The Yeti Society - Martin Sexton

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and father have a gift for languages. I can put cultured Urdu into good English, I can speak highly colloquial Urdu, Arabic, count in Uzbek, use Punjabi, Braj Bhasha, some Persian, Sanskrit, Brushuski common words. My sister says I also like to swear in English. I went to the Aga Khan middle school and because my father was respected I sometimes stayed in the castle or Baltit Fort in the Hunza Valley by the white-capped mountains. One day my father's teacher let me hold and look at a manuscript that he said was the oldest in the world and told the most ancient of folk tales, the Jataka Tales. He would recite The Story of the Great Ape, how the wisest of men, the first man was once born as a great ape and lived as a recluse amidst the forests of the hidden valleys of the Himalaya.

      I have a secret. In the Qurans that are sent—sometimes, old postcards or photographs or drawings fall out, with beautiful pictures of far-flung places. Strange cities, great buildings, people dressed in all manner of clothes, even women with painted faces who show their bodies, animals I have never seen. Some of these I keep and look at when Mr. Khan is sleeping. One day as I was sorting through the books an illustration fell out from the pages between the torn bindings, and I read the half-erased title ‘…tin in Tibet’. It had a young boy like me with a small white dog. He was on a mountain just like the mountains that we hide the books in. A great beast stood up in it, not a bear, but bigger than the tallest man, full of hair, as tall as the great stone outside the cave and like the rock carvings my father showed me. I examined the illustrated mountains and looked again at the strange animal and then gazed hard into the high mountain range all about me and wondered could such a beast live here? It excited me and I became more certain every day that indeed it did. The mountain was not named in these two loose pages but I could just barely read the torn and fuzzy worn type that it was in a place called Tibet and that the boy was called Tin and if the boy Tin could go, so could I. My English was good. I knew this place existed as my father allowed my sister and I to pore over the English atlas our mother had hidden. I knew that the mountains here and about met, and these mountains were linked by valleys and plains and other ranges that made the roof of the world—linking India, Nepal, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bhutan and Tibet. My father was a good fighter and joined the Mujahideen fighting the Russians. He was promised new weapons and money for our family by an American who said as tribal leader if he brought some of the other good fighters along, we would no longer be poor. My father said we were all descended from the great fighters of Huzan who were descendants of the men who followed Alexander the Great. His campaign historian recorded that he saw a tribe of such beings as those carved on the great stones once from his ships, as they navigated into a long river into the Indus and that his men shot arrows at them and Alexander ordered his men to swim to them and catch one but they all fled into the trees; that he had even asked the locals to bring one to him, but they said they could not be caught like other animals. All this would play over and over in my mind. I became lost in this more than anything else each time I gazed at these two faded pages of ‘…tin in Tibet’.

      One morning I awoke determined. I decided that I would go to the mountains. I would leave the old man and the caves and head higher into the range. I would even join the fighters and help them carry their guns and packs if need be; just so I could in turn leave them and find this hairy man of the mountains and the lost tribe Alexander the Great spoke of. Maybe I would find my father too. I, Mohammed, would find the Yeti and do all this and one day they would tell stories of me.

      CHAPTER TWO

      The Story of the Great Ape

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       The Universal Soul exists in every individual,

       it expresses itself in every creature,

       everything in the world is a projection of it.

      —The Shevetashvatara Upanishad

      The Story of the Great Ape, how the wisest of men, the first Buddha, was once born as a great ape and lived as a recluse in the Himalayan forest. He did not look like nor was he like other monkeys, nor did he behave as such. He was kind and virtuous. A time later, a shepherd got lost following his goats into the mountains and reached the secret forest in the hidden valley. He was exhausted and hungry and climbed to the top of a tree to rest and be safe from the tiger that roamed these mountains. From his vantage point he spied the answer to his appetite, a fruit-rich tree. He moved very carefully, almost like a slow monkey, through the great canopy of the forest towards the fruit tree. Coming closer, the chatter of the birds, insects and other animals of the forest fused with the sound of the great river that carved through the valley. Eventually, he was at the tree and when he reached a branch laden with fruit to pluck them, his eyes were bigger than his belly. He took more than he needed for his fair appetite or for his good balance. What's more, he had overlooked the roots of the tree, which had grown out of a sloping cliff over a waterfall. The branch he held with his free hand, sustaining a good part of his weight, gave way. He lost the fruit and none fell into the pit of the crevice where he lay. He was sore but no bones were broken and he was still hungry. It would make no difference to try again as where he had ended up was deep with sheer hard earth and rock walls and no exit seemed possible. He cursed his goats. Then when he looked up, to his annoyance, one of them stared down at him. It was the longest time he had ever looked directly into the face of one of his goats. Even when he had held a ram down forcibly to castrate it, or kill one for meat, he never really looked at his animals or considered them in any way other than as a means to an end. He knew what a goat looked like, of course, but today he seemed to see it for the first time, for he saw much he had never ever noticed before—that the goat did not have a round black centre in its eye, but a horizontal solid black line as a pupil. This goat stared at him for so long that it left him pondering, was it just these goats or did they all look like that? Then he wondered why did his male and female goats both have beards? He had never ever really considered his goats worth looking at, but rather more looking for, if he lost them. Goats after all, he reasoned, would become feral and return to the wild at the first opportunity. He cursed his goat to get him out of his predicament, for he did know goats were as good at getting out of things as getting into them, having once found several of his goats bleating from the top canopy of a very tall tree. But at this, the goat was gone. It was then he remembered that he was chastised by an old woman who told him not to beat his goats so harshly, that the goat was a Vahana, a vehicle of the gods. A black goat, ridden by Kali. This was her realm. He would never have a wife or siddhi (special powers) granted, as the female Shaiva that follow Kali would know, and curse him back tenfold. The shepherd began to feel sorry for himself but still managed to be angry at his goats.

      Then he smelt something, not unlike the stench of a he-goat, but this was a far more powerful odour. Then to his amazement he saw a creature, a Great Ape, but not simply an overgrown monkey. It was large, it stood upright, covered in hair, apart from its face, and was taller, more robust than any man he had ever seen. When the Great Ape saw the distress of the man and his predicament he decided, against his better judgement, to free the man. With difficulty, as the pit was deep, he managed with arduous exertions to rescue him.

      The Great Ape ingeniously fashioned a stretcher from two large branches and smaller ones that he elegantly weaved and he hauled the man out and rolled him to the side of the rock fall. The next part was only marginally less difficult than the first—not for the Great Ape alone—but as he was carrying the man, who would have most surely failed by his own effort, even if he had fallen just to the precipice before the rock pit. Finally the man was in a place where he could eventually make his way back to the village. Dusk fell and the Great Ape was exhausted and wished to rest. He motioned to the man to sit beside him and clearly signed that he take first watch and warn him of any tiger in the night and wake him from his rest—for as long as he was not surprised whilst sleeping, he could guard the man against the tiger.

      But the man was still frightened and disturbed by the size and strangeness of the beast. He was ungrateful and wished not to remain vulnerable on the ground at night and to hide high in the tree canopy until dawn. His heart was hardened and he remained resentful despite his rescue. He decided he would take his chances on his own, without the Ape. A panic and darkness entered him and at once he decided he would kill the

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