by Michael Gill
The call came through:
‘That you, Mike? Thanks for your letter. Are you still interested in this expedition?’
‘Yes I am.’
‘Well. I guess you may as well come along. And look, I don’t know how tied up you are down there, but if you can get the time off I’d like you to go over to London for three months before the trip starts and work with Griff to get yourself au fait with the physiology side of things. How does that sound to you?’
‘That – that sounds incredible.’
‘Well, I’ll let you know a few more details later. Louise and I are going to Chicago and you could travel with us. How about dropping Griff Pugh a line in the meantime – here’s the address …’
I put the phone down, stunned. A flatmate standing nearby had picked up the conversation. He looked enviously at me.
‘You lucky bastard.’
Chicago and London
Close to midnight on 29 May, anniversary of a more famous occasion, I found myself walking across the wet tarmac towards the first plane I had set foot in, an Electra gleaming against the black backdrop of the night. Four stops later, we landed in Chicago where Ed had publicity events to attend to. There was a luncheon for the whole staff of World Book on the top floor of the Merchandise Mart where Ed was to tell them about the expedition the company was funding. As the time came for Ed to address the assembled multitude I thought to myself what an ordeal it must be, but then I saw a professional in action: a few sentences that linked him to World Book, which made him one of them; a story that made them laugh; a lucid account of the expedition, with the occasional back reference to the Himalayas or the Antarctic. It was masterly and the audience loved him.
A television interview followed in the open space on the roof of the Mart. The main spokesperson for the yeti part of the expedition was Marlin Perkins, the 50-year-old director of the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and well known for his zoo programme, Wild Kingdom, on TV. He was slim, quietly spoken, distinguished-looking, with a fine head of silver hair. Standing beside him was a 2.5-metre high artist’s impression of a yeti, a barrel-chested primate that could have crushed any of us with one hand.
‘Tell me, Marlin,’ said the interviewer, ‘what makes you think there is such a thing as a yeti?’
‘Well, Dave, everyone who goes to the Himalayas hears about them and after a while you begin to think that, well, where there’s smoke there’s fire. But I think the best evidence is these photos of yeti tracks I’ve got here. Eric Shipton took these in 1951 right in the place where we’re going hunting. All I know is that something must have made these tracks.’
‘And you hope to catch him, do you?’
‘Yes we do. We’ve got powerful spotting telescopes, we’ve got cameras set off by trip-wires and we’ve got tape-recorders for picking up the noise he makes.’
‘But how are you actually going to catch him, Marlin?’
‘Well, I’ll show you, Dave. You see this gun I’ve got here? This is a Capchur gun which shoots a needle loaded with tranquilliser. All you have to do is estimate the size of the yeti, adjust the dose and let the critter have it. Like this.’ And, raising the gun, with great deliberation he plunked a dart into a padded area on the animal’s belly.
‘Of course, if I make the dose too big, I might kill him.’
‘And I guess if you make it too small he might kill you.’
‘Yes, Dave, I guess that’s so.’
‘Just one more question, Marlin. What are you going to do with the yeti once you’ve got him?’
‘Dave, I couldn’t think of a better place than the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.’
After a week in Chicago, we moved on through New York to London where we were met by Griff Pugh, a tall, stooped figure with splendid thick orange hair. He had a hesitant charm, a mildly deprecating smile and a quietly British way of greeting that set him apart from his more effusive American counterparts in Chicago.
‘Hello Ed. Nice to see you. Where’s your luggage. I’ve got a car outside.’
It was a new, silver-grey, two-seater Austin Healey. ‘Nice little car,’ said Griff as he climbed into the driver’s seat. We tied our luggage on the back as best we could. Ed took the front seat while Louise and I perched on top of luggage in the space behind. As the car drew out and picked up speed, we felt the force of the wind striking us at shoulder level.
‘I hope he doesn’t go too fast,’ Louise shouted to me. We could just hear Griff talking to Ed.
‘I’ll take her down the M1 and show you what she can do …’
‘That was a hundred and ten miles an hour,’ explained Griff when we had slowed down. It was the first of a series of car journeys that turned out to be the most exciting and dangerous moments of the expedition.
For the next few days Griff and his wife Josephine kindly put me up in their grand house at Hatching Green. There were large oil paintings of ancestors on the walls. The Pughs appeared in Debrett’s Peerage, and Josephine was an heiress to part of a large fortune created by her great-uncle Sir Ernest Cassel. These were levels of sophistication and wealth that hardly existed in New Zealand.
Each day Griff drove me into his laboratory at the MRC building beside Hampstead Heath. The morning drive at 10 a.m. was after the main commuter influx, but at 6 p.m. the homeward-bound traffic was bumper-to-bumper in its single lane. Griff, pulling out into the empty oncoming lane, would accelerate past a line of slow-moving commuters until a corner, or an approaching car, made it necessary to re-enter the slow lane, thumb on horn as a request for a space to be made. These were moments of high emotion: exhilaration for Griff, terror for his passenger, impotent rage for the line of less adventurous commuters. Griff was an accident waiting to happen – and it did shortly after his return from the Himalayas. The Austin Healey was a write-off, Griff laid up with a broken hip.
At the laboratory I met Mike Ward, Jim Milledge and John West as they came in for their baseline studies, riding the bicycle ergometer at five work rates ranging from easy to maximal. I learned to handle the bags and tubes, to measure O2 and CO2 levels in expired air samples, and calculate the results. As the day of departure came closer, I was increasingly involved in sorting and packing equipment:
Dear Ed, The chaos at Hampstead this week is indescribable: the lab is littered from end to end with apparatus of all sorts, half-packed cases, wrapping, new parcels arriving all the time; Griff shuffles round amongst it all with a hunted look, cursing everyone for their inefficiency. The phone rings continuously in the background, usually with some irate person complaining bitterly about suddenly receiving an order that they can’t possibly hope to deliver on time. Meanwhile Pam, the lab-girl, and I, struggle on with packing … I spent a profitable three days at Cambridge learning how to do psychometric tests … Mike24
By the last week of August the loose ends had been tidied up. The last of the sea-level tests had been completed, and we had spent a weekend assembling the pre-fabricated Silver Hut designed in England by the Timber Development Association in association with Griff. The future looked rosy. Deliver a yeti to the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. Live in the comfort of this fine hut through a Himalayan winter at 19,000ft. Then a quick, oxygenless ascent of Makalu. What could go wrong?
– CHAPTER 22 –
The Silver Hut expedition
Kathmandu in 1960 had only recently been opened to the rest of the world. In 1951 a bloodless revolution had overthrown 180 years of feudal rule, first by Hindu King Prithvi Narayan Shah and his descendants, and then for a hundred years by the Rana family whose vast Italianate palaces overshadowed the humble dwellings of poor commoners. For someone from a makeshift new country like New Zealand, its labyrinthine bazaars and old temples with their Buddhist and Hindu gods were achingly romantic and picturesque. There were hardly any vehicles except a few trucks and the occasional royal Rolls Royce carried over tracks from India on long poles. The early September of our arrival was the end of the monsoon when emerald-green rice fields filled the valley f
rom wall to wall.
Our base in Kathmandu was the Hotel Royal, a reconditioned Rana Palace run by a larger-than-life White Russian by the name of Boris Lisanevich – rhymes with son-of-a-bitch, he used to say. He was a man of wide-ranging abilities and experience: he’d been chased out of Russia by the revolution of 1917, had danced with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Paris and London, established a nightclub in Calcutta, was friend to King Tribhuvan in the lead-up to the anti-Rana revolution of 1950. He lived with his Danish wife Inger and a leopard cub in a penthouse on top of the Hotel Royal from which he practised his entrepreneurial skills. His occasional imprisonments and bankruptcies were celebrated with a Russian banquet, which kicked off with three glasses of vodka, each of a different colour.
Already in residence at the Hotel Royal was our journalist, Desmond Doig. He was born in 1921 to Anglo-Irish parents in the city of Allahabad on the banks of the Ganges. His schooling at Kurseong, south of Darjeeling, had just ended when war broke out. After joining the Gurkhas, amongst whom he learned fluent Nepali, he fought in North Africa and Italy. Post-war England held no attractions for someone of his background who was also gay, but jobs were not easily come by in post-Independence India. Salvation came in the form of an offer to join the Calcutta Statesman as one of its few remaining English staff. He came to the expedition when World Book commissioned a search for a journalist. Desmond describes how he came to be the lucky one:
One day I was called, surprisingly, into the office of the Editor of the Statesman. ‘Ah Doig,’ he said. ‘How would you like to spend a year in Nepal looking for the Abominable Snowman? Somewhere near Everest. With Sir Edmund Hillary and assorted mountaineers and scientists.’ He presumed that I could climb a bit, withstand the cold, and generally carry The Paper’s flag through snow and ice. The important thing was that I could speak Nepali and had experience of Yetis …
‘Of course, Doig, there’s no guarantee that you will go. I have merely been asked, as have editors the world over, to put forward a name for the job of the expedition’s scribe. If they like the sound of you you’ll be interviewed in London by Hillary.’
I found myself on the short list amongst whom were names famous in the British newspaper world, ink-stained giants of the breed. The interview opened with the comment from Hillary that I was ‘damned fat’ but my knowledge of Nepalese people, their language and their Yetis, did the trick. ‘You’ll have to lose some weight,’ said Hillary. ‘I advise some exercise, cut down on the wine.’
Also present was John Dienhart of World Books who later confided to me, ‘You know something, I’ve started wondering whether I should have encouraged this venture or not. I actually worked the whole thing. It’s the greatest publicity stunt a Public Relations man has ever pulled off. What do you think about that?1
There was an element of boasting in this – a PR man has to promote himself as well as his company and its product – and also an element of truth, for the yeti hunt could reasonably be described as a stunt. The scientific side of the expedition was serious enough, however, and fitted with the educational mission of World Book Encyclopedia. As for the attempt on Makalu, it could be read as a scientific experiment, a stunt, or a high-risk sporting activity indulged in by a small, deviant subsection of the community. For the expedition to be seen as successful it would need to satisfy the expectations of World Book, the scientists and the mountaineering community – which in the event it did. John Dienhart was pure American, with a crew cut, a treasure trove of current slang, and a round boyish face that crinkled easily into laughter. On the grounds that ‘everyone should spend a year of their lives in the Himalayas’, he joined the yeti group, but when the romance of sleeping in a tent with no bathroom had worn off he abbreviated the year to a week and retreated to Bangkok. Nevertheless he, with Ed and Griff Pugh, was one of the triumvirate who launched the expedition.
By the end of the first week in September, members of the expedition had gathered in Kathmandu. Loads were sorted, 160 for the yeti-hunters and 310 for the scientific group. Griff established his independence early in the expedition by arriving late.
Dear Griff … I was a little aghast to find that you hadn’t sent off to me the lists of equipment … Thinking about the possibility of your late arrival in Kathmandu I have some further thoughts … As the Director of Physiology and Medical Services it’s not a bad idea to be in at the start of things when decisions are being made – in Kathmandu. Temperamentally I think you’ll find it rather difficult if the other boys have made up all the loads, initiated the medical programme, and generally got things going … What do you want to do? Regards, Ed2
On the day of departure Ed wrote another note:
Dear Griff, Your late arrival is slightly complicating arrangements … I have received a letter from a chap called Lahiri thanking me for including him in the expedition. I do not remember having done so – do you know anything about it? Regards, Ed3
Ed was quickly informed that Dr Lahiri was one of Griff’s scientific team but there were early signs of flawed communications.
Clues to the yeti
Ed had chosen the Rolwaling Valley as a destination partly because it was reputed to be a yeti stronghold. It was in this region that Eric Shipton, Mike Ward and the Sherpa Sen Tenzing had photographed by far the best-defined yeti footprint on record. The valley’s remote Sherpa community centred on the village of Beding, a cluster of 20 stone houses huddled under the immense cliffs of unclimbed Gauri Shankar. Desmond Doig entered the village announcing that he would pay for a yeti, dead or alive, or parts thereof. Within a week he had his first yeti relic, a man-sized skin of thick black fur with an ivory band across the shoulders and brown fur on its face. To the zoologists it was clearly the skin of the rare Tibetan blue bear, and indeed the owner had acquired it in Tibet where blue bears had always been strong yeti candidates. Two more identical skins, all identified by Sherpas as being those of a yeti, would be bought during the next two months, along with a goat skin, a dried human hand, two small red pandas, a fox – and a yeti scalp.
Having spent three weeks gradually acclimatising, Ed and his troops deployed themselves at their ultimate locations around the rim of the Ripimu Glacier at 18,000ft with telescopes, trip-wire cameras and capchur guns. We had with us somewhere, we were told, an instrument that produced the sound of a yeti mating call. There was debate as to who would use it. Would it be answered by an angry, territorial male or by a sexually aroused female? Neither could be contemplated with equanimity. There was also the problem of how we would handle a live yeti emerging from a drug-induced coma, for we had no facilities for containing a large, disgruntled ape who would not have been placated by the promise that s/he was about to spend the rest of her days in the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago.
Sightings of yetis, as distinct from footprints, had been recorded only by Sherpas and Tibetans and even then at second hand. One of our Sherpas, Siku, had had a narrow escape from a yeti. He had been left on his own one stormy night in a mountaineering camp at 17,000ft when he heard a yeti coming towards the tent. There were sounds all around, the wind gusting fiercely around the rocks, the wild flapping of the tent, but above it all came clearly the whistling sound that yetis are known for, and it was getting louder. In a one-on-one encounter the yeti has the advantage of size and strength but when running downhill they are hampered by their long hair (and the females by their breasts) which gets in their eyes. Spurred on by terror, Siku took to his heels straight down the steep grass and rocks of the mountainside to appear in the nearest village an hour later, wild-eyed, exhausted and bleeding from his falls in the dark. The yeti itself regrettably left no tracks but there could be no doubting that to Siku it was terrifyingly real.
Yeti tracks, on the other hand, had been reported by mountaineers for many years. Some were fox tracks, some were bear tracks, others so altered by melting that they were unidentifiable, but Sherpas always swore they belonged to a yeti. We found them ourselves in 1960 on a névé at the head of
the Rolwaling: tracks in the snow that were badly blurred by melting, but at a stretch they might have belonged to a large primate. At least one set was made by a fox, for where it walked in permanent shade the big single prints separated into two much smaller prints with the toes and pads of a fox. At least twice on the expedition we saw foxes purposefully crossing snowfields and a pass.
At the end of October the yeti party left the Rolwaling by crossing the 19,000ft Tashi Laptsa Pass to enter the Khumbu region. A destination here was Khumjung, in whose monastery was one of the best-known relics, a scalp said to be 200 years old. It was a domed affair covered in coarse, henna-stained hair except along its ridged crest where the hair had been worn away by being used as a hat during festivals. As the scalp of a primate it was unconvincing but the possibility existed. ‘Could we,’ asked Ed, ‘borrow the scalp for examination by our scientist friends in Paris, London and Chicago?’
The agreement with the village elders included three conditions:
A payment of 8000 rupees (about $80)
A village elder must accompany the scalp on its travels
The expedition will build a school in Khumjung.4
It was an intriguing set of requests, particularly the last, which is the first mention in Ed’s diary of building a school. Thus did the all-powerful yeti weave a potent new thread into the course of Ed’s life: the provision of education for Sherpas.
The scalp was duly taken to Europe and the USA to be examined by experts who declared that it had been fabricated from the skin of a serow, a goat-antelope. Khunjo Chumbi, the village elder who accompanied the scalp during these examinations, was in no way discomfited:
In Nepal we have neither giraffes nor kangaroos so we know nothing about them. In France, or London, or Chicago, there are no Yetis so I sympathise with your ignorance. When I return to Solu Khumbu I will find a yeti for you. When you have gone to such trouble to prove the existence of the yeti, it is up to us Sherpas to help you. We cannot have you doubted by your own people.5