In a World of his Own
Bombay is not a very good listening post for the Himalayas, and one should, I think, accept with considerable reserve the news agency report from that city that an Abominable Snow- man has been caught and is now in a Tibetan zoo. The creature is described as a semi-human, gorilla-like monster" stunted, with a cone-shaped head and reddish-brown hair "; one can readily visualise it wolfing the salted almonds at a literary cocktail-party. I myself have long believed in the existence of the Abominable Snowman, whose status— as an unsolved mystery of a kind particularly attractive to those of us who will never really understand about the sound-barrier —is going to raise awkward problems before it can be radically altered. The Snowman has not yet been seen by a white man, but one day it will be seen, and perhaps photographed at long range. But what then ? We shall not be very much the wiser, and in order to become so we shall have to either shoot the poor Snowman or catch him in a trap. He is unlikely to survive for long the latter experience, since we do not know, and indeed cannot imagine, what he lives on and after the rarefied atmosphere of the Himalayas he will scarcely thrive in Regent's Park, even if equipped with a smog-mask.
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