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fact a civil engineer who spent his time hill-walking, painting, reading rather too many expedition books and writing (unpublished) books on the Theory of Relativity.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.
Yeti prints on Everest … an English Ulysses … RAF Mosquito over Everest … climbing in women’s clothing … a sex diary … the Daily Mail Snowman Expedition … Casino Royale … a yeti scalp … a giant panda cub.
More yeti footprints appeared near Mount Everest in 1951, and this time they were properly photographed and created a sensation in the popular press. These ones were monstrous, with hideously misshapen toes. They were the Ur prints, the image which finally confirmed the Abominable Snowman in the public mind as a real, living monster. They shook the scientific establishment and kicked off a literary war between biographers. And they were presented to the public by Eric Shipton, whose name will therefore be associated forever with the yeti.
Of all our explorers, Shipton most closely approximates to the protagonist of Tennyson’s dramatic monologue ‘Ulysses’, from which poem he took an epigram for his Blank on the Map, and for the title of his second autobiography, That Untravelled World. The poem obviously meant something to him as an epic traveller. But Homer’s Ulysses was also a smooth talker and a trickster with an eye for the ladies.
As his biographer Jim Perrin explained,1