Philip Kerr: Esau

To avoid any similar falls of ice. Jack had been following a course to the side of the ridge, but now he was right under the danger area, an enormous boulder of hard ice attached to the rock by nothing more than frost.

If this lot were to go, he told himself, they would really be in for it. To take his mind off the danger, he began to divert himself by trying to remember the name of the Greek hero condemned by Zeus to an eternity of pushing a huge stone up a hill. As it constantly rolled down again, his task was everlasting. What was his name?

But even as the question passed through Jack’s mind, a long, ghostly finger of loose powder snow blew off the crest of the overhang and joined the faintest trace of cloud that rolled across the flawless, bright blue sky. Some of it showered Jack’s face, refreshing him like a burst of spray from a bottle of eau-de-cologne. He licked the cool moisture from his cracked lips, lifted his ice axe and started to cut another handhold on the perilous route he had mentally marked out. It would take him to the corner of the ridge, away from the threat of icy obliteration.

He paused as hundreds of shards of snow and ice came scampering off the crest of the ridge like tiny, suicidal white lemmings, and when at last they stopped, he realized that the throbbing in his head had started again.

‘Sisyphus,’ Jack muttered, remembering the Greek’s name as he quickly finished the handhold. ‘It was Sisyphus, the Crafty.’ An eternity of second chances. That’s what it looked like. The boulder above Jack’s head would come down only once. And that would be it. The terminal descent of man. He tugged a length of rope through the piton runners and moved up the ice arête.

‘Sooner I get out from under this bastard the better.’

His ears had started to play tricks on him again. This time it was as if he had gone deaf. Jack stopped where he was and repeated his last sentence, but it was as though the sound had been sucked away from the mountain. He felt the words vibrate in his mouth but heard nothing. There seemed to be some kind of vacuum into which all the sound on the ice ridge was emptying and, like the dead calm before a storm at sea, the sense of menace was overpowering.

He looked down and called out to Didier, but once again his shout was snatched away, and the sound merged into thunderous rumble. A second later, the mountain shrugged off several thousand tons of snow and ice, shutting out the blue sky behind the frozen black curtain of an enormous avalanche.

Enveloped in a huge cumulus cloud of stifling snow and drowning vapour. Jack felt himself carried off the rocky, mountainous altar.

For what seemed like an eternity he fell.

Trapped inside the belly of the white whale of the avalanche, with nothing to inform his battered senses of the world outside it, he had no impression of speed or acceleration, nor even of danger. Just of overwhelming, elemental power. It was as if he were in the very grip of winter. Kept together by the cold, he would melt and disappear as soon as he hit the ground. Jack. Jack Frost.

Almost as suddenly as it had started, the direction of the avalanche seemed to change, and feeling an increasing pressure about his body. Jack instinctively started to swim. He kicked his legs, thrust out his arms, and struggled to reach some imaginary surface.

Then everything stopped and all was dark and silent.

His legs were free. But his whole upper body was covered in snow. Struggling backward. Jack collapsed onto a hard rocky floor. For several minutes he lay there, stunned and blinded with snow. He found he could move his arms, and gently he cleared his nose, mouth, ears, and eyes of snow. He looked around and realized that he was in a kind of bergschrund — a big, horizontal crevasse in the rock face. The entrance to the bergschrund was stopped up with snow, but the light shining through seemed to suggest that he was not blocked in too deeply.

The rope, still tight around Jack’s waist, led through the snow blockage. Struggling to his knees he gave the rope a hard pull. But even as he crawled through the snow and hauled at the rope, he knew that Didier must be dead. That he himself was alive seemed improbable enough.

After several frantic pulls, the frayed end of the rope appeared. Dragging himself to the mouth of the bergschrund, he managed to peer out. One look at the obliterated slope below seemed to confirm the worst. The avalanche had been a huge one. It had swept the whole lower glacier, from six thousand metres right down to Camp One on top of the Rognon at about five thousand. Like Didier, the Sherpas there would have had little chance of survival.

Somehow the avalanche had dumped him on the very lip of the bergschrund. At a different angle a collision with its hard lower lip would have killed him. Instead the bergschrund had protected him from the lethal icy debris that now rendered the route back down the north face to the Rognon and Camp One unrecognizable.

Sick to his stomach and yet somehow elated that he had survived unscathed. Jack sat down and began to remove the snow and ice from inside his jacket and trousers, pondering his next move. He estimated it was about four hundred and fifty metres back down to Camp Two at the foot of the rock face. At just above five thousand two hundred, the camp was located where the rock wall overhung the glacier, and there was just a chance that this might have protected the two Sherpas there from the worst of the avalanche, although they were almost certainly buried much deeper than he was.

Even so, he knew that he could not climb down before dark. His radio was gone, and the route down was too difficult to attempt in his condition with the sun already setting. Besides, he had a rucksack of stores still strapped to his back and he was aware that his best chance was to spend the night in the bergschrund and climb down first thing in the morning.

Jack shrugged off the rucksack and stood up painfully to inspect what would be his sleeping quarters for the night, almost impaling himself on one of the long icicles that hung from the vaulting ceiling, jabbing the darkness like the teeth of some forgotten prehistoric animal. The icicle, as long as a javelin, broke off and smashed on the floor.

He opened his rucksack and took out his Maglite.

‘Not exactly the Stein Eriksen Lodge,’ said Jack, at the same time reminding himself that it might just as easily have been his grave.

If only they had left it at the southwest face of Annapurna. That would have been enough for most people. It was their own good luck that had defeated them, for their lightweight ascent of Annapurna had been blessed with such fine weather that they had completed it in half the allotted time. But for his own vaulting ambition Didier Lauren and the Sherpas on the glacier below might now still be alive.

He sat down again and flashed the light around him.

The bergschrund was shaped like a funnel lying on its side, about nine metres wide and six metres high at the entrance, narrowing at the rear to a tunnel about one and a half metres square.

With hours to kill he decided he might as well see how far the tunnel bored into the mountainside. Advancing to the rear of the cave, he squatted down and shone the powerful halogen beam along the tunnel.

Jack knew that the Himalayas were home to bear and langur, even to leopard, but he thought it unlikely they would have made their home in such an inaccessible place so far above the tree line.

Bunched down on his haunches, he started to make his way along the tunnel.

About a hundred metres in, the tunnel sloped upward, reminding him of the long and narrow passageway that led to the Queen’s Burial Chamber in Egypt’s Great Pyramid — a journey that was not for the fainthearted, the claustrophobic, or the orthopedically afflicted. After only a short hesitation. Jack decided to push on, determined to find out how deep the cave was.