Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Ancestral Legacies

This is the roof of the world. An immense, sequestered place, the highest of the high plateaus, many times the size of the Reich. I'm still sick. The porters still gesticulate and exchange private jokes when they assume my attention is elsewhere. Beger's bad ankle is still swollen. Somewhere I've misplaced my certainty.

The day was brutally hot and now no one can get warm. We sit around the fire like terns thunderstruck by the cold. Ahead of us the hardpan goes on for two thousand kilometers before it encounters a tree. It feels like the back of the beyond, the place where rumors lose their way. This is the second week of the trek, and every aspect of what's surrounded us has been featureless.

Beger lies on his side wrapped in a blanket. The boot on his good foot is too near the fire. We watch its sole sizzle as though we're dumbfounded by speech. Above us the starlessness comes and goes. When the wind dies, there's no sound. One of the pack animals coughs up something with a ragged, liquid snort.

We're feeding the fire with pats of yak dung. So even it is hushed. It's a feeble, smelly warmth.

We're without information or curiosity. Neither of us speculate. Confronted with what surrounds us, our powers of imagination have dissipated.

The world is empty. The world in every direction is empty. After sunup the sky comes down like an edict. The blue is so intense that birds fly low to the ground, intimidated.

In Lharigo I was chased away from a nomad encampment.

Children threw stones. Dogs gamboled unpleasantly about my heels. Women waved small ceramic pots of flour to exorcise my evil spirit.

Beger received the same greeting when he straggled in an hour or so later. “I don't think we should ask about the yeti,” he said, grimacing at his forearm. A dog had shredded his sleeve.

My name is Ernst Schäfer and I sit with my assistant, Beger, and seven sherpas with uncertain work habits only a very small part of the way across the Chang Tang, the frozen desert between the Trans-Himalayas and the Kunlun Mountains.

The sherpas, already convinced of our slow-wittedness, tell stories of the yeti — women the yeti have abducted, yaks killed in a single blow, shattered sheep pens, and always the ubiquitous footprints. How can you tell when a yak's been killed in a single blow? Beger wants to know. In response they snigger at him and pass around a small pot of dried cream and a sack of what they call tsampa, a kind of roasted barley. Beger is offered none of either. They're really a very dirty people.

Gulam, the sherpas' leader, intones as though telling ghost stories to a child, “They come into the village and take what they want.” The other porters parody the terrified expressions of the eyewitnesses.

“When the facts run dry, they start inventing,” Beger complains, gingerly unlacing his boot. “They lie to us on principle.”

His foot does not look good. My guess would be an infection from a leech at the beginning of the trip.

Beger and I are the entirety of Operation Tibet, which was a closely guarded secret when we began and, now that we're a fly-speck in the darkness on the other side of the moon, has no doubt become even more so. We are what's known back at the offices of the Reichsführer SS as the Schäfer Unit. This has been the cause of much bitter amusement on Beger's part. Whenever we hit a snag or find ourselves powerless before native intransigence or a pack of goats that won't clear the track, leaving us half-frozen and shivering and peering miserably down into an icy abyss, Beger will say, “Don't they see that we're the Schäfer Unit?”

“I think they do,” I'll tell him.

Our purpose, as far as the Reichschancellery understands, is twofold. First, we're to explore prehistoric and linguistic issues related to locating the core of the Nordic-Aryan legacy. The language is the Reichsführer's. And second, the two of us are to incite the Tibetan army against British troops. The plan involves our rendezvousing with emissaries from our new ally, the Bolsheviks. With their help, I'm to become a German Lawrence of the Himalayas. The Bolshevik emissaries are nowhere to be found. There is no Tibetan army, and there are no British troops.

This kind of foolishness carries very little water with me. Before I was assigned to Ancestral Legacy, an odd bureaucratic backwater recently flooded with funding, I was an ornithologist of international renown, as well as an expert in zoology, botany, agriculture, and ethnology. Not to mention one of the foremost Tibetan specialists of this age. So, as I told Beger, while I've been continually impressed with Reichsführer Himmler's political gifts, I've been able to contain my awe when it comes to his scientific theories. His theories are the donkey cart we've used to land us where we want to be: here on this high plateau with sufficient funding and no oversight, in search of the yeti.

Beger's interests in the yeti lie in his having made a name for himself with a precocious monograph on the importance of the forehead in racial analysis. He studied anthropology at the institute in Berlin-Dahlem with Fischer and Abel, and he's convinced the yeti are an early hominid. He can imagine to what uses a yeti skull could be put in his research. And naturally he's devoted to science, so in the normal course of events he can work up a useful curiosity about most phenomena. Plus there's the invigorating fact that service in the Schäfer Unit has excused him from active military duty. His service to the Fatherland is supposed to be his ongoing evaluation of the Tibetan material we're intended to gather.

We haven't gathered much. He did some desultory poking around with one of the sherpas as translator before we left Lha-rigo. But for the most part I've led us to areas considered desolate even by Tibetan standards: areas of the yeti, or of nothing at all.

The ideal age for a man on an expedition like this is between thirty-one and thirty-five. I'm thirty-seven. A man much younger, like Beger, who's twenty-five, possesses the necessary vigor in abundance but not the discipline and focus of mind so crucial to patient inquiry.

And lately his powers of observation have been curtailed sharply by a postadolescent self-absorption. He's miserable about his foot and miserable that we're so out of touch with the world. He has two brothers serving in the war with Poland, a bit of news we learned about from a week-old Italian newspaper.

Of course we knew something was up before we left.

One brother is a Stuka pilot, the other a sapper in the Wehr-macht. I do a poor job keeping track of which is which.

This part of the Chang Tang is far from even the rarely used trade routes. Gulam has led us here because his uncle and brother insist that yeti roam these regions at night in search of food. During the day, with nothing stirring in any direction, the notion seems absurd, but we do well to remind ourselves that over the centuries the Tibetans have learned to survive in an environment that presents an unyielding stone face to outsiders.

We have more than Gulam's assertions on which to base our decision: two days into the trek we encountered a veritable square dance of footprints baked into a previously marshy depression near a water source. The footprints were six inches deep and two and a half feet long. A separate and enormous big toe was clearly visible on each.

“What was this, a meeting hall?” Beger remarked, unsure where to begin with his measuring tape.

…

One sherpa stands watch while the others sleep. Beger's head is under the blanket, and because his complaints have stopped I assume he's asleep as well. Eventually he pulls his boot from the fire.

Each night, my shivering prevents me from listening as intently as I would like. I have not found a solution to this problem. The previous night I walked off half a kilometer into the darkness, keeping a fix on the wavering glow of the fire. The exercise warmed me a little, and as soon as I stopped moving, small, brittle sounds rose up around me. Nocturnal rodents or insects, perhaps, going about their business. Gazing off at a tiny glow of warmth in the distance: that must be, I realized, the yeti's experience.

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.

“Maybe they're using this as a salt lick,” Beger says from inside the tent.

After dark a yak is set out as a lure. Staked to the ground fifty yards or so from the camp, it bleats and grunts its frustration at being separated from its fellows. I clean and ready our rifles. They're formidable, if a little balky when left untended, but their heft is reassuring. The yak bleats all night long. The next day we travel twenty or so kilometers around the shoreline and repeat the procedure.

The guns travel in specially sewn oilskin pouches for protection against the grit. Beger tries soaking his foot in the salt water while we watch the sun set. Up to this point, in terms of birds, I've noticed only a few small snow finches and the occasional sand grouse.

The sun's rays lance over mountain ridges that remain unimaginably distant. The salt around us turns orange in the light.

From that first childhood moment in which I could see over my windowsill, I dreamed of far horizons. At the age of seven I found a translation of Sir Charles Bell's Grammar of Colloquial Tibetan. The first two phrases I learned were “the elephant gun is on the yak” and “all monks are too lazy.” Few foreigners have explored Tibet as comprehensively as I have. I've traversed eleven thousand kilometers on quests botanical and zoological. I've suffered missionaries, British colonial officers, unwashed philosophers, and the mineral ingratitude of the natives themselves. With Tibet, everyone grasps a different aspect, but no one comprehends the entirety. It's more than a country. It's an island looking down on the rest of the planet.

Our third morning at the lake, the yak is still bleating, the wind still blowing. Outside the tent it's very cold. I watch two of the porters rig up an ingenious little sling for their food pouches.

I'm interested in the racial origins of inventiveness. The gene for nomadism is clearly hereditary, given that racial groups like the Comanche, the Gypsies, and the Tibetans are all nomadic; what, then, of the gene for resourcefulness of a certain kind, or inventiveness? Might that not be an area in which such peoples are our equal, if not superior?

Beger, when I raise the notion, is intrigued by the idea, within limits.

This is a golden time for anthropologists, especially within the Reich. Lenz was certainly correct to remark that we're presently governed by the first widely influential leader to recognize that the central mission of politics is race hygiene. All of us in the sciences have profited by such a regime, even if we've also had to accommodate ourselves to a good deal of foolishness and boorishness. It is, we all agree, crucial to delineate precisely and objectively the hierarchical boundaries between the classes and the races, because scientific precision reassures the ordinary citizen that the law will protect his own security.

We've all done our bit. Ancestral Legacy devoted many man-hours of work to the drafting of the Marriage Health Law, especially to the definitions of hereditary degeneracy in its various manifestations. And before this mission I myself had begun branching out into the more positive aspects of eugenics: conceiving new methods to increase the birthrate of the superior populations. It's a national opportunity. And there's simply too much funding there to ignore.

The new poultice seems to have made Beger worse. He soldiers on but remarks more than once with a sheepish smile that he's feeling a little green. We stop for a midday meal, and I tend to his foot myself. The smell once his boot is off is eye-watering.

“We may have to go back,” I tell him, unwrapping the mess.

He can't even bring himself to disagree, though he's stricken at the prospect of having let us down.

Gulam's hail magician, who also dabbles in medicine, is called over to examine the foot. He seems briskly untroubled by what he sees and returns half an hour later with some kind of paste in a wooden bowl. He applies the paste with his fingers and leaves me to rewrap the foot.

The next morning the tethered yak is gone. The tether is snapped. Footprints surround the spot and trail away to the salt lake, where they disappear. I ask who was on watch but the porters refuse to acknowledge any accusation in my question. The yeti are, after all, magical animals.

The incident does seem to have affected morale, however. A certain listlessness or wariness is evident in the manner in which the group goes about its business of packing up and preparing to get under way. “We will all be killed,” one of the porters says sotto voce to Gulam, believing me out of earshot. He sounds matter-of-fact.

I take advantage of a small snow squall nearby to hold up the column, gather the porters round and deliver a scientific lecture on the origins of snowstorms. I want them to register that a white man's rationality can have more power than all of the mountain spirits whirling in their heads. They seem impressed enough with the information they've been given. I ask if there are questions, and they all stare back at me silently. I give the word for the column to proceed.

We strike out, finally, from the shores of the lake, heading back into the endless plains. The change depresses Beger's spirits further. “How much longer like this?” he asks the porter closest to him on the pack animal.

“Until the rocks grow beards,” the porter jokes.

Two or three of them still mutter every so often about the loss of their tea maker. But they are of a race that can make do in any number of ways, I remind myself. This is a people who can burn sheep dung hot enough to melt metal.

Truth be told, our friend Reichsführer Himmler has had some very strange ideas. He wants to prove that the Nordic race descended directly from the skies. His theory of glacial cosmogony insists that all cosmic energy erupts from the collision between ice and fire, and nowhere is that clash more primeval, of course, than here, where the land is closest to the upper sky. Hence the entire department of Ancestral Legacy, with its charge to study the origi-nary area, spirit, deeds, and legacy of the Indo-Germanic race. The whole thing is mostly unscientific. He's sent us off in search of a proto-Gangetic Indo-European language, which would be evidence that Tibet was once inhabited by a Caucasian race, perhaps ancestors of the Scythians. I had a number of talks with him in which I sought to guide him back to firmer theoretical ground, all without success. There is a certain futility to resisting one of the Reichsführer's pet projects.

In the middle of the night I'm awakened by that same high whistling. Surrounded by snores, I wrestle myself hurriedly into my outer garments and emerge from the tent, shining my pocket torch about. The porter on watch is gazing disinterestedly off into the darkness. When I shine my beam in the direction of our tethered yak, it's swallowed in the gloom. I investigate. The tethered yak is gone. The porter claims to have heard nothing.

The entire next day Beger seems half-asleep. Every so often a porter's casual hand nudges him back upright on his pack animal.

During the evening meal that night their barley beer tastes slightly strange. Beger is already asleep and I find that I too can hardly keep my eyes open. I give Gulam instructions about tethering the next yak closer to camp and then close my eyes for a moment's rest. The next morning I wake very late, my mouth an old stewpot. The sun outside the tent is blinding. The yak is tethered nearby, as I requested. The porters and the other pack animals are gone.

Beger exhibits surprisingly little reaction to the news. They left water and food, as well as the guns. I have my compass. But with only the two of us, we're at least three weeks from help, I tell him.

“At least,” he agrees, his face turned to the tent wall.

We seem unable to rouse ourselves quickly, and thus get started distressingly late in the day. The yak periodically rebels at being ridden, so we make only a handful of kilometers before having to stop for the night. We manage three days of this before that yak disappears as well. This time even the tether is gone.

“Somewhere some yeti are having a feast,” Beger says to himself when I inform him. He spends the day out of the sun in the dispirited half teepee of the tent. Without help, I've only been able to erect it in a semicollapsed way.

What a creature, I think, with real wonder. Sitting at the tent's entrance and tracking the dust storms and whirligigs on the horizon, I remind myself that I've done what I set out to do: validated, to my own satisfaction, my belief. Before me, science had to settle for the same trio of consolation prizes: footprints, dens, fecal matter. I'm going to be like Du Chaillu, the Frenchman who was the first to shoot a gorilla: an animal that for two thousand years Europeans believed to be mythical. And I'm not simply discovering another animal. On the scrolls that serve as meditation aids in the monasteries, the yeti are positioned between the animals and mankind. I've been mocked for devoting my life to a legend. But legends have moved whole nations and held them together.

Beger turns feverish in the night. I minister to him with water and cool compresses. He cries silently and gives himself over to being held. He sweats through his undergarments, and when I peel them off, we both can see a red line running from his ankle up to the lymph nodes in his groin.

I get him redressed and resettled. His ankle I leave alone.

I doze beside him, dreaming of river crossings, the frigid water roiling and rushing and spray that tastes of minerals. In Shigatse the breeze smelled of juniper trees and tasted of dust. A spotted white bull lolled about in the middle of the street. In one village where we were welcomed, children bathed in our honor. We bedded down in furs on the ground, and the fleas and my fears that we wouldn't find enough petrol the next day kept me awake. That day on a high pass we saw across a half-mile gorge the giant goat known as the takin. It was snub-nosed and fearsome across the shoulders, and reputed to have pushed travelers off narrow and precipitous tracks. But its hair, in the sun, was a stunning gold. The golden fleece, I thought. The golden fleece.

…

I wake in the darkness, my hand hunting for my torch. We're both wheezing from the thinness of the air. Holding my breath, I cover Beger's mouth and nose with my palm and listen. There's a strong wind; under it, a far-off whistling. Something smells. I give Beger a shake but it fails to rouse him. I think of the yak outside the night before, its eyes shut against the wind, snow speckling its black fur.

In June the sherpas observe the Mani Rimbu—“All Will Be Well”—a celebration during which they venerate their nature gods. At the climax a gruesomely costumed effigy of a yeti appears. A missionary whose garden had been torn to pieces told me when I came to investigate, “These creatures are God's children, the same as us.”

The whistling comes from the other side of the tent. The one wall that's fully erect shudders and buffets against its pole.

I try to listen. Beger wheezes, his breathing further obstructed by blankets. Bruno: his first name is Bruno.

During our initial interview Gulam told me of a face-to-face encounter near his uncle's corral. The thing's face and palms were black. Its nostrils frightening in ways he couldn't make clear. He'd been petrified by the yellow of its eyes. It had hissed and then scrambled away, toting a yak calf under its arm.

A shriek, a bellow, sounds above the tent. I switch on the torch and jerk its beam to the opening. The face in the darkness bares its teeth. The faces behind it jostle forward.