Thin Air Read online

  The next moment, with appalling certainty, I know. There’s something outside the tent.

  I’m desperate to wake Cotterell, but I can’t. I dare not put out my hand, dare not move. And now I hear – or rather, I sense within the silence – that something is coming up behind me.

  The crunch of footsteps on snow crust: a dragging, halting gait – no, not a gait; it sounds … it sounds as if it’s on all fours.

  If I sat upright and peered through the window … But I can’t. I can’t bear the thought of what I might see.

  Now I hear the rustle and creak of frozen windproofs. It’s rising to its feet. Much closer, right behind me. Only a thin layer of canvas between us.

  The rustling stops. The stillness is appalling.

  I force myself to twist round and peer at the front flap.

  My heart jerks. There’s a head in the window. Motionless. Close. And yet, no haze of frosty breath. It was behind me and now it’s there.

  I can’t move. My limbs are frozen, as if caked in ice. I can’t bear to look for another second. I screw my eyes shut. When I open them, it’s gone.

  Like the snapping of a spell, I can hear the wind and the bang-bang of canvas; and Cotterell’s stertorous breath.

  I can move. I struggle out of my sleeping bags and drag on wind jacket, windproof trousers, boots. I fumble for my electric torch, but don’t dare light it. I pull on my undergloves, shove my mittens in my pockets with the torch, grapple with the tent flaps’ frozen slipknots. My heart is hammering against my ribs, but I don’t hesitate. I have to know.

  The sky is black. No moon; a scattering of stars in the rents between clouds. Dim grey snow hissing across camp. There’s nothing by the tent.

  Crawling outside, I lurch to my feet. I take a few steps to make sure.

  The crackle of frozen canvas, then a shaft of yellow light stabs the snow.

  ‘Stephen?’ Kits’ head pokes out between the flaps in a smoky haze of breath. ‘What are you doing?’ he whispers.

  Clicking on my torch, I sweep the ground around my tent. The snow is pristine. No footprints. Only my own few faltering steps.

  I switch off my torch and scan the camp, my eyes sweeping the tents, the grey mounds of the stores dump, up towards—

  It’s on the Crag. Dark against the stars and horribly there: a hooded figure in climbing gear.

  Until this moment, I could have persuaded myself that it was a dream, but not now, standing here with Kits behind me and the wind flinging snow in my face like glass.

  ‘Stephen! What’s wrong?’

  I glance at him over my shoulder, then back to the Crag. The figure is gone. But it was there. I saw it. Kits didn’t. Only me.

  I clear my throat. ‘Nothing,’ I croak. ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  12

  It can’t have been an hallucination caused by mountain sickness. I’m hardly suffering from that; just a touch of nausea and breathlessness, and they’re minor symptoms.

  If I’d fought in Flanders like Cotterell, I could put it down to war-strain. Repressed experiences thrusting up from my unconscious mind. But I’m not ‘repressing’ anything. I heard those noises outside the tent. I didn’t imagine them, and it wasn’t a dream. There’s a reason I pulled on my clothes and crawled out into the cold: because I heard something.

  And I saw what I saw on the Crag.

  But what was it?

  I’m amazed that at breakfast, nothing shows in my face. The four of us are crammed into Garrard and Kits’ tent, and no one notices a thing.

  Kits asks through a mouthful of porridge why I was outside in the dark, and I tell him I’d returned from relieving myself and was looking for Cedric. Casually, I ask if he saw anything odd.

  ‘Odd? What d’you mean?’

  ‘On the Crag. I thought … Looked like a gorak. Pretty rum, spotting a bird this high. You didn’t see it?’

  He chuckles. ‘No, but that’s obviously what roused Cedric. He’s a devil for goraks, aren’t you, my lad? Lucky for him he found his way back to my tent!’

  So now there’s no room for doubt. Kits didn’t see it. Only me. And I can’t tell anyone, they’d think it’s the altitude and send me back to Base.

  Nearly five and getting light, but it’s snowing too hard to make a start, so we’re stuck here in Camp Two. Cotterell is writing in our tent, and I’m with Garrard and Kits. The more cramped it is, the safer I feel.

  Garrard is reading, and Cedric is sprawled across his legs with his muzzle between his paws, casting me sheepish glances – as well he might, after deserting me last night. Kits and I are taking turns to peer through the window. He’s as desperate as I am to leave, although with him it’s because he’s easily bored and detests inaction.

  ‘I think it’s clearing up,’ he says hopefully.

  ‘Nima doesn’t think it’ll last,’ I add.

  Garrard snorts. ‘Be realistic, chaps, it’s a white-out!’

  He’s right. What if it goes on all day? I don’t know what I’ll do if we have to stay here another night.

  It’s no good, I have to face the truth. There’s something terribly wrong with Camp Two.

  What do I mean by ‘wrong’? Well I don’t mean ghosts. Not in the sense of disembodied spirits; I don’t believe in them. As a scientist, of course, I’m prepared to accept evidence to the contrary, but so far I haven’t come across any. And what I experienced last night is not evidence to the contrary. No. When the last synapse in the brain flickers and dies, that’s it, lights out. That is what I believe.

  But energy, now. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so isn’t it at least possible that some kind of energy – perhaps magnetic, or even some force of emotion – may have lingered here for years? And perhaps – perhaps there’s something about me that makes me a sort of ‘physical medium’ for that energy: like a battery, or a lightning rod? Maybe that’s what Cedric sensed last night. Maybe that’s why he still won’t come near me.

  It’s an hypothesis, and it makes me feel slightly better. I’ve put a frame around the ‘wrongness’. I’ve contained it.

  And this means that there’s really no point in trying to learn any more about what happened to Lyell and his companions. It won’t change a thing. What I need to hold on to is the fact that whatever is wrong with Camp Two affects only Camp Two. That’s crucial. I had no sense of ‘wrongness’ on the climb up from the grave knoll, or at Camp One, or on the climb to Camp Two itself.

  Then why is it so strong here?

  Well, it must be because this is where Lyell pitched his Camp Two. And presumably, too, because somewhere above us is the place where that first accident happened, the one that turned their luck. How did Cotterell’s book put it? They had climbed to a little over twenty-two thousand feet when, as often happens at altitude, a trivial error triggered disaster.

  But that’s above us. So why is the wrongness here?

  ‘Stephen?’ Kits is holding out a steaming mug of tea.

  ‘Thanks. What’s the weather doing?’

  He pulls a face. ‘Still, it’s not even nine o’clock. Plenty of time to clear up.’

  ‘Ever the optimist,’ murmurs Garrard without raising his eyes from his book.

  The tea is sweet and strong and marvellously bracing, but while I sit drinking and chatting, the animal part of me remains watchful and tense. What I experienced last night has set me apart. Even now, in this cramped little tent, I’m bracing myself – because at any moment, another crack might open up, and the darkness seep through.

  I was wrong, I can’t go on like this. It’s not knowing that makes it so dreadful. Come on, Stephen, no more denial. The key to all this must be in the Lyell expedition. You really do need to know.

  ‘Kits,’ I say briskly. ‘Bloody But Unbowed. Did you bring it with you?’

  * * *

  Time passes unevenly at altitude. An hour goes by in a minute, and a minute stretches to an hour. Today has felt like a year.

  Still snowing. Dense
grey billows swirling past the window. Bloody But Unbowed lies unopened on my rucksack. I can’t bring myself to read it just yet, so instead I head out to check on the Sherpas.

  The wind is a granite fist in my face as I stagger forwards, clutching the rope that’s strung between the tents. I keep my head down, and refuse to look up at the Crag. I experience nothing untoward, but the sense that I might – the dread like a stone in the pit of my stomach – is almost as bad.

  The Sherpas respectfully make room for me and hand me a mug of tea. Nima says the snow will be over by morning, although I suspect that’s wishful thinking: he hates this camp as much as I. He says it’s unlucky; that’s why Cherma has frostnip. I tell him Cherma has frostnip because yesterday he took off his mittens too often. Nima nods politely, but I can see he’s not convinced. Cherma gives a gap-toothed grin and says it doesn’t hurt much. As I dose him with aspirin, I tell him that it’s when it doesn’t hurt that he needs to worry.

  It’s four in the afternoon and I’m back in our tent. Back with Bloody But Unbowed on my rucksack, waiting to be read. Cedric is with Garrard and Kits, and Cotterell is dozing. His colour is good and he’s breathing more freely, but I plan to use him as an excuse to sit up tonight with an electric lamp. I’ve no intention of going to sleep. I don’t dare.

  Still snowing, still windy. The endless snap of canvas is horribly wearing on the nerves.

  At lunch, to keep up our spirits, we discussed the site for Camp Three. We aim to pitch it more or less where Lyell did, at the foot of a cliff on the eastern edge of the Icefall, within a day’s climb of the Great Shelf. Cotterell said the plan for Camp Three is to dig ice caves; apparently Bauer found them warmer than tents, and safe from avalanches. ‘And no bloody noise,’ Garrard added wearily.

  At first, I didn’t care for the idea: an ice cave sounds unpleasantly like a snow globe. But on reflection, I like the sound of those solid walls. There’d be no chance of anything coming up behind me.

  So now, Lyell.

  To my annoyance, my heart starts to pound as I open Kits’ much-thumbed, heavily annotated little volume. I can’t bring myself to dive straight in at the point where they establish Camp Two, so instead, I skim the opening chapters.

  The first surprise is that I can’t stand Lyell. I was a boy of nine when I last read Bloody But Unbowed, and at that age, I worshipped him: a soldier tempered by the suns of the Punjab and the grim task of tackling the Boer in the South African War. I wanted to be him. I longed to follow in his footsteps and take a nonchalant ‘stroll’ across a twenty-thousand-foot pass in the Karakorams. (He wrote a book about that too, Jaunts in the Karakoram-Himalaya, which I also lapped up.) What I admired most was that he never seemed to try. In the Karakorams, he didn’t even bother taking an ice-axe or nailed boots, merely a certain amount of pluck.

  Reading him now, all this strikes me as the height of arrogance. To Lyell, amateurism is a mark of breeding. He’s a snob of the first water. His contempt for the stench of professionalism drips from every page. He even sneers at crampons (he calls them ‘climbing irons’) as being unsporting and bad form. No wonder the expedition was plagued by what he refers to as ‘mishaps’: stolen rations, supply problems, coolie mutinies.

  Oddly enough, he seems to loathe Kangchenjunga itself. He feels neither awe nor curiosity, he simply wishes to conquer: It is an affront, a challenge to Man’s supremacy.

  As a leader, he’s a tyrant, sounding a reveille every morning on an alpine horn (I wonder how his fellow sahibs enjoyed that!). And he regards his coolies as barely sentient brutes: vicious and disgustingly prolific, their hovels swarm with progeny like weevils in mouldy rice. He sees nothing wrong in making them trek the glacier in bare feet, and when one of them collapses and begs to be left to die, Lyell is happy to comply, merely begrudging the dying man’s kin the time it takes to say a prayer and cover his face with a kerchief.

  What strikes me most forcibly is his overweening vanity. His fellow sahibs are mere cyphers, sketchily described. This expedition is all about Edmund Lyell.

  But I’m prevaricating. The climb. What about the climb?

  All seems to have gone well up to Camp Two, barring the odd ‘scrape’ – in which Lyell, of course, usually saves the day. The chapter after that is headed ‘A Fatal Blunder’.

  After a splendid night and a hearty breakfast of meat lozenges and Brand’s peptone soup, we set off from Camp Two in excellent spirits. With the baggage coolies bringing up the rear, we spent an agreeable morning engaged in some tolerably tricky climbing, our aim being to conquer the formidable ice crag which reared like a wild beast over Camp Two. This we accomplished around noon, and paused atop it for a spot of luncheon. That was when disaster struck.

  ‘Stephen?’ shouts Kits from his tent. ‘You haven’t forgotten that it’s our turn to cook dinner?’

  ‘Um …’ I croak. ‘In a minute.’

  It all began on the Crag. Of course it did. Here at Camp Two, we’re at twenty-one thousand nine hundred feet. Cotterell’s little book said that it was at just over twenty-two thousand that things went wrong.

  We had taken off our rück-sacks in order to avail ourselves of our water-bottles, Lyell goes on. Ward, as was his custom, had seated himself apart from the rest of us. He must have made some clumsy move and knocked his rück-sack off the edge, although the first we knew of it was when we heard him shout, ‘Below!’ as a warning to the baggage coolies, who were still climbing.

  Ward? Who on earth is Ward?

  Afterwards, we surmised that his rück-sack must have snagged a few feet down, thus tempting him to further foolishness – although none of us saw this, as it happened too quickly. What we do know is that instead of soliciting our help, Ward then compounded his error by trying to retrieve the article alone. The reader may imagine our consternation when we saw him climbing unroped a few feet down the crag, in an idiotic attempt to reach for his rück-sack! He contrived to seize it in one hand, then lost his balance and fell. He made no sound – men seldom do when they fall – and he struck the ice with a sickening crunch a hundred feet below, on the edge of the crevasse. He did not respond to our calls and we feared the worst, but I conceived it my duty to climb down and ascertain his condition. This I did, ably belayed by Tennant, and on reaching the fallen man, I found my melancholy supposition confirmed.

  ‘Come on, Stephen, no shirking!’

  ‘I said I’m coming!’

  He was quite dead, having apparently broken his neck, but as the body was half overhanging the crevasse, I saw at once that it would be too hazardous to attempt to retrieve it alone. Accordingly, I climbed back to the others, then sent a runner down to the baggage train with orders for four coolies to remain behind and recover the body. Thereafter, we five said a brief prayer for our fallen comrade, then steeled ourselves to the grim task of continuing our ascent to the Great Shelf.

  The reader who lacks mountain experience may regard such behaviour as callous. The seasoned alpinist will, I trust, sympathise with our predicament. The afternoon was wearing on and we were driven by a harsh imperative, namely, the absolute necessity of establishing the next camp before darkness fell.

  Feverishly, I flick through the remaining pages. Lyell’s account of the rest of the climb doesn’t seem to differ from the outline in Cotterell’s book. Soon after that fatal fall from the Crag, a blizzard drove everyone back to Camp Two, and kept them there for three days. By the time the weather cleared, they were so weakened by the ‘rarefied air’ that they had no choice but to abandon the attempt on the summit. Shortly afterwards, as they were making their descent to Camp One, the avalanche struck.

  When I was a boy, the avalanche was my favourite part of the story, but reading Lyell now, I find it nauseating. He makes it sound as if he and Tennant managed the rescue practically single-handed: digging their comrades from the snow, raising a cairn on the knoll for Freemantle and Knight, bearing the injured Stratton and Yates back over the Yalung. There’s scarcely a line about the
two hundred coolies who did the actual work. Or the four coolies who also lost their lives in the avalanche.

  And as far as I can tell, there’s no further mention of Ward. Who the bloody hell was Ward?

  ‘Where’s Pache, and who’s Ward?’ I ask Kits a few minutes later, as I open a tin of sausages to add to the porridge.

  Kits is miffed at me and doesn’t reply.

  I repeat the question.

  ‘What?’ he says irritably.

  ‘Who’s Ward?’

  ‘He was the first man to die, the one who dropped the rucksack. Cedric, down!’

  ‘I thought that was Pache.’

  ‘Oh Stephen, really! Pache belonged to a completely different expedition!’

  I stare at him. ‘What?’

  Crossly, he stirs the porridge, narrowing his eyes against the steam. ‘Lieutenant Alexis Pache, a Swiss-German, killed with three coolies in an avalanche on the expedition led by that scoundrel Crowley in ’05. 1905, Stephen, the year before Lyell! As you’d have known if you’d bothered to pay your respects at the poor fellow’s grave.’

  I’ve cut myself on the tin. Blood is oozing from a gash in the heel of my hand. ‘So – where’s Ward buried?’

  Kits spoons dried vegetables into the porridge. ‘He isn’t.’

  ‘But … Lyell retrieved the body. He said that.’

  ‘You didn’t read very attentively, did you? Lyell ordered the coolies to retrieve the body, but they disobeyed. Then, after the blizzard, Lyell searched, but he couldn’t find it.’

  My heart is flopping about like a landed fish. ‘Then what happened to it?’

  ‘God knows. Blown off the mountain, down the crevasse. It was gone, that’s all anyone knows. Rest in peace, Arthur Ward.’

  13

  He didn’t have a middle name; he was just plain Arthur Ward. And according to Lyell, nobody liked him. He was an engraver ‘by trade’ (one can almost smell Lyell’s disdain), and he didn’t smoke, drink or chat. In short, he wasn’t clubbable. Beyond that, I can’t find much about him in Bloody But Unbowed.