Philip Kerr - Esau

‘Oh? What did you mean?’

‘The universe is exactly the way it should be if there is no supernatural design, no purpose, just complete indifference. To me it seems quite extraordinary that we should try and equip it with any meaning other than a purely scientific one.’

‘Swift, you’re much too elemental,’ chuckled Jameson. ‘If the gods do intervene, it’s because we need to believe we’re more than just a few atoms. It’s what distinguishes human nature from the rest of nature.’

Disappointed that the tracks had led them to nothing. Swift shrugged, hardly caring to argue with him.

‘Come on,’ she sighed. ‘We’d better get back to camp.’

Three weeks went by, and with no sightings of the yeti or its tracks, the high spirits that had characterized the first full day on the glacier began slowly to evaporate. As the expedition team learned to appreciate the enormous size of the Sanctuary and became aware of its many hazards, not the least being the extreme weather, the scale of their task began to dawn on them. Swift did her best to remain optimistic, but as the third week gave way to the fourth, even she started to have misgivings that they might never find her living fossil, Esau. So it was to revive her own confidence as much as anyone else’s that she told the sirdar to announce to all the Sherpas that she would pay a bonus of fifty U.S. dollars to the man who discovered a genuine yeti track. Efforts among the Sherpas were redoubled but proved useless, and with each succeeding day the expedition grew more and more demoralized.

Jack had come to believe that the expedition was attempting to cover too much ground and decided to establish another camp, on the slopes of Machhapuchhare, at a site he selected through his binoculars and named Advance Camp One. While Jutta and Cody were to go with Ang Tsering and make a reconnaissance in a valley close to Annapurna III that they had yet to explore. Jack would lead Swift, Mac, and Jameson up the lower slopes of Machhapuchhare, to establish a camp where they might stay for some days at a time. Warner would stay back at ABC, while Boyd was to be left to look for core samples on his own.

‘We’ll need a camp that’s higher up,’ Jack announced with a nod in the direction of the now familiar Fish Tail. ‘Chances are we’ll be doing much of our searching up that way. The place I have in mind is the little island of rock you can see farther down the glacier on the lower slopes of Machhapuchhare. It’s what we mountaineers call a Rognon. In this snow, it’s going to be heavy going, to say nothing of the higher altitude. The extra six hundred metres are going to seem like ten.’

‘I thought you said we were acclimatized already,’ objected Swift.

Jack laughed. ‘To just over four thousand metres, yes. Not to nearly five thousand. But this is what it’s all about, folks. No sooner have you got used to one altitude than you go higher and start the whole lousy process all over again.’

He pointed after the four Sherpas, led by Hurké Gurung, who were already making steady progress down the glacier in the knee-deep snow, despite the loads they carried on their backs. To Swift they looked like tiny flies crawling over a newly iced cake.

‘Come on,’ said Jack. ‘The sooner we get going, the sooner we can come back again.’

The morning was fine but Jack’s party made slow work of following the Sherpas, who were soon out of sight in an ice field. They had marked the route with bamboo flagpoles and the party had no problem trailing them. By the time they reached a series of jagged-looking ice towers, however. Swift and Jameson were feeling the effects of altitude and had been forced to take some of the acetazolamide tablets that Jutta Henze had provided. These dehydrated the user by making him, or her, want to urinate, and Swift was subjected to the uncomfortable experience of squatting to pee underneath icicles that hung from one of the ice towers like the enormous fangs of some prehistoric monster.

Jack called out to her from behind another serac.

‘You can sure pick a spot, I’ll say that for you. Swift. One of those toothpicks falls, you’re the sharp end of Dracula, honey.’

Swift finished quickly and joined the others at the beginning of a corridor that the sirdar had marked to lead them through the seracs. A little way behind them, where Jack was standing, she could see the yawning black hole of an enormous crevasse, and she began to realize just how hazardous the area really was. Surrounded by a maze of precarious-looking ice towers, thorn-sharp icicles, and hidden chasms. Swift thought the place looked almost as if it had been created by some vindictive snow queen to impede their progress.

It had been a difficult year for Sherpas and porters. Because of the Indo-Pakistan war, few visitors were flying to Delhi from the West, and with few direct flights to Khatmandu, tourism in Nepal had all but collapsed. Money was short. Things were as bad as Hurké Gurung could remember in all the time he had been guiding climbing expeditions in the Himalayas.

He had thought that the presence of the scientific expedition to the Annapurna Sanctuary and, more important, their plentiful supply of U.S. dollars would have made those Nepalese lucky enough to find work grateful to their employers and hence more pliable. Instead the sirdar discovered that it had produced exactly the opposite effect, with every man determined to screw every last cent and perk from the Americans. Several times he had found himself embarrassed by the apparently churlish demands of his fellow countrymen — demands that he was obliged, reluctantly, to put to Jack sahib: more cigarettes, more sweatshirts, more woollen pullovers, more Dachstein mitts, more fleece jackets, more woollen hats, and better footwear — in short, more of everything that could later be sold for hard currency. Hurké was very aware of how desperate the plight of his people had become, for they depended on tourist dollars to give them a small improvement in their otherwise subsistence-level living standard. He knew how rich all Westerners were in comparison. But he felt compromised, remembering the friendship and admiration he had for the man who had once saved his life. It was difficult to make extra demands of such a man, especially when the truth was that the rest of the Sherpas were acutely nervous of the object of their expedition and potentially unreliable.

When it was a matter of plodding through deep snow at altitudes of over seven and a half thousand metres while carrying loads of three and half kilogrammes or more, the sirdar believed that his men lacked for nothing in courage and strength. But yetis were a different story. Just the sound of a yeti — the loud whistling noise like the plaintive call of a big bird of prey — was enough to put them in fear for their lives.

As one of the bravest and toughest of Sherpas, the so-called Tigers, Hurké Gurung was not himself afraid. And on the rare occasions when he did feel fear of something — usually a storm or a route up a mountain — he did not show it. That was what being a sirdar meant.

Mac had climbed onto a bank of snow and was looking through binoculars toward the lower slopes of Machhapuchhare on the other side of the forest of ice.

‘No sign of them yet.’

Jack got on the radio.

‘Hurké, this is Jack. Come in please, over?’

There was a brief pause, and then they all heard the calm voice of the sirdar.

‘Receiving you loud and clear. Jack sahib.’

‘How’s the route through the glacier coming?’

‘We are through, sahib. It’s not very straight. But no other way could be found. Maybe you will see better way. But I think it is not as bad as the ice fall near Everest.’