Kitabı oku: «Yeti», sayfa 3

This, the classic sighting of bear tracks masquerading as yeti prints, is worth deconstructing. All the usual features are present: the shock of the initial sighting, the puzzlement, the backwards-facing feet, the fear of the Sherpas and the curiosity of the Sahib. As John Napier explains in his seminal study Bigfoot: The Yeti and Sasquatch in Myth and Reality,¹¹ bears are a good candidate for the makers of yeti footprints for several reasons. First, like humans, bears are plantigrade; that is, the anatomy of their walking leg is such that the sole of the foot takes the weight. Their toes and metatarsals are flat on the ground. So they make footprints that look like those of a huge human (or yeti). The other options are digitigrade, walking on the toes with the heel and wrist permanently raised, like dogs and cats, and unguligrade, walking on the nail or nails of the toes (what we call the hoof) with the heel/wrist and the digits permanently raised. So horses are running on their toenails.

Secondly, when bears are walking slowly their hindfeet land just behind the impression made by their forefeet, and when they are walking fast their hindfeet land just beyond the impression of the forefeet. And – here’s the important bit – at an intermediate speed the two footprints join together, sometimes with the toes of the forefeet appearing to be … reversed toes. To make this clear, the oft-repeated story of toes at the rear of the yeti footprint could be explained by medium-speed bears.

At an amble, the bear footprints follow one another more in a line, rather like those of a fashion model on a catwalk (well, a bit like that). This just might explain the footprints in a line seen by some witnesses. But there is another possible explanation for those linear sightings. Bears can also walk on their hindlegs for short distances and will stand on their hindlegs to fight with the claws on their front paws, to reach fruit from high branches, or to climb trees. These behaviours will result in human-looking bipedal footprints.

As for the ‘elephant’ footprints noted later by Shipton et al., when overnight temperatures are low an icy crust forms on the snow. This icy crust is 2 to 3 inches deep and can support the weight of a man. Mountaineers know this, so they get up just after midnight for an ‘Alpine start’ and move fast across the surface of the snow. Your crampons barely scratch the snow and it is a delight to climb at this time of the morning and watch the sun rise on the peaks around you. Later in the day, the crust melts and gives way when walked on, to the despair of the knackered climber, whose every step now plunges deep into the snow. At either side of the footprint, a roughly triangular area of snow caves in and the resulting shape is rhomboidal. If melting is now added, gigantic elephant-like tracks are the result.

Let’s get back to Frank Smythe:

On returning to the base camp some days later, the porters made a statement. It was witnessed by Oliver and runs as follows:

‘We, Wangdi Nurbu, Nurbu Bhotia and Pasang Urgen, porters employed by Mr F. S. Smythe, were accompanying Mr Smythe on July 17th over a glacier pass north of the Bhyundar Valley when we saw on the pass tracks which we knew to be those of a Mirka or jungli Admi (wild man). We have often seen bear, snow leopard and other animal tracks, but we swear that these tracks were none of these, but were the tracks of a Mirka.

‘We told Mr Smythe that these were the tracks of a Mirka and we saw him take photographs and make measurements. We have never seen a Mirka because anyone who sees one dies or is killed, but there are pictures of the tracks, which are the same as we have seen, in Tibetan monasteries.’

My photographs were developed by Kodak Ltd of Bombay under conditions that precluded any subsequent accusation of faking and, together with my measurements and observations, were sent to my literary agent, Mr Leonard P. Moore, who was instrumental in having them examined by Professor Julian Huxley, Secretary of the Zoological Society, Mr Martin A. G. Hinton, Keeper of Zoology at the Natural History Museum, and Mr R. I. Pocock. The conclusion reached by these experts was that the tracks were made by a bear. At first, due to a misunderstanding as to the exact locality in which the tracks had been seen, the bear was said to be Ursus arctos pruinosus, but subsequently it was decided that it was Ursus arctos isabellinus, which is distributed throughout the western and central Himalayas. The tracks agreed in size and character with that animal and there is no reason to suppose that they could have been made by anything else. This bear sometimes grows as large as, or larger than, a grizzly, and there is a well-grown specimen in the Natural History Museum. It also varies in colour from brown to silver-grey.

The fact that the tracks appeared to have been made by a biped is explained by the fact that the bear, like all bears, puts its rear foot at the rear end of the impression left by its front foot. Only the side toes would show, and this explains the Tibetans’ belief that the curious indentations, in reality superimposed by the rear foot, are the front toes of a Snowman who walks with his toes behind him. This also explains the size of the spoor, which when melted out by the sun would appear enormous. Mr Eric Shipton describes some tracks he saw near the peak of Nanda Ghunti in Garhwal as resembling those of a young elephant. So also would the tracks I saw when the sun had melted them away at the edges …

The Snowman is reputed to be large, fierce, and carnivorous; the large ones eat yaks and the small ones men. He is sometimes white, and sometimes black or brown. About the female, the most definite account I have heard is that she is only slightly less fierce than the male, but is hampered in her movements by exceptionally large pendulous breasts, which she must per force sling over her shoulders when walking or running.

Of recent years considerable force has been lent to the legend by Europeans having seen strange tracks in the snow, sometimes far above the permanent snow-line, apparently of a biped. Such tracks had in all cases been spoiled or partially spoiled by the sun, but if such tracks were made by bears, then it is obvious that bears very seldom wander on to the upper snows, otherwise fresh tracks unmelted by the sun would have been observed by travellers. The movements of animals are incalculable, and there seems no logical explanation as to why a bear should venture far from its haunts of woodland and pasture. There is one point in connection with this which may have an important bearing on the tracks we saw, which I have omitted previously in order to bring it in at this juncture. On the way up the Bhyundar Valley from the base camp, I saw a bear about 200 yards distant on the northern slopes of the valley. It bolted immediately, and so quickly that I did not catch more than a glimpse of it, and disappeared into a small cave under an overhanging crag. When the men, who were behind, came up with me, I suggested that we should try to coax it into the open, in order that I could photograph it, so the men threw stones into the cave while I stood by with my camera. But the bear was not to be scared out so easily, and as I had no rifle it was not advisable to approach near to the cave. It is possible that we so scared this bear that the same evening it made up the hillside some 4,000 feet to the pass. There are two objections to this theory: firstly, that it appeared to be the ordinary small black bear, and too small to make tracks of the size we saw, and, secondly, that the tracks ascended the glacier fully a mile to the east of the point where we saw the bear. We may, however, have unwittingly disturbed another and larger bear during our ascent to our camp. At all events, it is logical to assume that an animal would not venture so far from its native haunts without some strong motive to impel it. One last and very interesting point – The Sikh surveyor who I had met in the Bhyundar Valley was reported by the Postmaster of Joshimath as having seen a huge white bear in the neighbourhood of the Bhyundar Valley.

It seems possible that the Snowman legend originated through certain traders who saw bears when crossing the passes over the Himalayas and carried their stories into Tibet, where they became magnified and distorted by the people of that superstitious country which, though Buddhist in theory, has never emancipated itself from ancient nature and devil worship. Whether or not bears exist on the Tibetan side of the Himalayas I cannot say. It is probable that they do in comparatively low and densely forested valleys such as the Kharta and Kharma Valleys east of Mount Everest, and it may be that they are distributed more widely than is at present known.

After my return to England I wrote an article, which was published by The Times, in which I narrated my experiences and put forward my conclusions, which were based, of course, on the identifications of the zoological experts. I must confess that this article was provocative, not to say dogmatic, but until it was published I had no idea that the Abominable Snowman, as he is popularly known, is as much beloved by the great British public as the sea-serpent and the Loch Ness monster. Indeed, in debunking what had become an institution, I roused a hornet’s nest about my ears … ¹²

There is a great deal to draw from Frank Smythe’s account.¹³ His observations are comprehensive and his conclusions are clear: he decided that the tracks he saw were made by a bear. But did that mean that all footprints in snow were made by bears? He admits to his Times article being provocative and dogmatic, and in time this would have repercussions. The British public, however, were having none of it. Their appetite was for more mystery. And soon enough, along came some more clues.

CHAPTER THREE

Nazi SS Operation Tibet … shooting your wife is wrong … Abominable Snowmen of Everest … Shipton and Tilman … the last explorers … a Blank on the Map … Appendix B … a one-legged, carnivorous bird … the Ascent of Rum Doodle.

In his book My Quest for the Yeti, the mountaineer Reinhold Messner reproduces a letter sent to him by the German explorer Ernst Schäfer which refers to footprints seen by Smythe and Shipton:

In 1933–35, the British mountaineers Frank Smythe and Eric Shipton discovered the first ‘yeti footprints’, and published the pictures they took in The London Illustrated News and in Paris Match [Schäfer seemed unaware of the earlier Howard-Bury report]. This created a sensation. The ‘Abominable Snowman’ aroused the interest of journalists and opened up financial resources for numerous Everest expeditions. In 1938, after I had uncovered the whole sham in my publications with Senckenberg in Frankfurt and established the yeti’s real identity with the pictures and pelts of Tibetan bears, Smythe and Shipton came to me on their knees, begging me not to publish my findings in the English-speaking press. The secret had to be kept at all costs – ‘Or else the press won’t give us the money we need for our next Everest expedition.’¹

Can this be true? Could Smythe and Shipton really have been so cynical? If so, this would cast doubt on the yeti’s most iconic footprint, discovered later by Shipton in 1951. This case will take some unravelling, but it is an interesting journey to Mount Everest and beyond.

At the time of his alleged meeting with Smythe and Shipton, the 28-year-old Ernst Schäfer was a swashbuckling German explorer and ornithologist who had already been on two expeditions to China and Tibet under the leadership of Brooke Dolan, the son of a wealthy American industrialist. Schäfer had worked on these trips as a scientist and wrote a successful book about the second expedition which had made his name in Germany.² He could have emigrated to America and had a gilded career, but he sold out to the Nazis, as did hundreds of other young academics, seeing opportunities ahead. And then the Nazis demonstrated exactly what happens when criminals get hold of a modern industrial state, using fake science to justify their actions.

Schäfer’s colleague in 1938 was the anthropologist Bruno Beger, who was fascinated by the idea that the Aryans, ancestors of the Nordics, could still be found in a lost civilisation somewhere in Tibet. His proposal to the expedition was ‘to study the current racial-anthropological situation through measurements, trait research, photography and moulds … and to collect material about the proportion, origins, significance and development of the Nordic race in this region’.

Nordic culture was all the rage in the 1930s, as was the pseudo-science of eugenics. Tolkien used the Völsunga saga translated by William Morris of the Arts and Crafts movement in his The Lord of the Rings, as did Wagner in his Ring of the Nibelung cycle of operas. The eponymous ring would grant magical domination over the whole world. Wagner’s ideas were much lauded by Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy, and these Nordic myths fed the strange beliefs held by Hitler and his Reich Minister of the Interior, Heinrich Himmler, who was the founder of the German SS.

Schäfer’s third expedition was under Himmler’s personal patronage and he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer, a Nazi party rank approximating to major. Rather like the alpinist Heinrich Harrer, Schäfer claimed after the war that he had joined the SS to advance his career, but in fact he colluded in the hunt for evidence to support these Nazi folk myths. The expedition would search for proof of Aryan supremacy and also serve as a cover for offensive operations against British India during the coming war. Schäfer eventually would regret his alliance with the top Nazis: ‘He was to later call his alliance with Himmler his biggest mistake. But he was an opportunist who had a tremendous craving for recognition.’³

Himmler was obsessed by the belief in Aryan and Nordic racial superiority over lesser races (some of these ideas may have originated with Major Waddell, whom we met earlier, in Chapter Two). He believed in the Welteislehre, or Glacial Cosmogony, which held that the planets and moon were made of ice and that the solar system had evolved out of a cosmic collision of an icy star with our sun. This theory contradicted Albert Einstein’s ‘Jewish’ theory of relativity. Somehow, the Aryan race was bred out of an ice storm, evolved in the Arctic or Tibet, and founded a civilisation on the lost continent of Atlantis. Himmler, a failed chicken farmer, was fascinated by eugenics and wanted to breed back to ‘racially pure and healthy’ Aryans. For this he needed to know where the original stock originated.

The discovery of the Tarim mummies at Lop Nor in Central Asia by explorers such as Sven Hedin, Albert von Le Coq and Sir Aurel Stein lent credence to the idea that the Aryans came from Tibet. These corpses looked German or Irish and they were buried with sun symbols and woven twill cloth like that found in Austria. One found after the Nazi era even had greying reddish-brown hair framing high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, full lips and a ginger beard, and he was wearing a red twill tunic and leggings with a pattern resembling tartan. Was the homeland of the Indo-Germans therefore located somewhere in Tibet? Had there been an Aryan civilisation there, now lost? Was the Abominable Snowman racially related to Germans, and somehow branched off from our ancestors and still living in the ice of the Himalayas? These and other mystical ideas swirled around in the heads of the Welteislehre adherents such as Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Hitler, who said the Aryan type was ‘the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung’.

To support his theories, Himmler founded the SS Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage Society), an institute which mounted eight Indiana Jones-style expeditions worldwide to uncover the archaeological and cultural history of the Aryan race. The Ahnenerbe became a magnet for dubious individuals with bizarre ideas. One senior figure was interested in finding out whether Tibetan women hid magical stones in their vaginas. Others believed that ancient Nordic folk myths might act as an antidote to the disturbing new world of industrialisation, cities and consumerism. The Ahnenerbe also attracted ambitious young scientists like Schäfer who felt they needed a leg up the academic career ladder, despite the number of Jews whom the Nazis had removed from the universities.

Himmler’s ideas verged on the delusional. He instructed his scientists to look for evidence of ‘the thunderbolt, Thor’s hammer’, which he believed to be ‘an early, highly developed form of war weapon of our forefathers’. This notion is eerily prescient of the atomic bomb which the Nazis’ Uranprojekt was racing to build. It would be the magic ring which would give them mastery over the whole world. Himmler himself wore a Mjölnir pendant in the shape of Thor’s hammer.

The Ahnenerbe’s expeditions were calculated to promote the racial theories of the Nazis, and so the participating scientists had to allow the ideology in order to overcome any scientific objectivity. For a serious scientist such as Schäfer, this might have involved a certain amount of double-think. Ahnenerbe’s researchers travelled to Finland and Sweden to examine Bronze Age carvings and study folk customs; during the war they removed the Bayeux Tapestry to examine it for Aryan clues; they raced to Poland to appropriate the Veit Stoss altarpiece, and to the Crimea for Gothic artefacts; and, in this case, sent Schäfer to Tibet to find evidence of early Aryans’ conquest of Asia. And while they were at it, they might as well cause trouble for the British in India.

On his 1938–39 Tibet expedition, Schäfer’s first task was to research passes from which to mount guerrilla attacks on British India, and his second assignment was to find the blue-eyed, blond-haired lost tribe of Aryans living in Tibet. Just before the team left Germany in 1938, the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper ran an article on the expedition which alerted British officials to its intentions. They knew war was coming and refused Schäfer’s team entry to India. Himmler then wrote to Admiral Barry Domvile who happened to be both a Nazi supporter and former head of British naval intelligence, and Domvile gave Himmler’s letter to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. He then allowed the SS team to enter Sikkim, a region of northern India bordering Tibet (Domvile was interned during the war for his pro-Nazi inclinations).

Just before departure to Tibet, Schäfer had shot his wife Hertha in a bizarre duck-hunting accident. He said a sudden wave had unbalanced him and caused him to discharge the weapon into his spouse of only four months. The two servants with them did what they could, but she was dead by the time they got her home.

Schäfer had his own agenda in Tibet and considered Glacial Cosmogony as pseudo-scientific. His instincts were right, as this theory is now considered completely unscientific and another example of how easily large numbers of humans can be fooled. However, he went along with Himmler’s demands in order to be able to mount the expedition. In effect, he was doing precisely what he had accused Smythe and Shipton of: compromising with the truth to facilitate another trip.

The expedition did not go well. After obstructions from the British authorities in India, the party camped on the border between Sikkim and Tibet. After making contact with locals, Tibet’s council of ministers permitted Schäfer, the self-described ‘master of a hundred sciences’, to visit the forbidden capital of Lhasa. His team were told that they could not bring scientific equipment with them or kill any animals or birds, but both conditions were ignored. They decorated their mules with Nazi swastikas and shot every wild creature that came within range. They collected a staggering 3,500 birds, 2,000 eggs, 400 skulls and the pelts of countless mammals, reptiles, amphibians, several thousand butterflies, grasshoppers, 2,000 ethnological objects, minerals, maps and 40,000 black-and-white photographs which still reside in German museums and research institutes.

Schäfer was proud of being ‘the second white man to shoot a Giant Panda’ and he liked to smear the blood of his animal victims on his face. As we have seen, on the expedition with him was Bruno Beger, the anthropologist who later helped to select Jewish victims from Auschwitz for a skeleton collection. He measured the skulls of the Tibetan people they met with callipers and took plaster casts.⁴ The first attempt at making a mask failed when the Tibetan subject had a seizure and nearly choked to death.

Schäfer decided to commemorate his wife Hertha by firing a symbolic shot from his rifle, a curious idea considering the circumstances of her death. However, he forgot to remove the cleaning rod from the barrel and the breech exploded, knocking him off his feet and burning his face with the explosion.

On the positive side, Schäfer refused to take the stories of wild men seriously. He became testy with his porters, who day and night discussed the yeti, and so he started faking large footsteps outside their tents in the snow. In this he was to start a long tradition in yeti fakery. He was quite sure the stories arose from the Himalayan brown bear, and described the adventure that proved his theory:

On the morning of the second day, a wild-looking Wata [local tribesman] with a rascally face comes to me and tells the fantastic story of a snowman that haunts the tall mountains. This is the same mythical creature about which Himalaya explorers always like to write because it envelops the unconquered peaks of the mountain chains with the nimbus of mystery. It is supposed to be as tall as a yak, hairy like a bear, and walk on two legs like a man, but its soles are said to point backward so that one can never track its trail. At night it is supposed to roam, descend deep into the valleys, devastate the livestock of the native people, and tear apart men whom it then carries up to its mountain home near the glaciers.

After I listen calmly to this bloody tale, I convey to the Wata that he does not have to make up such a tall tale; however, if he could bring me to the cave of such a ‘snowman’, and if the monster is actually in its lair, then the empty tin can in my tent, which appears to be the object of his great pleasure, would be his reward. But should he have lied to his lord, added Wang [his Tibetan foreman], he could expect a beating with the riding crop. Smiling, with many bows, the lad bids his leave with the promise to return early the next morning and report to me. Wang is also of the opinion that there are snowmen and draws for me the face of the mystery animal in the darkest colours, just like he has heard about it from the elders of his native tribe countless times: devils and evil spirits wreak havoc up there day and night in order to kill men. ‘But Wang,’ I scoffed, ‘how can you as my senior companion believe in such fairy tales?’ Wang explained that these forces were manifest all around them. After all, ‘the same evil demons already tried to menace us many times as we traverse the wild steppes. They also sent us the violent snowstorms that fell on our weak little group like supernatural forces and at night wanted to rip apart our tents with crude fists as if they had rotten canvas before them.’ I insisted ‘that this snowman is nothing other than a bear, perhaps a “Mashinng”, a really large one; but with our “big gun”, I will easily shoot him dead before he even leaves the cave!’

The Wata returned within the day with a witness who had, while searching for lost sheep, found a cave in which ‘he beheld for the first time with his own eyes the yellow head of a snowman.’

Following his guides to the den of the yeti, I shot it at point-blank range when it emerged, roaring angrily, from its nap and it was indeed a Himalayan brown bear.⁵

On their return home to Germany, Reichsführer-SS Himmler greeted Schäfer and his expedition members on the tarmac at Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, where he presented Schäfer with the SS skull ring and dagger of honour. However, it ended badly for them all. Himmler’s puny physique, poor eyesight and digestive problems hardly made him the figurehead for a super-race. He was a pedant, a sadist, probably the most brutal mass murderer in history and the architect of the Holocaust. He was, in short, the middle manager from hell. He committed suicide in custody using a hidden cyanide pill.

Schäfer returned from Tibet with his 7,000 plant specimens with the intention of developing hardy strains of cereals for the newly conquered regions of Eastern Europe. He also brought back a poorly faked yeti specimen with a lower jaw made of clay with teeth jammed into it. His scientific reputation after the war was damaged by his association with Himmler, which perhaps explains why his rebuttal of the yeti story didn’t gain ground. The expedition cameraman who filmed the Tibet expedition afterwards worked at Dachau, recording prisoners made hypothermic in freezing water or suffocating in decompression chambers. These experiments on living human subjects were used to solve high-altitude and pilot-survival problems for the Luftwaffe.

Bruno Beger was soon busy selecting Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz and recording their skeletons and skulls for an anatomical institute in Strasbourg. Although convicted by a German court long after the war as an accessory to 86 murders, he was given the minimum sentence of three years in prison, which he never served. Author Heather Pringle tells how she tracked him down, aged ninety. Beger was unrepentant: he still thought that the Jews were a ‘mongrel race’, and he still believed in the racial science of the 1930s.⁶ Towards the end of their collaboration, Beger wrote to Schäfer, describing a ‘tall, healthy child of nature’ he had been experimenting on. ‘He could have been a Tibetan. His manner of speaking, his movements and the way he introduced himself were simply ravishing; in a word, from the Asian heartland.’ And then this child of nature was killed and dissected, another victim of the mindset that enabled Nazi science to regard fellow humans as objects to be experimented upon.

Schäfer had plans for a further expedition to Tibet during the war, ostensibly to harass the British forces in India. These hopes came to nothing. He wrote several books on Tibet, and may have had something to do with the Iron Man statue, a Buddhist figurine which mysteriously appeared in Germany sometime after 1939. This is beautifully carved from a piece of meteorite and featured an anticlockwise Buddhist swastika. This space Buddha was about as close as the Nazis got to their dreams of Glacial Cosmogony.

In this context, then, Schäfer’s letter to Messner is puzzling. He himself was convinced that the native porter’s stories about the yeti were simply sightings of Himalayan bears. And Frank Smythe had by then published articles and a book setting out his own reasons for the same conclusion. Shipton was another kettle of fish. I believe Schäfer had the wrong name: he meant Shipton and Tilman, a British climber and explorer with a more ambiguous attitude towards the yeti.

It could be argued that Schäfer had an axe to grind. He can hardly have been expected to be a British sympathiser. However, his conviction that the yeti was in fact a bear and his careful unravelling of the ‘hoax’ in his books suggests that he took a serious and scientific approach towards the truth. He quite rightly objected to what he regarded as a mischievous fable being used to fund Mount Everest expeditions. In the case of Shipton and Tilman, it is also just possible that he had misinterpreted the British humorous tendency.⁷

Besides, if Schäfer had captured a live yeti and taken him back to Nazi Germany, what would have become of the poor creature?

Somervell and Norton’s near-success on Mount Everest in 1924, coming to within 1,000 feet of the summit without oxygen sets, misled those who followed. Time and time again, the British sent expensive expeditions out to Tibet, and time and time again they were repulsed at around the same altitude. But the combination of the world’s highest mountain and now a mysterious man-beast was to prove irresistible for the British press and public alike. Pressure mounted on the Mount Everest Committee to make another attempt. So, in 1938, the inimitable Bill Tilman, the ‘last explorer’, was invited to lead a lightweight, somewhat cheaper, expedition to Everest, with a £2,360 budget instead of the £10,000 that the 1936 expedition had squandered: about £110,000 versus £500,000 in today’s money.

Tilman was certainly the greatest explorer and adventurer of the twentieth century. He won the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal in 1952, but his career also encompassed military service in both world wars: he won the Military Cross twice in the first conflict and led a band of underground Albanian Resistance fighters for the British Special Services in the Second World War. In between the wars, he worked as a planter in Africa where he met his long-term climbing companion Eric Shipton. He was the first to climb the Indian mountain Nanda Devi, the highest peak then climbed, and he led the 1938 Everest expedition. He evolved a lightweight, living-off-the-land style of exploration which is now much admired by other adventurers but which was difficult for his companions, who were expected to eat lentils and pemmican at high altitude. After the Second World War, he undertook a little spying in the Karakoram and then embarked on a second career as a deep-sea sailing explorer in a series of ancient Bristol pilot cutters, two of which he sank in unexpected encounters with the land. After a lifetime of inventive expeditions to high mountains and cold seas, he and his crew eventually disappeared on an Antarctic voyage in his 80th year, a mystery to the end.