Philip Kerr - Esau

Jack shrugged.

‘You know, what interests me about what this man Noyce says is that a gorilla’s alarm call is a shrill and prolonged scream that sounds and indeed spectrographically looks like a piercing whistle.’

‘It’s a small world.’ He shook his head. ‘Could have been anything. An eagle. A lemur... Have you finished?’

‘Jack, I’ve hardly started. In 1951, Sir Eric Shipton photographed and took casts of a series of footprints that he and others observed in the snow of the Menlung Glacier, near Everest, at about five thousand five hundred metres. Shipton and Sherpa Tenzing, who later reached the summit of Everest with Sir Edmund Hillary, followed the tracks until they lost them. Tenzing himself had seen a yeti back in 1949. He described it as being well above man-height, covered in reddish hair, but barefaced.’

‘Is that barefaced as in barefaced lie?’ laughed Jack. ‘And footprints.’ He snorted. ‘Footprints can be caused by all sorts of atmospheric phenomena. I read about it somewhere. A warm current of air intruding in the colder atmosphere causing tiny patches of moisture that turn to water and, when they fall, become blobs in the snow that look to all appearances like footprints.’

‘In a regular formation? A metre or so apart?’ It was Swift’s turn to look amused. ‘That explanation’s more fantastic than the one I’m proposing. But even if you could dismiss Shipton and Tenzing, which I don’t think you do, can you also dismiss Sir John Hunt, who found not one but two sets of strange tracks near the Zemu Glacier in 1937? He said that the tracks were definitely not those of a bear and he had no explanation for them. Subsequently he stated his belief in the existence of some indigenous higher anthropoid unknown to science.’

Jack looked up at the ceiling as if he wished she would finish.

‘All right then,’ she said. ‘There are still dozens of other sightings of the animal. Montgomery McGovern in 1924, Colonel Howard-Bury in 1924, Henry Elwes in 1921, Major L. A. Waddell in 1899, W. Rockhill in 1884, and Lieutenant George White in 1838. Jack, the legend goes back as far as 1820, in J. B. Frazer’s Journal of a Tour through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himalayan Mountains. You can hardly dismiss them all as mad, or liars, or hippies, or mistaken. This creature and its footprints have been reported in areas as distinct from one another as Nepal, Tibet, Sikkim, Garwhal, the Karakoram, the Upper Sahween area, and Bhutan.’

Jack grunted stubbornly and pressed his forehead against the cool windowpane. Outside, the sun was burning its way through cool clouds and a buzzard was slowly drifting in the blue beyond like some passenger jet full of human souls.

‘You’ve seen it. Jack,’ she persisted. ‘You know you have. What’s the point of pretending you haven’t?’

‘I don’t know what I saw,’ he said irritably. ‘Like I said, it was probably the effects of the altitude. Lack of oxygen causes all sorts of physical problems. Pulmonary oedema, insomnia, loss of appetite, weight loss, and fluid retention. Take fluid retention, for instance. It causes the brain to swell and, pressing against the inside of your skull, it can cause you to hallucinate. If that wasn’t enough you’re also susceptible to conjunctivitis caused by excessive ultraviolet light. Your eyes feel gritty, then painful, until it’s impossible to open them properly.’

Swift nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said patiently. ‘It’s understandable that anyone would want better evidence than the sight of some very sore eyes.’ She paused. ‘So I faxed the Natural History Museum in London, and they FedExed me some photographs of a plaster cast made by a Russian zoologist, Vladimir Tschernezky, using Shipton’s photographs.’

She rolled the Toshiba’s trackball with her thumb and pulled down an image of the cast that she had scanned onto the CD.

‘The foot is about one and a half times as large as a male gorilla’s,’ she said. ‘But about the same overall length. And check the size of that big toe.’

Jack continued looking out the window.

‘It’s exceptionally thick. I’m no mountaineer but I’d say it was the kind of foot that was ideal for grasping rocks on a steep incline.’

Jack glanced casually at the screen. He pursed his lips critically and said, ‘Yeah. It could be.’

‘Moreover, the heel size would seem to indicate a creature that was altogether larger and heavier than a gorilla.’

Noticing that she now had his attention, she accessed a drawing of some comparative footprints.

‘That’s the gorilla’s footprint on the left there,’ she explained. ‘The one in the middle was found by Shipton as low as five thousand five hundred metres. Some of them even led over a crevasse — a leap of some four and a half to six metres. And there were no claw marks. You can see the difference.’

‘What’s the one on the right?’ he asked.

‘This was a print reconstructed using Neanderthal type skeletal remains that were discovered in the Crimea,’ she explained. ‘As you can see, the breadth of all three feet — almost half as wide as they are long — is quite consistent. But only Shipton’s prints show such a deviated hallux. Big toe. And such an unusually long second toe as well.’

‘I had the people in the biomedical visualization lab digitize an image of the skull you found, in conjunction with the footprints that Shipton found. Using cranial landmarks and tissue depths from the anatomical data of gorillas, they were able to effect a full fossil reconstruction of the kind of anthropoid that we’re interested in.’

‘That you’re interested in,’ he said without looking away from the screen.

Swift smiled to herself and pulled down a short animated sequence that illustrated the reconstruction of the creature from the feet up. Hairiness, impossible to deduce from the fossil and the footprint, was not enhanced. But watching it. Jack felt his heart skip a beat, for the computer animation finished to reveal a 3-D colour illustration of a bipedal anthropoid he half recognized.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered. ‘How’d you do that?’

‘The computer,’ she said coolly.

Jack turned away for a moment as if he needed somehow to gather himself.

She paused, waiting for him to look back, and when he did she thumbed the trackball up to the creature’s head for a close-up.

‘I think the interesting thing about this sequence,’ she said, ‘is how the predicted skull shape exactly tallies with the skull you found in the Annapurna Sanctuary.’

She dragged down a small icon from the corner of her screen and dropped it on top of the creature’s head. As she did so, the icon exploded, becoming one of the colour photographs Swift had taken of the skull in her own laboratory.

Nodding with appreciation. Jack allowed that it was a good match.

‘I’m glad you of all people think so.’

‘You know, it might be nice at that,’ he murmured. ‘To go back and prove some of those bastards wrong.’

‘Wouldn’t it just?’

‘Besides, seems like I left more than just a good friend back in the Sanctuary.’

‘Oh? What was that?’

Jack shook his head. ‘Amazing,’ he said quietly.

‘Anatomically speaking,’ she said, ‘Esau occupies an approximately intermediate position between a gorilla and the fossil form Paranthropus crassidens, also known as Australopithecus afarensis. ’

Jack was still shaking his head with wonder at what she had shown him.

‘That’s the creature I saw on Everest. Swift, that’s a yeti.’