from Odell, who has not yet finished criticising the food we ate on Nanda Devi in 1936 and who, in spite of his half-starved condition, succeeded in getting to the top.’14
However, Odell did have a point: once again, the British had failed on Everest. Little did they know that their youngest Sherpa, 24-year-old Tenzing Norgay, would finally manage to climb the mountain in 1953 with Edmund Hillary. He was described by the leader as young, keen, strong and very likeable. Shipton had employed him on the 1935 Everest reconnaissance expedition, catching his flashing smile in the employment lines. Nor could they suspect that a British woman, Rebecca Stephens, would climb Everest in 1993; a 13-year-old boy, Jordan Romero, would climb it in 2010; or an 80-year-old Japanese man, Yuichiro Miura, in 2013. Surely, they wouldn’t believe that 234 people would reach the top in a single day in 2012. One of the greatest mysteries about mountains is how they appear to lose their difficulty. As British mountaineer and author Albert Mummery said: ‘It has frequently been noticed that all mountains appear doomed to pass through the three stages: An inaccessible peak – The most difficult ascent in the Alps – An easy day for a lady.’15 This is not a topic for this book, but it has been addressed at length in at least one other.16
Once again, the weather was bad that year so they retreated to the Rongbuk monastery, where they had already noticed that someone had demolished the monument to those who died in 1924 (the carved stone panels on this had been executed by Howard Somervell, the polymath, in an Arts and Crafts style). Tilman and the other climbers questioned the lamas:
Odell, who as a member of the 1924 expedition was particularly interested, then asked who had destroyed the big cairn erected at the Base Camp … The abbot disclaimed all responsibility on the part of the monastery and suggested that the culprits were the ‘Abominable Snowmen’. This reply staggered me, for though I had an open mind on the matter I was not prepared to hear it treated so lightly in that of all places. I was shocked to think that this apparently jesting reply, accompanied as it was by a chuckle from the abbot and a loud laugh from the assembled monks, indicated a disbelief in the ‘Abominable Snowman’ … Further questioning showed clearly that no jest was intended, and we were told that at least five of these strange creatures lived up near the snout of the glacier and were often heard at night.17
Another explanation could be that the monument, which might have been considered to sacrilegiously resemble a Tibetan religious chorten, had indeed been demolished by the lamas.18
There was more to see in the Rongbuk monastery. In the innermost shrine, they were shown a piece of rock with ‘the very clear impress of a large human foot’. Odell, a geologist of some standing, could not provide an explanation. Another mysterious footprint!
Tilman’s book of the expedition, Mount Everest 1938, was not published until ten years later, after the war. In it he discusses the Abominable Snowman at length: ‘Since no book on Mount Everest is complete without appendices, I have collected all the available evidence, old and new, and relegated it to the decent obscurity of Appendix B.’ As well as being obscure, Appendix B19 is now extremely hard to find (having been unaccountably left out of the otherwise excellent Diadem edition of his collected Mountain-Travel books). It is written in a suspiciously jocular manner – ‘Nothing like a little judicious levity’ – but Tilman manages to make the case for the Abominable Snowman whilst undermining him and at the same time hinting that he doesn’t take the whole phenomenon entirely seriously. In fact, this is a masterpiece of sustained comic irony, a difficult rhetorical trick to pull off but one that Tilman manages, time and time again.
He firstly deals with the genesis of the Western yeti, thanks to Howard-Bury’s missing exclamation marks, then suggests that the journalist Henry Newman may have had one explan-ation of the phenomenon:
… in Tibet there is no capital punishment, and men found guilty of grave crimes are simply turned out of their villages and monastery. They live in caves like wild animals, and in order to obtain food become expert thieves and robbers. Also in parts of Tibet and the Himalaya many caves are inhabited by ascetics and others striving to obtain magical powers by cutting themselves off from mankind and refusing to wash.
In other words, was the yeti phenomenon merely wild Tibetans trying to make ends meet? Henry Newman had translated the porters’ name for the wild men as ‘metch kangmi’, kangmi meaning snowman and metch meaning disgusting, or abominable, but it appears that the word ‘metch’ actually means someone wearing tattered or disgusting clothes. This fitted better with the idea of exiled wild men wearing the remnants of their original clothing, attacking travellers; or indeed, hermits wearing rotting rags. This seems a possible origin for the story.
Tilman points out that snow is an unsatisfactory medium for footprints. A foot changes shape as the body’s weight comes onto it and the resulting print can look nothing like the foot that made it. And the effect of intense high-altitude sun is first to collapse the sides of the print by melting, then to enlarge the whole thing, ending with a vague circular shape. An explanation for bare footprints in snow was provided by one of Tilman’s correspondents:
In 1930 on the summit of a 17,000 ft pass in Ladakh, Capt. Henniker met a man completely naked except for a loincloth. It was bitterly cold and snowing gently. When he expressed some natural astonishment, he was met with the reply in perfect English: ‘Good morning, Sir, and a Happy Christmas to you’ (it was actually July). The hardy traveller was an MA of an English university (Cambridge, one suspects) and was on a pilgrimage for the good of his soul. He explained that one soon got used to the cold and that many Hindus did the same thing.20
Tilman then records the series of letters to The Times which had produced more eyewitnesses. One of them was from Ronald Kaulback, who on a journey to the Upper Salween in 1936 reported seeing at 16,000 feet five sets of tracks which looked exactly as though made by a bare-footed man. Two of his porters thought they had been made by snow leopards, but two claimed they were made by mountain men, which they described as like a man, white-skinned, with long hair on head, arms and shoulders. There were no bears recorded in that area. This letter produced another witness, Wing-Commander Beaumont, who had seen similar tracks near the source of the Ganges (however, bare-footed pilgrims are known to visit this sacred site). These letters in turn produced a volley from the zoologists, who suggested langurs might produce such footprints. Or giant pandas. Kaulback responded drily that he had seen and heard of no monkeys despite exploring the area for five months, and as for giant pandas there were no bamboo shoots, ‘a sine qua non for pandas without which they languish and die’.
At this point, Tilman summarises the evidence: ‘So far then we have as candidates for the authorship of queer tracks seen on three several occasions, snow leopards, outlaws, bears, pandas, ascetics, langurs, or X the unknown quantity (which we may as well call the ‘Abominable Snowman’) roughly in that order of probability.’
But Tilman is equivocal about the actual existence of the Abominable Snowman: ‘… everything turns upon the interpretation of footprints. And if fingerprints can hang a man, as they frequently do, surely footprints may be allowed to establish the existence of one.’ However, despite his taciturnity, Tilman did have a tongue and at times it was in his cheek. His dark humour was sometimes misunderstood. Earlier in the same book, Mount Everest, 1938, he discusses the idea of dropping expedition stores onto the slopes of Everest: ‘There is a good case for dropping bombs on civilians because so few of them can be described as inoffensive, but mountains can claim the rights of “open towns” and our self-respect should restrain us from dropping on them tents, tins, or possibly men.’ One American reviewer complained of Tilman’s complete lack of humour.
Tilman the satirist (and admirer of Jonathan Swift) reserves his ammunition for the
