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