When I wake, the fire's gone out. The sherpa standing watch is on his back, snoring. There's a whistling — at a high, high pitch— impossibly far off.
When Alexander had conquered the entire known world — when he'd finally subjugated even the Indus Valley and pushed his phalanxes up to the precipices and chasms of the Kashmir — he's said to have sent a small expedition off to engage the yeti, maddeningly visible on the higher elevations. The expedition perished and the yeti eluded him. Pliny the Elder, who would later fall victim to his own thirst for knowledge while attempting to record natural processes during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, insisted that in the Land of the Satyrs — the mountains that lay to the east of India — lived creatures that were extremely swift and could run on two feet or four. They bore a human shape and because of their agility and strength could be caught only when infirm or old.
Aelianus, historian of the Emperor Septimus, wrote of his legions' frustration with the same satyrs, whom he described as shaggy-haired and startlingly accurate with stones. As far back as 1832, Britain's first representative to Nepal described an unknown creature that moved erectly, was covered in long, dark hair, and had no tail.
But of course it wasn't until a scientist — the renowned Tibetan specialist L. A. Waddell — reported sightings that Western interest was piqued. And when in 1921 Howard-Bury reported the animals on the north side of Everest at nineteen thousand feet, a journalist rendered the yeti's Tibetan name as abominable snowman: a mistranslation that torments us to this day. “And no wild goose chases after abominable snowmen,” the Reichsführer warned me during our last personal interview before my departure.
“What do they eat?” Beger asks once we're under way the next morning. He's taken to riding one of the pack animals for part of the day to rest his foot. Undifferentiated flatness stretches as far as the eye can see. Occasionally some brittle yellow grass. And this is the late summer, when the vegetation is at its best.
“Glacier rats,” Gulam calls from the front the column, two animals ahead. “Some rabbits. Maybe a marmot.”
Our column is stopped for the rest of the morning by winds we heard approaching while they were still hours off. When they scoured across the last few hundred yards we could see the hard-pan come alive in a line. Now that they've arrived we can lean at an angle into them without falling forward. A piece of clothing is ripped from one of our bundles and spirited off into the distance. Eventually the animals are gathered in a circle and made to sit while we take shelter in the center. Beger and I wrap our heads against the blowing grit. We can hear the porters playing bakchen, a game like dominos.
Our plan is to go at least seventeen hundred kilometers into the heart of the Chang Tang. The Tibetan name is synonymous with hardship and desolation. The entire plateau possesses no plants other than artemisia, wild nettles, a few dwarf willows I'm assured are still a thousand kilometers away, and these arid and burnt-looking needlegrasses now aflutter in the gale. Only two nomadic and elusive tribes inhabit its rim. Gulam's second in command is along principally to work his magic to prevent hail. Within minutes a clear sky here can cloud over with horrendous and lethal hailstorms. In one of the first European accounts of the plateau, an entry lists the loss of five men, each of their names followed by the phrase Dead by Hail.
As quickly as the wind comes, it's gone. We stand again, and what we shake off glitters in the sun. The ground feels frozen — the bone-dry hardpan rests on permafrost — and yet the sun is hot and there's no trace of snow. We estimate our altitude to be sixteen thousand feet. Our hearts pound every day, as a matter of course, from the thinness of the air and the excitement.
We get under way again. Within the hour, there's some distress from the porters. They've lost their tea maker, and I refuse to allow them to go back for it.
Beger is back on foot, keeping up nicely, with a little hop-step he's developed. He asks my opinion of the Polish air force.
“Are you thinking of Ewald?” I ask.
“Alfred,” he says. “Ewald's the sapper.”
“Of course,” I tell him. “Ewald's the sapper.” After giving the matter thought, I dismiss his worries. One of the few details the Italian news account was able to provide concerned the massive nature of our initial attacks on the Poles' airfields. “And I've seen the Poles' airfields,” I remind him. “They're the Tibetans of Europe.”
He laughs, pleased, and repeats the phrase.
I overheard him and some of his cronies in a wine cellar near the university the night before we left. He was unaware I was occupying the next high-backed booth. “He's like a father to you,” one of the cronies had joked.
“Yes, the kind effortlessly surpassed,” he'd responded. When the laughter subsided he referred to my book, published the year before, and quoted the opening sentence.
“All right, you lot, keep it down,” the serving girl had scolded the gathering with a mock sternness from her station behind the bar.
Say what you will about the National Socialists' ideologies, but they're all essentially ideologies of human inequality. Of which a half hour in any Tibetan village would provide ample proof: between the walls and the woodpiles in every courtyard are the proudly displayed chest-high mounds of horse manure; beside the manure will always be someone as apparently simpleminded as he is elderly, pounding butter tea in a knee-high cylinder. For days afterward you'll smell of frozen garlic and rancid fat.
Families are helpful panoplies of any number of degenerate diagnostic characteristics, as if arrayed for the scientist's perusal. Even the most masculine of the porters we have here with us partake at times of the nature of the child, or the female, or the senile Caucasian. During the planning of our trek, for example, Gulam could not be instructed to use my fountain pen. Instead he took it in his fist and tapped out a shape on the paper as if he was working with a chisel.
These are people whose methods of going about the day have remained unchanged since the Stone Age. And yet they were for a time in the ancient world the uncontested masters of Central Asia.
My theory is that the altitude, combined with the intensity of ultraviolet rays and the cold, hugely reduces the likelihood of bacterial reproduction. Otherwise these people would have long since died off, given their lack of commitment to even the most elementary hygiene.
…
Another long week of walking and riding. Beger cries out periodically when he turns his foot in his boot. The porters have tried a different poultice.
At twilight we come to the edge of a great salt lake, a startling robin's egg blue in the blinding sun. Dried salts of varying widths band the shoreline. Three of the porters explore with Gulam while the others start a fire and erect a communal tent. Some sort of animal sinew is employed for the guy ropes.
Beger is of the opinion that we have a much better chance of finding the yeti in the higher elevations, where most of the sightings have been recorded.
“The conventional wisdom,” I tell him.
He responds with an unpleasant smile before turning away. The lobes of his ears below his fur hat are a merry red from the sun. “Here, what's to prevent them from seeing us coming kilometers and kilometers away?” he asks.
“By all accounts they have no fear of people,” I remind him. “And of course they'd have as much warning in the mountains as they would here.”
He glumly drops the subject.
“Our only alternative is to choose whom to trust and then to trust them,” I tell him.
He snorts.
Gulam returns pleased. A short way down the shoreline are fresh footprints and the crushed bones of something.