Philip Kerr - Esau

‘Okay, don’t lose it. I’m going to try and get you out of there.’

For what seemed like an eternity Swift just hung there, turning on the rope, eyes closed, and hardly daring to look up for fear that she should find Jack slowly dragged down into the crevasse after her. But when she felt herself drawn several centimetres up the crevasse. Swift opened her eyes.

Gradually her sight adjusted to the frigid gloom, and her immediate thoughts upon seeing the cold abyss beneath her redundant feet had to do with the breaking strength, elongation, elasticity, impact force, number of falls sustainable, and water absorption inability of the rope holding her. She had seen enough movies to have in her mind’s eye a picture of a rope slowly fraying on the edge of the crevasse above her as Jack struggled to pull her up before it finally snapped.

Trying to clear her head of these images, she attempted to help Jack by telling him how much rope he would have to haul, and she perceived that she had fallen about six metres down inside the chasm. With this came the realization that it would probably take him as long as an hour to haul her out of there.

‘Jack? I’m about six metres down,’ she reported loudly, her voice already sounding like it belonged to something dead, a plangent soul lost in that unfathomed space. ‘Is there anything you want me to do?’

Slowly, he began to draw himself toward the head of his ice axe and farther away from the edge of the crevasse. The dead weight on the rope’s end was almost too much for him, and the karabiner was now halfway down his arm, but gradually, he got his head level with the shovel-like end of the axe that was the adze. When he was quite certain that he was secure, he twisted out the pick and then swung it at arm’s length, hammering it fast into the ice above his head, before drawing himself up the length of the shaft once again.

Jack repeated this manoeuvre until there were at least six metres between himself and the crevasse. Only then did he slowly turn onto his back and feel around for the rope, ready to begin the laboriously slow, backbreaking task of hauling Swift up and out of the crevasse.

The very next moment he felt something separate under his shoulder. Like buttons popping on a shirt.

The harness was of a type that enhanced the safety of climbers when a large rucksack was being carried as it helped prevent a climber from inverting in the event of a fall. Buckled securely, the load of a climber’s weight was evenly spread around the whole harness. But with the whole weight of the rope holding Swift brought to bear on only half of the harness, the integrity of the stitching on the flat webbing shoulder strap could only last a short while.

Jack guessed in an instant what was happening. Desperately he lunged for the rope and missed. He cried out as the strap holding the karabiner unfolded like a tiny fist, and the rope holding Swift disappeared into the crevasse.

She heard him shout something, but the actual words were lost as distinguishing yet more of her dark and cheerless surroundings, she was suddenly falling again.

Her scream had hardly time to leave her lips before she landed — almost immediately grasping what must have become of the two yetis, before something hit her head. Seeing it was the karabiner that had been attached to Jack’s harness, along with the rest of the rope that had been holding her up, she started to sense just how narrow was the escape she had enjoyed.

As narrow as the ledge she had landed on.

Another metre or so further along the crevasse and she would surely have missed it altogether. Inside the curling Up of the crevasse, about nine metres down the throat of the chasm, she was sitting on a long twisting shelf covered in ice and snow that bore the same tracks as the glacier outside, a natural mountain path that led hundreds of metres away into the shadows. The two yetis must have been aware of the existence of the shelf, for it was plain to her that they must have jumped from the edge of the crevasse straight down into the very darkest part of the fissure — a prodigious leap that would, she knew, have challenged the instincts of even the most resourceful and intelligent of wild animals.

Jack’s head appeared over the edge of the crevasse, shouting her name in a voice hoarsened with fear.

‘It’s okay,’ she called to him. ‘I’m okay. There’s a kind of ledge here about a metre wide. I’m sitting on it.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Now we know what happened to the yetis,’ she said.

Jack started to laugh.

Pressing herself back against the wall of the crevasse, she stood up slowly, her trembling legs reminding her of how close she had come to dying. A cold sweat and sudden wave of nausea followed.

‘You okay?’

‘I think so. I couldn’t have fallen more than about three metres from where I was. I’m about nine metres down.’

‘That’s a hell of a jump,’ observed Jack.

Realizing what had happened to the two yetis was enough to make Swift understand a little of how these legendary creatures had managed to evade observation and capture for so long. If they could make such a jump on to an invisible rock ledge, what other physical feats might they be capable of?

‘Can you throw the rope up to me?’

Straight away Swift wrestled off her knapsack and the coil of rope and took out a Mini-Maglite, for there was a peculiar atmosphere in the half-light of the crevasse she hoped to quickly dispel. Shining the powerful beam of the Maglite ahead of her she saw the ledge — over a metre wide where she stood, but narrowing as it snaked away into the darkness — and the tracks. They would have to come back later, perhaps the following day, and continue tracking the yetis. It was impossible to lose the trail, for there was clearly only one way to go and that was along and inside the crevasse.

She put away the Maglite, uncoiled the rope, measured out a length, and mentally rehearsed the act of tossing it up.

‘I don’t think so,’ she reported. ‘There’s not enough room.’

Looking up at the top of the crevasse and the narrow aperture of blue sky beyond. Swift waited to hear what Jack would suggest next, and she shivered. In her fear she had paid no attention to how bitterly cold it was in there.

‘What do we do now?’ she called to him.

‘Good question,’ said Jack, and retreating from the edge of the crevasse, he went to fetch the radio.

As soon as he picked it up he saw there was no LCD on its tiny grey screen and realized that there was no signal. Somehow the aerial had become detached when the radio had hit the ice. Jack scanned the edge of the crevasse, but the squat black rubber piece that provided the radio signal was nowhere to be seen.

‘Shit.’

That was the thing about equipment failure. One failure usually occasioned another.

A glance at his watch and then the sky reminded him of what he already knew. There was no time to walk down to Camp One and then come back again with Mac and Jameson before dark. He knew how cold it could get inside a crevasse. Bad enough in daylight, but in darkness it would be like a butcher’s deep freeze. Seeing Swift’s ice axe on the ground, he picked it up, certain now that with two ice axes he had no alternative but to climb down into the crevasse, collect the rope himself, and climb back up again.

Jack found himself retching as he realized he was going to have to do what he had hoped to avoid at least until he was better prepared.

He was going to have to climb a sheer wall of ice, without ropes, with only his crampons and the two ice axes to aid him. It would be as near to being back up Annapurna as he could imagine.

Jutta, Cody, and Ang Tsering returned to ABC to find Boyd laying out cylindrical specimens of ice on a special groundsheet, samples obtained from the glacier using a portable drill bit. The specimens, called cores, were almost two metres long and seven or eight centimetres in diameter, and each one was attached by a couple of wires to a small digital computer. When Boyd saw the three coming, he stopped what he was doing and stood up and adopted a somber-looking expression.