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 Shipton was an explorer-mystic who never really fitted into the Establishment way of thinking. In 1930, as a young planter in Kenya, he received a letter out of the blue from the fellow-colonialist Bill Tilman suggesting that they might try some climbing together. That letter sparked one of the most successful climbing and exploring partnerships in history. Later that year, they made the first ascent of the West Ridge of Mount Kenya, and for the rest of that decade they completed an unmatched series of climbs and explorations, from the penetration of the unvisited Nanda Devi Sanctuary and expeditions to Mount Everest in 1935 and 1938, to the first crossings of huge expanses of unexplored Himalayas. The whole decade was spent in their trademark lightweight unsupported Himalayan exploration, the full extent of which is still unacknowledged.
A strange connection between yetis and spying begins to emerge. During and after the Second World War, Shipton served as the British Consul-General in Kashgar, fighting a rearguard action against the foreign players in the last rounds of the Great Game. Every month he would write letters headed ‘Secret’ in which he detailed the latest activities of the main Russian and Chinese players of the game. In Persia during the war, he acted as a ‘double hatter’, ostensibly acting as an agricultural advisor but also reporting on political matters on the border between Persia and Iraq. Then in 1951, on a reconnaissance expedition to Mount Everest in just-opened Nepal, he and Ed Hillary spotted the eventual route to the top on the southern slopes of the mountain. It was on this trip that he discovered his evidence for the yeti.
Then disaster struck: not a climbing accident, which might have been expected, but something far more treacherous. He had been asked to lead the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, and, having accepted, was then dumped by the Mount Everest committee, some of whom felt that he lacked the killer instinct and Establishment ties to fulfil the role. The less experienced Colonel John Hunt was appointed and the rest is history. Success and fame all round: except for Eric Shipton. ‘I leave London absolutely shattered,’ he wrote. Anyone who has been shafted by bureaucrats will sympathise. But there might have been another reason why the committee didn’t trust Shipton.
After this shameful episode, Eric Shipton’s marriage broke up, he lost his job as warden of an Outward Bound school and he then worked for a while as a forestry labourer. He became a sort of international tramp, but he did have a final decade of enjoyable and fruitful exploration in Patagonia. He ended his days leading easy treks in the Himalayas and lecturing on cruises. However, he will always be remembered as a kindly, wise and amused man who imbued confidence in his fellow climbers. Frank Smythe described a particularly trying day on Kamet: ‘We sank in knee deep, and I reflected grimly that we should have to retrace our steps up that slope towards the end of the day. But no one who climbs with Shipton can remain pessimistic, for he imparts an imperturbability into a day’s work which are themselves a guarantee of success.’2
There we have it, our thumbnail sketch of the man. But what did he discover about the yeti? When Nepal’s borders had finally opened after the Second World War, it was at last possible
