Philip Kerr: Esau

The ice ridge, its delicate formations cut deep into the face of Machhapuchhare like dozens of giant bridal veils from a celestial wedding ceremony, soared above his throbbing head in the dazzling, late afternoon sunshine. Beneath his cramponed feet, his toes barely gripping the vertical ice wall, stretched the yawning gap that was the Annapurna South Glacier. Some twelve kilometres behind his back, which ached from the weight of a heavy rucksack, the distinctive peak of Annapurna rose from the ground like a huge octopus. Not that he was looking. Cutting hand- and footholds with an ice axe at six thousand metres meant there was no time to relax on the rope and enjoy the view. Scenery counted for nothing when there was a summit to be reached. Especially when it was a summit that was officially forbidden.

Western climbers called it Fish Tail Peak, which underlined how the sinuous twisting mountain might elude a man’s grasp. At the suggestion of some sentimental Brit gone native, who had himself failed to reach the summit in 1957, the Nepalese government had declared that Machhapuchhare, three times as big as the Matterhorn, should forever remain pure and inviolate. As a result, it was now impossible to get a permit to climb one of the most beautiful and challenging of all the peaks surrounding the Annapurna Sanctuary.

Most climbers might have let it go there, for fear of the consequences. Jail sentences and fines could be imposed. Future expedition permits could be denied. Sherpas could be withheld. But Jack had come to regard this mountain, Machhapuchhare, as an affront, a mockery of his publicly declared intention to conquer all the major Himalayan peaks. And as soon as he and his partner had successfully completed their officially sanctioned ascent of Annapurna’s southwest face, they decided to climb without a permit. A lightning assault that had seemed like a good idea until the bad weather hit.

He pushed himself up on one of the footholds he had cut earlier, reached up with his axe, and hacked another handhold out of the ice face.

Bad enough, he thought, that mountaineers were obliged to stop climbing Kangchenjunga just a few metres short of the summit to keep from defiling its holy peak. But that there should be a mountain that you were actually forbidden to climb was unthinkable. One of the reasons you went climbing in the first place was to get away from terrestrial rules and regulations. Jack was quite used to people advising him that this mountain or that wall was unclimbable. Mostly he had proved them wrong. But a mountain you were forbidden to climb, and by a government too — that was something else. As far as their liaison officer in Khatmandu was concerned, they were still on Annapurna; their Sherpas had been bribed to keep silent. Nobody was going to tell him where he could and could not climb.

The very thought of it was enough to make Jack wield the axe with greater ferocity, sending a shower of ice chips and water spray into his weather-beaten face, until a crumbling step beneath his boot made him stop to adjust his balance and fumble to insert another ice screw.

Not easy, wearing Dachstein woollen mitts.

‘How’re you doing?’ shouted his climbing partner from about fifteen metres below.

Jack said nothing. Muscles aching from his ice climb, he clung to the wall with one hand as he tried to turn the screw with fingers that were numb with cold. If he didn’t get off this wall soon he would risk frostbite. There was no time for a report of his progress. Or lack of it. If they didn’t make the top soon, they were in serious trouble. Days spent in a hanging tent had cost them valuable fuel. There was only enough for another day or two at the most, and without fuel they could not melt snow for their coffee.

At last the screw was tight and he was able to take the weight off his arm. He drew deep breaths of the thin mountain air and tried to steady the alarming pulse in his temple.

Jack could not recall a more demanding piece of ice climbing. Even the Annapurna had not seemed so hard. Near the top, Machhapuchhare looked not so much like a fish tail as a spear point driven up through the earth by some giant subterranean warrior. There was no doubt about it: High-altitude wall climbing remained the real challenge for any modern Alpinist, and Machhapuchhare’s Gothic heights, as sheer as any New York skyscraper, were perhaps the ultimate test of all. What a fool he was. Let him finish the climb before he worried about the authorities discovering what he had done.

The throbbing in his head seemed to diminish.

Except that now he was aware of a strange whistling in his ears. Like tinnitus at first, it grew louder, until the whistling had become a roaring, like the sound of an artillery shell fired from a warship in a distant bay, until the noise filled his ears and he wondered if he was experiencing some dreadful effect of high altitude, a pulmonary oedema or even a cerebral hemorrhage.

For a brief and nauseous moment Jack heard the screws that held him on to the rock face grinding in the ice as the whole mountain shook, and he closed his eyes.

A moment or two passed. The noise ended on the glacier somewhere to the north of him. He remained aloft. The breath he had been unconsciously holding escaped from his chapped lips in an exclamation of gratitude and relief as he opened his eves again.

‘What the hell was it?’ shouted Didier, at the bottom of the ice wall.

‘I’m glad you heard it too,’ said Jack.

‘Sounded like it was over the other side of the mountain. What was it?’

‘Somewhere nearer the north, I reckon.’

‘Maybe an avalanche.’

‘Must have been a hell of a big one,’ said Jack.

‘Up here they’re all big ones.’

‘Could even have been a meteorite.’

Jack heard Didier laugh.

‘Shit,’ said Didier. ‘As if this wasn’t already dangerous enough. The Almighty has to throw rocks down on us as well.’

Jack pushed himself away from the wall and, leaning back on the rope, he looked up at the huge overhang of ice above his head.

‘I think it looks okay,’ he shouted.

In his mind was a picture of the avalanche debris that he and Didier had seen scattered at the foot of the ridge they were on, an unpleasant reminder of the risks he and his French Canadian partner were taking.

‘Well, I guess we’ll know all about it soon enough,’ he added quietly.

The week before they had arrived in the Annapurna Sanctuary to mount their lightweight, two-man assault on the tenth highest mountain in the world — and then its forbidden sister peak — a German expedition, much larger than their own, had been wiped out by a big avalanche on the south wall of Lhotse, the great black peak that was linked to Everest by the famous south col. Six men had died. According to one of the Sherpas who had witnessed the accident, a whole serac, several hundred tons of solid ice, had collapsed on top of them.