White Mountain

by Robert Twigger

  Infant in front ofPotala in early twentieth-century Lhasa

  * Peter Fleming, Bayonets to Lhasa

  9

  The Yeti: True Story with Pics

  He who knows a great deal has a hundred eyes compared to the ignorant man.

  Tibetan proverb

  I was descending from the foothills of Kanchenjunga when I saw the print. I snapped the photograph and walked on.

  Did I really believe? Well, one thing I have noticed is that when you are abroad, in a strange place where strange things are believed and treated as quite normal . . . you start believing too. I’d been in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and heard ghosts walking in a haunted hotel, clanking their chains . . . or was it all the rum I had consumed earlier that evening? I’d been in the Indonesian rainforest and seen a witch doctor come out of a trance and correctly predict the whereabouts of a rare giant snake some two days’ journey away – an impossible feat by Western standards. So, being in yeti country, I suspended disbelief; it seemed the polite and maybe right thing to do.

  Seeing is believing

  Imaginary creatures transform a banal journey into an exciting one. Sometimes the imaginary creatures turn out to be real, but this is rare. Though the living fossil coelacanth was found, I doubt if the Loch Ness monster will be making an appearance anytime soon. Yet even saying that fills me with a kind of sadness, as if I know, a better part of me knows, that we must never shut the door on the imaginary, fantastical, invisible world . . .

  The problem is not that people are simply credulous – if that was the case, then belief in weird creatures would have died out centuries ago – the problem is that unexplained animals are a convenient way to park our huge and sometimes barely contained awe, wonder, and of course fear of the world, especially when we face that world alone. Switch off the phone, walk away from the crowd, leave your iPad behind and ditch the GPS, take a stroll in the mountains alone. All sorts of strange impressions will crowd in: flashes of fear but also wonder, humility at the hugeness of the mountains, deep pleasure at seeing flowers in the snow, and was that a blue-tailed sheep? Accepting that the yeti might be true means that you have a concept shape out there, your eyesight is improved instantly, though you might start seeing things. Who hasn’t had the experience of being in the hills and seeing something though you are not sure what – a human, an animal, a rock. When at last you know, it is as if the camera lens has suddenly achieved sharp focus. You see the details that confirm the correct identification easily now.

  When you have an idea of what you are looking at, you see it more easily. Birdwatchers seem like magicians: one brief glimpse of a fluttering wing and they can reel off a species and its habits, but more impressive still is when they see a bird in a tree or far off on the wing, while you see nothing until it is pointed out. They expect birds to be there – and they are.

  If enough people believe a thing is true, well, maybe . . . I have certainly had experiences where reality seems to bend to the will of the group of people whose reality I am sharing. You can always find another explanation, but the simplest one is that reality is a concept concocted by the group you are a part of.

  Which is why strange beasts have to live in remote places: the human group mind is weaker here.

  Kanchenjunga, and the Zemu Glacier especially, is rich in yeti lore. There is some evidence that the Lepchas – the original inhabitants of that region, somewhat displaced now by Nepalese and Tibetans – were among the earliest to worship a yeti-type creature of the snows. They refer to it in stories and parables as ‘The Glacier Being’, and it functions as a god of the hunt.

  In the pre-Buddhist Bon religion of Tibet there is a legendary apelike creature who fights with a large polished stone as a weapon. Certainly, the region is predisposed to believe in the yeti’s existence.

  Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History. ‘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 both on four feet and on two. They have human-like bodies, and because of their swiftness can only be caught when they are ill or old.’

  Claudius Aelianus, who lived in AD 220, wrote in his Animal Stories'.

  If one enters the mountains neighbouring India one comes upon lush, overgrown valleys. The Indians call this region Koruda. Animals that look like the 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 din of approaching hunters and the barking of dogs, they run with incredible speed to hide in mountain caves. For they are masters of mountain climbing. They also repel approaching humans by hurling stones down at them.

  When Tenzing Norgay, the Sherpa who accompanied Edmund Hillary to the summit of Everest, was asked about yetis he just laughed and said in fifty years of climbing he hadn’t seen one. Hillary himself organised a famous yeti hunt in 1960. And Lord Hunt, the leader of the successful 1953 Everest expedition, saw two yeti prints near Kanchenjunga, not so far from where I had seen mine. Two more Everest veterans, Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, also claimed to have seen yeti prints. And Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb Everest solo and without oxygen, claimed to have seen a yeti while traversing the Tibetan headwaters of the Mekong River.

  The yeti – famous from the Pamirs along the whole length of the Himalayas as far as the Burmese hills – has many names: chemong, shukpa, migo, kang-mi and meti. The name yeti comes from the Sherpa people, who migrated from the Khumbu area of Nepal. For generations of climbers, the Sherpas have provided tall yeti tales as entertainment after a day’s climbing. But surely there cannot be so much smoke without a little fire?

  The current era of ‘scientific’ yeti hunting started in the nineteenth century. In 1832, B. H. Hodgson, a British scholar and civil servant resident in Nepal, reported an unknown animal that ‘moved erectly, was covered in long, dark hair, and had no tail’. He concluded it was some kind of orang-utan. Naturally, a certain scepticism attended his reports, but then again, Paul du Chaillu’s nineteenth-century sighting of a huge gorilla in Uganda was laughed at until a specimen was actually found. Another early Himalayan traveller and Tibetan specialist, Major L. A. Waddell, reported the first of the many strange footprints that have so fuelled yeti speculation. He wrote that they were bear prints, but that they had an apelike cast to them. He noted, as many writers on the yeti do, that no one questioned had actually seen the beast – though they all knew people who had seen it.

  In 1921, during the first expedition to climb Everest from the north side, Colonel Charles Howard-Bury claimed he saw dark flitting shadows at 6,000 metres. At the precise spot that he had seen these moving shapes, he found gigantic footprints to back up his claims. He wrote that these were possibly wolf prints which had been ‘double printed’s – back feet overprinting a front-foot paw mark to make a larger, more human-looking print.

  It was after this expedition that the name Abominable Snowman’ was first coined by newspaper reporter Henry Newman writing for the Statesman of Calcutta. He had reached for the description because the yeti the Sherpas described was always filthy and produced an abominable odour.

  The ‘scrupulous witness’ and sound Scottish climber W. H. Murray wrote of the 1951 Everest reconnaissance expedition:

  They were yetis' tracks. At least two of them had left spoor. Shipton and Ward followed the tracks for more than a mile down the glacier, finally losing them on the lateral moraine. Some of the prints were particularly clear. Pad marks could be seen within the footprints, which were 12 inches long, and where the creature had jumped the smaller crevasses the scrabble marks of its toes could be seen on the farther side.

  But years later, Edmund Hillary, after his own yeti expeditions, explained to writer Jim Perrin that the tracks were a joke played by Eric Shipton: ‘We all knew, apart from Bill Murray maybe, but none of us could say, and Eric let it run and run. He just loved to wind people up that way.’


  In 1960 Edmund Hillary had a different view. He led an expedition to search for the yeti. In 1953 he and Tenzing both claimed they had seen the yeti high up on the snowy flanks of Everest. In their dotage, Tenzing changed his mind and both would become rather more sceptical. One suspects that the ridicule that is heaped on any would-be cryptozoologist, even one with a high reputation like Sir Edmund Hillary, becomes irksome after a while. He also suffered when the two samples of yeti fur he brought back in 1960 turned out to be from the very rare Tibetan blue bear.

  Support for the scam explanation of the yeti comes from an unlikely quarter – the Nazi ethnologist Ernst Schäfer. Liberally quoted in Reinhold Messner’s book about his own quest for the yeti, one can’t help being a little sceptical about anything said by a man who willingly visited Dachau to study the results of the cruel and pointless experiments staged there – the logical conclusion of science pursued without conscience, foresight or basic humanity. Messner – who, when Schäfer died, received his collection of yeti ‘scalps’, or rather, fur samples from Tibetan bears: ‘I had the opportunity to set out on such an expedition to the uninhabitable regions of Inner Tibet . . . there I shot a number of yetis, in the form of the mighty Tibetan bear.’ – unloads the usual apologies that crypto-Nazis also offer. He claims – utterly wrongly – that ‘without the support of Himmler . . . expeditions abroad would have been impossible during that era.’ (Heinrich Harrer’s attempt on Nanga Parbat in 1939 was without Himmler’s support, revealing Messner’s desire to exculpate Nazi actions. He also makes the absurd statement that Schäfer ‘as a cosmopolitan man with international connections couldn’t have thought much of Himmler’s ideas of ancestral legacy’. In other words, he was an OK chap, even if he did wear an SS uniform.)

  We will look further at the abominable Dr Schäfer and his expeditions to the Himalayas later (the nasty Nazi character in the Indiana Jones film Raiders of the Lost Ark was based on him).

  A growing group of yeti spotters, including Messner, incline to the idea that the Abominable Snowman is in fact a species of bear. Bears move through the forest with a clumsy noise that rivals human progress through such places. Bears can run on all four legs or just two. It is conceivable that there is a species or hybrid species found in the remoter parts of the Himalayas that is able to move on both two and four legs and may be the origin of all the yeti tales.

  In 1933-35, the British mountaineers Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton discovered the first ‘yeti footprints’, and published the pictures they’d taken in the Illustrated London News and Paris Match:

  This created a sensation. The ‘Abominable Snowman’ aroused the interests of journalists and opened up the financial resources for numerous Everest expeditions. In 1938, after I had uncovered the whole sham in my publications . . . and established the yeti’s real identity with the pictures and pelts of my 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.’

  There is no evidence that Shipton and Smythe ever met Schäfer or communicated with him in any way. Perhaps Schäfer invented the story, having seen the way yeti stories galvanised interest. And these stories did seem to congregate around the most expensive mountain to climb, Everest.

  During his own expedition, which entered Lhasa in 1939, Schäfer spent much of 1938 in northern Sikkim. At Green Lake, in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, he found himself at the very heart of yeti country. Green Lake is where Migyud, another appellation for the Abominable Snowman, has his lair. Schäfer found his team of Gurkhas and Sikkimese much exercised with thoughts of the yeti. He took to playing tricks on them by faking footprints. Perhaps Schäfer was projecting his own cynicism about the yeti’s existence on to Shipton and Smythe.

  After many visits to the Himalayas, Messner found himself alone in the eastern Tibetan forest and yearning for some company. He thought he heard a yak approaching, which would signify, also, human company:

  . . . noiseless and light footed, it raced across the forest floor, disappearing, reappearing, picking up speed. Neither branches nor ditches slowed its progress. This was not a yak . . . It moved upright. It was as if my own shadow had been projected on to the thicket. For one heartbeat it stood motionless, then turned away and disappeared into the dusk . . . The forest remained silent: no stones rolled down the slope, no twigs snapped. I might have heard a few soft footfalls in the grayness of the underbrush.

  He goes into the underbrush and finds a gigantic footprint: ‘My shoes didn’t sink in nearly as deeply as had the creature’s bare soles.’

  From this position of personal experience and credulity, Messner eventually arrives at the same position as Schäfer: the yeti is one of the various misunderstood forms of the Tibetan bear – the blue, the brown and the black. Tibetan bears can vary a great deal in colour; some brown bears can be almost white. This mirrors our experience of bears in other countries: black bears in Canada can be brown, grizzlies can hybridise with polar bears, some bears are adept at tree climbing, others less so. Tibetan black bears, in their early years, are supposed to be expert and silent tree climbers; later on, they prefer padding along the forest floor. Bears are usually noisy travellers, but only where they are common – typically the arboreal forests of the far north. Where bears are hunted and endangered – such as the Pyrenees – they very rarely appear. Indeed, if the locals have made a habit of killing bears that loiter at a certain altitude, then there would be, over time, considerable evolutionary pressure for variation within the species to produce a silent, snow-loving, high-altitude bear – a yeti.

  Anyone who has seen a bear print – the black bear of North America, for example – will know how similar they look to a human footprint. There are five toes and an elongated sole print, which, depending on the surface that the print is made in, can look deceptively like the clumsy spoor of a giant humanoid. If the bear has walked in its own footprints, it can be further elongated and look more human. If the double print is made in snow the differences between the two can be erased by melting, making it resemble a single giant ape footprint.

  Dr Makoto Nebuka conducted a twelve-year study of the language sources for the word yeti. He concluded (somewhat controversially) that it was a corruption of meti, a regional Himalayan dialect word for bear. Other names for the yeti include dzu-the, which means ‘cattle bear’ and miche or midred, which means man-bear. Bun manchi or jungle man is used in Nepal outside the Sherpa communities where yeti is a more common usage.

  The bear thesis found unexpected support when Professor Bryan Sykes of Wolfson College, Oxford University, found traces of ancient polar bear DNA when he tested thirty-eight fragments of supposed yeti and bigfoot specimens submitted by museums around the world. It was an act of some courage by Sykes. A younger academic would have risked ridicule and ostracism for daring to support such a controversial idea as cryptozoology. But with a professorship and a solid reputation, he was ready to risk the backlash. And of course there was one. His claim that one specimen closely resembled an extinct form of polar bear whose DNA was extracted from a frozen jawbone found in Svalbard, Norway, was disputed. The specimen was between 40,000 and 120,000 years old. If such a bear existed in the Himalayas, it would probably predate human settlement of the region. The ‘yeti’ would then have been displaced by incoming man and would probably have tried to terrorise the incoming homo sapiens. Perhaps this ancestral memory was the source of so many yeti myths in so many cultures?

  But the challenge held up – the ‘yeti’ fragment of hair Sykes tested was either from a polar bear or a brown bear. Sykes altered his claim from being that the yeti was an extinct form of polar bear, to a polar bear species that had somehow become separated and got stuck at the high altitudes of the Himalayan mountains. The critics pushed home a second complaint – that it is impossible with current DNA testing and the amount of genetic mate
rial on hand to assert whether the ‘yeti’ was a brown bear or a polar bear. Professor Sykes prefers the exotic suggestion of a marooned clan of polar bears. Those who follow the stricter strictures of Occam’s razor claim that this is evidence for a brown bear as that would be the simplest explanation.

  Professor Sykes has yet to mount an expedition in search of his yeti. Yet he has stated:

  I think this bear, which nobody has seen alive, may still be there and may have quite a lot of polar bear in it. It may be some sort of hybrid and if its behaviour is different from normal bears, which is what eye witnesses report, then I think that may well be the source of the mystery and the source of the legend.*

  Whether a new kind of bear is found or not, the balance of the evidence does incline away from a giant primate of some description. Despite a desire to believe in the yeti, forgivable surely, Professor Bryan Sykes can only be congratulated for being a real scientist – appraising the evidence in a properly scientific manner and not avoiding a subject simply because of academic prejudice. If more scientists were as courageous, many of the odd and persistent mysteries of this planet would be on their way to being solved. Too often science returns again and again to a very narrow field of interest, deeming certain areas off limits – such as the miraculous temperature-changing monks – until, finally, someone has the nerve to test such a thing. Many of the mysteries of the Himalayas – telepathy, action at a distance, altered sense of time – may well rely on physical laws we have yet to discover, simply too subtle for our current methods. One of which being the possible requirement to suspend disbelief in order for certain phenomena to flourish. Just as Pasteur had to remove bacteria from food to prove that spontaneous generation did not occur, we may have to remove certain disabling states of mind in order for subtle mental effects to appear. After all, we accept in the testable world of sport that a positive focused attitude is far more effective at generating results than a negative defeated one.