Escape from Kathmandu

VIII

I gave Nathan and Sarah a buzz and they joined us at the door of Room 355. Sarah let us in. Inside was a big suite—style, generic Holiday Inn—it could have been in any city on earth. Except that there was a slight smell of wet fur.

Sarah went to the bathroom door, unlocked it. There was a noise inside. Nathan, Freds and I shifted around behind her uncomfortably. She opened the door. There was a movement, and there he was, standing before us. I found myself staring into the eyes of the yeti.

In the Kathmandu tourist scene, there are calendars, postcards, and embroidered T-shirts with a drawing of a yeti on them. It’s always the same drawing, which I could never understand; why should everyone agree to use the same guess? It annoyed me: a little furball thing with his back to you, looking over his shoulder with a standard monkey face, and displaying the bottom of one big bare foot.

I’m happy to report that the real yeti didn’t look anything like that. Oh he was furry, all right; but he was about Fred’s height, and had a distinctly humanoid face, surrounded by a beardlike ruff of matted reddish fur. He looked a little like Lincoln—a short and very ugly Lincoln, sure, with a squashed nose and rather prominent eyebrow ridges—but the resemblance was there. I was relieved to see how human his face looked; my plan depended on it, and I was glad Nathan hadn’t exaggerated in his description. The only feature that really looked unusual was his occipital crest, a ridge of bone and muscle that ran fore-and-aft over the top of his head, like his skull itself had a Mohawk haircut.

Well, we were all standing there like a statue called “People Meet Yeti,” when Freds decided to break the ice; he stepped forward and offered the guy a hand. “Namaste!” he said.

“No, no—” Nathan brushed by him and held out the necklace of fossil shells that he had been given in the spring.

“Is this the same one?” I croaked, momentarily at a loss. Because up until that bathroom door opened, part of me hadn’t really believed in it all.

“I think so.”

The yeti reached out and touched the necklace and Nathan’s hand. Statue time again. Then the yeti stepped forward and touched Nathan’s face with his long, furry hand. He whistled something quiet. Nathan was quivering; there were tears in Sarah’s eyes. I was impressed myself. Freds said, “He looks kind of like Buddha, don’t you think? He doesn’t have the belly, but those eyes, man. Buddha to the max.”

We got to work. I opened my pack and got out baggy overalls, a yellow “Free Tibet” T-shirt, and a large anorak. Nathan was taking his shirt off and putting it back on to show the yeti what we had in mind.

Slowly, carefully, gently, with many a soft-spoken sound and slow gesture, we got the yeti into the clothes. The T-shirt was the hardest part; he squeaked a little when we pulled it over his head. The anorak was zippered, luckily. With every move I made I said, “Namaste, blessed sir, namaste.”

The hands and feet were a problem. His hands were strange, fingers skinny and almost twice as long as mine, and pretty hairy as well; but wearing mittens in the daytime in Kathmandu was almost worse. I suspended judgement on them and turned to his feet. This was the only area of the tourist drawing that was close to correct; his feet were huge, furry, and just about square. He had a big toe like a very fat thumb. The boots I had brought, biggest I could find in a hurry, weren’t wide enough. Eventually I put him in Tibetan wool socks and Birkenstock sandals, modified by a penknife to let the big toe hang over the side.

Lastly I put my blue Dodgers cap on his head. The cap concealed the occipital crest perfectly, and the bill did a lot to obscure his rather low forehead and prominent eyebrows. I topped everything off with a pair of mirrored wraparound sunglasses. “Hey, neat,” Freds remarked. Also a Sherpa necklace, made of five pieces of coral and three giant chunks of rough turquoise, strung on black cord. Principle of distraction, you know.

All this time Sarah and Nathan were ransacking the drawers and luggage, stealing all the camera film and notebooks and whatever else might have contained evidence of the yeti. And throughout it all the yeti stood there, calm and attentive: watching Nathan, sticking his hand down a sleeve like a millionaire with his valet, stepping carefully into the Birkenstocks, adjusting the bill of the baseball cap, everything. I was really impressed, and so was Freds. “He really is like Buddha, isn’t he?” I thought the physical resemblance was a bit muted at this point, but his attitude couldn’t have been more mellow if he’d been the Gautama himself.

When Nathan and Sarah were done searching they looked up at our handiwork. “God he looks weird,” Sarah said.

Nathan just sat on the bed and put his head in his hands. “It’ll never work,” he said. “Never.”

“Sure it will!” Freds exclaimed, zipping the anorak up a little farther. “You see people on Freak Street looking like this all the time! Man, when I went to school I played football with a whole team of guys that looked just like him! Fact is, in my state he could run for Senator—”

“Whoah, whoah,” I said. “No time to waste, here. Give me the scissors and brush, I still have to do his hair.” I tried brushing it over his ears with little success, then gave him a trim in back. One trip, I was thinking, just one short walk down to a taxi. And in pretty dark halls. “Is it even on both sides?”

“For God’s sake, George, let’s go!” Nathan was getting antsy, and we had been a while. We gathered our belongings, filled the packs, and tugged old Buddha out into the hall.