Philip Kerr - Esau

Jack reached the figure eight, and feeling a little stronger, he stood up and took a few paces forward, at the same time kicking something the size of a rock but also somehow hollow. It was his helmet. At least now he could conserve some precious body heat, even if the means of generating it were no longer functioning. He put on the helmet, plugged it into the redundant life-support unit he still wore on his back, and started to pick his way slowly back across the ice blocks that covered the cavern floor. His water pipe was gone, but miraculously the carbide light on top of the helmet still worked — although not the halogen — prompting him to wonder how he would have managed the route back along the shelf in total darkness. The yellow carbide lamp illuminated the difficulty he now faced in getting back down the icy slope that led on to the shelf, twisting around into the darkness of the crevasse helter-skelter. With only one good shoulder, it would be impossible to layback his way down, and without the ice axe to brake his slide, the journey down might easily end at the unfathomed bottom of the crevasse.

Jack sat down on his backside and braced himself. He took as deep a breath as the pain in his ribs allowed and then launched himself down the icy slope.

The sirdar stepped carefully along the shelf inside the crevasse, keeping as close to the wall as his own overriding sense of urgency permitted. He tried to keep his mind on the route in front of him, but isolated inside the SCE suit and alone in the darkness, his thoughts returned to Jack and how the American had saved his own life.

It had been six years before. There had been an accident on Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world. A rock-step on the southwestern ridge. Having helped Jack and Didier establish a camp from which they hoped to conquer the summit, Hurké and another climber, an Englishman named Thompson, had been descending a snow ridge between six thousand four hundred and six thousand seven hundred metres when they slipped and fell. Thompson had been killed. Although badly injured, Hurké had managed to use his ice axe to brake his fall but as a result had suffered severe lacerations to his hands. Jack had abseiled down to him and in doing so had almost been killed himself — once when a peg had come out of the hard granite wall, and again when he was struck by a small rock fall.

There was no getting away from it: But for Jack sahib, he would still be on that mountainside.

Hurké’s radio crackled. It was Jameson. Inside the sirdar’s helmet he sounded like the voice of his own conscience. Or maybe the Lord Shiva himself. Hurké stopped to take a rest.

‘Hurké, how are you coming along?’

‘Good, thank you, Jameson sahib. But this is a bad place. I would not be surprised to see writing on this wall. There is a destiny here.’

‘If that’s so, then I’m sure you must be earning good points for your karma,’ advised Jameson. ‘Like the sadhu we saw. Remember?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

The sirdar wasn’t sure if he believed in karma and the wheel of rebirth very much. He had seen too many people killed in the mountains to accept the idea that an unfulfilled karma would bind him yet more closely to a continuing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. His belief in friendship seemed stronger.

‘I just wanted to warn you about something when you come back,’ said Jameson. ‘I’ve left a net over the mouth of the crevasse. Just in case another yeti should decide to drop in. You wouldn’t want one following you, would you?’

Hurké cast his mind back to the ice field and his encounter with the two yetis.

‘No indeed, sahib.’

‘Anyway, let me know when you’re on your way back. Won’t take long to shift it out of your way. Half an hour at the most.’

‘Yes, sahib. Thank you.’

‘That’s all. Cheerio.’

Hurké smiled and walked on. He liked the way Jameson had spoken to him. The agreji made it seem as if it was a foregone conclusion that the sirdar would be coming back.

‘Saathi, pheri bhetaulaa,’ he said to himself. Friend, I hope we meet again.

‘Oh shit.’

Jack realised that he was sliding too fast. Leaning back against the slope meant that he only succeeded in streamlining himself. He felt like some kind of winter sports athlete, the ones wrapped in skintight rubber wetsuits. Lugeing. He yelled with fright as the slope turned and the crevasse raced toward him.

At the last second, when he was certain he was about to cannon over the edge of the precipice. Jack pointed his toes, and dug into the ice with the points of his crampons. Such was his desperation to stop and, as a corollary, so strong was the downward force he exerted on the crampons that one of them immediately broke off his boot and disappeared painfully under his body and then behind his head. Ignoring the cramp that now racked the backs of his legs. Jack gouged hard at the ice with the other remaining crampon.

Too hard...

His foot stopped dead, but his body kept on travelling and he found himself catapulted forward as if he had been thrown over the handlebars of a suddenly braking motorcycle. He had a brief, heart-stopping view of the depths of the crevasse before the shelf came rushing toward him and, knowing that he was about to hit flat rock, he tried to break his fall with his forearms.

Safety never felt so hard.

With all the wind knocked out of him and the pain in his ribs now multiplied tenfold. Jack heard something groan horribly in the darkness, followed by a whistling in his ears that grew louder as he slipped into an abyss of unconsciousness darker and deeper even than the place he was in.

It was one of Mac’s fondest axioms that forecasting in the Himalayas was an unpredictable science, especially when you were trying to forecast the weather. By the time Jameson and the Sherpas had followed the rest of the team down to Camp One on top of the Machhapuchhare Rognon, the threatened storm that had driven everyone from the ice corridor had cleared with a rapidity worthy of the most capricious mountain deity. Jameson crawled into the largest of the tents and found Swift cooking some beef consommé on the primus stove.

‘Want some? This has got sherry in it.’

‘Sherry. Good Lord, at last I’m back in civilization. I can hardly wait.’

Cody, wearing his Petzl headlamp and looking like a coal miner, was already inside his sleeping bag and reading Seven Pillars of Wisdom .

‘Seems an odd choice of reading up here,’ remarked Jameson.

‘All of the books I brought have absolutely nothing to do with mountains, snow, or apes,’ explained the primatologist. ‘Most of all apes. Just reading about the desert helps make me feel warm again.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Jameson. ‘This billet isn’t quite up to the standard of the clamshell, is it?’

‘Boyd’s making us soft,’ grumbled Mac. Radio in hand, he was keeping in touch with the sirdar’s progress inside the crevasse.

‘Where’s Jutta?’ Jameson said to no one in particular.

‘Inside one of the other tents,’ said Swift. ‘Asleep.’ She handed Jameson a mug full of steaming consommé. ‘As soon as I’ve had some of this soup, I’m off to bed myself.’

Jameson nodded with loud enthusiasm. ‘This is good.’

‘Any more of that?’ asked Mac.

Swift opened another can, emptied it into the saucepan, and then poured in some sherry. She replaced the pan on top of a primus flame and stirred the mixture thoughtfully. They had all overheard Jameson’s conversation with the sirdar. She admired his persistence. Jameson was as worried about Jack as everyone else, she had no doubt of it. But that did not stop him from having the main object of the expedition at the forefront of his mind. It was only this kind of dogged determination that would give them any chance of success.