012 A REDEEMER PETRICHOR In his Zen essay The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen recalls that in the 8th century the trail of horror left by the Tibetan army was so savage that Trisong Detsän, the ruthless king, decided to spare his people from daily-visual- abhorrence. His army had just obliterated and banished the Chinese Tang dynasty, and Trisong sought redemption in an Indian figure, the sage PadmaSambhava, AKA Guru Rinpoche (the precious Guru). Sambhava was summoned to sacralise the Himalayas. If he succeeded in cleansing the unfathomable heights, the ripple effect would turn the blood-stainedsnowflakes into raindrops purging the death-infested soil —a Redeemer petrichor. KARMA SHIELD. Tingri, Tibet. —B.C. AND BEYOND C’s Sambhava walked the deadliest cliffs barefoot and oblivious to food, sleep or fear. The scale of the mission proved unmanageable for a single hero, therefore he invoked the only one that could help. Siddharta manifested swiftly, considered the issue, crouched, picked a spherical stone from the ground, threw it down the Himalayas, and told Sambhava that if he were to find it, the seed of holiness would bloom all over the valley. SAMYE EAST Sambhava not only found the pebble: he used it as the cornerstone of Samye, the first Buddhist temple ever built in Tibet. He would go on spreading the faith and translating the canon of Buddhist scripture from Sanskrit, until the hills and the plains of the doomed land became the same fertile soil where the Buddha had attained Nirvana a few centuries prior, born a stone’s throw away from Samye, ironically. FOUR THOUSAND YEARS OR A SECOND The centuries rolled, swallowed time and spat its corpses, and the big wheel of storytelling kept on fuelling and lapidating the tales of the unknown. Not long after the departure of Sambhava, amidst the same iced gorges were he became the Redeemer; a new enemy was the hottest talk of every bonfire. “He was a fearsome, hairy, reddish-brown creature larger than a bear that would devour you in a mouthful,” evokes Matthiessen. Over the centuries, no evidence of its existence was gathered: many claimed to have seen it, but no one had proof. It was not until 1951 when a young mountaineer fromMissouri, Eric Shipton, took a photo of a large footprint on the Himalayan iced crust. Eric had left home to engage in the sentimental hunt of the “Abominable Snowman.” HOWIE Eric had learnt about the abominable in Missouri, while reading about the first reconnaissance expedition to Mt. Everest in 1921. The military leader of the group, Charles Howard-Bury, an Irish royalist and remarkable botanist, had coined the termwhile fighting for his men’s lives at 20 thousand feet. Eric became irresistibly drawn and then haunted by the catchy epithet. Now Here: Everest, June 13th, 1921 — THE ABOMINABLE Howard-Bury and his mountaineers were exhausted, almost blue, engulfed by nasty blizzards and vertiginous falls, trying to open a route to the summit, and failing. They had been stranded for days at the highest altitude ever met by a human, and they had lost contact with their surveyor and photographer, Oliver Wheeler, the man who had the key to survival. While fighting the evil weather, stranded NOWHERE, news reached that the only story about the expedition their native English readers care about back home was that of a colossal hairy creature. “The fucken’ Abominable Snowman? For real? What’s wrong with people? They go through The Great War and come out believing in fairy tales, oblivious to the true fight?” Howard-Bury crumpled the insidious telegram with his frostbitten hands. Ahead of him, his leader mountaineer, the irresistible and indefatigable George Mallory, was losing it. “Forget about the Yeti and the damned readers, where is Wheeler? We are lost without him!” His voice was so loud, that a chunk of ice the size of Iceland started to crack on the ice ridge looming above them.
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