Before all that, he was one of the foremost Alpinists in England. He was invited to join the 1922 Mount Everest expedition and took part in the first serious attempt to climb the mountain with his friend Mallory, and his oxygen-free height record with fellow climber Edward Norton in 1924 stood for over fifty years. He even won an Olympic gold medal. He was one of the extraordinary Everesters, from the land of the yeti.
Of course, I was only interested in the amazing story he was telling me. ‘Norton and I had a last-ditch attempt to climb Mount Everest, and we got higher than any man had ever been before. I really couldn’t breathe properly and on the way down my throat blocked up completely. I sat down to die, but as one last try I pressed my chest hard [and here the old man pushed his chest to demonstrate to me] and up came the blockage. We got down safely. We met Mallory at the North Col on his way up. He said to me that he had forgotten his camera, and I lent him mine. So if my camera was ever found, you could prove that Mallory got to the top.’ It was a throwaway comment, which he probably made a hundred times in the course of telling this story, but this time it found its mark.
So I spent much of the rest of my life learning to be a mountaineer and then hunting for the camera on Mount Everest. This search would also lead me to the yeti. Many times, I cursed myself for chasing Uncle Hunch’s wild goose, but on the way we found George Mallory’s body. Poor Mallory. His shroud was the snow.8
When men and mountains meet … campfire stories … the Abdominal Snowman … the 1921 Reconnaissance of Mount Everest … a remarkable man … more footprints … The Valley of the Flowers.
‘Great things are done when men and mountains meet’ wrote William Blake. He might have added that there would be some great tales, too. On one Mallory filming expedition, I climbed with the actor Brian Blessed to around 25,000 feet on the North Ridge of Mount Everest. His generous stomach and his bellowing of stories around the campfire earned him the nickname of Abdominal Snowman. The Sherpas were fascinated by him and swore that he actually was a yeti. They would giggle explosively and roll on the snow with laughter at his antics. Sherpa people generally have a good sense of fun, and I noticed that whenever a yeti was mentioned this would often provoke a smile, a laugh – but occasionally an uneasy look.
In the course of thirty or so trips to the Himalayas, I heard many tales about the beast from Sherpas and they were clearly believers. There are very similar stories from local villagers all along the Himalayas, from Arunachal Pradesh to Ladakh, and even though the names changed they seemed to be talking about three kinds of yeti. First, and largest, is the terrifying dzu-teh, who stands eight feet tall when he is on his back legs; however, he prefers to walk on all fours. He can kill a yak with one swipe of his claws. There is the smaller chu-the or thelma, a little reddish-coloured child-sized creature who walks on two legs and has long arms. He is seen in the forests of Sikkim and Nepal. Then there is the meh-teh, who is most like a man and has orangey-red fur on his body. He attacks humans and is the one most often depicted on monastery wall paintings. Yeh-teh or yeti is a mutation of his name. He looks most like the Tintin in Tibet yeti.
A drawing of the three yetis by Lama Kapa Kalden of Khumjung, 1954.
Some of the Sherpas I climbed with had stories about family yaks being attacked, and yak-herders terrorised by a creature that sounds like the enormous dzu-teh. In 1986 in Namche Bazaar, capital of the Sherpa Khumbu region, I met Sonam Hisha Sherpa. Twenty years previously, he had been grazing his yak/cow crosses, the dzo, high on a pasture. During the night, he heard loud whistling and bellowing while he cowered with fright in a cave with his companions. They were sure they were going to be killed by the dzu-teh after it had finished with their livestock. In the morning, Sonam and his men found that two dzo had been killed and eaten. There was no meat or bones remaining: only blood, dung and intestines.
So what was the truth about the yeti? After my own Bhutanese yeti finding, I decided to follow the footprints back in recorded history and see what stood up to scrutiny. In this book, we’ll follow the Westerners’ yeti tracks first and see if they lead us to the original Himalayan yeti. On the way, we will meet some of the most remarkable men in exploration history.
The earliest Western account of a wild man in the Himalayas dates from 1832 and is given by Brian Houghton Hodgson, the Court of Nepal’s first British Resident, and the first Englishman permitted to visit this forbidden land. Hodgson had to contend with the hotbed that was (and still is) Nepalese politics. He was particularly interested in the natural history and ethnography of the region, and so his report carries some weight. He recorded that his native hunters had been frightened by a ‘wild man’:1
Religion has introduced the Bandar [rhesus macaque] monkey into the central region, where it seems to flourish, half domesticated, in the neighbourhood of temples, in the populous valley of Nepal proper [this is still the case]. My shooters were once alarmed in the Kachár by the apparition of a ‘wild man’, possibly an ourang, but I doubt their accuracy. They mistook the creature for a càcodemon or rakshas (demons), and fled from it instead of shooting it. It moved, they said, erectly, was covered with long dark hair, and had no tail.
It has to be noted that Hodgson didn’t see the wild man of Nepal himself, and he doubted the story. We can go back further in history for stories about wild men. Alexander the Great set out to conquer Persia and India in 326 BC, penetrating nearly as far as Kashmir. He heard about strange wild men of the snows, who were described as something like the satyrs, the lustful Greek gods with the body of a man but the horns, legs and feet of an animal. Alexander demanded to have one of them brought to him, but the local villagers said the creature could not survive at low altitude (rather a good excuse). Later, Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis Historia: ‘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 on both four feet and on two. They have bodies like men, and because of their speed can only be caught when they are ill or old.’ He went on to describe monstrous races of peoples such as the cynocephali or dog-heads, the sciapodae, whose single foot was so huge it could act as a sunshade, and the mouthless astomi, who lived on scents alone. By comparison, his yeti sounds quite plausible. ‘When I have observed nature she has always induced me to deem no statement about her incredible.’
Septimius Severus was the only Roman emperor to be born in Libya, Africa, and he lived in York between 208 and 211 BC. His head priest, Claudius Aelianus, wrote De Natura Animalium (On the Nature of Animals), a book of facts and fables about the animal kingdom designed to illustrate human morals. I like to imagine the Roman emperor reading it to take his mind off his final illness during the Yorkshire drizzle. In his book, Aelianus describes an animal similar to the yeti:
If one enters the mountains of neighbouring India, one comes upon lush, overgrown valleys … animals that look like 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 dim of approaching hunters and the barking of dogs, they run with incredible speed to hide in mountain caves. For they are masters at mountain climbing. They also repel approaching humans by hurling stones down at them.
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