Like You'd Understand, Anyway

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.