Philip Kerr - Esau

‘I don’t suppose there’s a chance that any of those men could still be alive?’ said Cody.

Jutta shook her head. ‘People don’t normally come out of a crevasse alive. It’s like falling off a cliff.’

‘It’s too bad this had to happen. What’s the normal procedure, Tsering? Do we go back, try to help recover the bodies?’

The young assistant sirdar shook his head slowly.

‘I doubt that such a thing would be possible. Indeed it might well cost the lives of yet more men. But what better place of burial could a Sherpa have than to lie in the snow and ice where he fell? There will be a time for formal ceremonies. But it is not now, and you will find, Cody sahib, that those who survive will behave with dignity and make no excessive show of the grief they feel.’

Cody nodded politely but thought Ang Tsering was a pompous ass. He disliked the assistant sirdar, thinking him conceited, and could not understand why Jutta seemed so keen to help him improve his German. Or perhaps it was just that like many of her race, she felt an English-speaking world to be a slap in the face of a German one. Either way he was tired of hearing the proper way to order a meal, or to count, or to ask for a hotel room in German. Even Tsering, he suspected, was showing signs of a general weariness with things Teutonic.

Tsering walked on a short way, to the top of the slope on which they stood. Warner’s radio message had interrupted them in the act of using the map to identify this slope as Gandharba Chuli, a long ridge that slowly ascended the more precipitate heights of Machhapuchhare, where the other team was headed.

Cody sighed.

‘He’s a moody sonofabitch.’

Immediately Cody regretted saying it, expecting Jutta to leap to the Sherpa’s defence and point out that five of Tsering’s fellow Sherpas had just lost their lives. Instead he found her agreeing with him.

‘I keep trying to be nice to him, but I know what you mean.’

‘I shouldn’t have said that. Five of his people were just killed.’

Jutta shrugged. ‘But I think his mood was like this before we found out about those others,’ she said. ‘His mood is always not good.’

‘I think I prefer the company of apes to someone like Ang Tsering,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to be racist or anything. It’s just that—’

Jutta smiled. ‘Don’t apologize. I know what you mean. Have you always worked with apes?’

‘Oh, I’ve done everything with apes. Everything except mate with one. And believe me, it wasn’t for lack of offers. Female gorillas can be very insistent. Back in the seventies some friends of mine in the CIA even tried to enlist my help in setting up a program to exploit large primates for the military. Teaching chimps to drive car bombs. Training gorillas for jungle warfare, that kind of thing.’ Noting the look of shock on Jutta’s face, he added quickly, ‘Not that I agreed to do it, of course.’

Jutta nodded her approval.

‘So what do we do now?’ he asked. ‘I guess if they’ve sighted two yetis, there’s not much need for us to go gallivanting off down this end of the Sanctuary.’

Tsering was waving at them to come up the slope.

‘Now what’s he want?’ grumbled Cody.

They trailed up the slope after the assistant sirdar and found him staring down the valley through an ancient pair of binoculars. Silently, Tsering pointed into the distance. His keen eyes had spotted something — a tiny figure in the distance heading up the valley, toward Tarke Kang, the Glacier Dome.

Both Cody and Jutta found their own field glasses and pointed them at the figure. For a moment they thought that the Sanctuary must be teeming with yetis until, a little farther to the north, they saw two little black triangles. They were tents.

It was another camp.

Running between the two branches of the glacier, the corridor was marked by snow walls to their right and icy rubble to their left, and the route brought them nearer to the sheer cliff that had impeded the perennial progress of the eroding ice. Overawed by the proximity of the mountain and the uncanny silence. Swift walked in the tracks of the two yetis, as she had been advised, with the caution of one who half expected their creators suddenly to appear from behind a heap of snow and attack her with all the ferocity of a tiger defending its territory.

But there was something else too. An uncomfortable feeling that they were being observed, that they themselves were being tracked. And so far from ABC, in such inhospitable and overwhelming surroundings. Swift realized that she was afraid. A couple of times, she had to stop and look around, just to make sure that Jack was still roped to her, for the glacier and the mountain and the nature of their quest had reduced them both to silence.

When, after an hour’s walking, she stopped a third time, it was not because of her fear of finding herself left alone in such a place but because the tracks suddenly deviated from the main corridor and led three metres up and over the glacier wall to their left.

Catching up to her. Jack glanced up at the icy wall and instinctively picking out a route, quickly climbed to the top.

‘Maybe they thought they were being followed,’ she said, only half joking.

Searching for the trail. Jack grunted. Then finding it again, and seeing where it led, he said, ‘You could be right. You’d better come up and see this for yourself.’

Worried less about falling than about the ice wall collapsing on top of her, he sat down and, trying to spread the load of his body on the icy platform, kept the rope taut until she was sitting alongside him. Helping her onto her feet, he said, ‘Be careful now. The glacier’s very broken up here, and one false step, you could find yourself—’

‘I know, I know,’ she said irritably, for by now she was feeling very tired. ‘I’m history.’

‘That’s right. Pure theory. No fossil.’

He turned carefully and led her across a short slope of jumbled ice and snow, to where the tracks ended at the curling blue-and-white lip of an enormous crevasse.

Gingerly they approached the edge and, with a growing sense of bafflement, stared first across the gaping black chasm and then into the frozen resonance of its hidden depths.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Swift, searching around her feet. ‘The tracks stop right here on the very edge. Did they jump across, do you think? It must be six metres.’

‘Seven and a half,’ admitted Jack.

Finding his binoculars, he surveyed the opposite side of the crevasse. There were no tracks to be seen, and the snow on the far side looked as pristine as if it had been manufactured for a magazine. Jack shook his head.

‘Is this the Twilight Zone or what? Not even a fingerprint.’

‘Could their tracks have been somehow covered up by something, maybe more snow?’

‘On just one side of the crevasse? That’s a little too peculiar, even for the Himalayas.’ He looked all around them, as if searching for some kind of clue. ‘It’s like they just disappeared.’

‘We both know that isn’t possible.’

‘Chasing around after a myth and a legend, who knows what’s possible and what isn’t?’

‘As I see it, there are just two possibilities. One, they jumped into the crevasse.’

‘Like lemmings, you mean,’ shrugged Jack. ‘Suicide.’

‘Two, they’re smarter than we thought. Perhaps they sensed they were being followed and somehow they backtracked, Indian style, placing their feet in their own tracks.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But there has to be a logical explanation.’

Jack nodded.

‘Either way, we’ve got zip,’ he said. ‘We might as well go back.’ He tried to unhook the radio from his jacket but found it was stuck under the chest harness buckle. Jack unclipped it and tugged the radio free. ‘I’ll let them know we’re coming.’