Philip Kerr - Esau

Reading the message. Jack smiled grimly.

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ he whispered, and headed back upstairs, toward his exit window.

Back at the hotel, the concierge was nowhere to be seen. Jack reclaimed his jacket, shoes, and socks and went straight up to the room where Swift greeted his appearance with horror.

‘What the hell happened to you? You look like you’ve been crawling along the street.’

Jack looked at himself. It was true. He was filthy.

‘I had a bit of an accident,’ he said vaguely. ‘I slipped on the sidewalk.’ He went into the bathroom and pulled off his turtleneck. ‘It’s getting icy out there.’

‘Too much to drink, more like,’ she said, coming up behind and hugging him warmly.

‘I’m sorry we quarrelled. But don’t you see? This expedition means everything to me. It’s the chance of a lifetime. The chance to give my professional life some meaning. You can see that, can’t you?’

‘Yeah. I can see that it’s important to you.’

‘But you’re the boss. Jack. The expedition leader. You know the logistics of going somewhere like this.’

Swift squeezed him affectionately and tried to convey an impression of having to struggle to say what she was about to say. She had been preparing her little speech while he was gone and hoped it would convey the right combination of acquiescence and seductiveness.

‘If you think there’s some reason we should delay,’ she said, kissing his bare shoulder, ‘some reason we should tell Mister Beinart, and Semath, and the National Geographic people that we’ll find the grant money from somewhere else, then that’s fine with me. Okay?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason at all.’ Perhaps it wasn’t necessary that she knew what he knew. Besides, he only half understood it himself. He would just have to be on the lookout — but for what, he wasn’t sure.

It was an alien, separate world, like something cast adrift in outer space, some asteroid or comet, hostile, unfastened from the rest of earth, a frozen place of snow and rock. In this lost, abstracted place, time and space had different meanings, and sometimes no meaning at all. Ten minutes or ten kilometres — these measurements signified nothing. The Himalayas made the clock run more slowly than in the rest of the world, and all that mattered was how far could be walked or climbed from one sunrise to its setting. Mountains made everything relative.

On every side Swift felt their arcane and unsettling presence, like ancient holy men, their bodies shrouded from pointed head to massive toe in long white robes of snow, as if their faces might be too old, too wrinkled, and too terrible to behold.

Like the rest of the expeditionary team on the six-day trek up from Chomrong, she seldom spoke, and amid a mountainous silence that felt unnatural, she began to rediscover the quiet privacy of her own mind. It was like entering a walled garden, long neglected and overgrown.

Small wonder, she thought, that the Himalayas were regarded as a holy place, for in such icy, frigid silence, where the only noise was the sound of your own footsteps as, quietly growling, they sank into the tight-packed snow, it was easy to mistake the still, small voice of consciousness as the actual spoken word of some immanent being.

Walking slowly up the ever steepening trail that led to the Annapurna Sanctuary, Swift reflected on how much louder that unspoken voice must have sounded to ancient man. Was this how it had been? From where else but mountains did the gods speak to men? The Himalayas, being much higher than the highest mountains of vision found anywhere else in the religious and mythical world, were endowed with a silence that much more profound, with voices that much clearer, and with a sense of epiphany that much more sacred. For a scientist in the late twentieth century, this sense of the eternal and the numinous was both exhilarating and a little frightening.

The Annapurna Sanctuary, a glacier basin as protected and holy as the name suggested, was a natural amphitheatre created by ten of the world’s highest mountain peaks. It was Jack’s fourth time to the Sanctuary, but he never passed by the northwest face of Machhapuchhare, the seven-thousand-metre-high mountain and symbol of Shiva that marked the entrance to the Sanctuary, without feeling like a kind of grave robber intent on desecrating the pyramid of some antique king and stealing something precious.

Annapurna Base Camp, or ABC as it was more easily known, lay at the head of a valley filled with deep snow. This had been the site of the successful 1970 expedition to climb one of the Himalayas’ great walls, although now as he looked up at the solid mass of rock and reflected upon his own failure to climb it, Jack thought it almost inconceivable that anyone choosing that route should actually have made it to the top.

Perhaps that was why he had failed after all? Any kind of doubt could be fatal on a mountain like Annapurna.

It was like standing in front of an enormous tidal wave of rock and snow that threatened to come crashing down upon his head at any second. But as far away from the foot of the mountain as it was, ABC was reasonably safe from all but the most cataclysmic collapse of snow and ice.

Here, at nearly four thousand one hundred metres, the air was noticeably thinner. At anything above three thousand metres the oxygen concentration inside human lungs starts to drop. To ensure that everyone on the expedition would become properly acclimatized. Jack had insisted that they should all endure the walk up from Chomrong.

The last four hundred metres from MBC — Machhapuchhare Base Camp — had been the hardest walking of all, and some of the expeditionary team were already feeling the effects. They arrived fifty minutes behind Jack and the sirdar — the Sherpa leader — breathless and lightheaded and wondering irritably what had happened to the stone huts that were supposed to be there and which the guidebooks had described as simple lodges for tourists during the trekking season. The miscellaneous team of scientists and climbers did not think of themselves as tourists, but after walking for six days in all weathers, even the most basic tourist comfort had begun to sound attractive. The mystery of the disappearing lodges was soon solved when Jack, who had never been in any doubt where these were to be found, ordered the porters to start digging in the snow.

He had chosen to pitch camp at ABC instead of MBC, which was nearer to the forbidden mountain of Machhapuchhare where Swift wanted to concentrate their search, for several reasons: For one, the lodges at ABC were of a better standard; he hoped to get the team acclimatized to a slightly higher altitude; but most important of all, he wanted to keep the real search area of Machhapuchhare a secret from the authorities for as long as possible. The first inkling they had that the expedition was intent on violating the terms of their permit, and their liaison officer back in Khat would be forced to recall the Sherpas.

Boyd located some of the heavier supplies, including the main tent, that had been dropped near the site by an army helicopter from Pokhara. While Boyd set about erecting the tent. Jack climbed down a vertical snow shaft, several metres deep, breaking through the bamboo thatched roof of one of the buried dwellings — the Hotel Paradise Garden Lodge — and dropping into its perfectly dry interior. Another shaft was sunk in the snow, another roof was broached, and soon two horizontal tunnels connecting the front doors of both lodges were excavated and connected. Within a few hours of their arrival. Jack and the Nepalese Sherpas had located all four lodges and connected them via an icy warren of under-snow tunnels. Aluminium ladders were placed in two of the vertical shafts, to become an entrance and an exit, and a system of halogen lights was rigged so that underneath the thick duvet of snow, the lodges, which were simply furnished with bunk beds, tables, and chairs, could accommodate the eight members of the team as well as at least a dozen Sherpas and porters.