer, so there was surely enough prey.

So, what was the creature? Was it a bear? The absence of claw-marks suggested otherwise. Could it therefore be the mythical beast that is spoken of all along the Himalayas: the Abominable Snowman, or yeti? Is the yeti really living in the unexplored wilderness of North Bhutan?

I decided to find out what I could about the strange world of mythical beasts: the cryptids.

CHAPTER ONE

A surprising discovery … Attenborough, a believer … Tintin in Tibet … the Third Eye … upon that mountain … a hero of Mount Everest … a wild goose chase … a lost camera … his shroud the snow.

When I gazed at those yeti footprints in the Lost Valley, I felt a mixture of fear and bewilderment. It was only later that I felt a connection to those who had gone before. For nearly a century, Western explorers had been coming back from the heights with reports of man-like beasts in the Himalayas. They began with stories of strange footprints, then told of the violent deaths of their pack animals, killed with one savage blow. Their Sherpas told them that yetis were seven feet tall, covered with brownish hair. Their feet faced backwards, which made them confusing to track. The males had a long fringe of hair over their eyes and the females had pendulous breasts which they slung over their shoulders when they ran. Your only hope of escaping from a yeti was to quickly determine which sex it was and then run downhill if it was a male, who would be blinded by his fringe, or run uphill if it was a female, who would be impeded by her breasts. Sometimes lonely males would kidnap Sherpa women and keep them in their caves, breeding strange children.

I decided to look back through the years and try to disentangle myth from reality, cryptozoology from science. In thirty years of climbing in these mountains, why had I only seen footprints? Why had no one managed to capture one of these fabled beasts? Where did they live, and could I find any solid proof of the yeti? Furthermore, was there any evidence for Bigfoot, the yeti’s American cousin?

Mountaineering as a sport has collected a great literature around it in a way that, say, football or table tennis have not, so this book will take us through some of the most gripping accounts of the Abominable Snowman ever written. Cryptozoology itself has given us great fiction too, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Hollywood’s Jurassic Park. Somewhere in these pages lies the truth about these beasts and the dangers contained within them. This is a detective story, and like the best detective stories it starts with a discovery and a mystery.

We humans have only identified about two million of the estimated 10 million living species on our planet, and new species have been discovered in modern times that scientists had previously refused to accept. The gorilla was a legendary creature seen in the fifth century BCE by Hanno the Navigator, who described ‘a savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and who our interpreters called Gorillae. We pursued but could take none of the males; they all escaped to the top of precipices, which they mounted with ease, and threw down stones.’ The name was derived from Ancient Greek (gorillai), meaning ‘tribe of hairy women’. An Andrew Battel of Leigh, Essex, traded in the Kingdom of Congo during the 1590s and described ‘a kind of Great Apes, if they might be so termed, of the height of a man but twice as bigge in features of their limes with strength proportionable, hairie all over, otherwise altogether like men and women in the whole bodily shape’. This was a good description of the gorilla, but the animal was regarded as mythical until 1902 when Captain Robert von Beringe shot and recovered two mountain gorilla specimens in the course of an expedition to establish the boundaries of German East Africa. When standing on two legs, they look remarkably like the speculative pictures of the yeti I have seen.

Then there was the ‘African unicorn’, the okapi, which was only discovered in 1901. It turned out to be a relative of the giraffe. Even giraffes themselves were regarded as fabulous until the mid-nineteenth century. A hairy pig thought to be extinct since the Pleistocene, the Chacoan peccary, was found trotting around happily in Argentina as late as 1971. Live giant pandas weren’t seen in Europe until 1916, and the existence of the Komodo dragon was disbelieved until 1926. So there were plenty of precedents for legendary animals such as the yeti eventually being accepted by scientists once they had been found (and then shot) by Westerners.

Sir David Attenborough is convinced. ‘I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real,’ said the TV naturalist. ‘There are footprints that stretch for hundreds of miles and we know that in the 1930s a German fossil was found with these huge molars that were four or five times the size of human molars. They had to be the molars of a large ape, one that was huge, about 10 or 12 feet tall. It was immense. And it is not impossible that it might exist. If you have walked the Himalayas, there are these immense rhododendron forests that go on for hundreds of square miles which could hold the yeti. If there are some still alive and you walked near their habitat, you can bet that these creatures may be aware of you, but you wouldn’t be aware of them.’¹

The New Scientist magazine, reporting on a photograph of a yeti footprint, was confident that the creature existed. Like Attenborough, the writer concluded that it could be a giant ape: ‘The Abominable Snowman might well be a huge, heavily-built bipedal primate similar to the fossil Gigantopithecus … the Snowman must be taken seriously.’²

And what about the North American cousin of the yeti, the Bigfoot? ‘I’m sure that they exist,’ said the celebrated primatologist Jane Goodall on NPR radio. ‘I’ve talked to so many Native Americans, who’ve all described the same sounds, two who’ve seen them.’³

There was good reason to believe, therefore, that I had been close to a large primate unknown to science. Had I disturbed the beginning of a stalking manoeuvre which would have led to the violent death of the solitary yak? The predator would have to have been big enough to take on a yak bull, with jaws and teeth powerful enough to kill it. Or would it despatch the animal with one savage blow, and then turn towards me?

When I was a child, all I knew about the Abominable Snowman was what I had read in Tintin in Tibet, drawn by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé and published in 1959. Tintin has a dream in which he sees his Chinese friend Chang lying in plane wreckage. Tintin, Captain Haddock and Snowy the dog travel to Kathmandu, then trek to Tibet. After various adventures they encounter the terrifying yeti, or migou, and their porters run away. Eventually Chang is found in the yeti’s cave, having been nursed back to health by the beast. They all return to civilisation without a proper encounter with the animal, who watches them depart with apparent sadness. In the last frame, Chang says: ‘You know, I hope they never succeed in finding him. They’d treat him like some wild animal. I tell you, Tintin, from the way he took care of me, I couldn’t help wondering if deep down, he hadn’t a human soul.’

The drawings in the book were inspired by reports from the Golden Age of Himalayan climbing, then in full swing. Kathmandu is represented as it was in the 1950s, with no cars or even bicycles, just porters, and the city’s streets are so empty they are covered with red pimento peppers drying in the sun. I was entranced by the drawings of the mountains and in particular by the idea of a giant man-beast with a coconut-shaped head. How wonderful it would be if there existed a huge, orange, hairy creature, living in the high mountains, unknown to science! How marvellous it would be to contact him, to learn his language and protect him and his furry family! No doubt he would look just like the yeti in Tintin in Tibet, and would be a giant, cuddly, missing link.

Tintin Yeti

However, as with most children’s books there was a darker adult subtext. During composition, Hergé (Georges Remi) was in the throes of a mental breakdown caused by the realisation that he had fallen out of love with his wife Germaine, whom he had married in 1932, and fallen into love with Fanny Vlamink, a colourist who worked with him at the Studios Hergé. Fanny was 28 years his junior and a master of the colouring technique that he felt he had never quite come to grips with. Hergé’s breakdown included nightmares about the colour white:

At the time, I was going through a time of real crisis and my dreams were nearly always white dreams. And they were extremely distressing … At a particular moment, in an immaculately white alcove, a white skeleton appeared that tried to catch me. And then instantly everything around me became white.⁴

Hergé, a Catholic, went to see a Jungian psychoanalyst who interpreted his dreams as a search for purity and tried to persuade him to abandon his work. He ignored the advice and persisted with Tintin in Tibet, which eventually became his favourite work. The book’s plates contain large areas of the colour white depicting the snowy Himalayas (Tibet, of course, is largely an orangey-brown high-altitude desert). The mountain above the Tibetan monastery is called the White Goddess. And Tintin’s companion is a white dog named Snowy. Hergé himself stated that the story ‘must be a solo voyage of redemption’ from the ‘whiteness of guilt’.⁵

Of course, these interpretations can be taken too far: Tintin’s other companion is the alcoholic sea-captain Archibald Haddock. His name came from ‘a sad English fish’ cooked by the long-suffering Germaine.

It is worth noting that the front cover of Tintin in Tibet does not incorporate an image of the yeti, just his footprints. In the picture, Tharkey, the loyal Sherpa (another Western archetype), looks matter-of-fact, as if to him the yeti is an accepted phenomenon, but Tintin and Captain Haddock look astounded by the size of the footprints in the snow.

Tintin in Tibet

As a child during the 1960s, I became interested in Tibet and Buddhism. One book that went around my school in Rutland was The Third Eye, an autobiography by the Tibetan lama Lobsang Rampa. It is a gripping read. Born to a wealthy Lhasa aristocrat, he has a hole bored in his skull to reveal a third eye with which he discerns the auras of those around the Dalai Lama, and thus understands their true motives. He sees the British ambassador Sir Charles Alfred Bell as naive but unthreatening, but warns the Dalai Lama that the Chinese diplomats are a real threat to Tibet’s independence and that he must prepare for war and invasion. He practises levitation and clairvoyance.

Tuesday Lobsang Rampa (to give him his full name) also describes an encounter with a yeti. ‘We looked at each other, both of us frozen with fright for a period which seemed ageless. It was pointing a hand at me and making a curious mewing noise like a kitten. The head had no frontal lobes but seemed to slope back almost directly from the heavy brows. The chin receded greatly and the teeth were large and prominent. As I looked and perhaps jumped with fright, the yeti screeched, turned and leaped away.’⁶

The Third Eye was immensely popular and became a bestseller. There were follow-ups: Doctor from Lhasa and The Rampa Story. I, for one, was absolutely gripped and couldn’t wait to get my hands on the next T. Lobsang Rampa book. After all, boys reading this stuff were considered cool.

Unfortunately for us, T. Lobsang Rampa was in fact Cyril Hoskins, a plumber’s son from Plympton, Devon. Cyril didn’t possess a passport, hadn’t ever been to Tibet and couldn’t even read or speak the language. The whole series of books had been faked.

Hoskins had been uncovered by the real Tibetologist and climber, the great Heinrich Harrer, who had become suspicious of one of the books. Before the Second World War, Harrer had been attempting to climb the mountain Nanga Parbat in British India when he was captured and interned in a prisoner of war camp. Being Harrer, he managed to escape, cross the border into Tibet and become the young Dalai Lama’s personal tutor. He was the real thing: a mountaineering hero. On reading The Third Eye, he became suspicious of certain details. There was the description of a tropical oasis on the Tibetan plateau, something which does not and cannot exist. The plateau itself was described as being at an altitude of 24,000 feet instead of around 14,000 feet. There were other discrepancies, such as Lobsang Rampa’s claim that the Tibetan apprentices had to memorise every page of the Kangyur Buddhist Sutras. These were not even read by students.

Harrer and other Tibetan scholars became convinced that the book was fiction, so they hired Clifford Burgess, a private detective from Liverpool, to investigate Lobsang Rampa. He revealed Cyril Hoskins, and the whole inglorious story of fakery was exposed on 3 February 1958 in the Daily Express under the headline: ‘The Full Truth About The Bogus Lama.’ It turned out that Hoskins had got the idea for The Third Eye by reading books such as Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet in the London libraries.⁷ T. Lobsang Rampa lived to write again, however, producing books such as Living with the Lama and My Visit to Venus.

The significance of this tale is not the fact of the hoax but the amount of credence attached to it. I swallowed the story whole. So did my school friends and most adult readers. The Third Eye inspired many who later became Tibetologists, and in many ways T. Lobsang Rampa helped to start New Age culture. We wanted to believe in him. And we wanted to believe in his yeti.

I learned more about the yeti during nine expeditions to Mount Everest in my search for the English climber George Mallory. I lived for a total of two years on that mountain. As a boy, I had heard stories about my Uncle Hunch who had made the very first climb of the mountain with his friend Mallory. I remember standing on the lawn outside Verlands House in Painswick, aged twelve, and looking up at Hunch: the legendary Howard Somervell (who was actually a cousin, not an uncle). By then he was a stout old man in his eighties, but with a youthful twinkle in his eye. He knew he was starting a hare in front of this young boy.

Somervell was a remarkable polymath: a double first at Cambridge, a talented artist (his pictures of Everest are still on the walls of the Alpine Club in London) and an accomplished musician (he transcribed the music he heard in Tibet into Western notation). He had worked as a surgeon during the Somme offensive in the First World War, and during that apocalyptic battle he had to operate in a field hospital with a mile-long queue of litters carrying the broken and dying youth of Britain. During a rest from surgery, he sat and watched a young soldier lying asleep on the grass. It slowly dawned on him that the boy was dead, and it seems that it was this particular trauma that prompted him to throw away a successful career as a London surgeon and become a medical missionary in India instead.

Before all that, he was one of the foremost Alpinists in England. He was invited to join the 1922 Mount Everest expedition and took part in the first serious attempt to climb the mountain with his friend Mallory, and his oxygen-free height record with fellow climber Edward Norton in 1924 stood for over fifty years. He even won an Olympic gold medal. He was one of the extraordinary Everesters, from the land of the yeti.

Of course, I was only interested in the amazing story he was telling me. ‘Norton and I had a last-ditch attempt to climb Mount Everest, and we got higher than any man had ever been before. I really couldn’t breathe properly and on the way down my throat blocked up completely. I sat down to die, but as one last try I pressed my chest hard [and here the old man pushed his chest to demonstrate to me] and up came the blockage. We got down safely. We met Mallory at the North Col on his way up. He said to me that he had forgotten his camera, and I lent him mine. So if my camera was ever found, you could prove that Mallory got to the top.’ It was a throwaway comment, which he probably made a hundred times in the course of telling this story, but this time it found its mark.

So I spent much of the rest of my life learning to be a mountaineer and then hunting for the camera on Mount Everest. This search would also lead me to the yeti. Many times, I cursed myself for chasing Uncle Hunch’s wild goose, but on the way we found George Mallory’s body. Poor Mallory. His shroud was the snow.⁸

CHAPTER TWO

When men and mountains meet … campfire stories … the Abdominal Snowman … the 1921 Reconnaissance of Mount Everest … a remarkable man … more footprints … The Valley of the Flowers.

‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet’ wrote William Blake. He might have added that there would be some great tales, too. On one Mallory filming expedition, I climbed with the actor Brian Blessed to around 25,000 feet on the North Ridge of Mount Everest. His generous stomach and his bellowing of stories around the campfire earned him the nickname of Abdominal Snowman. The Sherpas were fascinated by him and swore that he actually was a yeti. They would giggle explosively and roll on the snow with laughter at his antics. Sherpa people generally have a good sense of fun, and I noticed that whenever a yeti was mentioned this would often provoke a smile, a laugh – but occasionally an uneasy look.

In the course of thirty or so trips to the Himalayas, I heard many tales about the beast from Sherpas and they were clearly believers. There are very similar stories from local villagers all along the Himalayas, from Arunachal Pradesh to Ladakh, and even though the names changed they seemed to be talking about three kinds of yeti. First, and largest, is the terrifying dzu-teh, who stands eight feet tall when he is on his back legs; however, he prefers to walk on all fours. He can kill a yak with one swipe of his claws. There is the smaller chu-the or thelma, a little reddish-coloured child-sized creature who walks on two legs and has long arms. He is seen in the forests of Sikkim and Nepal. Then there is the meh-teh, who is most like a man and has orangey-red fur on his body. He attacks humans and is the one most often depicted on monastery wall paintings. Yeh-teh or yeti is a mutation of his name. He looks most like the Tintin in Tibet yeti.

A drawing of the three yetis by Lama Kapa Kalden of Khumjung, 1954.

Some of the Sherpas I climbed with had stories about family yaks being attacked, and yak-herders terrorised by a creature that sounds like the enormous dzu-teh. In 1986 in Namche Bazaar, capital of the Sherpa Khumbu region, I met Sonam Hisha Sherpa. Twenty years previously, he had been grazing his yak/cow crosses, the dzo, high on a pasture. During the night, he heard loud whistling and bellowing while he cowered with fright in a cave with his companions. They were sure they were going to be killed by the dzu-teh after it had finished with their livestock. In the morning, Sonam and his men found that two dzo had been killed and eaten. There was no meat or bones remaining: only blood, dung and intestines.

So what was the truth about the yeti? After my own Bhutanese yeti finding, I decided to follow the footprints back in recorded history and see what stood up to scrutiny. In this book, we’ll follow the Westerners’ yeti tracks first and see if they lead us to the original Himalayan yeti. On the way, we will meet some of the most remarkable men in exploration history.

The earliest Western account of a wild man in the Himalayas dates from 1832 and is given by Brian Houghton Hodgson, the Court of Nepal’s first British Resident, and the first Englishman permitted to visit this forbidden land. Hodgson had to contend with the hotbed that was (and still is) Nepalese politics. He was particularly interested in the natural history and ethnography of the region, and so his report carries some weight. He recorded that his native hunters had been frightened by a ‘wild man’:¹

Religion has introduced the Bandar [rhesus macaque] monkey into the central region, where it seems to flourish, half domesticated, in the neighbourhood of temples, in the populous valley of Nepal proper [this is still the case]. My shooters were once alarmed in the Kachár by the apparition of a ‘wild man’, possibly an ourang, but I doubt their accuracy. They mistook the creature for a càcodemon or rakshas (demons), and fled from it instead of shooting it. It moved, they said, erectly, was covered with long dark hair, and had no tail.

It has to be noted that Hodgson didn’t see the wild man of Nepal himself, and he doubted the story. We can go back further in history for stories about wild men. Alexander the Great set out to conquer Persia and India in 326 BC, penetrating nearly as far as Kashmir. He heard about strange wild men of the snows, who were described as something like the satyrs, the lustful Greek gods with the body of a man but the horns, legs and feet of an animal. Alexander demanded to have one of them brought to him, but the local villagers said the creature could not survive at low altitude (rather a good excuse). Later, Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis Historia: ‘In the land of the satyrs, in the mountains that lie to the east of India, live creatures that are extremely swift, as they can run on both four feet and on two. They have bodies like men, and because of their speed can only be caught when they are ill or old.’ He went on to describe monstrous races of peoples such as the cynocephali or dog-heads, the sciapodae, whose single foot was so huge it could act as a sunshade, and the mouthless astomi, who lived on scents alone. By comparison, his yeti sounds quite plausible. ‘When I have observed nature she has always induced me to deem no statement about her incredible.’

Septimius Severus was the only Roman emperor to be born in Libya, Africa, and he lived in York between 208 and 211 BC. His head priest, Claudius Aelianus, wrote De Natura Animalium (On the Nature of Animals), a book of facts and fables about the animal kingdom designed to illustrate human morals. I like to imagine the Roman emperor reading it to take his mind off his final illness during the Yorkshire drizzle. In his book, Aelianus describes an animal similar to the yeti:

If one enters the mountains of neighbouring India, one comes upon lush, overgrown valleys … animals that look like Satyrs roam these valleys. They are covered with shaggy hair and have a long horse’s tail. When left to themselves, they stay in the forest and eat tree sprouts. But when they hear the dim of approaching hunters and the barking of dogs, they run with incredible speed to hide in mountain caves. For they are masters at mountain climbing. They also repel approaching humans by hurling stones down at them.

The first sighting of yeti footprints by a Westerner was made by the English soldier and explorer Major Laurence Waddell. He was a Professor of Tibetan Culture and a Professor of Chemistry, a surgeon and an archaeologist, and he had roamed Tibet in disguise. He is thought by some to be the real-life precursor of the film character Indiana Jones.² One of his theories included a belief that the beginning of all civilisation dated from the Aryan Sumerians who were blond Nordics with blue eyes. These theories were later picked up by the German Nazis and led to their expedition to Tibet in 1938–39. While exploring in northeast Sikkim in 1889, Waddell’s party came across a set of large footprints which his servants said were made by the yeti, a beast that was highly dangerous and fed on humans:

Some large footprints in the snow led across our track and away up to the higher peaks. These were alleged to be the trail of the hairy wild men who are believed to live amongst the eternal snows, along with the mythical white lions, whose roar is reputed to be heard during storms [perhaps these were avalanches]. The belief in these creatures is universal amongst Tibetans. None, however, of the many Tibetans who I have interrogated on this subject could ever give me an authentic case. On the most superficial investigation, it always resolved into something heard tell of. These so-called hairy wild men are evidently the great yellow snow-bear (Ursus isabellinus) which is highly carnivorous and often kills yaks. Yet, although most of the Tibetans know this bear sufficiently to give it a wide berth, they live in such an atmosphere of superstition that they are always ready to find extraordinary and supernatural explanations of uncommon events.³

Note that Major Waddell did not believe in the story of wild men, and identified the creature as a bear. It should also be noted that Ursus isabellinus comes in many colours: sometimes yellow, sometimes sandy, brown or blackish. Crucially for our story, Waddell was the first modern European to report the existence of the yeti legend. In so doing, he was the first in a long line of British explorers whose words on the yeti were misrepresented and whose conclusions were deleted.

The next explorer to march across our stage is Lt-Col. Charles Howard-Bury, leader of the 1921 Everest reconnaissance expedition, who saw something strange when he was crossing the Lhakpa’ La at 21,000 feet.

Howard-Bury was another of the extraordinary Everesters. He was wealthy and moved easily in high society. He had a most colourful life, growing up in a haunted gothic castle at Charleville, County Offaly, Ireland. Then, in 1905, he stained his skin with walnut juice and travelled into Tibet without permission, being ticked off by the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, on his return (Tibet must have been crowded with heavily stained Englishmen at that time). He bought a bear cub, named it Agu and took it home to Ireland where it grew into a seven-foot adult. So he was familiar with bear prints. He was taken prisoner during the First World War by the Germans and staged an escape with other officers. He never married and lived with the Shakespearean actor Rex Beaumont, whom he had met, aged 57, when Beaumont was 26. Together they restored Belvedere House, Westmeath, Ireland, and also built a villa in Tunis. Here they entertained colourful notables such as Sacheverell Sitwell, Dame Freya Stark and the professional pederast André Gide.

Was Howard-Bury prone to the telling of tall stories? Fellow Everester George Mallory didn’t much like him but thought not. The story he brought back seemed entirely plausible to fellow members of the Alpine Club. He was a careful observer of nature and a plant hunter (Primula buryana is named after him). After the Mallory research, I found it hard to disentangle truth from wishful thinking, but I felt that it was important to note what Howard-Bury himself observed and then see how the newspapers reported the story. Howard-Bury’s diary notes for 22 September 1921 read: ‘We distinguished hare and fox tracks; but one mark, like that of a human foot, was most puzzling. The coolies assured me that it was the track of a wild, hairy man, and that these men were occasionally to be found in the wildest and most inaccessible mountains.’

Later, he expanded the story: he reported that the party (including Mallory, who also saw the tracks) was camped at 20,000 feet and set off at 4am in bright moonlight to make their crossing of the pass. On the way, they saw the footprints, which ‘were probably caused by a large loping grey wolf, which in the soft snow formed double tracks rather like those of a bare-footed man’. However, the porters ‘at once volunteered that the tracks must be that of “The Wild Man of the Snows”, to which they gave the name metoh kangmi’.

Howard-Bury himself did not believe these stories. He had sent a newspaper article home by telegraph, and, as Bill Tilman so delightfully put it in his famous yeti Appendix B to Mount Everest 1938: ‘In order to dissociate himself from such an extravagant and laughable belief he put no less than three exclamation marks after the statement (the Wild Men of the Snows!!!); but the telegraph system makes no allowance for subtleties and the finer points of literature, the savings sign were omitted, and the news was accorded very full value at home.’⁴

The Times of London ran the story under the lurid headline of ‘Tibetan Tales of Hairy Murderers’. As a result, a journalist for The Statesman in Calcutta, Henry Newman, who wrote under the telling pseudonym ‘Kim’, interviewed the porters on their return to Darjeeling. It is rare that you can spot the actual beginning of a legend, but here is the moment of birth of the Western yeti:

I fell into conversation with some of the porters, and to my surprise and delight another Tibetan who was present gave me a full description of the wild men, how their feet were turned backwards to enable them to climb easily and how their hair was so long and matted that, when going downhill, it fell over their eyes … When I asked him what name was applied to these men, he said ‘metoh kangmi’: kangmi means ‘snow men’ and the word ‘metoh’ I translated as ‘abominable’.

This was a mis-translation. Howard-Bury had already offered ‘man-bear’ as the translation. Later we will see that what ‘another Tibetan’ probably said was meh-teh, which was a fabled creature familiar to any Sherpa or Tibetan who had heard the stories on his mother’s knee, or who had looked up at the frescoes in a Buddhist monastery. What the porters were describing was perfectly familiar to them in their own terms: ‘man-bear’. Tilman recounted in his Appendix B how Newman wrote a letter long afterwards in The Times, a paper with a long and profitable relationship with the Abominable Snowman and Mount Everest. ‘The whole story seemed such a joyous creation, that I sent it to one or two newspapers. Later I was told I had not quite got the force of the word “metch”, which did not mean “abominable” quite so much as filthy or disgusting, somebody wearing filthy tattered clothing. The Tibetan word means something like that, but it is much more emphatic, just as a Tibetan is more dirty than anyone else.’

In fact, Newman, Tilman or his publisher had got the spelling wrong: the letters TCH cannot be rendered in Tibetan, and what Newman probably should have written was ‘metoh’, meaning man-bear and certainly not ‘abominable’. The word that the Sherpas use to refer to the creature is actually yeh-teh, or yeti, which is perhaps a corruption of meh-teh, again ‘man-bear’.

It may seem that I am making a meal of this, but whether by accident or by design Newman had ‘improved’ the story to invent a name that was not a true translation of what the porters had actually said, but instead was destined to send a frisson of horror through The Times readers of the Home Counties. This was such a powerful new myth that it may have helped the eventual climbing of Mount Everest.

Newman had gleaned the fascinating fact that the wild men had their feet turned backwards to enable them to climb easily, which is an odd detail as climbers in those pre-war days used to reverse up very steep ice slopes when wearing their flexible crampons. Newman’s pseudonym ‘Kim’ suggests that he was an admirer of Rudyard Kipling’s character, the boy-spy, and so the Western yeti also began his long and peculiar association with the intelligence services, eventually reaching as far as MI5 and the CIA. As for Newman’s exaggeration of the name Abominable Snowman, perhaps he was gilding a dog’s ear, but whatever his reason the name stuck.

Thus began the long-running Western legend of the Abominable Snowman/yeti. And all because of the absence of three exclamation marks!!! Another newspaper picked up the first report and embellished it in January 1922, claiming that Howard-Bury’s party had discovered ‘a race of wild men living among the perpetual snows’. There was a quote from one William Hugh Knight, who the writer claimed was ‘one of the best known explorers of Tibet’, and a member of ‘the British Royal Societies club’ who said that he had ‘seen one of the wild men from a fairly close distance sometime previously; he hadn’t reported it before, but felt that due to the statement about manlike footprints that was made by Howard-Bury’s party, he was now compelled to add his own evidence to the growing pile’.

Knight said that the wild man was ‘… a little under six feet high, almost stark naked in that bitter cold: it was the month of November. He was kind of pale yellow all over, about the colour of a Chinaman, a shock of matted hair on his head, little hair on his face, highly-splayed feet, and large, formidable hands. His muscular development in the arms, thighs, legs, back, and chest was terrific. He had in his hand what seemed to be some form of primitive bow.’ The article went on to claim that the porters had seen the creatures moving around on the snow slopes above them.

The only problem is that William Hugh Knight wasn’t one of the best-known explorers of Tibet, and the British Royal Societies club didn’t exist. However, there was a Captain William Henry Knight, who had obtained six months’ leave to explore Kashmir and Ladakh over sixty years earlier, in 1860, and wrote the Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet,⁵ but nothing in his book resembles the reported description. It would seem that the journalist had plucked the name of a long-dead real Tibetan explorer, changed the name slightly, invented an explorer’s club and made up the quote.⁶ This was indeed part of a growing pile: a pile of lies. Incidentally, note that at this stage the wild man is recognisably human: he is partly clothed, he has little hair on his face and he carries a bow. It is only later that he becomes more like the furry ape of legend.

Howard-Bury was well aware of the sensation his report had caused. In his book about the expedition, Mount Everest: The Reconnaissance, 1921, he wrote: ‘We were able to pick out tracks of hares and foxes, but one that at first looked like a human foot puzzled us considerably. Our coolies at once jumped to the conclusion that this must be “The Wild Man of the Snows”, to which they gave the name of metoh kangmi, “the abominable snowman” who interested the newspapers so much. On my return to civilised countries I read with interest delightful accounts of the ways and customs of this wild man who we were supposed to have met.’⁷

What was needed now, of course, was a sighting, and so along it came. In 1925 the British-Greek photographer N. A. Tombazi was on a British Geological Expedition near the Zemu glacier, when he spotted a yeti-like figure between 200 and 300 yards away. He reported: ‘Unquestionably, the figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull at some dwarf rhododendron bushes. It showed up dark against the snow and as far as I could make out, wore no clothes. Within the next minute or so it had moved into some thick scrub and was lost to view.’

Later, Tombazi and his companions descended to the spot and saw footprints ‘similar in shape to those of a man, but only six to seven inches long by four inches wide … The prints were undoubtedly those of a biped.’⁸ Tombazi did not believe in the Abominable Snowman and thought what he had seen was a wandering pilgrim. One wonders why he bothered to report the sighting at all, but this suggests that thoughts of mysterious bipedal beasts were beginning to enter the minds of Himalayan explorers.

Undaunted by this conclusion, writers of books about Mount Everest, fuelled by George Mallory and Andrew Irvine’s mysterious disappearance near the summit in 1924, embroidered the tale even further. In 1937, Stanley Snaith produced a pot-boiler, At Grips with Everest, covering the five Everest expeditions to date, filled with speech-day guff about how Everest was ‘spiritually within our Empire’. He described how the Abominable Snowman’s footprints were made by ‘a naked foot: large, splayed, a mark where the toes had gripped the ground where the heel had rested.’⁹ This is not what Howard-Bury reported, but from then on these tracks were made by a man-like monster.

The Case of the Abominable Snowman was a whodunit written in 1941 by one of our poets laureate, Cecil Day-Lewis, using the pen-name Nicholas Blake. Although not featuring the yeti but instead a corpse discovered inside a melting snowman, it indicated that the term had entered the public mind.

Our next book which exaggerated and distorted the Howard-Bury and Waddell reports was Abominable Snowmen by Ivan T. Sanderson. According to Sanderson, in 1920 (the wrong date) the Everest team led by Howard-Bury were under the Lhapka-La [sic] at 17,000 feet (the wrong altitude) watching ‘a number of dark forms moving about on a snowfield far above’. (They didn’t.) They hastened upwards and found footprints a size ‘three times those of normal humans’. (No!) Ivan T. Sanderson then states that the porters used the term yeti (and no, they didn’t).

Furthermore, Sanderson completely misrepresented Major Waddell’s report, making up details about bare feet making the footprints and completely omitting Waddell’s conclusion that they were made by a bear. Abominable Snowmen became the starting point for many subsequent yeti writers. But Sanderson listed both Howard-Bury’s and Waddell’s books in his bibliography and thus knew that neither of the expedition leaders believed their porters’ interpretation. But why spoil a good story?

If the first Western sightings of yeti prints were exaggerated and distorted, did this necessarily mean that all subsequent sightings were unreliable? As a BBC producer, I sometimes felt the temptation to embroider stories, but I can honestly say that in thirty years with the Corporation I saw little fakery. The temptation was always there, though.

Let me give an example. A good friend of mine was shooting a documentary series for an un-named TV company about a certain tribe in a certain country. It was horribly hot, and the director was loud, sweltering and increasingly angry that the local men he was filming on a hunting trip couldn’t even find and kill a rabbit. The budget was fast running out and he had a mortgage to pay. Aware, no doubt, that his next gig depended on a kill, he phoned a game park in a neighbouring country and ordered a small antelope to be shot and airlifted in. The resulting film shows a clip of grainy footage of a similar animal running away, and then cuts to a spear sticking out of the bullet hole in the corpse. The audience were shown this as a representation of truth and were deceived. The director got another job and his executive producer was satisfied. The problem is this: it was a lie.

As a rule, though, newspapers seem to be worse than TV, and the Internet is worse still. The rise of US President Donald Trump was accompanied by the rise of the so-called false news sites, where there are no editorial controls over content, and the only driver is the number of dollars racked up by click-bait.

I decided to check a few more of the famous yeti sightings and try to get to the bottom of them. Was the beast going to disappear before my eyes?

Our next account of the yeti, from 1937, is to be found in The Valley of the Flowers,¹⁰ by the English mountaineer, Frank Smythe. He was the first climber to make a living by writing books about his expeditions, unlike the Alpine Club set who were often independently wealthy. Smythe’s particular genius was the way in which he brought the wonder and pleasure of mountaineering to a wider public. However, in person he was famously grumpy, a condition which a companion wryly noted ‘decreased with altitude’. He initiated a furious volley of letters in The Times after his encounter with the yeti.

In The Valley of the Flowers, he wrote a chapter dedicated to the Abominable Snowman. This is worth quoting at length as it gives a flavour of Smythe’s writing style with his love of flowers, his gentle humour and his scientific approach to the subject of the yeti. It also contains all the classic ingredients of a yeti hunt: the exotic location, the find, the puzzlement and fear, the tracking and the deductions. His conclusions led to a public rebuttal, which would have consequences later.

Smythe was with a small party of Sherpas in an unexplored valley parallel to the Bhyundar valley, now in the state of Uttarakhand, northern India:

On July 16th I left the base camp, taking with me Wangdi, Pasang and Nurbu with light equipment and provisions for five days. The past week had seen many more flowers come into bloom, prominent among which was the pedicularis. This plant goes by the unpleasant popular name of lousewort, from the Latin pediculus, a louse, as one of the species, Pedicularis palustris, was said to infect sheep with a lousy disease; but it would be difficult to associate the beautiful pedicularis of the Bhyundar Valley with any disease, particularly the Pedicularis siphonantjia with its light purple blooms …

Next morning we were away in excellent weather. Being lightly laden, I was well ahead of the men. On approaching the pass, I was surprised to notice some tracks in the snow, which I first took to be those of a man, though we had seen no traces of shepherds. But when I came up to the tracks I saw the imprint of a huge naked foot, apparently of a biped, and in stride closely resembling my own tracks.

What was it? I was very interested, and at once proceeded to take some photographs. I was engaged in this work when the porters joined me. It was at once evident when they saw the tracks that they were frightened. Wangdi was the first to speak.

‘Bad Manshi!’ he said, and then ‘Mirka!’ And in case I still did not understand, ‘Kang Admi’ (Snowman).

I had already anticipated such a reply and to reassure him and the other two, for I had no wish for my expedition to end prematurely, I said it must be a bear or snow leopard. But Wangdi would have none of this and explained at length how the tracks could not possibly be those of a bear, snow leopard, wolf or any other animal. Had he not seen many such tracks in the past? It was the Snowman, and he looked uneasily about him …

Presently the men plucked up courage and assisted me. They were unanimous that the Snowman walked with his toes behind him and that the impressions at the heel were in reality the front toes. I was soon able to disprove this to my own satisfaction by discovering a place where the beast had jumped down from some rocks, making deep impressions where he had landed, and slithering a little in the snow …

Superstition, however, knows no logic, and my explanation produced no effect whatsoever on Wangdi.

At length, having taken all the photographs I wanted on the pass, I asked the men to accompany me and follow up the tracks. They were very averse to this at first, but eventually agreed, as they said, following their own ‘logic’, that the Snowman had come from, not gone, in that direction. From the pass the tracks followed a broad, slightly ascending snow-ridge and, except for one divergence, took an almost straight line. After some 300 yards they turned off the ridge and descended a steep rock-face fully 1,000 feet high seamed with snow gullies. Through my monocular glass I was able to follow them down to a small but considerably crevassed glacier, descending towards the Bhyundar valley and down this to the lowermost limit of the new snow. I was much impressed by the difficulties overcome and the intelligence displayed in overcoming them. In order to descend the face, the beast had made a series of intricate traverses and had zigzagged down a series of ridges and gullies. His track down the glacier was masterly, and from our perch I could see every detail and how cunningly he had avoided concealed snow-covered crevasses. An expert mountaineer could not have made a better route and to have accomplished it without an ice-axe would have been both difficult and dangerous, whilst the unroped descent of a crevassed snow-covered glacier must be accounted as unjustifiable. Obviously the ‘Snowman’ was well qualified for membership of the Himalayan Club.

My examination in this direction completed, we returned to the pass, and I decided to follow the track in the reverse direction. The man, however, said that this was the direction in which the Snowman was going, and if we overtook him, and even so much as set eyes upon him, we should all drop dead in our tracks, or come to an otherwise bad end. They were so scared at the prospect that I felt it was unfair to force them to accompany me, though I believe that Wangdi, at least, would have done so had I asked him.

The tracks, to begin with, traversed along the side of a rough rock-ridge below the minor point we had ascended when we first visited the pass. I followed them for a short distance along the snow to one side of the rocks, then they turned upwards into the mouth of a small cave under some slabs. I was puzzled to account for the fact that, whereas tracks appeared to come out of the cave, there were none going into it. I had already proved to my own satisfaction the absurdity of the porters’ contention that the Snowman walked with his toes behind him; still, I was now alone and cut off from sight of the porters by a mist that had suddenly formed, and I could not altogether repress a ridiculous feeling that perhaps they were right after all; such is the power of superstition high up in the lonely Himalayas. I am ashamed to admit that I stood at a distance from the cave and threw a lump of rock into it before venturing further. Nothing happened, so I went up to the mouth of the cave and looked inside; naturally there was nothing there. I then saw that the single track was explained by the beast having climbed down a steep rock and jumped into the snow at the mouth of the cave. I lost the track among the rocks, so climbed up to the little summit we had previously visited. The mist was now dense and I waited fully a quarter of an hour for it to clear. It was a curious experience seated there with no other human being within sight, and some queer thoughts passed through my mind. Was there really a Snowman? If so, would I encounter him? If I did, an ice-axe would be a poor substitute for a rifle, but Wangdi had said that even to see a Snowman was to die. Evidently he killed you by some miraculous hypnotism; then presumably gobbled you up. It was a fairy-tale come to life … Meditating on this strange affair, I returned to the porters, who were unfeignedly glad to see me, for they had assumed that I was walking to my death.

This, the classic sighting of bear tracks masquerading as yeti prints, is worth deconstructing. All the usual features are present: the shock of the initial sighting, the puzzlement, the backwards-facing feet, the fear of the Sherpas and the curiosity of the Sahib. As John Napier explains in his seminal study Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality,¹¹ bears are a good candidate for the makers of yeti footprints for several reasons. First, like humans, bears are plantigrade; that is, the anatomy of their walking leg is such that the sole of the foot takes the weight. Their toes and metatarsals are flat on the ground. So they make footprints that look like those of a huge human (or yeti). The other options are digitigrade, walking on the toes with the heel and wrist permanently raised, like dogs and cats, and unguligrade, walking on the nail or nails of the toes (what we call the hoof) with the heel/wrist and the digits permanently raised. So horses are running on their toenails.

Secondly, when bears are walking slowly their hindfeet land just behind the impression made by their forefeet, and when they are walking fast their hindfeet land just beyond the impression of the forefeet. And – here’s the important bit – at an intermediate speed the two footprints join together, sometimes with the toes of the forefeet appearing to be … reversed toes. To make this clear, the oft-repeated story of toes at the rear of the yeti footprint could be explained by medium-speed bears.

At an amble, the bear footprints follow one another more in a line, rather like those of a fashion model on a catwalk (well, a bit like that). This just might explain the footprints in a line seen by some witnesses. But there is another possible explanation for those linear sightings. Bears can also walk on their hindlegs for short distances and will stand on their hindlegs to fight with the claws on their front paws, to reach fruit from high branches, or to climb trees. These behaviours will result in human-looking bipedal footprints.

As for the ‘elephant’ footprints noted later by Shipton et al., when overnight temperatures are low an icy crust forms on the snow. This icy crust is 2 to 3 inches deep and can support the weight of a man. Mountaineers know this, so they get up just after midnight for an ‘Alpine start’ and move fast across the surface of the snow. Your crampons barely scratch the snow and it is a delight to climb at this time of the morning and watch the sun rise on the peaks around you. Later in the day, the crust melts and gives way when walked on, to the despair of the knackered climber, whose every step now plunges deep into the snow. At either side of the footprint, a roughly triangular area of snow caves in and the resulting shape is rhomboidal. If melting is now added, gigantic elephant-like tracks are the result.

Let’s get back to Frank Smythe:

On returning to the base camp some days later, the porters made a statement. It was witnessed by Oliver and runs as follows:

‘We, Wangdi Nurbu, Nurbu Bhotia and Pasang Urgen, porters employed by Mr F. S. Smythe, were accompanying Mr Smythe on July 17th over a glacier pass north of the Bhyundar Valley when we saw on the pass tracks which we knew to be those of a Mirka or jungli Admi (wild man). We have often seen bear, snow leopard and other animal tracks, but we swear that these tracks were none of these, but were the tracks of a Mirka.

‘We told Mr Smythe that these were the tracks of a Mirka and we saw him take photographs and make measurements. We have never seen a Mirka because anyone who sees one dies or is killed, but there are pictures of the tracks, which are the same as we have seen, in Tibetan monasteries.’

My photographs were developed by Kodak Ltd of Bombay under conditions that precluded any subsequent accusation of faking and, together with my measurements and observations, were sent to my literary agent, Mr Leonard P. Moore, who was instrumental in having them examined by Professor Julian Huxley, Secretary of the Zoological Society, Mr Martin A. G. Hinton, Keeper of Zoology at the Natural History Museum, and Mr R. I. Pocock. The conclusion reached by these experts was that the tracks were made by a bear. At first, due to a misunderstanding as to the exact locality in which the tracks had been seen, the bear was said to be Ursus arctos pruinosus, but subsequently it was decided that it was Ursus arctos isabellinus, which is distributed throughout the western and central Himalayas. The tracks agreed in size and character with that animal and there is no reason to suppose that they could have been made by anything else. This bear sometimes grows as large as, or larger than, a grizzly, and there is a well-grown specimen in the Natural History Museum. It also varies in colour from brown to silver-grey.

The fact that the tracks appeared to have been made by a biped is explained by the fact that the bear, like all bears, puts its rear foot at the rear end of the impression left by its front foot. Only the side toes would show, and this explains the Tibetans’ belief that the curious indentations, in reality superimposed by the rear foot, are the front toes of a Snowman who walks with his toes behind him. This also explains the size of the spoor, which when melted out by the sun would appear enormous. Mr Eric Shipton describes some tracks he saw near the peak of Nanda Ghunti in Garhwal as resembling those of a young elephant. So also would the tracks I saw when the sun had melted them away at the edges …

The Snowman is reputed to be large, fierce, and carnivorous; the large ones eat yaks and the small ones men. He is sometimes white, and sometimes black or brown. About the female, the most definite account I have heard is that she is only slightly less fierce than the male, but is hampered in her movements by exceptionally large pendulous breasts, which she must per force sling over her shoulders when walking or running.

Of recent years considerable force has been lent to the legend by Europeans having seen strange tracks in the snow, sometimes far above the permanent snow-line, apparently of a biped. Such tracks had in all cases been spoiled or partially spoiled by the sun, but if such tracks were made by bears, then it is obvious that bears very seldom wander on to the upper snows, otherwise fresh tracks unmelted by the sun would have been observed by travellers. The movements of animals are incalculable, and there seems no logical explanation as to why a bear should venture far from its haunts of woodland and pasture. There is one point in connection with this which may have an important bearing on the tracks we saw, which I have omitted previously in order to bring it in at this juncture. On the way up the Bhyundar Valley from the base camp, I saw a bear about 200 yards distant on the northern slopes of the valley. It bolted immediately, and so quickly that I did not catch more than a glimpse of it, and disappeared into a small cave under an overhanging crag. When the men, who were behind, came up with me, I suggested that we should try to coax it into the open, in order that I could photograph it, so the men threw stones into the cave while I stood by with my camera. But the bear was not to be scared out so easily, and as I had no rifle it was not advisable to approach near to the cave. It is possible that we so scared this bear that the same evening it made up the hillside some 4,000 feet to the pass. There are two objections to this theory: firstly, that it appeared to be the ordinary small black bear, and too small to make tracks of the size we saw, and, secondly, that the tracks ascended the glacier fully a mile to the east of the point where we saw the bear. We may, however, have unwittingly disturbed another and larger bear during our ascent to our camp. At all events, it is logical to assume that an animal would not venture so far from its native haunts without some strong motive to impel it. One last and very interesting point – The Sikh surveyor who I had met in the Bhyundar Valley was reported by the Postmaster of Joshimath as having seen a huge white bear in the neighbourhood of the Bhyundar Valley.

It seems possible that the Snowman legend originated through certain traders who saw bears when crossing the passes over the Himalayas and carried their stories into Tibet, where they became magnified and distorted by the people of that superstitious country which, though Buddhist in theory, has never emancipated itself from ancient nature and devil worship. Whether or not bears exist on the Tibetan side of the Himalayas I cannot say. It is probable that they do in comparatively low and densely forested valleys such as the Kharta and Kharma Valleys east of Mount Everest, and it may be that they are distributed more widely than is at present known.

After my return to England I wrote an article, which was published by The Times, in which I narrated my experiences and put forward my conclusions, which were based, of course, on the identifications of the zoological experts. I must confess that this article was provocative, not to say dogmatic, but until it was published I had no idea that the Abominable Snowman, as he is popularly known, is as much beloved by the great British public as the sea-serpent and the Loch Ness monster. Indeed, in debunking what had become an institution, I roused a hornet’s nest about my ears … ¹²

There is a great deal to draw from Frank Smythe’s account.¹³ His observations are comprehensive and his conclusions are clear: he decided that the tracks he saw were made by a bear. But did that mean that all footprints in snow were made by bears? He admits to his Times article being provocative and dogmatic, and in time this would have repercussions. The British public, however, were having none of it. Their appetite was for more mystery. And soon enough, along came some more clues.

CHAPTER THREE

Nazi SS Operation Tibet … shooting your wife is wrong … Abominable Snowmen of Everest … Shipton and Tilman … the last explorers … a Blank on the Map … Appendix B … a one-legged, carnivorous bird … the Ascent of Rum Doodle.

In his book My Quest for the Yeti, the mountaineer Reinhold Messner reproduces a letter sent to him by the German explorer Ernst Schäfer which refers to footprints seen by Smythe and Shipton:

In 1933–35, the British mountaineers Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton discovered the first ‘yeti footprints’, and published the pictures they took in The London Illustrated News and in Paris Match [Schäfer seemed unaware of the earlier Howard-Bury report]. This created a sensation. The ‘Abominable Snowman’ aroused the interest of journalists and opened up financial resources for numerous Everest expeditions. In 1938, after I had uncovered the whole sham in my publications with Senckenberg in Frankfurt and established the yeti’s real identity with the pictures and pelts of Tibetan bears, Smythe and Shipton came to me on their knees, begging me not to publish my findings in the English-speaking press. The secret had to be kept at all costs – ‘Or else the press won’t give us the money we need for our next Everest expedition.’¹

Can this be true? Could Smythe and Shipton really have been so cynical? If so, this would cast doubt on the yeti’s most iconic footprint, discovered later by Shipton in 1951. This case will take some unravelling, but it is an interesting journey to Mount Everest and beyond.

At the time of his alleged meeting with Smythe and Shipton, the 28-year-old Ernst Schäfer was a swashbuckling German explorer and ornithologist who had already been on two expeditions to China and Tibet under the leadership of Brooke Dolan, the son of a wealthy American industrialist. Schäfer had worked on these trips as a scientist and wrote a successful book about the second expedition which had made his name in Germany.² He could have emigrated to America and had a gilded career, but he sold out to the Nazis, as did hundreds of other young academics, seeing opportunities ahead. And then the Nazis demonstrated exactly what happens when criminals get hold of a modern industrial state, using fake science to justify their actions.

Schäfer’s colleague in 1938 was the anthropologist Bruno Beger, who was fascinated by the idea that the Aryans, ancestors of the Nordics, could still be found in a lost civilisation somewhere in Tibet. His proposal to the expedition was ‘to study the current racial-anthropological situation through measurements, trait research, photography and moulds … and to collect material about the proportion, origins, significance and development of the Nordic race in this region’.

Nordic culture was all the rage in the 1930s, as was the pseudo-science of eugenics. Tolkien used the Völsunga saga translated by William Morris of the Arts and Crafts movement in his The Lord of the Rings, as did Wagner in his Ring of the Nibelung cycle of operas. The eponymous ring would grant magical domination over the whole world. Wagner’s ideas were much lauded by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy, and these Nordic myths fed the strange beliefs held by Hitler and his Reich Minister of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, who was the founder of the German SS.

Schäfer’s third expedition was under Himmler’s personal patronage and he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer, a Nazi party rank approximating to major. Rather like the alpinist Heinrich Harrer, Schäfer claimed after the war that he had joined the SS to advance his career, but in fact he colluded in the hunt for evidence to support these Nazi folk myths. The expedition would search for proof of Aryan supremacy and also serve as a cover for offensive operations against British India during the coming war. Schäfer eventually would regret his alliance with the top Nazis: ‘He was to later call his alliance with Himmler his biggest mistake. But he was an opportunist who had a tremendous craving for recognition.’³

Himmler was obsessed by the belief in Aryan and Nordic racial superiority over lesser races (some of these ideas may have originated with Major Waddell, whom we met earlier, in Chapter Two). He believed in the Welteislehre, or Glacial Cosmogony, which held that the planets and moon were made of ice and that the solar system had evolved out of a cosmic collision of an icy star with our sun. This theory contradicted Albert Einstein’s ‘Jewish’ theory of relativity. Somehow, the Aryan race was bred out of an ice storm, evolved in the Arctic or Tibet, and founded a civilisation on the lost continent of Atlantis. Himmler, a failed chicken farmer, was fascinated by eugenics and wanted to breed back to ‘racially pure and healthy’ Aryans. For this he needed to know where the original stock originated.

The discovery of the Tarim mummies at Lop Nor in Central Asia by explorers such as Sven Hedin, Albert von Le Coq and Sir Aurel Stein lent credence to the idea that the Aryans came from Tibet. These corpses looked German or Irish and they were buried with sun symbols and woven twill cloth like that found in Austria. One found after the Nazi era even had greying reddish-brown hair framing high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, full lips and a ginger beard, and he was wearing a red twill tunic and leggings with a pattern resembling tartan. Was the homeland of the Indo-Germans therefore located somewhere in Tibet? Had there been an Aryan civilisation there, now lost? Was the Abominable Snowman racially related to Germans, and somehow branched off from our ancestors and still living in the ice of the Himalayas? These and other mystical ideas swirled around in the heads of the Welteislehre adherents such as Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler, who said the Aryan type was ‘the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung’.

To support his theories, Himmler founded the SS Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Society), an institute which mounted eight Indiana Jones-style expeditions worldwide to uncover the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe became a magnet for dubious individuals with bizarre ideas. One senior figure was interested in finding out whether Tibetan women hid magical stones in their vaginas. Others believed that ancient Nordic folk myths might act as an antidote to the disturbing new world of industrialisation, cities and consumerism. The Ahnenerbe also attracted ambitious young scientists like Schäfer who felt they needed a leg up the academic career ladder, despite the number of Jews whom the Nazis had removed from the universities.

Himmler’s ideas verged on the delusional. He instructed his scientists to look for evidence of ‘the thunderbolt, Thor’s hammer’, which he believed to be ‘an early, highly developed form of war weapon of our forefathers’. This notion is eerily prescient of the atomic bomb which the Nazis’ Uranprojekt was racing to build. It would be the magic ring which would give them mastery over the whole world. Himmler himself wore a Mjölnir pendant in the shape of Thor’s hammer.

The Ahnenerbe’s expeditions were calculated to promote the racial theories of the Nazis, and so the participating scientists had to allow the ideology in order to overcome any scientific objectivity. For a serious scientist such as Schäfer, this might have involved a certain amount of double-think. Ahnenerbe’s researchers travelled to Finland and Sweden to examine Bronze Age carvings and study folk customs; during the war they removed the Bayeux Tapestry to examine it for Aryan clues; they raced to Poland to appropriate the Veit Stoss altarpiece, and to the Crimea for Gothic artefacts; and, in this case, sent Schäfer to Tibet to find evidence of early Aryans’ conquest of Asia. And while they were at it, they might as well cause trouble for the British in India.

On his 1938–39 Tibet expedition, Schäfer’s first task was to research passes from which to mount guerrilla attacks on British India, and his second assignment was to find the blue-eyed, blond-haired lost tribe of Aryans living in Tibet. Just before the team left Germany in 1938, the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper ran an article on the expedition which alerted British officials to its intentions. They knew war was coming and refused Schäfer’s team entry to India. Himmler then wrote to Admiral Barry Domvile who happened to be both a Nazi supporter and former head of British naval intelligence, and Domvile gave Himmler’s letter to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He then allowed the SS team to enter Sikkim, a region of northern India bordering Tibet (Domvile was interned during the war for his pro-Nazi inclinations).

Just before departure to Tibet, Schäfer had shot his wife Hertha in a bizarre duck-hunting accident. He said a sudden wave had unbalanced him and caused him to discharge the weapon into his spouse of only four months. The two servants with them did what they could, but she was dead by the time they got her home.

Schäfer had his own agenda in Tibet and considered Glacial Cosmogony as pseudo-scientific. His instincts were right, as this theory is now considered completely unscientific and another example of how easily large numbers of humans can be fooled. However, he went along with Himmler’s demands in order to be able to mount the expedition. In effect, he was doing precisely what he had accused Smythe and Shipton of: compromising with the truth to facilitate another trip.

The expedition did not go well. After obstructions from the British authorities in India, the party camped on the border between Sikkim and Tibet. After making contact with locals, Tibet’s council of ministers permitted Schäfer, the self-described ‘master of a hundred sciences’, to visit the forbidden capital of Lhasa. His team were told that they could not bring scientific equipment with them or kill any animals or birds, but both conditions were ignored. They decorated their mules with Nazi swastikas and shot every wild creature that came within range. They collected a staggering 3,500 birds, 2,000 eggs, 400 skulls and the pelts of countless mammals, reptiles, amphibians, several thousand butterflies, grasshoppers, 2,000 ethnological objects, minerals, maps and 40,000 black-and-white photographs which still reside in German museums and research institutes.

Schäfer was proud of being ‘the second white man to shoot a Giant Panda’ and he liked to smear the blood of his animal victims on his face. As we have seen, on the expedition with him was Bruno Beger, the anthropologist who later helped to select Jewish victims from Auschwitz for a skeleton collection. He measured the skulls of the Tibetan people they met with callipers and took plaster casts.⁴ The first attempt at making a mask failed when the Tibetan subject had a seizure and nearly choked to death.

Schäfer decided to commemorate his wife Hertha by firing a symbolic shot from his rifle, a curious idea considering the circumstances of her death. However, he forgot to remove the cleaning rod from the barrel and the breech exploded, knocking him off his feet and burning his face with the explosion.

On the positive side, Schäfer refused to take the stories of wild men seriously. He became testy with his porters, who day and night discussed the yeti, and so he started faking large footsteps outside their tents in the snow. In this he was to start a long tradition in yeti fakery. He was quite sure the stories arose from the Himalayan brown bear, and described the adventure that proved his theory:

On the morning of the second day, a wild-looking Wata [local tribesman] with a rascally face comes to me and tells the fantastic story of a snowman that haunts the tall mountains. This is the same mythical creature about which Himalaya explorers always like to write because it envelops the unconquered peaks of the mountain chains with the nimbus of mystery. It is supposed to be as tall as a yak, hairy like a bear, and walk on two legs like a man, but its soles are said to point backward so that one can never track its trail. At night it is supposed to roam, descend deep into the valleys, devastate the livestock of the native people, and tear apart men whom it then carries up to its mountain home near the glaciers.

After I listen calmly to this bloody tale, I convey to the Wata that he does not have to make up such a tall tale; however, if he could bring me to the cave of such a ‘snowman’, and if the monster is actually in its lair, then the empty tin can in my tent, which appears to be the object of his great pleasure, would be his reward. But should he have lied to his lord, added Wang [his Tibetan foreman], he could expect a beating with the riding crop. Smiling, with many bows, the lad bids his leave with the promise to return early the next morning and report to me. Wang is also of the opinion that there are snowmen and draws for me the face of the mystery animal in the darkest colours, just like he has heard about it from the elders of his native tribe countless times: devils and evil spirits wreak havoc up there day and night in order to kill men. ‘But Wang,’ I scoffed, ‘how can you as my senior companion believe in such fairy tales?’ Wang explained that these forces were manifest all around them. After all, ‘the same evil demons already tried to menace us many times as we traverse the wild steppes. They also sent us the violent snowstorms that fell on our weak little group like supernatural forces and at night wanted to rip apart our tents with crude fists as if they had rotten canvas before them.’ I insisted ‘that this snowman is nothing other than a bear, perhaps a “Mashinng”, a really large one; but with our “big gun”, I will easily shoot him dead before he even leaves the cave!’

The Wata returned within the day with a witness who had, while searching for lost sheep, found a cave in which ‘he beheld for the first time with his own eyes the yellow head of a snowman.’

Following his guides to the den of the yeti, I shot it at point-blank range when it emerged, roaring angrily, from its nap and it was indeed a Himalayan brown bear.⁵

On their return home to Germany, Reichsführer-SS Himmler greeted Schäfer and his expedition members on the tarmac at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, where he presented Schäfer with the SS skull ring and dagger of honour. However, it ended badly for them all. Himmler’s puny physique, poor eyesight and digestive problems hardly made him the figurehead for a super-race. He was a pedant, a sadist, probably the most brutal mass murderer in history and the architect of the Holocaust. He was, in short, the middle manager from hell. He committed suicide in custody using a hidden cyanide pill.

Schäfer returned from Tibet with his 7,000 plant specimens with the intention of developing hardy strains of cereals for the newly conquered regions of Eastern Europe. He also brought back a poorly faked yeti specimen with a lower jaw made of clay with teeth jammed into it. His scientific reputation after the war was damaged by his association with Himmler, which perhaps explains why his rebuttal of the yeti story didn’t gain ground. The expedition cameraman who filmed the Tibet expedition afterwards worked at Dachau, recording prisoners made hypothermic in freezing water or suffocating in decompression chambers. These experiments on living human subjects were used to solve high-altitude and pilot-survival problems for the Luftwaffe.

Bruno Beger was soon busy selecting Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and recording their skeletons and skulls for an anatomical institute in Strasbourg. Although convicted by a German court long after the war as an accessory to 86 murders, he was given the minimum sentence of three years in prison, which he never served. Author Heather Pringle tells how she tracked him down, aged ninety. Beger was unrepentant: he still thought that the Jews were a ‘mongrel race’, and he still believed in the racial science of the 1930s.⁶ Towards the end of their collaboration, Beger wrote to Schäfer, describing a ‘tall, healthy child of nature’ he had been experimenting on. ‘He could have been a Tibetan. His manner of speaking, his movements and the way he introduced himself were simply ravishing; in a word, from the Asian heartland.’ And then this child of nature was killed and dissected, another victim of the mindset that enabled Nazi science to regard fellow humans as objects to be experimented upon.

Schäfer had plans for a further expedition to Tibet during the war, ostensibly to harass the British forces in India. These hopes came to nothing. He wrote several books on Tibet, and may have had something to do with the Iron Man statue, a Buddhist figurine which mysteriously appeared in Germany sometime after 1939. This is beautifully carved from a piece of meteorite and featured an anticlockwise Buddhist swastika. This space Buddha was about as close as the Nazis got to their dreams of Glacial Cosmogony.

In this context, then, Schäfer’s letter to Messner is puzzling. He himself was convinced that the native porter’s stories about the yeti were simply sightings of Himalayan bears. And Frank Smythe had by then published articles and a book setting out his own reasons for the same conclusion. Shipton was another kettle of fish. I believe Schäfer had the wrong name: he meant Shipton and Tilman, a British climber and explorer with a more ambiguous attitude towards the yeti.

It could be argued that Schäfer had an axe to grind. He can hardly have been expected to be a British sympathiser. However, his conviction that the yeti was in fact a bear and his careful unravelling of the ‘hoax’ in his books suggests that he took a serious and scientific approach towards the truth. He quite rightly objected to what he regarded as a mischievous fable being used to fund Mount Everest expeditions. In the case of Shipton and Tilman, it is also just possible that he had misinterpreted the British humorous tendency.⁷

Besides, if Schäfer had captured a live yeti and taken him back to Nazi Germany, what would have become of the poor creature?

Somervell and Norton’s near-success on Mount Everest in 1924, coming to within 1,000 feet of the summit without oxygen sets, misled those who followed. Time and time again, the British sent expensive expeditions out to Tibet, and time and time again they were repulsed at around the same altitude. But the combination of the world’s highest mountain and now a mysterious man-beast was to prove irresistible for the British press and public alike. Pressure mounted on the Mount Everest Committee to make another attempt. So, in 1938, the inimitable Bill Tilman, the ‘last explorer’, was invited to lead a lightweight, somewhat cheaper, expedition to Everest, with a £2,360 budget instead of the £10,000 that the 1936 expedition had squandered: about £110,000 versus £500,000 in today’s money.

Tilman was certainly the greatest explorer and adventurer of the twentieth century. He won the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal in 1952, but his career also encompassed military service in both world wars: he won the Military Cross twice in the first conflict and led a band of underground Albanian Resistance fighters for the British Special Services in the Second World War. In between the wars, he worked as a planter in Africa where he met his long-term climbing companion Eric Shipton. He was the first to climb the Indian mountain Nanda Devi, the highest peak then climbed, and he led the 1938 Everest expedition. He evolved a lightweight, living-off-the-land style of exploration which is now much admired by other adventurers but which was difficult for his companions, who were expected to eat lentils and pemmican at high altitude. After the Second World War, he undertook a little spying in the Karakoram and then embarked on a second career as a deep-sea sailing explorer in a series of ancient Bristol pilot cutters, two of which he sank in unexpected encounters with the land. After a lifetime of inventive expeditions to high mountains and cold seas, he and his crew eventually disappeared on an Antarctic voyage in his 80th year, a mystery to the end.

Tilman was something of an enigma. Clearly traumatised by his experiences as a 17-year-old in the First World War, he appeared to grow a crust over his emotions which made him appear indifferent to his own or others’ sufferings. He was gruff and taciturn, but not irritable. In appearance he was stocky, wore a moustache and smoked a pipe. He never married and appeared to prefer the company of men, but didn’t show any interest in either sex. He seemed to exert an iron grip on his emotions, and one wonders what would have tumbled out had he ever let go. The key to Bill Tilman seems to be what happened to him during the most terrible conflict the world has ever seen. Coming out of it aged just twenty, he asked the question: ‘Why was I spared when so many of the best of my companions were not?’ Like Howard Somervell who asked just the same question, he seemed to suffer from that paradoxical complaint: survivor’s guilt. In the end, Tilman seemed happiest on the open road: ‘I felt uncommonly happy at trekking once more behind a string of mules with their bright headbands, gaudy red wool tassels, and jingling bells, over a road and country new to me with the promise of sixteen such days ahead. I felt I could go on like this for ever, that life had little better to offer than to march day after day in an unknown country to an unattainable goal.’⁸

Being Tilman, though, he immediately undermined the conceit by self-deprecation: ‘The morning was well advanced and it was uncommonly hot, so that my thoughts underwent a gradual change. Far from wishing the march to go on for ever, I did not care how soon it would be over. I did not care if it was my last.’

His enduring achievement is his series of fourteen travel books, some of them classics of the genre. He is the master of a good travel tale, with a self-deprecating black humour which is sometimes misunderstood.

Turning to the subject of the yeti, or Abominable Snowman, firstly we have to concede that Tilman had an ambivalent attitude to science. As one of his biographers, J. R. L. Anderson, pointed out,⁹ he held that travel and mountain climbing should be ends in themselves and science should not be allowed to compromise the adventure. He himself wrote: ‘The idea of sending a scientific expedition to Everest is really deplorable; there could be no worse mixture of objectives.’¹⁰ In this he was controversial, as some might say that the only reason Everest was eventually climbed (on the ninth attempt, in 1953) was by Griffith Pugh’s application of science in the form of oxygen equipment, diet and clothing. Adventurers of the hardy variety would retort that Everest was only climbed properly in an ethical way in 1978 by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habler when they succeeded without using supplementary oxygen.

Despite this, Tilman was a careful observer, taking great trouble to check geographical locations and work out heights on his spying mission in Chitral: ‘We used an aneroid barometer and at specially important points took boiling point thermometer readings. As there were no basic stations sufficiently near for the reduction of the barometer to sea level, the barometrical readings taken during three days before leaving Urumchi were used as a check. For this period a correct mean height of the barometer was ascertained by using the observations made by Strowkowski over a period of three years in Urumchi.’¹¹

A sailor would know just how proficient Tilman was at celestial navigation, finding himself around the oceans of the world armed only with paper charts, compass, sextant and a copy of Lecky’s Wrinkles In Practical Navigation: ‘The amateur sailor, or haphazard navigator, should ponder a remark of the editor of the new edition of Lecky’s Wrinkles: “There is nothing more distressing than running ashore, unless it be a doubt as to which continent that shore belongs.”’¹²

However, it cannot be denied that Tilman sometimes derided science and scientists in his books, and I suspect that, like his friend Eric Shipton, he had a sense of humour and may have played fast and loose with the truth when it came to the Abominable Snowman.

On Mount Everest in 1938, Tilman’s team included Eric Shipton and Frank Smythe: the very two men accused by Ernst Schäfer of using yeti footprints to raise expedition funding. All three of these men had seen strange footprints in the Himalayas. One can imagine the campfire stories about the Abominable Snowman. Rongbuk is an eerie valley at the best of times; I have walked alone there at night with the ghosts of Mallory and Irvine at my back and can imagine that the shifting shadows beyond the firelight might have caused the odd shiver of fear.

These same three climbers had just had a minor spat in the newspapers before the expedition. Smythe had reported his find of what he insisted were bear tracks in The Times of 10 November 1937, perhaps with a view to some helpful pre-publicity for his next book; and Tilman, under the pseudonym of Balu (the bear), had put up a defence of the Abominable Snowman in the letters page on 13 November where he wrote: ‘Mr Smythe’s article, if it was an attempt to abolish that venerable institution, the “Yeti”, was hardly worth the paper on which it was written.’

This was nicely calculated to wind up the irascible Smythe (note that this was one of the first public uses of the term ‘yeti’ instead of Abominable Snowman). Shipton, also writing pseudonymously (as The Foreign Sportsman, one of the Sherpa’s nicknames), had given his own first-hand experience of footprints in the snow, and supported Balu. He wrote: ‘Balu’s contribution to the discussion was welcome. His spirited defence of the Abominable Snowman wilting under the combined attack of Mr Smythe and the Zoological Society reminded me of Kipling’s lines: “Horrible, hairy, human, with paws like hands in prayer, making his supplication rose Adam-Zad the bear.”’

In short, Tilman and Shipton were having a bit of fun taking the mickey out of the presumptuous Frank Smythe and a bunch of self-important scientists. This was altogether more amusing than the annual ‘first cuckoo of spring’ type of letters to The Times, and this controversy between Himalayan rivals, I suggest, may have provided the spark for what I think was the biggest yeti hoax of the century. (But that was to come much later, in 1951, after Smythe was dead.)

Tilman loved the Abominable Snowman story and had had first-hand experience of it. This is what he reported in his Times letter. He told the 1938 Everest party how in the previous year, during his great journey of exploration across the Karakoram with Eric Shipton, he and two Sherpas came across the footprints of a strange animal:

While contouring round the foot of the ridge between these two feeder glaciers, we saw in the snow the tracks of an Abominable Snowman. They were eight inches in diameter, eighteen inches apart, almost circular, without signs of toe or heel. They were three of four days old, so melting must have altered the outline. The most remarkable thing was that they were in a straight line one behind the other, with no ‘stagger’ right or left, like a bird’s spoor. A four-footed animal walking slowly puts its hindfoot in the track of its forefoot, but there are always some marks of overlapping, nor are the tracks immediately in front of each other. However many-legged it was, the bird or beast was heavy, the tracks being nearly a foot deep. We followed them for a mile, when they disappeared on some rock. The tracks came from a glacier pool where the animal had evidently drunk, and the next day we picked up the same spoor on the north side of Snow Lake.

The Sherpas judged them to belong to the smaller type of Snowman, or yeti, as they call them, of which there are apparently two varieties: the smaller, whose spoor we were following, which feeds on men, while his larger brother confines himself to a diet of yaks. My remark that no-one had been here for thirty years and that he must be devilish hungry did not amuse the Sherpas as much as expected! The jest was considered ill-timed, as it perhaps was, the three of us standing forlorn and alone in a great expanse of snow, looking at the strange tracks like so many Robinson Crusoes.¹³

Tilman attempted to take a photograph but claimed that he managed to make two exposures on the same negative and so nothing came out. This seems odd, as he seemed perfectly competent with his camera on other expeditions. One might begin to smell a horrible, hairy rat. Later, his team saw bear tracks and agreed that they were 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 (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.

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