Yeti: An Abominable History

CHAPTER ONE

A surprising discovery … Attenborough, a believer … Tintin in Tibet … the Third Eye … upon that mountain … a hero of Mount Everest … a wild goose chase … a lost camera … his shroud the snow.

When I gazed at those yeti footprints in the Lost Valley, I felt a mixture of fear and bewilderment. It was only later that I felt a connection to those who had gone before. For nearly a century, Western explorers had been coming back from the heights with reports of man-like beasts in the Himalayas. They began with stories of strange footprints, then told of the violent deaths of their pack animals, killed with one savage blow. Their Sherpas told them that yetis were seven feet tall, covered with brownish hair. Their feet faced backwards, which made them confusing to track. The males had a long fringe of hair over their eyes and the females had pendulous breasts which they slung over their shoulders when they ran. Your only hope of escaping from a yeti was to quickly determine which sex it was and then run downhill if it was a male, who would be blinded by his fringe, or run uphill if it was a female, who would be impeded by her breasts. Sometimes lonely males would kidnap Sherpa women and keep them in their caves, breeding strange children.

I decided to look back through the years and try to disentangle myth from reality, cryptozoology from science. In thirty years of climbing in these mountains, why had I only seen footprints? Why had no one managed to capture one of these fabled beasts? Where did they live, and could I find any solid proof of the yeti? Furthermore, was there any evidence for Bigfoot, the yeti’s American cousin?

Mountaineering as a sport has collected a great literature around it in a way that, say, football or table tennis have not, so this book will take us through some of the most gripping accounts of the Abominable Snowman ever written. Cryptozoology itself has given us great fiction too, such as Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and Hollywood’s Jurassic Park. Somewhere in these pages lies the truth about these beasts and the dangers contained within them. This is a detective story, and like the best detective stories it starts with a discovery and a mystery.

We humans have only identified about two million of the estimated 10 million living species on our planet, and new species have been discovered in modern times that scientists had previously refused to accept. The gorilla was a legendary creature seen in the fifth century BCE by Hanno the Navigator, who described ‘a savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and who our interpreters called Gorillae. We pursued but could take none of the males; they all escaped to the top of precipices, which they mounted with ease, and threw down stones.’ The name was derived from Ancient Greek

Then there was the ‘African unicorn’, the okapi, which was only discovered in 1901. It turned out to be a relative of the giraffe. Even giraffes themselves were regarded as fabulous until the mid-nineteenth century. A hairy pig thought to be extinct since the Pleistocene, the Chacoan peccary, was found trotting around happily in Argentina as late as 1971. Live giant pandas weren’t seen in Europe until 1916, and the existence of the Komodo dragon was disbelieved until 1926. So there were plenty of precedents for legendary animals such as the yeti eventually being accepted by scientists once they had been found (and then shot) by Westerners.

Sir David Attenborough is convinced. ‘I believe the Abominable Snowman may be real,’ said the TV naturalist. ‘There are footprints that stretch for hundreds of miles and we know that in the 1930s a German fossil was found with these huge molars that were four or five times the size of human molars. They had to be the molars of a large ape, one that was huge, about 10 or 12 feet tall. It was immense. And it is not impossible that it might exist. If you have walked the Himalayas, there are these immense rhododendron forests that go on for hundreds of square miles which could hold the yeti. If there are some still alive and you walked near their habitat, you can bet that these creatures may be aware of you, but you wouldn’t be aware of them.’1

The New Scientist magazine, reporting on a photograph of a yeti footprint, was confident that the creature existed. Like Attenborough, the writer concluded that it could be a giant ape: ‘The Abominable Snowman might well be a huge, heavily-built bipedal primate similar to the fossil Gigantopithecus … the Snowman must be taken seriously.’2

And what about the North American cousin of the yeti, the Bigfoot? ‘I’m sure that they exist,’ said the celebrated primatologist Jane Goodall on NPR radio. ‘I’ve talked to so many Native Americans, who’ve all described the same sounds, two who’ve seen them.’3

There was good reason to believe, therefore, that I had been close to a large primate unknown to science. Had I disturbed the beginning of a stalking manoeuvre which would have led to the violent death of the solitary yak? The predator would have to have been big enough to take on a yak bull, with jaws and teeth powerful enough to kill it. Or would it despatch the animal with one savage blow, and then turn towards me?

When I was a child, all I knew about the Abominable Snowman was what I had read in Tintin in Tibet, drawn by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé and published in 1959. Tintin has a dream in which he sees his Chinese friend Chang lying in plane wreckage. Tintin, Captain Haddock and Snowy the dog travel to Kathmandu, then trek to Tibet. After various adventures they encounter the terrifying yeti, or migou, and their porters run away. Eventually Chang is found in the yeti’s cave, having been nursed back to health by the beast. They all return to civilisation without a proper encounter with the animal, who watches them depart with apparent sadness. In the last frame, Chang says: ‘You know, I hope they never succeed in finding him. They’d treat him like some wild animal. I tell you, Tintin, from the way he took care of me, I couldn’t help wondering if deep down, he hadn’t a human soul.’

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.