Chasing A Chimera
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My Quest for the Yeti
By Reinhold Messner
St Martin’s Press
Price: $20.25
In 1978, Reinhold Messner climbed the highest of all peaks — Mt Everest — without bottled oxygen. In the same year he climbed Nanga Parbat alone. Two years later his solo expedition to the summit of Everest established his status as one of the world’s greatest mountaineers. Yet even with these accomplishments, Messner could not cease his adventures. He’s still climbing, and when he’s not, he’s usually walking toward the Poles.

But arguably his greatest adventure — one that has come closest to threatening the summiteer’s credibility — came in 1986 when, during a trek through Tibet, Messner encountered a figure not quite unlike himself — a legend in real life, a yeti.
Messner aspires to describe the ever-changing physical appearance of what is known in the West as the Abominable Snowman: ‘‘The creature towered menacingly, its face a grey 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.’’

Accompanying this altogether ambiguous, and not previously unknown, piece of information, Messner lets us in on the fact that it was high up in the mountains, on a cold dark night in a forest, at a time when he had sustained himself mostly on a diet of hard bread and bacon for days. Combine this with tales in summit circles that say Messner’s personality has undergone change after his high altitude climbs, suspicion targets brain damage due to lack of oxygen. There are others such as Messner’s sherpa who claims he introduced hash in high altitudes to the Austrian alpinist.

All facts, one would imagine, pointing to losing brain cells by the millions and almost certain delusional behaviour. The thought lends itself to you and to Messner only through the start of his latest written offering, My Quest For The Yeti. No one in their right mind, or even out of it, chases a hallucination for 12 years trying to prove it is true. Certainly not Messner, who even after losing seven toes to frostbite has always had mountains to climb and miles to go before he dreams.
From his first sighting to 1998, when Messner submitted his findings to a team of scientists, he walked through Himalayan villages in Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and India to ask the locals about the existence of the yeti, trying to separate myth from reality.

There’s little luck and plenty of trouble. Tibetans don’t talk of the yeti for fear that it will bring bad luck, meanwhile Messner loses a companion to blood poisoning, is trailed by Chinese soldiers, sleeps in a prison cell in Llahrigo, is chased by mountain dogs, and his first roll that contained footprints of the yeti gets damaged.
None of this, astonishingly, deters Messner from his search. Through his maze of data all that the explorer can tell us about the BigFoot, is that it is not the missing link, the apeman who spawns human progeny he is believed to be but a strange-postured species of brown bear called chemo.

For those who are unconvinced by this hypothesis, and there will be many, is woven another tale. A well-crafted story of an explorer’s adventure. Messner brings alive the past with the quasi-historical yarns of those who have looked for the yeti in the past, among them Alexander the Great. He also breathes life into the more contemporary issue of Chinese occupation of Tibet — which has turned the home of its once-artistic, predominantly spiritual community into habitat for kitsch and stone barracks.

There’s also some lacklustre prose — yes, even the author of the magical account The Crystal Horizon can have a bad hair day — which nevertheless captures the breathtaking vistas of Himalayan landscape. But the legend of yeti, the purpose of his book, eludes Messner. He certainly has a theory and he thinks he has proved it. But no one is really going to be convinced by the transformation of an ape into a bear overnight. Yet there is reassurance in disbelief, to know that amidst all the conquered mountains peaks some myths remain unchallenged.

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