Mountain man's hunt for another meeting with yeti

LONDON - "It's a nice view, isn't it?" says someone. Reinhold Messner is looking out across a panorama of London, over grimy rooftops on a rare smog-free day.

He does not answer. Not surprising, perhaps, from a man who lives for part of the year in an ancient Alpine castle surrounded on three sides by sheer rock, who was the first person to climb all 14 mountains over 8000m, and who has come face to face with a yeti.

Though many people know Messner, aged 54, for his mountaineering accomplishments, for almost 14 years he has quietly been pursuing the truth behind the myth of the "abominable snowman."

The term was coined by a British journalist back in the 1920s to describe the animal about which Tibetans and others in the Himalayas told tales that fascinated Western visitors.

The first well-known, and documented, sighting of a phenomenon attributed to the yeti was the discovery of naked footprints in the snows of Mt Everest, at 6400m, in 1921 by Colonel C.K. Howard-Bury, then a well-known climber.

His porters told him it was "metch-kangmi" - literally, the stinking man of the snow.

Messner believes that he now knows the truth about the yeti.

"Do you know the yeti?" he asks, his eyes watching me intensely, his voice implying that he's used to people answering no.

I always thought the yeti was real because as a child, I read Herge's Tintin in Tibet. The yeti is depicted as something like a huge orang-utan living high on the snow slopes. Nobody told me it was a myth, and nobody proved it did not exist.

What's more, as the story was published in 1960 and has been translated into 28 languages (including Chinese and, ironically, Tibetan) it seems likely that many other children around the world have grown up feeling, as I did, that the yeti was another of the cast of characters who existed as long as you did not look straight at them.

Messner, however, despite his years of travels in the Himalayas, always thought such tales were utter rubbish - until he came face to face with a yeti while walking alone in July 1986 somewhere in Tibet.

In his latest book, My Quest for the Yeti, he describes what happened.

"Sometime between dusk and midnight ... I suddenly heard an eerie sound - a whistling noise, similar to the warning call mountain goats make.

"Out of the corner of my eye I saw the outline of an upright figure dart between the trees to the edge of the clearing.



"The figure hurried on, silent and hunched forward, disappearing behind a tree only to reappear again against the moonlight. It stopped for a moment and turned to look at me.

"Again I heard the whistle, more of an angry hiss, and for a heartbeat I saw eyes and teeth. The creature towered menacingly, its face a gray shadow, its body a black outline.

"Covered with hair, it stood upright on two short legs and had powerful arms that hung down almost to its knees.

"I guessed it to be over seven feet tall. Its body looked much heavier than that of a man of that size, but it moved with such agility and power toward the edge of the escarpment that I was both startled and relieved."



To his surprise, he was scorned in Europe and the United States when he reported his experience. So he determined to track down the yeti - if not to capture it, then to understand what animal had given rise to the legend.

It has been a long search, and in the process Messner realised that by exploring, he was tearing apart a myth - a process which he sees reflected in the increasing commercialisation of the world's highest mountain, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and our growing preference for fact over storytelling.

His searches took him through the highlands and lowlands of the Himalayan countries and to countless fake hides and tall stories.

Even by the end of his search, he had not seen a yeti in its lair.

But he did conclude that what we call a yeti is actually a species of bear which split from the main species many thousands of years ago, and has adapted to life in the sparse environment of the mountains, only rarely encountering humans.

The legend grew from the oral tradition of the region; though once Westerners arrived they latched on to it, keen to discover (and tear down) new myths and tales.

The end result, Messner believes, is that Western visitors began echoing back the tale of the yeti to Himalayan people who had not heard it, but who found that by telling (and inflating) such tales they could persuade these rich foreigners to linger.

So there are two sides to the yeti: the reality - a sort of bear-like animal - and the legend, expressed by stories such as Tintin, of a powerful man-animal which abducts women and children.

"I define the yeti as the sum of the legend and the zoological reality,"says Messner.

The Himalayan people have many names for the animal of the legend - chemo, dremo being typical (they never use "yeti").

But it is possible that the yeti legend might disappear, subsumed by the Chinese invasion of Tibet. Messner has seen it at first hand over years.

Won't his book destroy the legend?

He smiles again. "The Tibetans won't read it. Even if they could read it. And for us in the West, it was important to me to show that this wasn't just some tale.

"The yeti, you see, is a monster created in the people's heads from the reality. I am sure: the yeti will never die."

- INDEPENDENT