Absent Friends
Tintin and the Yeti
Tintin in Tibet by Hergé
Tintin and the captain are mountaineering. Or rather, Tintin is. The captain (Captain Haddock) isn’t; he’s setting in the breakfast room, in the solarium, of the hotel while Tintin (and his dog Snowy) mountaineer. Tintin says all the things that hikers love to tell you.
Oh, the air, he says. It’s so fresh. It’s so clear. It’s a wonderful thing to be up and outdoors.
The captain is having none of it.
Mountains are dreadful, he says. Mountains are rough. Mountains are dangerous. Climbing them’s tough. You’ll never get me up a mountain. Oh no — not on your life.
And then they read in the paper about an awful air disaster involving a plane that was destined for Nepal. Rather than landing in Kathmandu, the aircraft crashed atop a high mountain. The crew and passengers were not numerous, but a team of Nepalese sherpas were immediately gathered and sent after them.
The captain reiterates: you’d never get me up a mountain — oh no. Those poor, poor souls, trapped up there.
This attempted rescue goes on and while it does, Tintin falls into a daydream. It’s not an ordinary dream. In it, he sees a friend of his — the Chinese boy called Chang, from an earlier adventure. The boy’s in trouble. That’s what Tintin sees in his dream.
He awakens with a great start.
Stuff and nonsense, says the captain. Dreams aren’t prophetic. They simply can’t tell the future in any way.
Meanwhile, the search for airline disaster survivors has ceased. They must all have died of exposure or starvation or thirst. The sherpas disperse and go home. All of this is mere background.
Tintin remains unsettled, sure his dream must have told him something. And them he gets a letter — forwarded on from his flat to the captain’s country estate, and then on to the mountainside hotel where the two of them (and Snowy) are staying.
Wouldn’t you know it? It’s from Chang. And he says he’s hoping to see Tintin in Europe, but first, he’s got to fly from China to Nepal to visit his relatives. That puts him, Tintin is sure, on the doomed airliner. Tintin is overcome.
He must be dead, the captain says. After all, the sherpas said there were clearly no survivors. But Tintin disagrees. He’s absolutely certain. His dream was powerful, definitive. It can’t be doubted. He hears Chang’s name everywhere. He’s got to go to Nepal himself. He’s got to go to see if he can rescue his friend.
You’re a fool, the captain tells Tintin. You’re a fool and you’ll be throwing your own life away for nothing. What’s there to do up there except to freeze to death or to fall into a crevasse, or to be swallowed up by an avalanche? Nothing — that’s what. And the whole thing is nothing doing. You’ll go there, put yourself at immense risk, see nothing but danger and failure, and then try to return home — a sadder and wiser man, perhaps, but also possibly a dead one. It’s a crazy, delusional thing to want to do, going to Nepal. And that’s why I simply have to go with you.
That does not stop the captain complaining the whole way there. When they’re in Delhi briefly for an airline layover, it’s the captain — of course — who upsets a scared cow. He’s the man to whom all the bad and humiliating things happen. It’s he who must go up a set of airport stairs leading to a plane that is not there.
The whole journey, the captain keeps up his complaining. When they arrive in Nepal and find Chang’s relatives, the relations tell Tintin that Chang must be dead; the journey’s a hopeless one; and though it was nice Tintin came to visit their own humble home and all that, he really ought to turn around.
But Tintin presses on — and, with many irritated snippy comments, the captain does, too. Tintin’s friendship with Chang is too great; and the captain cannot abandon his friend, no matter the odds.
Soon, they’re up the side of a hard mountain: the first stage of their journey outward. Most of the sherpas refused to go further than the site of the downed plane. They say the abominable snowman, a yeti, lives up there. And surely he will carry away anyone who disturbs his home.
When the captain tries to palliate the situation with a drop of whisky, he’s told that the yeti will without doubt set upon anyone who has some tempting alcohol for him to enjoy. When the captain’s surreptitious bottle vanishes, of course, it seems to prove two things: that the yeti does in fact exist, and that the captain suddenly cares rather a lot more about continuing with the journey.
After all, if there really is an abominable snowman, a yeti, up there, he has something to answer for now. He took something that doesn’t belong to him. And he ought to pay for the privilege.
This is a story without an adversary. Normally, Tintin has a conspiracy to foil or a criminal enterprise to overturn. But this time, it’s nature who is his enemy. There are many times in this book where Tintin and the captain are horribly beset by the snows and the winds. They’re threatened by avalanches and crevasses and falling off the sides of cliffs.
They really suffer; they really do face death. At one moment, the captain is truly prepared to sacrifice his life for Tintin. They, and their final brave sherpa, Tharkey, press on into the white darkness at the top of the world. And they do it all for love of each other, for absent friends.