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BOOKS
Big
Foot Pursuit
One legend
goes after another in the snowy expanse of the Himalayas
By
Suman Dubey
 |
MY
QUEST FOR THE YETI
By Reinhold Messner
Macmillan
Pages: 165
£ 14.99 |
What
happens when two legends meet? One, from the real world, the first man
to reach the summit of Mt Everest without using bottled oxygen, the first
to climb all 14 mountains higher than 8,000 metres, and arguably the most
accomplished mountaineer alive. The other, a creature of the wild, unseen
and uncaught, yet all pervasive in the lore of the Himalayas and Tibet,
a riddle without as yet an acknowledged reality. Such an encounter can
only be momentous-and this vivid and gripping account of it doesn't disappoint.
Reinhold
Messner is not only a great explorer and climber, he is an accomplished
storyteller. His books, about a dozen by now, are memorable not only for
the feats they describe but the manner in which they do so. His search
for the yeti has the suspense of a mystery and the thrill of an adventure.
Most expeditions that set out to find the mythical hairy beast who had
left footprints for many to see but had never itself been sighted, returned
empty-handed, rich in theory but poor on fact. Messner has actually attempted
an answer to the question that has dogged them all: Does the yeti exist?
Messner's
interest in the yeti emerges from a mid-1986
encounter with an animal in the jungles of eastern Tibet somewhere near
the upper reaches of the Mekong river. Messner was transfixed by the first,
fleeting appearance of the "apparition", as he calls it. He
didn't have the presence of mind to photograph it, but it had left a footprint
that was suggestive of a yeti's footprint photographed by another great
Himalayan explorer, Eric Shipton, in 1951. Then, pushing on through the
forest, he saw it again. And the legend of the yeti took over: It stood
over 7 ft tall, it seemed to change shape the longer he stared at it,
and it ran with a power and agility no human could match.
That was
the beginning of Messner's quest. It was never far from his thoughts,
as he made one remarkable climb or exploration after another. Following
the 1986 encounter, he made no fewer than 21 explorations which he describes
as "yeti research expeditions" before presenting his findings
to the world of science in late 1998. Everywhere he went, from the Karakoram
to Bhutan, from Nepal to eastern Tibet, Messner came across countless
people who had stories to tell about the yeti.
Those who
claimed to have seen it unfailingly described it as walking on two feet,
unlike bears which move on all fours, taller than a man, hairy, and capable
of great strength and speed. In monasteries and elsewhere, Messner was
shown relics said to be of yetis', but, as with the famous scalp at Pangboche
monastery in Solo Khumbu in the Everest region, they turned out to be
something else. He also corresponded with a German explorer and zoologist
sent by Nazi Germany to incite the Tibetans against the British before
World War II who in the process also searched for the yeti. Finally, in
the summer of 1997, Messner was able to photograph a yeti-like creature
in the Karakorams, and he felt ready to knit all the pieces of his research
together.
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