LEGEND NOT PROVED

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27065, 13 June 1953, Page 9

LEGEND NOT PROVED

No Trace Of The Snowman (From the Special Correspondent of “The Times”—Copyright) BASE CAMP. It seems improbable that the present British expedition to Mount Everest, whatever its other -achievements, will be able to record an encounter with the Abominable Snowman; for among the habits cf that intriguing creature appears to be a preference for imprinting his squashy footprints in the snows of autumn. The Snowman may rest assured, however, that he is not forgotten; your correspondent has looked eagerly for traces of him in every secluded gull}, and on every patch of clear snow, and has been disappointed that not so much as a toeprint has been produced in response to an offer of 100 rupees (about £5) made public among the local Sherpa population. In a way this is odd; for there seems no doubt at all in the mind of any local inhabitant that the Abominable Snowman, or yeti, exists and has his home in the mountains of the Everest region. The monks of Thyangboche monastery, some miles south of the

mountain, tell almost casually of the occasion when a Snowman appeared on the heights above their buildings apd was frightened away (as well he might be) by the concerted blowing and thumping of the monastic trumpets and drums. They speak with the same realistic acceptance of what they call a recent incident in a region of southern Tibet, only a few miles away across the mountain frontier. There, it is said, Snowmen made an intolerable nuisance of themselves each night by undoing every job of work undertaken by the villagers—uprooting their potatoes, unroofing their houses, dirtying their washing. The villagers dealt simply and traditionally with them by placing large bowls of chang (homebrewed beer) in prominent places near their houses. Next night the Snowmen, intoxicated as apparently only yetis can be, were easily slaughtered.

Familiar Folk-Story This familiar folk-story with the Abominable Snowman playing the part of the Welsh goblin, has a curious and unexpected seq'uel. According to the monks of Thyangboche the local Tibetan authorities had qualms of conscience about the rather tainted methods used to defeat the yetis. Today, they insist in all seriousness, thgre exists in that district of Tibet a local administrative order forbidding the ill-treatment of Abominable Snowmen. In 1951 Sen Tensing gave Eric Shipton a circumstantial eye-witness account of the appearance of a yeti at Thyangboche; and he is still ready to talk about the creature. He says that Snowmen, though of moderate height, have the strength of four men; one village in the Sherpa district of Khumbu, he claims, has been repeatedly annoyed by their predeliction for removing the roofs of houses (Sherpa roofs are not very firmly attached to their walls, and indeed in some hill villages are merely held on by-heavy, stones). Another Sherpa porter claims to have met a yeti face to face in the Khumbu valley, the glacier valley running down from Mount Everest towards Namche Bazar. From his account of the incident it seems likely that he did in fact see some sort of creature: but he has been asked to tell the tale so often that the details have acquired an unnatural clarity, and • include that familiar goblinesque feature, feet placed back to front. Sherpas in Agreement All this, it may be said, is no more than fable and legend of a kind common among peasant peoples of the world over; but there is a disconcerting measure of agreement among Sherpas on the general characteristics of the yeti. He is said to stand about sft 6in high and to be covered, including his face, with brownish hair. He walks sometimes on his hind legs, sometimes on all fours.

His cries are of two kinds—a sort of wail. *and a bark; sounds heard recently by Colonel Hunt, leader of this expedition, and some companions, and taken by them to be the cat-calls of Sherpas, were confidently interpreted by their porters as the calls of the Abominable Snowman. The principal food of the yeti, so it is said, is the small tailless Tibetan rat, not unlike a hamster, which is common among these mountains. (Other rather less convincing accounts say he eats yaks and humans). * The Sherpas appear to think of the yeti as some kind of wild man rather than any species of animal. Most of the evidence, however —and among this expedition it is generally assumed that the yeti exists in some form or another—seems to point to an ape; and it is perhaps not without signi-

ficance that the mountains of this range are known, locally as the Mahalangur—the Great Langur Range. Langur monkeys do live in the lower hills, of the Himalaya, though not generally above the snowline, as the yeti apparently does; it has been suggested that the Abominable Snowmen are elderly and unproductive members of Langur tribes, expelled into the high mountains to spend a mysterious dotage among the snows. Footprint Legend But the spoor of the Snowman' is unlike any known animal’s, and those v<ho have seen it are not inclined to accept the theory that each footprint is a double imprint—fore and hind foot superimposed—of the. Langur monkey: a theory that has found a certain amount of favour among remote London -savants. It is equally difficult for anyone who has visited this part of Nepal or southern Tibet to swallow the ingenious suggestion, recently put forward in the “Glasgow Herald,” that the Snowman’s footprints are no more than some kind of meteorological phenomenon. Intelligent opinion here is so entirely convinced—-

indeed, so matter-of-fact on the subject—that the yeti is a creature of flesh and blood. So the Abominable Snowman keeps his secret. No corpse of a yeti has ever been found. The spoor, seen on several occasions by responsible Europeans, has never been accompanied by droppfngs. Yeti footprints in soft snow have generally disappeared after some hundreds of yards and have certainly never led investigators to a lair. It is perhaps permissible to hope that with Everest conquered this baffling creature will remain, secure in some ghastly cavern as he eats his tailless rats, “not at home” to the inquisitive. (Copyrights