measuring of the prints ‘with the calm scientific diligence of a Sherlock Holmes’ and the way his photographs were carefully submitted to the ‘Zoological pundits’, who pronounced them to be made by a bear. ‘Whereupon, Mr Smythe, triumphantly flourishing his Sherpa’s affidavit, announced to his expectant audience that “a superstition of the Himalaya is now explained, at all events to Europeans”. In short, delenda est homo niveus disgustans;21 moreover, any tracks seen in the snow in the past, the present, or the future, may safely be ascribed to bears. As a non sequitur this bears comparison with the classic example: “No wonder they call this Stony Stratford, I was never so bitten by fleas in my life.”’22
He makes a good point: Smythe’s tracks were almost certainly those of the bear, but mystery footprints come in all shapes and sizes. Because his Sherpas had identified undisputed bear tracks as those of a wild man, Smythe had leaped to the conclusion that all mysterious tracks were made by bears. It was not his facts that were suspect but his inferences.
Tilman then produces his one-legged, carnivorous, hopping bird, weighing perhaps a ton, which he thought might explain the circular footprints he had seen. Perhaps pulling another leg, he suggests that a more likely explanation was that Abominable Snowmen had developed a primitive kind of snowshoe, despite these being unknown to the natives of the Himalayas.
Why was Tilman so anti-science? This is something that comes up again and again, and you can see the same tendency in the Bigfoot believers. Perhaps he wanted a space left for mystery in the Himalayas. In all of his writings about the yeti, Tilman adopted an anti-science ‘unbecoming levity’; as one interviewer found, ‘… it was obvious that he also belongs to the school which considers that the mystery of the yeti should be left uninvestigated; that once the unknown becomes known and the glamour dispelled, the interest evaporated.’23
This is an odd position. Tilman spent his exploring lifetime attempting to know the unknown among high mountains and cold seas. Was the glamour dispelled once the blanks on the maps and charts were filled in? In line with his generation, Tilman attended church and was a believer. However, he doesn’t seem to have ever been a lover. Unknowns that become knowns in these circumstances might be too disillusioning. Maybe he just preferred the yeti to be left as a mystery.
Towards the end of Appendix B, Tilman describes how on his return march from Everest in 1938 he took a side trip and bumped into Ernst Schäfer’s SS Tibet expedition. Over a few glasses of kümmel24 he begged the Auschwitz anthropologist Bruno Beger to look into the mystery of Homo odious and quite possibly asked him not to upset the applecart. This may have prompted Schäfer’s curt dismissal in his letter to Messner. I also suspect that Schäfer may have mixed him up with Smythe.
Tilman ends Appendix B with an account of what happened next. He and two Sherpas set out to make the first crossing of the Zemu Gap, a 19,000-foot col near Kangchenjunga. They noticed a single track of booted footprints ahead of them that Tilman disappointedly noted went over the col (thus making it a pass). Enquiring in Darjeeling, they could find no climbers boasting of the ascent: ‘men who climb in the Himalaya, though they may be strong, are not often silent.’ Further enquires elicited a response from John Hunt, the future leader of the successful 1953 Everest expedition, who said he had also seen tracks the previous year, and not only were there tracks, but actual steps had been cut in the far side of the pass.25
Tilman suggests that the maker of the tracks had picked up a pair of discarded climbing boots from the old German base camp near Kangchenjunga, and used them to cross the Zemu Gap. ‘I have hinted that the subject of our inquiry may not be as “dumb” as we think, and we are not to assume that a Snowman has not wit enough to keep his feet dry if they happen to be the shape that fits into boots.’
Tilman’s conclusion is that something has made the strange footprints he enumerates, including the strange Rongbuk stone footprint, and that something might as well be the Abominable Snowman. There is a dubious logic about this. He concludes with a veiled threat, which we may quail at: ‘I think he would be a bold and in some ways an impious sceptic who after balancing the evidence does not decide to give him the benefit of the doubt.’
So, covered with footprints, we end Appendix B perhaps more confused than when we began it, but with a vague feeling that we’ve been hoodwinked.
My next bookish proposition has been virtually unknown to the reading public since it first appeared in 1956. ‘For most people, it appears … the funniest book they have never heard of,’ wrote Bill Bryson, in a lavish preface that puts it on a par with The Diary of a Nobody (which Evelyn Waugh, in his turn, described as ‘the funniest book in the world’). This cult book is so loved by the mountaineering tendency that it has been taken around the world by climbers and Antarctic scientists, and inspired the names of a mountain in the Masson range in Antarctica, the northeast ridge of Pikes Peak, Colorado, and (perhaps more usefully) the famous bar and restaurant in Kathmandu, Nepal. It also presents solid evidence of the ‘Atrocious Snowman’.
The Ascent of Rum Doodle is a lethal parody of the stiff-upper-lipped, tight-arsed English school of expedition literature in which the sadder of us are steeped. It is the story of a group of utter incompetents who set out to climb the world’s highest mountain, the 40,500-foot Rum Doodle, a mountain ‘celebrated but rarely seen’ (a ‘rum do’ means a strange event). It is claimed by Bryson and others that The Ascent of Rum Doodle is based on Bill Tilman’s The Ascent of Nanda Devi, but I don’t think that is entirely correct. There is already quite enough self-parody in that book: when they reach the summit, Tilman writes, ‘we so far forgot ourselves as to shake hands on it’. No, I suggest that more likely texts to be satirised are Noel Odell’s Everest, 1925, Ralph Barker’s The Last Blue Mountain, and John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest; robust, militaristic accounts redounding to the credit of the writers. However, I could be wrong; you might also detect something in Rum Doodle of the underlying squabbles of Tilman’s book Mount Everest 1938 (‘we were forced to breakfast on lentils and pemmican.’)
The writer was W. E. Bowman, who seemed to have so much knowledge of high-altitude climbing that many readers assumed the name was a pseudonym for Tilman. Bowman was in fact a civil engineer who spent his time hill-walking, painting, reading rather too many expedition books and writing (unpublished) books on the Theory of Relativity. He only saw high mountains once, on a trip to Switzerland. As Bill Bryson recounts, the book did not fare well at first. One reviewer from Good Housekeeping admitted that she had got quite far in, before realising it wasn’t entirely serious. Thirty years after its publication in hardback, Arrow Books issued a paperback edition, which has to be some kind of a record. Bowman’s characters are all immediately recognisable to anyone who has been on a Himalayan expedition. They are:
Burley, the expedition leader, the strong thrusting and unsympathetic climber type.
Binder, the narrator (a Bounder, perhaps?)
Prone, the doctor, who spends the whole time lying down suffering from various appalling diseases.
Shute, the photographer, who accidentally exposes all his film stock to daylight.
Wish, the scientist, who wants to take a three-ton pneumatic geologist’s hammer, and who while testing his altitude measuring equipment during the voyage to Yogistan discovers that the ship is 153 feet above sea level.
Then there is the language expert Constant (consonant?), who manages to infuriate the leader of the 30,000 Yogistani porters by informing him that he lusted after his wife.
However,
