Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

Maslama was nodding furiously. ‘You can depend on me,’ he promised. ‘I'm a man who respects a person's privacy. Mum’ – for the second time! – ‘is the word.’

Gibreel fled the compartment with the lunatic's hymns in hot pursuit. As he rushed to the far end of the train Maslama's paeans remained faintly audible behind him. ‘Alleluia! Alleluia!’ Apparently his new disciple had launched into selections from Handel's Messiah .

However: Gibreel wasn't followed, and there was, fortunately, a first-class carriage at the rear of the train, too. This one was of open-plan design, with comfortable orange seats arranged in fours around tables, and Gibreel settled down by a window, staring towards London, with his chest thumping and his hat jammed down on his head. He was trying to come to terms with the undeniable fact of the halo, and failing to do so, because what with the derangement of John Maslama behind him and the excitement of Alleluia Cone ahead it was hard to get his thoughts straight. Then to his despair Mrs. Rekha Merchant floated up alongside his window, sitting on her flying Bokhara, evidently impervious to the snowstorm that was building up out there and making England look like a television set after the day's programmes end. She gave him a little wave and he felt hope ebbing from him. Retribution on a levitating rug: he closed his eyes and concentrated on trying not to shake.

‘I know what a ghost is,’ Allie Cone said to a classroom of teenage girls whose faces were illuminated by the soft inner light of worship. ‘In the high Himalayas it is often the case that climbers find themselves being accompanied by the ghosts of those who failed in the attempt, or the sadder, but also prouder, ghosts of those who succeeded in reaching the summit, only to perish on the way down.’

Outside, in the Fields, the snow was settling on the high, bare trees, and on the flat expanse of the park. Between the low, dark snow-clouds and the white-carpeted city the light was a dirty yellow colour, a narrow, foggy light that dulled the heart and made it impossible to dream. Up there , Allie remembered, up there at eight thousand metres, the light was of such clarity that it seemed to resonate, to sing, like music. Here on the flat earth the light, too, was flat and earthbound. Here nothing flew, the sedge was withered, and no birds sang. Soon it would be dark.

‘Ms Cone?’ The girls’ hands, waving in the air, drew her back into the classroom. ‘Ghosts, miss? Straight up?’

‘You're pulling our legs, right?’ Scepticism wrestled with adoration in their faces. She knew the question they really wanted to ask, and probably would not: the question of the miracle of her skin. She had heard them whispering excitedly as she entered the classroom, ‘s true, look, how pale , ‘s incredible. Alleluia Cone, whose iciness could resist the heat of the eight-thousand-metre sun. Allie the snow maiden, the icequeen. Miss, how come you never get a tan? When she went up Everest with the triumphant Collingwood expedition, the papers called them Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though she was no Disneyish cutie, her full lips pale rather than rose-red, her hair ice-blonde instead of black, her eyes not innocently wide but narrowed, out of habit, against the high snow-glare. A memory of Gibreel Farishta welled up, catching her unawares: Gibreel at some point during their three and a half days, booming with his usual foot-in-mouth lack of restraint, ‘Baby, you're no iceberg, whatever they say. You're a passionate lady, bibi. Hot, like a kachori.’ He had pretended to blow on scalded fingertips, and shook his hand for emphasis: O, too hot. O, throw water . Gibreel Farishta. She controlled herself: Hi ho, it's off to work.

‘Ghosts,’ she repeated firmly. ‘On the Everest climb, after I came through the ice-fall, I saw a man sitting on an outcrop in the lotus position, with his eyes shut and a tartan tam-o'-shanter on his head, chanting the old mantra: om mani padmé hum.’ She had guessed at once, from his archaic clothing and surprising behaviour, that this was the spectre of Maurice Wilson, the yogi who had prepared for a solo ascent of Everest, back in 1934, by starving himself for three weeks in order to cement so deep a union between his body and soul that the mountain would be too weak to tear them apart. He had gone up in a light aircraft as high as it would take him, crash-landed deliberately in a snow-field, headed upwards, and never returned. Wilson opened his eyes as Allie approached, and nodded lightly in greeting. He strolled beside her for the rest of that day, or hung in the air while she worked her way up a face. Once he belly-flopped into the snow of a sharp incline and glided upwards as if he were riding on an invisible anti-gravity toboggan. Allie had found herself behaving quite naturally, as if she'd just bumped into an old acquaintance, for reasons afterwards obscure to her.

Wilson chattered on a fair bit – ‘Don't get a lot of company these days, one way and another’ – and expressed, among other things, his deep irritation at having had his body discovered by the Chinese expedition of 1960. ‘Little yellow buggers actually had the gall, the sheer face, to film my corpse.’ Alleluia Cone was struck by the bright, yellow-and-black tartan of his immaculate knickerbockers. All this she told the girls at Brickhall Fields Girls’ School, who had written so many letters pleading for her to address them that she had not been able to refuse. ‘You've got to,’ they pleaded in writing. ‘You even live here.’ From the window of the classroom she could see her flat across the park, just visible through the thickening fall of snow.

What she did not tell the class was this: as Maurice Wilson's ghost described, in patient detail, his own ascent, and also his posthumous discoveries, for example the slow, circuitous, infinitely delicate and invariably unproductive mating ritual of the yeti, which he had witnessed recently on the South Col, – so it occurred to her that her vision of the eccentric of 1934, the first human being ever to attempt to scale Everest on his own, a sort of abominable snowman himself, had been no accident, but a kind of signpost, a declaration of kinship. A prophecy of the future, perhaps, for it was at that moment that her secret dream was born, the impossible thing: the dream of the unaccompanied climb. It was possible, also, that Maurice Wilson was the angel of her death.

‘I wanted to talk about ghosts,’ she was saying, ‘because most mountaineers, when they come down from the peaks, grow embarrassed and leave these stories out of their accounts. But they do exist, I have to admit it, even though I'm the type who's always kept her feet on solid ground.’

That was a laugh. Her feet. Even before the ascent of Everest she had begun to suffer from shooting pains, and was informed by her general practitioner, a no-nonsense Bombay woman called Dr Mistry, that she was suffering from fallen arches. ‘In common parlance, flat feet.’ Her arches, always weak, had been further weakened by years of wearing sneakers and other unsuitable shoes. Dr Mistry couldn't recommend much: toe-clenching exercises, running upstairs barefoot, sensible footwear. ‘You're young enough,’ she said. ‘If you take care, you'll live. If not, you'll be a cripple at forty.’ When Gibreel – damn it! – heard that she had climbed Everest with spears in her feet he took to calling her his silkie. He had read a Bumper Book of fairy-tales in which he found the story of the sea-woman who left the ocean and took on human form for the sake of the man she loved. She had feet instead of fins, but every step she took was an agony, as if she were walking over broken glass; yet she went on walking, forward, away from the sea and over land. You did it for a bloody mountain, he said. Would you do it for a man?