Came across this fascinating account. It's wonderful to imagine that a small group of Denisovans still live peacefully in Shangri-La...
(1956) by T. LOBSANG RAMPA:
(from page 160 onward)
During this time we went to the Chang Tang Highlands. In this book there is no time for more than a brief mention of this region.To do the expedition justice would require several books. The Dalai Lama had blessed each of the fifteen members of the party and we had all set off in high spirits, mounted on mules: mules will go where horses will not. We made our slow way along by Tengri Tso, on to the huge lakes at Zilling Nor, and ever northwards. The slow climb over the Tangla Range, and on into unexplored territory.It is difficult to say how long we took, because time meant nothing to us: there was no reason for us to hurry, we went at our own comfortable speed and saved our strength and energy for later exertions.
As we made our way farther and farther into the Highlands, the ground ever rising, I was reminded of the face of the moon as seen through the large telescope at the Potala. Immense mountain ranges, and deep canyons. Here the vista was the same. The unending, eternal mountains, and crevices which seemed bottomless. We struggled on through this “lunar landscape”, finding the conditions becoming harder and harder. At last the mules could go no farther. In the rarefied air they were soon spent and could not manage to cross some of the rocky gorges where we swung dizzily at the end of a yak-hair rope. In the most sheltered spot we could find we left our mules and the five weakest members of the party stayed with them. They were sheltered from the worst blasts of that barren, wind-swept landscape by a spur of rock which towered upwards like a jagged wolf fang. At the base there was a cave where softer rock had been eroded by time. A precipitous path could be followed which would lead downwards to a valley where there was sparse vegetation on which the mules could feed. A tinkling stream dashed along the tableland and rushed over the edge of a cliff to fall thousands of feet below, so far below that even the sound of its landing was lost.
Here we rested for two days before plodding on higher and higher. Our backs ached with the loads we were carrying, and our lungs felt as if they would burst for want of air. On we went, over crevices and ravines. Over many of them we had to toss iron hooks to which ropes were attached. Toss, and hope that there would be a safe hold at the other side. We would take turns to swing the rope with the hook, and take turns to swarm across when a hold was secured. Once across we had another end of rope so that when all the party had negotiated the canyon, the rope also could be brought over by pulling one end. Sometimes we could get no hold.Then one of us would have the rope tied around his waist, and from the highest point we could reach, would try to swing like a pendulum, increasing the momentum with each swing. With one of us across the other side, he would have to clamber up as best he could in order to reach a point where the rope would be roughly horizontal. We all took it in turns tod o this, as it was hard and dangerous work.
One monk was killed doing it. He had climbed high on our side of a cliff and let himself swing. Apparently he badly misjudged, for he crashed into the opposite wall with terrible force, leaving his face and his brains on the points of the jagged rocks. We hauled the body back, and had a service for him. There was no way of burying the body in solid rock, so we left him for the wind and the rain and the birds. The monk whose turn it now was did not look at all happy, so I went instead. It was obvious tome that in view of the predictions about me, I should be quite safe and my faith was rewarded. My own swing was cautious—in spite of the prediction!—and I reached with scrabbling fingers for the edge of the nearest rock. Only just did I manage to hang on and pull myself up, with the breath rasping my throat, and my heart pounding as if it would explode. For a time I lay, quite spent, then I managed to crawl a painful way up the mountain-side. The others, the best companions that anyone could have, swung their other rope to give me the best possible chance of reaching it. With the two ends now in my grasp, I made them secure and called out to them to pull hard and test it. One by one they came over, upside down, hands and feet linked over the rope, robes fluttering in the still breeze, the breeze which impeded us and did not help our breathing at all.
At the top of the cliff we rested a while and made our tea,although at this altitude the boiling-point was low, and the tea did not really warm us. Somewhat less tired now, we again took up our loads and stumbled onwards into the heart of this terrible region. Soon we came to a sheet of ice, a glacier, maybe, and our process became even more difficult. We had no spiked boots, no ice-axes, or mountaineering equipment; our only “equipment”consisted of our ordinary felt boots with the soles bound with hair to afford some grip, and ropes.
In passing, Tibetan mythology has a Cold Hell. Warmth is a blessing to us, so the opposite is cold, hence the cold hell. This trip to the Highlands showed me what cold could be!
After three days of this shuffling upwards over the ice-sheet,shivering in the bitter wind and wishing that we had never seen the place, the glacier led us downwards between towering rocks. Down and down we went, fumbling and slipping, down into an unknown depth. Several miles farther on we rounded a shoulder of a mountain and saw before us a dense white fog. From a distance we did not know if it was snow or cloud, it was so white and unbroken.As we approached we saw that it was indeed fog, as tendrils kept breaking away and drifting off.
The Lama Mingyar Dondup, the only one of us who had been here before, smiled with satisfaction: “You do look a cheerless lot! But you will have some pleasure now.” We saw nothing pleasant before us. Fog. Cold. Frozen ice below our feet and frozen sky above our heads. Jagged rocks like the fangs in a wolf’s mouth, rocks against which we bruised ourselves.And my Guide said that we were going to have “some pleasure”!
On into the cold and clammy fog we went, miserably plodding we knew not where. Hugging our robes about us for an illusion of warmth. Panting and shuddering with the cold. Farther, and yet farther in. And stopped, petrified with amazement and fright. The fog was becoming warm, the ground was growing hot. Those behind who had not reached so far, and could not see, bumped into us. Recovered somewhat from our stupefaction by the Lama Mingyar Dondup's laughter, we pushed forward again, blindly,reaching out for the man ahead, the one in the lead feeling unseeingly with his out-thrust staff. Below our feet stones threatened to trip us, pebbles rolled beneath our boots. Stones? Pebbles?Then where was the glacier, the ice? Quite suddenly the fog thinned, and we were through it. One by one we fumbled our way into—well, as I looked about me I thought that I had died of cold and had been transported to the Heavenly Fields. I rubbed my eyes with hot hands; I pinched myself and rapped my knuckles against a rock to see if I was flesh or spirit. But then I looked about: my eight companions were with me. Could we all have been so suddenly transported? And if so, what about the tenth member who had been killed against the rock face? And were we worthy of the heaven I saw before us?
Thirty heart-beats before we had been shivering with cold the other side of the fog-curtain. Now we were on the edge of collapse with the heat! The air shimmered, the ground steamed. A stream at our feet bubbled out of the earth itself, propelled by gouts of steam. About us there was green grass, greener than any I had ever seen before. Broad-leaved grass stood before us more than knee-high.We were dazed and frightened. Here was magic, something quite beyond our experience. Then the Lama Mingyar Dondup spoke: “If I looked like that when I first saw it, then I did look a sight! You fellows look as if you think the Ice Gods are having a sport with you.”
We looked about, almost too frightened to move, and then my Guide spoke again: “Let us jump over the stream, jump over, for the water is boiling. A few miles farther and we shall reach a really beautiful spot where we can rest.”
He was right, as ever. About three miles on we lay at full length on the moss-covered ground, lay without our robes as we felt asif we were being boiled. Here there were trees such as I had never seen before, and probably never shall see again. Highly coloured flowers bestrewed everything. Climbing vines laced the tree trunks and depended from the branches. Slightly to the right of the pleasant glade in which we rested we could see a small lake and ripples and circles on its surface indicated the presence of life within it. We still felt bewitched, we were sure that we had been overcome with the heat and passed to another plane of existence.Or had we been overcome with the cold? We did not know!
The foliage was luxuriant, now that I have travelled I should say that it was tropical. There were birds of a type even now strange to me. This was volcanic territory. Hot springs bubbled from the ground, and there were sulphurous odours. My Guide told us that there were, to his knowledge, two places only like this in the Highlands. He said that the underground heat, and the hot streams, melted the ice, and the high rock walls of the valley trapped the warm air. The dense white fog we had penetrated was the meeting-place of the hot and cold streams. He also told us that he had seen giant animal skeletons, skeletons which, in life, must have supported an animal twenty or thirty feet high. Later I sawbones myself.
Here I had my first sight of a yeti. I was bending picking herbs,when something made me look up. There, within ten yards of me,was this creature that I had heard so much about. Parents in Tibet often threaten naughty children with: “Behave yourself, or a yeti will get you!” Now, I thought, a yeti had got me and I was not happy about it. We looked at each other, both of us frozen with fright for a period which seemed ageless. It was pointing a hand at me, and uttering a curious mewing noise like a kitten. The head seemed to have no frontal lobes, but sloped back almost directly from the very heavy brows. The chin receded greatly and the teeth were large and prominent. Yet the skull capacity appeared similar to that of modern man with the exception of the missing forehead.The hands and feet were large and splayed. The legs were bowed and the arms were much longer than normal. I observed that the creature walked on the outer side of the feet as humans do. (Apes and others of that order do not walk on the outer surfaces.)
As I looked and perhaps jumped with fright, or from some other cause, the yeti screeched, turned, and leaped away. It seemed to make “one-leg” jumps and the result was like giant strides. My own reaction was also to run, in the opposite direction! Later,thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that I must have broken the Tibetan sprint record for altitudes above seventeen thousand feet.
Later we saw a few yetis in the distance. They hastened to hide at sight of us, and we certainly did not provoke them. The Lama Mingyar Dondup told us that these yetis were throwbacks of the human race who had taken a different path in evolution and who could only live in the most secluded places. Quite frequently we heard tales of yetis who had left the Highlands and had been seen leaping and bounding near inhabited regions. There are tales of lone women who have been carried off by male yetis. That may be one way in which they continue their line. Certainly some nuns confirmed this for us later when they told us that one of their Order had been carried off by a yeti in the night. However, on such things I am not competent to write. I can only say that I have seen yeti and baby yetis. I have also seen skeletons of them.
Some people have expressed doubts about the truth of my statements concerning the yetis. People have apparently written books of guesses about them, but none of these authors have seen one, as they admit. I have. A few years ago Marconi was laughed at when he said he was going to send a message by radio across the Atlantic. Western doctors solemnly asserted that Man could not travel at more than fifty miles an hour or they would die through the rush of air. There have been tales about a fish which was said to be a “living fossil”. Now scientists have seen them, captured them, dissected them. And if Western Man had his way, our poor old yetis would be captured, dissected and preserved in spirit.We believe that yetis have been driven to the Highlands and that elsewhere, except for very infrequent wanderers, they are extinct.The first sight of one causes fright. The second time one is filled with compassion for these creatures of a bygone age who are doomed to extinction through the strains of modern life.
I am prepared, when the Communists are chased out of Tibet, to accompany an expedition of skeptics and show them the yetis in the Highlands. It will be worth it to see the faces of these big business men when confronted with something beyond their commercial experience. They can use oxygen and bearers, I will use my old monk's robe. Cameras will prove the truth. We had no photographic equipment in Tibet in those days.
Our old legends relate that centuries ago Tibet had shores washed by the seas. Certain it is that fossils of fish and other marine creatures are to be found if the surface of the earth is disturbed. The Chinese have a similar belief. The Tablet of Yü which formerly stood on the Kou-lou peak of Mount Hêng in the province of Hu-pei records that the Great Yü rested upon the site (in 2278B.C.) after his labour of draining off the “waters of the deluge”which at the time submerged all China except the highest lands.The original stone has, I believe, been removed, but there are imitations at Wu-ch'ang Fu, a place near Hankow. A further copy is in the Yu-lin temple near Shao-hsing Fu in Chekiang. According to our belief, Tibet was once a low land, by the sea, and for reasons beyond our certain knowledge there were frightful earth-convulsions during which many lands sank beneath the waters, and others rose up as mountains.
The Chang Tang Highlands were rich in fossils, and in evidence that all this area had been a seashore. Giant shells, of vivid colours,curious stone sponges, and ridges of coral were common. Gold,too, was here, lumps of it which could be picked up as easily as could the pebbles. The waters which flowed from the depths of the earth were of all temperatures from boiling gouts of steam to near-freezing.It was a land of fantastic contrasts. Here there was a hot,humid atmosphere such as we had never before experienced. A few yards away, just the other side of a fog-curtain, there was the bitter cold that could sap the life and render a body as brittle as glass. The rarest of rare herbs grew here, and for those alone we had made this journey. Fruits were there, too, fruits such as we had never before seen. We tasted them, liked them, and satiated ourselves . . . the penalty was a hard one. During the night and the whole of next day we were too busy to gather herbs. Our stomachs were not used to such food. We left those fruits alone after that!
We loaded ourselves to the limit with herbs and plants, and retraced our footsteps through the fog. The cold the other side was terrible. Probably all of us felt like turning back and living in the luxuriant valley. One lama was unable to face the cold again.A few hours after passing the fog-curtain he collapsed, and although we camped then in an effort to help him, he was beyond aid, and went to the Heavenly Fields during the night. We did our best—throughout that night we had tried to warm him, lying on each side of him, but the bitter cold of that arid region was too much. He slept, and did not awaken. His load we shared between us, although we had considered before that we were laden to the limit. Back over that glittering sheet of age-old ice we retraced our painful steps. Our strength seemed to have been sapped by the comfortable warmth of the hidden valley, and we had insufficient food now. For the last two days of our journey back to the mules we did not eat at all—we had nothing left, not even tea.
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