Philip Kerr - Esau

The one thing that kept her going was the certainty that she was close to finding her own particular holy grail — Esau. The zoological find of the century. And she was going to make it. It would be in every science magazine and in every newspaper. She might have smiled if she hadn’t thought the extra effort would cause her to have a heart attack. It was just a question of following Jack’s route in the snow. All the way up the Rognon. Right to the top.

How did the Sherpas do it? How was it possible that people so much smaller than herself could carry such loads and still make faster progress than any Westerner burdened with not so much as a bumbag? Jack was right. A new respect for these tough little men could hardly be avoided: She felt it in her chest, in her thighs, in her shoulders, in her back every time she took another step. Her muscles felt as if they were saturated with lactic acid.

‘Are you okay?’

Jack and MacDougall had long disappeared over the crest of the Rognon. It was Miles Jameson, about fifty metres up ahead of her.

‘Yes,’ she gasped. ‘I’m just too tired to breathe, that’s all.’

She waited until the throbbing in her head seemed to diminish a little and then slowly plodded on. The grind of hauling her load up the Rognon quickly drove all thoughts of the yeti out of her mind. And she had long since ceased to pay very much attention to the tracks that the two creatures had left during their own descent and ascent of the Rognon. She had only one thought now, and that was the desperately slow, tedious business of getting up Machhapuchhare’s lowest slope.

When at last she reached the top, drenched in sweat, her lungs feeling as raw as if she had gargled with acid, she found that Mac and Jack had already erected one of the Stormhaven tents. Jameson had set up a paraffin stove and was boiling water for some tea. Swift slumped down onto the snow and let Jack remove the dead weight from her shoulders. When the load was gone, she rolled to one side like a dead body.

‘Proud of you,’ said Jack. ‘That was a hell of an effort you put in.’

Mute with fatigue. Swift nodded and lay back in the snow, staring up at the face of Machhapuchhare which, much closer now, towered over the Rognon like the ramparts of some enormous white castle. Something built by that mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. There was indeed a fairy-tale aspect to the mountain, as if it might indeed be magical. The peak was so sheer that only the actual summit was covered in snow, like the Paramount Pictures logo. Or was it Columbia? The biting Himalayan wind had airbrushed the snow so delicately that the peak seemed to be trying to tear itself from the greater mass below but could not break away from the white membrane that held it fast like glue. Shiva’s mountain looked so much more impressive on top of the Rognon than it did five kilometres away and six hundred metres farther down the glacier at ABC. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself back home in her bed in Berkeley, or in a hot tub, but as Jack was already giving orders, it was a short reverie.

‘Mac? You and Miles stay here and finish making camp. As soon as we’ve had that tea. Swift and I will push on after the yetis. We’ll try and follow those tracks for a while, and then get back here before dark.’

Something bloody lying near her in the snow made her recoil with disgust. It was the corpse of a small furry animal, about forty-five centimetres long — and it had been eviscerated.

‘Ugh, what’s that?’ she said.

Jameson gave it a cursory glance.

‘Dead marmot. Eagle probably had it. Lucky him. There’s not much meat in these mountains.’

Swift sat up slowly and took the cup of steaming tea that Miles handed her. She wanted to say that someone else should go, that she was physically finished, and she might well have, except that she knew she didn’t know how to put up a tent. Besides, it had been her idea to push on after the yetis in the first place. Instead she said:

‘We’re spending the night here, Jack?’

‘That’s the general idea.’

Swift looked at the tent and frowned. After the luxuries of the snow-buried lodges and the heated clamshell, the Stormhaven tent looked as flimsy as a paper lantern. She sipped her tea noisily and stared back across the valley toward the octopus-like shape that was Annapurna. She saw that Jack was right. It might as well have been thirty kilometres. There was no way to track the yetis and get back to ABC before nightfall.

She finished her tea and searched the flat dip on top of the Rognon for the yeti tracks. It was then that she saw that there was more ice field between the Rognon and the foot of the mountain and that the tracks led straight into it.

‘From here on we’ll need crampons and ice axes,’ said Jack and, hauling Swift’s legs out straight in front of her, strapped two sets of lethal-looking yellow points onto the soles of her boots. Then he helped her to her feet.

‘How do they feel?’

‘My legs? Like they used to belong to someone else. Someone old and crippled.’

‘I meant the crampons.’

Swift lifted one foot and then the other.

‘Okay, I guess.’

‘Let me know if they ball up under your foot, and we’ll adjust them.’

He put the rubber-covered nonslip shaft of a DMM ice axe into her gloved hand.

She hefted it experimentally and nodded, but the sight of Jack climbing into a chest harness and then collecting a slug of rope off the ground did nothing to allay a sudden sense of anxiety.

‘What’s this? Are you planning to give me a tow?’ she asked hopefully as he passed the rope around her waist.

‘Only if I have to.’

Expertly he tied a single figure eight about four feet from the end of the rope and half a fisherman’s knot back onto the main rope. Then he hooked it on to a karabiner that was hanging off the chest harness.

‘The figure eight will act as a stopper knot,’ he explained. ‘Just in case you need to stop suddenly.’

‘Jack, it’s not the stopping I need help with. It’s the getting started. Tie me a knot that will make my legs move.’ She shook her head with exasperation. ‘Why the hell should I want to stop suddenly?’

Mac guffawed loudly.

‘She doesn’t bloody get it. Jack.’

‘Get what?’

‘It’s in case you fall down a crevasse, darlin’.’ Mac laughed again. ‘That’s the kind of bloody sudden stop he’s on about. So you don’t go all the way to the bottom!’

‘Oh, great.’ Swift swallowed a mixture of fear and injury. To her greater chagrin, Mac suddenly produced a small compact camera and, still laughing, took her picture.

‘One for the album that. Come on, darlin’. Have a bit of faith. Don’t you know? Faith can move mountains.’

‘Oh yeah?’ She smiled thinly. ‘To do what?’

Jack shouldered Jameson’s Zuluarms rifle.

‘Swift, you go first. That way if you do fall, I can pull you out.’

‘Very reassuring.’

He shouldered his rucksack and then handed her a coil of spare rope.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘You can carry this. Now just take it nice and easy. Keep in the yetis’ tracks. Chances are they have a better idea of where the concealed hazards are than we do.’

Swift adjusted her sun goggles, zipped up her storm jacket, and sighed uncomfortably.

‘Why do I feel like I’m being staked out for something?’ she grumbled, and set off toward an ice corridor that ran through the upper part of the glacier to the point where it was divided in two by a ridge running down from the centre of the rock face.

The second search party was exploring a valley to the northeast of ABC that led up to Annapurna III when Lincoln Warner radioed them with the news that five Sherpas had been killed and two yetis sighted.