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.
