He also tried to sell me an engraved amber bead which, so he said, had been given him by his mother.
‘Keep the bead,’ I said, and slipped him the money as we went away.
We walked until mid-afternoon and had reached the outskirts of Khumjung when Sangye called out, ‘Bruce! You remember about the Yeti lady? There she is!’
We shinned over the wall and greeted Lakpa Doma, a handsome woman in her thirties with polished red cheeks and a dazzling smile. She wore heavy gold earrings, a striped Sherpa woman’s apron, and was mattocking her field while her old mother cut potato slips for planting.
This was Sangye’s version of her story:
One day in 1974 she was tending her family’s yaks in a summer pasture near Macchermo when the Yeti sprung on her from behind a rock, dragged her to the stream, but then dumped her and went on to slaughter three of the yaks simply by twisting their horns. The beast had the same yellow eyes, big brow-ridges and hollow temples. Some policemen came up from Namche to examine the yak carcasses and stated, categorically, that the killer had never been a man.
‘I suppose it was a dzu-teh?’ I said.
‘It was,’ said Sangye Dorje.
We waved goodbye to the ladies and came to the door of Sangye’s house, where we were to spend the night. We picked our way through a pitch-dark woodstore and climbed upstairs into a long warm room with brightly polished tables, bright rugs and a rack of copper cauldrons decorated with swastikas. His mother served countless cups of Tibetan tea and we peered at his baby boy, asleep in a pile of sheepskins.
Then, at sunset, we went to call on the Ger Lama.
He was a holy wanderer, who came here from Tibet about twenty-eight years ago, living in caves and herdsmen’s huts until he persuaded the villagers to help him build a hermitage. He had been once to Kathmandu, but never again. Mountains and solitude, he said, were essential to a life of prayer. He received us, sitting cross-legged in a small scarlet room painted with lotus flowers. His alarm clock, his books and sacred images were all well within his reach. One day, he said, he would return to Tibet, but whether in this life or the next, he was unsure. He blessed us each with a scarf of white gauze, and we went away, marvelling.
Next morning we went to see the famous ‘Yeti scalp’ which is preserved at the Khunjung gompa. The guardian had goitre. From a locked box he pulled out a hairy leather cap shaped a bit like a Mongol helmet, moulded in one piece and dyed with henna. There were several neat holes pierced around the lower edge, probably for the attachment of a brim.
‘Must be some kind of dance hat,’ I said.
‘But what’s the skin?’ whispered Elizabeth.
‘Old goat,’ I whispered back; for this ‘scalp’ and the one at Pangboche are supposed, according to expert opinion, to be made from a wild goat called the serow.
‘But whatever it is,’ I went on, ‘it’s certainly not a fake.’
I put a banknote in the guardian’s hand, and we left the village.
‘Well?’ asked Sangye sometime later. He sounded quite anxious. ‘What did you think about Yeti?’
We were walking to Gokyo along the vertiginous track that follows the flank of Khumbu Ylha. Yaks were grazing up to the skyline, and in among them was a herd of wild goats, their reddish hair blowing about in the breeze. The day was bright and cloudless and the snowy peaks across the valley seemed to be cut from cardboard.
‘I don’t know,’ I said to Sangye, not sure what to say. For what, indeed, could one say? What did I, or any other Westerner, really know about the Yeti?
I knew, for example, that Yetis or similar species had been knocking about European literature since the Elder Pliny (Natural History VII, 9) described a race of ‘wild men’ who lived in the Mountains of Imaeus (the Eastern Himalaya), moved with astonishing speed, and had huge feet turned back-to-front. I knew that the Sherpas, too, believed that Yeti had his feet turned back. I knew that several tough-minded mountaineers, such as Eric Shipton or Sir John Hunt, had not only photographed Yeti footprints in the snow, but had heard the Yeti shrieking. I also knew that Hillary’s ‘scientific’ expedition had failed to find the least trace of the creature, had sent the Pangboche ‘scalp’ to America for analysis, and had suggested that the ‘tracks’ were those of the snow-leopard or Tibetan blue bear, enlarged by the melting sun.
Of course, I reflected, it was just conceivable that some giant orang-outang-like ape had survived in the High Himalaya: but I, for one, was sceptical. I believed, rather, that Yeti was (for want of a better term) a creature of the Collective Unconscious. Man, after all, is the inventor of his own monsters. Babies ‘see’ monsters long before they are shown them in picture books. Milarepa, the Himalayan sage, ‘saw’ a Yeti at the entrance to his cave. St Anthony ‘saw’ his fantastical menagerie in the Desert. Hairy ‘devils’ did actually ‘possess’ the Salem witches; and only a few weeks earlier I had watched, in a school near Alice Springs, some Aboriginal children drawing an ape-like ogre from their mythology — in a continent that never saw an ape until the coming of the whites.
I believed, too, that the people most likely to ‘see’ Yetis were either simpletons or schizophrenics; religious ascetics or the very poor (both liable to protein deficiency); or those at high altitude with a diminished supply of oxygen to the brain. Perhaps Yeti was a mountain hallucination. But how could I explain this to Sangye?
‘You’re right,’ I said, funking the issue. ‘Yeti must be some kind of God.’
Around midday we reached a ridge where a well-heeled party of American bird-watchers had stopped to rest beside a Buddhist shrine. We talked to the wife of a San Francisco broker, who owned her own computer software business and seemed a bit puffed. We also had an intense conversation with a lone trekker, a Jewish Bruce from Boston, who wangled two eggs from our picnic and pitied our ignorance of computer technology.
Near Everest Base Camp, this Bruce had run into a professional Yeti hunter, a Scotsman, and had asked him for news of the Loch Ness Monster.
‘Bah!’ the Scot had snapped. ‘Only loonies look for the Monster.’
We slept under a pale moon at the yak-herding settlement of Labharma where Sangye had the key to a hut. Stalactites of soot hung from. its rafters. Over the hearth there was a rack for drying cheese and, on the door, a set of claw marks.
‘Probably a Yeti,’ Sangye sniggered: the Yeti was by now our standing joke.
The Yeti was even more of a joke in the morning when we got to Macchermo and inspected the scene of Lakpa Doma’s rape. Sangye growled; Pasang pulled a Yeti-face, and I imitated the walk of Groucho Marx. We then climbed up alongside the Ngozumpa Glacier and came out into a blinding bright landscape of snow and naked rock and green lakes half-frozen over. On a patch of open water a ruddy shelldrake was nibbling at some weed. Elizabeth was watching him through binoculars when I happened to turn round - and blinked.
‘Look!’ I blurted out. ‘Yeti tracks!’
‘Oh yeah?’ drawled Elizabeth, and went on watching the shelldrake.
‘Look at them!’
On the north-facing slope behind us there was a line of very strange footprints. They were each about fifteen inches long, wider at the toe than the heel, and on some you saw – or thought you saw - the imprint of a giant big toe. They approached the base of an almost vertical bank, stopped, continued on the slope higher up, and finally petered out along a rocky ridge. I reckoned that the creature had jumped at least eight feet into the air and twelve along. The tracks were perhaps a day old and had melted a little: even so, I could see that they hadn’t been made by any of the usual contenders – yak, blue bear, snow-leopard, langur monkey, human or human hoaxer. No hoaxer could have jumped that high, yet the Sherpas say that Yeti habitually jumps his own height and more. The strange thing was that its foot had scuffed the snow on the way up – unless it really was a Yeti-with-the-feet turned-back, in which case the jumper had been jumping down.
I was sure there must be some logical explanation and c
alled Sangye over.
‘Did you ever,’ I asked, ‘on any of your treks, see anything like them?’
‘Never,’ he said, darkly. ‘They were not made by men.’
‘Then who made them?’
‘Same as Yeti.’
I still have no idea what these ‘Yeti tracks’ were. My whole life has been a search for the miraculous: yet at the first faint flavour of the uncanny, I tend to turn rational and scientific. After this excitement, the whole party was infected with Yeti-fever and kept ‘seeing things’ on every mountain. On Cho Oyu we thought we saw Reinhold Messner manoeuvring across an ice-fall. He was on the mountain that day, but not where we could see him, and the ‘thing’ we did see turned out to be a pinnacle of rock, doubling and tripling as our eyes watered in the wind.
We camped at Gokyo and in the afternoon I climbed the summit of Gokyo Ri where, gasping for oxygen at 18,000 feet, I propped myself against a stone cairn and, while the wind ripped at the prayer-flags, gazed dully at the ring of blue-and-white peaks - Cho Oyu, Everest, Lhotse, Nuptse and, far to the east, the cone of Makalu.
The sky was all but cloudless; a stream of grey vapour crept up the valley from India, and above it, in the opposite direction, a few shreds of cumulus came blowing out of Tibet. I could see the Gyubanare Glacier snaking down from the Pass of Shangri La. And it occurred to me how easy it would be, in this incandescent atmosphere, to ‘see’ the real Shangri La as described by the mystics – the Valley of Eternal Youth, always lying somewhere to the North, where the houses are roofed with gold and the streambeds shimmer with precious stones.
Back at the camp, Sangye had shut himself in his tent with an old shaman and the two were chanting hymns to propitiate the Mountain Gods. The shaman said that sometimes people saw a monastery floating in the middle of Gokyo Lake. At sundown it started to freeze. I had a headache and could only sleep fitfully. All night I heard, or imagined, strange rumbles and half-expected a hairy hand to rip through the roof of the tent. It was good to see the dawn and Elizabeth stirring in her sleeping-bag.
‘Did you sleep?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she yawned. ‘I heard funny noises.’
‘What kind of noises?’
‘Thumps.’
After Gokyo the weather turned sour. Clouds hung below the snowline and snowflakes whizzed in our faces. We stopped at a tea-house called ‘Cho Oyu View’ where the boy called out ‘Milik tea or balak tea?’ and gave us boiled potatoes and hot chile peppers. We got stuck behind a caravan of fourteen yaks nose to tail which Elizabeth said looked like a ’hairy black centipede’. Across the main valley we saw the monastery of Thyangboche and heard the weird music of horns and cymbals carried on the morning wind. When, after two days, we got to Pangboche, we realised from the continuous stream of porters and white men with rucksacks that we’d rejoined the Everest trunk-route.
Pangboche gompa is a square red-washed building with the presence of a Palladian villa and an alley of windblown junipers leading up to it. Among its treasures is the second ‘Yeti-scalp’. It is the oldest shrine in the Khumbu and was founded by Sangye Dorje’s namesake, an aerobatic lama who lived about four hundred years ago and could fly back and forth across the Himalayas at will.
The guardian, a poetic soul reeking of rancid yak butter, removed the altar frontal and showed us a dent in the rock where the lama had landed. Like other Tibetan levitators, this Sangye Dorje seems to have had little control of his airbrakes and was always leaving dents in the landscape where he crashed. Cases of concussion, however, are unknown.
On the upper floor, we saw the lama’s portrait, which showed a young man with luminous white skin and masses of flowing chestnut hair. Apparently, he’d been very proud of this hair but, on settling at Pangboche, had obeyed an ascetic impulse, chopped it off, chucked it out, and the junipers had sprouted where it fell.
We then inspected the ‘scalp,’ which was identical to the Khumjung specimen, except that there were rather more holes. I also saw, stored in a rack with the ceremonial masks, a pair of cartwheel hats made of the same reddish goat skin, thus confirming my impression that they all belonged to some kind of ritual costume. The guardian, however, had a different tale. This particular Yeti, he said, had fallen for the young lama; had grown tame in his company; had learned to fetch his wood and water; and when it died, the lama had cut off the scalp and kept it in memory of their friendship.
‘Hm!’ said Elizabeth. ‘Beauty and the Beast!’
We pressed on eastward, but the weather disintegrated terribly. We had intended to climb Kalar Datar, an easy peak from which, on a clear day, you get the best view of Everest. There seemed little point in fog and snow, so we holed up in the rest-house at Pheriche and read. Some of the trekkers looked rather emaciated and were far too obsessed by their next meal to listen to cock-and-bull stories about the Yeti. Eventually, after three dismal days, we decided to beat it back to a warmer altitude.
On the way we stopped at Thyangboche where the novices put on a horn concert for our benefit. At Kyangzuma we saw a musk deer flitting past; and we watched the mating dance of the Impeyan pheasant, a dazzling bird whose plumage seemed to be composed of electricity. Once we got below Namche, every leaf had burst open and Elizabeth’s botanical enthusiasms took over, she yanked at branches, sniffed flowers, and called out Latin names with the conviction of a woman who knows her own mind. We also met a young English climber who had found, on the edge of a glacier, a scuba diver’s flipper.
‘So,’ I said to myself. ‘The Yeti hoaxer!’ – until I remembered that no flippered hoaxer could possibly have jumped eight feet into the air – or, for that matter, jumped down backwards.
Then we went down to Lukla to catch the plane.
We arrived in a rainstorm and, for three days, we waited for the cloud to clear. Lukla was full of stranded trekkers, some of whom had missed their cheap charter flights, and mooned about with an air of quiet desperation. Elizabeth called them the ‘down-at-the-mouthers’.
Other passengers were more vocal and kept haranguing the poor Nepali airline official with lists of their business appointments in London, Washington or Abu Dhabi. The most vociferous of all was a journalist who had flown in, against advice, for one night, and had intended to fly out the next day. He had been stuck for a week. In a voluminous blue down-jacket, he would waddle to the airline office to complain. He said that ‘for professional and personal reasons’ he HAD to be in Geneva on Tuesday. He implied the Nepali pilots were cowards. He demanded an Air Force helicopter. Had anyone radioed for the helicopter?
‘Yes,’ the Nepali nodded, smiling dreamily into the fog.
Obviously, every time there was a fog, the tourists started yelling for helicopters.
‘He should take up Tantric Buddhism,’ I said, when the journalist was out of earshot. ‘Then he could learn to levitate.’
1983
A LAMENT FOR AFGHANISTAN
Anyone who reads around the travel books of the Thirties must, in the end, conclude that Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana is the masterpiece. Byron was a gentleman, a scholar and an aesthete, who drowned in 1941 when his ship to West Africa was torpedoed. In his short life he travelled as far as China and Tibet, and to most of the countries nearer home. In 1928 he published The Station, an account of a visit to the monasteries of Mount Athos, and followed it up with two pioneering volumes on Byzantine civilisation, which, at that time, received scant consideration from academic circles. He had some lively prejudices. Among the targets of his abuse were the Catholic (as opposed to the Orthodox) Church; the art of Classical Greece; the paintings of Rembrandt; Shakespeare – and when his Intourist guide protested that the plays could never have been written by a grocer from Stratford-upon-Avon, he murmured, ‘They are exactly the sort of plays I would expect a grocer to write.’ In 1932, attracted by the photo of a Seljuk tomb-tower on the Turkoman steppe, he set out on a quest for the origins of Islamic architecture. And, if it is fair to place his earlier books as the
work of a dazzlingly gifted young amateur, it is equally fair to rank The Road to Oxiana as a work of genius.
I write as a partisan, not as a critic. Long ago, I raised it to the status of ‘sacred text’, and thus beyond criticism. My own copy – now spineless and floodstained after four journeys to Central Asia - has been with me since the age of fifteen. Consequently, I am apt to resent suggestions that it is a ‘lost book’ or in need of being ‘rescued from the library shelves’. By a stroke of luck, it was never lost on me.
Because I felt the death of Robert Byron so keenly, I sought out his friends and pestered them for their reminiscences. ‘Very cross,’ they said. ‘An awful tease.’ ‘Surprisingly tough.’ ‘Abrasive.’ ‘Incredibly funny.’ ‘Fat.’ ‘Rather hideous . . . eyes like a fish.’ ‘Wonderful imitation of Queen Victoria.’ By the time I was twenty-two, I had read everything I could – by and about him - and that summer set out on my own journey to Oxiana.
In 1962 - six years before the Hippies wrecked it (by driving educated Afghans into the arms of the Marxists) – you could set off to Afghanistan with the anticipations of, say, Delacroix off to Algiers. On the streets of Herat you saw men in mountainous turbans, strolling hand in hand, with roses in their mouths and rifles wrapped in flowered chintz. In Badakhshan you could picnic on Chinese carpets and listen to the bulbul. In Balkh, the Mother of Cities, I asked a fakir the way to the shrine of Hadji Piardeh. ‘I don’t know it,’ he said. ‘It must have been destroyed by Genghiz.’
Even the Afghan Embassy in London introduced you to a world that was hilarious and strange. Control of the visa section rested with a tousle-haired Russian émigré giant, who had cut the lining of his jacket so that it hung, as a curtain, to hide the holes in the seat of his trousers. At opening time, he’d be stirring up clouds of dust with a broom, only to let it settle afresh on the collapsing furniture. Once, when I tipped him ten shillings, he hugged me, lifted me off the floor and bellowed: ‘I hope you have a very ACCIDENT-FREE trip to Afghanistan!’