What was certainly true was that there wasn’t enough money to take more animals. But he was hardly likely to go around telling everyone about his shortages, was he? And anyway, two dogs were more than enough for what he had planned. On reflection, too big a team would only slow the expedition down, it would give advance warning to the shepherds and to the barmanu itself of threatening presences, and it would be much more complicated to establish contacts.
As time went by, Jordi reduced the amount of equipment that was anticipated for the journey. Every thing he surrendered shattered him, but he focused on assuaging his bad mood and furnishing all kinds of excuses. What mattered was to make it through, to go on the journey, even though the Aga Khan Foundation had refused to finance part of the expedition and nobody replied to his requests for sponsorship. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to face a void, was it?
He would write to Erik. According to his friend’s most recent letters, he was doing pretty well as professor of history in Manila. Of course he was, and those were just the kind of allies he needed — brave friends capable of venturing out to unknown lands. It did him good keeping a correspondence up with him, someone who could listen and share, all the more so at a time like this.
He began his letter in a confessional tone. Normally, he would avoid any shows of weakness, but when he sat down he felt the need to unload, to acknowledge his weaknesses. The distance that separated him from Erik relaxed him somewhat. Why not be honest? If not completely, then at least a little. Why shouldn’t he? It cost him less than he expected to admit to his friend that, despite the applause coming in from several quarters, the obstacles to launching a third incursion into Chitral were still too great. He would have to be very strong and very certain in his ideas if he wasn’t going to give up. Did these people not realise the scale of what he was proposing? The bigwigs just kept investing money in trivialities, while the things that really mattered, the things that could bring us the keys to our existence, give meaning to mankind …
Within a few days, Jordi had a letter from the Philippines. The envelope was bulkier than usual. When he opened it, it revealed a small wad of pages. Erik was sending him a photocopy of a story by Prosper Mérimée in which a maiden claimed to have been raped by a bear, or something like that. In his letter, Erik pointed out that Mérimée, whose creations always had their origins in local stories that were narrated with great precision, suggested the possibility that the violator was a yeti. Mérimée had never been in Lithuania, where the event took place, and as he didn’t want to be labelled credulous or stupid, he asked his friend and fellow writer Turgenev to corroborate the story. Turgenev, a Russian with an expert knowledge of the local mythology and landscape, considered it totally credible. Jordi was able to interpret his friend’s real message perfectly: ‘See? We’re not crazy.’
That spring, the production company Les Films de la Liane contacted the Troglodytes Association. They wanted to make a documentary about Jordi in Chitral for the Arte TV channel. The producers’ budget for the project would be one million, four hundred thousand francs, and they proposed to Jordi that the Troglodytes should help to fund it. The association did not have anything resembling a worthwhile amount to contribute, but it would be an unimprovable platform: Arte, the great European culture channel. What better showcase for winning himself some prestige in society?
Jordi took his calculator and began to add up the contributions from members. The number on the little screen made him tut-tut; it wasn’t going to get them anywhere. But faced with an opportunity like this, there was no way he could give up. When, really, had he ever given up on anything? He dialled telephone numbers that had been unused for years, he visited distant friends, he suggested to some subscribers that they might bring their contributions forward by a few months … and managed to get together a hundred and twenty-six thousand five hundred francs from savings, membership subs, and assistance such as that from his brother Andrés, though this all meant paring down to a minimum both the gear and the number of participants in the third expedition. He eliminated most of the names on the list, including the symbolic trackers, and prepared to do without the L’Homme brothers.
The investment left him broke. Please, let it come to something.
‘Of course it will, Jordi. Arte is watched by millions of people,’ said Cat.
‘Right, right. Thing is, the money was a real struggle, and I’ve been going through a hard time … I need to recover. Would you mind putting me up at your place for a few days? Not too long, don’t worry, but I also think being together would be useful to us in preparing for the mission.’
‘Staying at mine?’
‘Just a few days.’
‘I don’t know … I’ll have to see what he thinks, as you know.’
‘Sure, sure. Tell him I’m very quiet.’
Cat’s husband agreed. As Jordi had predicted, they made the most of the fact they were living together to prepare for the mission, stipulating that Valicourt would join after a few months, in early summer.
As he lay in the room he was borrowing from Valicourt, Jordi continued to ask himself whether it was all worth it. The prospect of being publicised on a grand scale didn’t fully compensate for the many things he had been forced to give up. Yes, he did aspire to being recognised, he knew a certain degree of popularity was necessary for his research to progress, but investing in the documentary had left him utterly broke again, and six years after his first expedition he was going to be returning to the mountains in pretty precarious conditions. Am I really never going to make it? Better just hope the documentary really did help somehow.
Early on 7 July 1993, he boarded a bus to show several sketches of likely barmanus to a palaeontologist friend. The man sitting beside him was reading Libération, at which Jordi kept throwing covert glances in the hope of finding some reference to the start of the San Fermín festivals — until the man turned the page, and the headline appeared. Jordi’s reaction was physical, a shaking that made his breathing accelerate. He was fixed on the bold letters, reading those words over and over again, moving closer to the page of Libération in a way that was not altogether polite. He needed to know more, he was trying to read the report, but that guy’s elbow … How many stops were left? Two. He didn’t wait for his. He got off at the next, and ran in search of the first newsstand, opening the paper to the page he had, of course, committed to memory: ‘Yeti’s horse found.’
An expedition headed by ethnologist Michel Peissel had located a new breed of horses at an altitude of five thousand metres, in the former Tibetan kingdom of Nangchen, in the Chinese province of Qinghai. These small animals had a hyper-developed lung capacity, making them capable of travelling ninety kilometres a day through the rarefied oxygen of those steppes.
‘They don’t look like any other breed of horses in the region, not the Mongolians nor the Cossack ones. They really are a distinct family,’ declared Peissel, who was being sponsored by the Loel Guinness Foundation. Peissel had travelled about four thousand kilometres on a first expedition, and he’d done another six hundred and twenty-two days’ travelling on a second when the discovery was made. He had just passed through five mountain ranges with several peaks at five thousand metres, and had accessed an isolated region that had been forbidden by the Chinese government in the early fifties. There are mentions of these horses in Chinese archives of the sixth century.
Jordi’s adrenaline shot up. There were reasons to be optimistic, at last. Peissel, one of his line, had managed it. It was possible.
XIV
MOUNTAIN gorillas, giant baboons, pygmy elephants, distant horses … every once in a while, an animal species is discovered that was believed extinct or was simply unknown. And it’s common for explorers to put their lives at risk in order to find them. That was the case with William Beebe, the first man to go down to a depth of five hundred metres in a capsule that allowed him to see certain animals and plants
believed lost in time. The story of this beguiling vision inspired Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. The novel tells the story of a man who sold his soul to a devil in order to enjoy a few magnificently inspiring years. Somebody said that it was possible to observe in his protagonist the catastrophic regression of a sophisticated spirit to a primitive archaism. The question that arises inevitably at the end is: was it worth it?
XV
‘YOU can’t go alone. If we do it together, the whole thing will be easier.’
‘There isn’t the money. You’d have to cover all your own costs.’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time,’ replied Erik, trying to catch Yannik’s eye.
The L’Homme brothers had discussed it at length, and despite the economic difficulties and Jordi’s unpredictable character, they were agreed that their friend was going to need company. Valicourt wouldn’t be travelling out till months later, and they couldn’t leave Jordi on his own.
Still, the third expedition began worse than expected. In the days before setting off, Jordi was still insisting on putting together a large-scale team, with employees, an old-style caravan … while Erik and Yannik were still intending to go on an adventure among friends.
When Jordi, as usual, held out the document with which they would sign over the rights in the photographs taken during the journey, Yannik had something to say about it.
‘Fine. I’ll sign it if you add an appendix that excludes private photos.’
‘What do you mean, “private”? We’re going to do research.’
‘Come on, Jordi,’ Yannik insisted. ‘There are always photos you want to keep as a memento, the photos where we’re posing, joking around … Put in a clause something like “except photos for souvenirs” and that’ll be it. No one’s ever going to see them; they’re for domestic use only. Since I’m going and I’m the person taking the photos, I will want to make use of a few for myself, to be honest.’
Very well. The L’Homme brothers were offering him help and company, so he could allow himself a small gesture towards them. And yet why was this claim coming now? Would Yannik have proposed the arrangement if he hadn’t been sure of Erik’s support? And you couldn’t be certain the L’Homme innocents weren’t going to bolt in the middle of the journey — you never know, if they sensed the barmanu was close, and all that glory …
In November, they entered the Swat valley. It was snowing. The Pashtuns between Bahrain and Kalam proved unpleasant and aggressive; their children sometimes threw rocks at them. Their appearance caused some surprise at the Kalam police post.
‘This isn’t safe for you. You should be careful.’
There was practically zero tourism, and the forests were almost completely uninhabited. They heard the echo of their voices in the ravines of the Kaghan valley, and they crossed the frozen plain until they came to ancient Yaghistan, the Land of the Unruly, one of the wildest and least hospitable areas in Pakistan.
Fjord demonstrated even more astonishing abilities, carrying bundles of at least twenty kilos strapped around his belly. The cold, the paths filled with stumbles and ditches, the bridges in terrible condition, and the indecipherable language of the Kohistanis and native Gujjars further complicated their already exhausting progress, which did at least serve to mark out a future area of exploration. Jordi concluded that the region to the south-east of Chitral and the north of Dir would, owing to its heavy woodedness and the considerable savagery of its inhabitants, constitute the prime zone for the search for the barmanu.
In December, the expeditioners returned to Chitral on a walk that was uncommonly tense. Some of the locals refused to greet them, and on one occasion went as far as to reprimand them, insisting they go back to their own country. Those extremists were a minority, sure; but on previous expeditions Jordi had never considered them a real threat, whereas now the pressure from them made it clear that it was impossible to talk about anything else with the Muslims, who continued to behave with their accustomed hospitality, offering biscuits, bread, milk, or tea while they criticised the Islamist radicals who were spreading across the area. Once again, they advised caution.
After unloading the equipment in Chitral, Jordi went straight to the Mountain Inn hotel. At the top of a sheet of paper, he elegantly wrote ‘Andrés Magraner’, and a few centimetres below that a text in which he asked his brother to write in French the messages he normally drafted in Spanish, so that Erik and Yannik might understand them in the event of his not being there in person. He sent the fax. Then he sent another to Valicourt in which he was a little more explicit: ‘We will not be sending any information or any precise details.’
He left the Mountain Inn unsure which worried him more — radical Islamism, or the suspicion that there were local researchers ready to meddle in his work. Coppens didn’t know how to keep quiet; he would surely have written to one of his Pakistani contacts to make himself ready in anticipation of the discovery of the barmanu. Perhaps it looked like paranoia, but hadn’t he personally experienced what those bastard scientists were capable of? Besides, paranoia or no, the rampant Islamism in their midst made it advisable to take the very greatest precautions, and that was what he was doing.
As he came back down Chitral’s main avenue, he felt the men’s eyes on him more sharply. Or was it he who was looking differently at them? I can’t go on like this. Soon I’ll start thinking everybody looks suspicious. Concentrate, Jordi. Concentrate. Do your work.
The three friends began to carry out sporadic sorties in search of pieces of testimony, and by arrangement with the forestry department secured the rental of a refuge at an altitude of two thousand six hundred metres on the Gatarsin mountain in Shishiku. The vast length of the valley and the dense foliage of the cedar forests transformed it into a geological anomaly that was perfect for observation. In this same place, years earlier, Jordi had gathered detailed testimony from a Gujjar who assured him that he had seen the barmanu.
During a break on the ascent to their new home, the men were drinking water. They were walled about by kilometres of foliage.
‘So, if we see it, what do you mean to do?’ said Yannik. ‘We have to have a plan.’
‘And you don’t think Jordi has one?’ replied Erik. The brothers turned towards him, and he immediately described where and how they would cage it, whom they would notify, what tests he would carry out on it.
‘And if for some reason the narcotics don’t work, and we need to go hand to hand,’ he smiled mischievously, ‘I have every faith in Yannik.’
‘I have the perfect rugby tackle ready for him,’ said the photographer, hugging the air like a rugby defender in action. ‘But first I’ll get several photos of him. A few, as a souvenir.’
As he said these words, Yannik looked in vain at Jordi’s eyes, but his friend was scanning the valley. He had surely heard him — as a souvenir — but he wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of expressing his annoyance. Why was Yannik provoking him? Pah, best just to turn a deaf ear.
‘What about you, Erik?’ asked Jordi, still peering at the forests.
‘I don’t know. I’ll just enjoy having it at last. One thing’s for sure, when we hand it over, I’ll try never to reveal the location where we captured it. Have you read The Last Giants? In the book, an explorer discovers a population of peace-loving Titans, and when he reveals their location, loads of armed men come along and massacre them.’
Faced with the vastness of vegetation, the trio fell silent.
They continued their ascent. Four hours later, they settled themselves into a cabin situated on a plain surrounded by forest. It would be more comfortable than the tents, and more discreet. This would be their winter observatory.
Today, Sirak Ulmulk runs the most luxurious hotel in Chitral. The Hindu Kush Heights has taken advantage of the outcrop of a hill to offer its guests a spectacular view of the valley. The river rushes powerfully at the foot of the road to Mas
tuj. The proliferation of aluminium roofs on the houses has removed a touch of the folklore from the landscape, but the ordering of the crops, the vast mountains, and the depth to which your eyes can see convey a stunning impression of beauty and freedom.
Siraj Ulmulk comes from a family of mehtars, princes who have dominated the region for centuries without much ceremony. He is a Muslim, and he holds some de facto power. ‘My father governed Chitral for forty-two years, not like now — no politician today lasts more than three or four years,’ he has been saying publicly for some time.
Jordi already knew all this about Ulmulk, and that he has a decisive role in the local Aga Khan Foundation, when he ran into him at a cocktail party being thrown by Ulmulk himself at his Islamabad home. In fact, this was why Jordi had arranged to come to the party. When he located Ulmulk in the main hall, Jordi walked over towards his host, who at that moment was speaking to a small circle of guests.
‘… as you can see by the way I’m dressed.’
Ulmulk was in trousers and a shirt, his skin was white, and his features could pass for western.
‘And yet they usually give me a full search at customs in America, as well as in Europe. Why?’
‘Why don’t you get rid of it? It would save you time,’ remarked one of the circle.
This was the moment Ulmulk was waiting for. He puffed up like a peacock, ostentatiously lifting his chin and replied: ‘It’s my identity. I studied for ten years in a school run by Catholic monks, but they didn’t convert me. I’m a Muslim.’
When the group dispersed, Jordi asked a French diplomat to introduce him to the hotelier. Face to face at last, Jordi was surprised not to feel in the least intimidated by Ulmulk’s charisma and power. On the contrary, Ulmulk’s aura of fame acted like a spur on Jordi: he felt free, agile, convincing. He soon began to explain his research into the barmanu.
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