Thin Air Read online

  ‘Oughtn’t you to? Physician heal thyself, sort of thing?’ A pause. ‘I daresay you’ve heard that a few times before.’

  I manage a wan smile. ‘Just a few. Over the years.’

  ‘Ah. Well. I’ll leave you in peace.’

  When he’s gone, I sip the marvellous strong tea, spilling most of it over myself. I really am pathetic. But I don’t know how I’m going to get through the night. I miss Cedric. I’ve grown accustomed to that mound under the groundsheet, and he hasn’t come back since I shooed him away. Worst of all, I’m terrified that I won’t get better, that I’ll be stuck down here at Base, and never set foot on the mountain.

  I don’t seem to be in my tent any more, I’m lying out on the ice, surrounded by shaggy white yaks. They’re jostling and nosing each other with big damp muzzles, I’m worried that I’ll be trampled – but when I try to push them away, they ignore me.

  Now they’re gone, and I’m inside the snow globe. I’m kneeling and pounding my fists against impenetrable glass, while Clare’s disembodied voice coos, ‘Isn’t it darling?’

  I’m back in my tent, too shaken to open my eyes.

  The pain doesn’t seem quite so appalling. If I lie perfectly still, maybe I’ll drift off …

  ‘Below!’

  That shout is agony: bands of hot wire tightening around my skull. Christ, why must he shout?

  Whoever it was, he doesn’t do it again. I lie staring into the darkness, listening to the silence.

  Something odd about it. It’s too dense, too absolute. In the gloom, I make out the wind sucking the sides of my tent in and out – but I can’t hear it. Am I still dreaming?

  I can’t be; I’m fully aware of being curled on my side, with a lump of ice digging uncomfortably into my hip, and the bunched-up sweater I’m using as a pillow scratchy against my cheek.

  I’m cold, too, despite my Jaeger combinations and double eiderdown sleeping bag. I can feel my scalp shrinking, pulling the hairs erect.

  No one would be climbing in the dark, let alone yelling a warning. And yet I still call out: ‘What happened? Is anyone hurt?’

  My voice sounds rough and hesitant. There’s no reply. But abruptly, I can hear again. The crack of canvas, the wind whining in the guy ropes.

  ‘Who shouted?’ I call.

  At last, Nima puts his head in. ‘Doctor Sahib?’

  ‘Someone shouted.’

  His woolly yellow cap is askew, and in the glimmer of his candle-lantern, his dark eyes meet mine with respectful curiosity. ‘Nobody shout, Doctor Sahib. Everybody sleep.’

  Of course they’re asleep, it’s two in the morning. It was only one of those dreams which one has on the edge of waking, and which can seem so astonishingly real.

  Feeling foolish, I tell Nima he can go. I lie watching his light fade, and the darkness close in. I’m completely alert, my ears straining for the faintest sound.

  I wish I hadn’t sent him away. I wish Cedric was here. I wish I had light.

  I grope for my electric torch, and hold it against my chest. But somehow, I don’t like to switch it on.

  That cry happened. It wasn’t a dream. I heard it.

  * * *

  Poor old McLellan, what rotten luck.

  I slept till ten, and woke feeling blessedly better. I ate five chuppaties slathered in butter and gooseberry jam, and downed three mugs of tea so strong you could trot a mouse on it, as Cook used to say.

  I was tackling the last chuppatie when Pasang came running. ‘Quick, Doctor Sahib, there is fall!’

  McLellan was returning from the latrine pit when he tripped. His ankle’s fine, but in breaking his fall, he also broke his wrist. So that’s his hopes dashed before we’ve even begun.

  It was a nasty fracture, and I gave him a stiff dose of Veramon. He put a brave face on it and even tried to joke: ‘You chaps had better look out up there, I’ll be running the show from Base!’ But later, I found him reading his bible with rigid concentration.

  When he saw me, he gave a wan smile. ‘Afraid not even the Good Book’s helping right now.’

  ‘It’s the most rotten luck. Painkiller doing its stuff?’

  ‘Oh yes, grand.’ But he was lying. I used to be a bit blasé about fractures, until I broke my ankle in the Dolomites. I couldn’t believe the pain.

  ‘I s’pose it’s for the best,’ McLellan said quietly. ‘I never did fit in with the rest of you.’

  ‘My dear fellow—’

  ‘Well it’s true, isn’t it?’ He forced a laugh. ‘Minor public school, desk job in military admin. Not quite-quite. As they say.’

  ‘You couldn’t be more wrong! You’re absolutely one of us and we depend on you most frightfully!’

  I feared I’d overdone it, but he looked at me with such a hopeful expression. He really wanted to believe. I felt a heel for not liking him more.

  Fortunately, our first mail-runner arrived, which cheered us immensely. He appeared as a distant speck on the glacier, and brought a green canvas post bag secured with red sealing wax, packed with news from home. The others had letters from wives and girlfriends, including three from McLellan’s missionary fiancée, which bucked him up a bit. I had a nicely acerbic one from Cousin Philippa, and no writ from Clare’s father, thank God.

  The fly in the ointment was Kits. He took great pains not to mention Dorothy and the boys in front of me, which only drew attention to the fact that I’m the one sahib who’s unattached. He did it on purpose, of course, to embarrass me, because he was angry: before lunch, I asked Cotterell to consider me for the summit. Cotterell was delighted, but Kits was furious. He seems to regard the summit as his. He doesn’t want his little brother muscling in.

  Tea has been and gone, and I’m outside my tent in glorious sunshine, with Cedric at my feet; apparently, I’m forgiven for having shooed him away last night. I’m sorting my latest batch of sphygmograph readings. Considering the altitude, everyone’s pulse curves are remarkably normal, even poor old McLellan’s – although in view of how grim I felt last night, I’ve been teaching Nima and Pasang emergency first aid. They’re proud of their Red Cross armbands, and Pasang’s already better at bandaging than me.

  The sun is scorching hot, but there’s a chill wind, accompanied by the usual rather maddening bang-bang of canvas, and that express-train roar across the Face, which never stops. Every so often, I hear the distant boom of an avalanche. Mostly they’re on Talung or the Saddle, but several times the Great Shelf has sent one down, and we’ve braced for the blast.

  There’s something hypnotic about the Face. Last night, I watched darkness creeping up it like a black tide. And on our first morning here, I saw Tiger Peak glare scarlet. For an instant, the Great Shelf and the precipices seemed tinged with blood. Then veils of snow-fog crept over the summit and down the Face, like something alive.

  When I look at the Face, I experience the same dread and desire I felt as a boy, gazing at that picture in the storybook. I can’t remember the story itself, but I remember that picture. Three knights riding their chargers up the Crystal Mountain, in search of treasure. One has almost reached the top; his horse’s hooves are striking sparks. A second topples backwards to his doom. A third lies dead at the bottom.

  Strange that we say the mountain has a ‘face’, when it’s really just a pile of rock and ice. It seems that even we Europeans can’t resist the urge to personify. Does that make us the same as the Sherpas, with their snow demons? Is all this personifying simply a way of rendering things less frightening? If the mountain has a face, it is amenable to reason, and if we treat it with respect, it won’t kill us. The alternative – which I happen to believe is the truth – is that it’s all just chance, and we’re throwing dice for our lives.

  The Sherpas say that the summit is the haunt of a vengeful snow god, Kang-my. To appease him, they’ve painted a prayer on a giant boulder near the lake, and draped it with strings of flags in the four directions of the wind.

  Garrard views all this with detache
d interest and wry amusement. Cotterell, ever the leader of men, tolerates it because it reassures them. Kits dismisses it as childish tosh, as no doubt would McLellan, if he didn’t feel so rotten. For myself, I seem to have lost some of my revulsion at their beliefs. Perhaps because I’ve realised that I can’t fight them.

  Tomorrow, we’re walking to the grave knoll to spy out the route. (I do wish everyone would stop calling it the grave knoll. It’s simply a knoll where there happen to be graves, they are not its defining feature.) But oddly enough, the Sherpas seem more worried about the lake. They won’t draw water from it for fear of offending the spirits, and when Nima washes my clothes, he insists on trudging half a mile to another lake, which for some reason he doesn’t regard as haunted.

  What must it be like to believe that the entire landscape is watching you? That before moving so much as a rock, you have to propitiate the demon you’re about to displace?

  They even regard goraks as suspect. Just now, one perched on my tent, and Nima chased it away.

  I feel sorry for him and his countrymen. It must be dreadful to live in fear of your surroundings.

  Although I suppose I’m not exactly immune from fancy, myself. That cry in the night. Shortly after I heard it, McLellan broke his wrist. It feels as if we’ve been warned.

  9

  Now that I’m on the grave knoll, I’m even more relieved that we didn’t camp here.

  Of course, in many ways it would’ve made an ideal Base. It’s rock instead of ice, which makes it warmer, and it’s far more convenient, as it’s where we’ll be starting the climb. But it feels as if Lyell has only just left.

  For some reason, there are two graves, a smallish oblong cairn with a rough wooden cross, and a larger one with two rusty ice-axes laid rather unsettlingly at the foot. Garrard tells me the smaller is for someone called Pache (he gives it two syllables and a guttural ‘ch’, as in ‘loch’), while the larger is for Freemantle and Knight. He’s about to say more, but I cut him short. ‘No thanks, I’ve heard enough.’

  He grins. ‘You’re really nothing like Kits, are you?’

  I shake my head and laugh.

  With Cedric at my heels, I wander off, leaving the others taking photographs of the graves. Even Cotterell’s joining in. I’m surprised at him, it’s the last thing they should be doing on the eve of the climb.

  Yates, Stratton, Pache, Freemantle and Knight. I wish I didn’t know their names; it makes them so disagreeably real. Still, it’s a relief to have all five accounted for. No more unpleasant discoveries. From now on, we can concentrate on the mountain.

  We left before dawn to reduce the risk of avalanche, and as it’s still early, we’re in the icy shadow of the Buttress, and exposed to the cutting west wind. The top of the knoll is almost flat, and the size of several cricket pitches. My boots crunch as I pick my way over black, lichen-crusted rocks.

  At last I’m actually standing on the mountain itself; albeit right at its feet. It is so immense I can’t take it in. I can’t see the Great Shelf because the Buttress blocks the view, but from where I stand, a vast wrinkled snow slope sweeps upwards, past the Buttress’s west flank, to join the upper reaches of the Icefall, which tumbles down the other side. This snow slope doesn’t appear that steep, but when I follow it through my field glasses, it keeps rising; it must be three thousand feet high. I feel a spurt of panic: the true panic terror of the wild.

  Turning my back on the mountain, I locate Base Camp, half a mile off on the glacier. The sahibs’ tents are a neat row of oxblood red, the porters’ larger green ones huddled around the cook-site. They look so insignificant. Like chunks of rubble.

  I don’t care for the knoll. Everywhere I turn, I see traces of Lyell. Over there are the remains of an old shelter wall, and the rectangular patches where they pitched their tents, still littered with rusty paraffin tins and bits of broken packing crate. There’s even an old chutney jar, with Crosse & Blackwell faintly legible on the label. I can almost see Lyell and his companions: smoking, reading letters from home, eagerly scanning the mountain that would kill them.

  Suddenly, I’m gripped by the same appalling sense of loneliness I felt at the Yates cairn. It’s as if I’ve been abandoned by my fellows and left here in this desolate place, with no hope of ever finding my way back.

  It’s completely irrational. That’s what’s alarming. Because I’m not alone. Here’s Cedric, sniffing that chutney jar – and there are the others, poking about near the graves.

  Cotterell calls my name. ‘Come over here and help with the route!’

  The feeling is gone as abruptly as it came. By the time I join them, I’m myself again.

  Soon the four of us are peering through our field glasses. Once more, I follow the snow slope up to the tip of the Buttress and beyond, to where it becomes a dazzling Cubist chaos of ice. That’s the upper part of the Icefall, which leads to the Great Shelf.

  All my desire comes roaring back. In a few days, I’ll be there. A few days after that, I will stand on the summit.

  ‘Not much doubt about the start,’ murmurs Cotterell. ‘We follow Lyell up this snow slope and pitch Camp One where he did. That ledge on the flank of the Buttress, at about – what, Kits, nineteen thousand feet?’

  ‘Nineteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty.’

  A fond glance from Cotterell. That’s my boy.

  ‘Next bit looks tricky,’ says Garrard. ‘Above the Buttress we’ll need to cross the Icefall and head up its eastern edge.’

  To the naked eye, the upper Icefall appears wrinkled, but through field-glasses, each ‘wrinkle’ is revealed as a towering pinnacle of ice.

  ‘Might be a levelish patch under that crag,’ I venture.

  ‘Where?’ say Garrard and Cotterell together.

  ‘Just right of that big zigzag crevasse – see that crag of darkish ice? A sort of whale-back curve? Under that.’

  There’s a silence, which lasts a while.

  ‘You’re thinking of that for Camp Two,’ says Garrard.

  I shrug. ‘Worth a try.’

  ‘No,’ says Kits.

  I look at him. ‘Why?’ He’s scarcely said a word to me all morning, and now this. He can’t still be sulking because I want a shot at the summit?

  ‘Because it’s a bad idea,’ he replies, still scanning the slope.

  ‘I don’t agree,’ I say evenly. ‘That crag would provide shelter from avalanches.’

  He snorts. ‘You’re the medic, Stephen. Why don’t you stick to that?’

  I’m about to snap back when Cotterell intervenes. ‘Let’s leave it, shall we, gentlemen? The important thing is to establish Camp One. We’ll have a better view from there.’

  ‘Shouldn’t take long,’ Garrard puts in smoothly. ‘We can cut steps up most of this snow slope and set ropes for the Sherpas. I’d say a couple of days to get a supply line up and running to Camp One. It’ll be easier now that poor old McLellan’s managing things from Base.’

  Cotterell’s nodding. ‘Good show. I want to aim for Advance Base on the Shelf within a week. Once that’s well stocked, we’ll lay siege to the summit from there.’

  He makes it sound like army manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain, and Garrard and I exchange wry grins. Kits is still stonily scanning the slope. Well, let him. He’ll get over it.

  At that moment, the sun kindles the slope above us, and I forget about Kits. What I’ve seen only makes me want the mountain more. If we take things steadily and the Monsoon doesn’t come early, we can do this.

  * * *

  The trouble with Kits is that everything in his whole life has come too easily. Head of House and Captain of the First Eleven at Winchester, star of the Cambridge Mountaineering Club, no need to work because of the Trust – and to cap it all, the beautiful Dorothy, who duly presented him with the regulation brace of boys, and who wouldn’t look at another man even if a millionaire made a play for her – although actually that’s a bad example, as she’s a millionaire’s daughter.

&nbs
p; Yes, for Kits, life has simply unrolled before him like some gorgeous tapestry. So it must come as a nasty shock when one of the lesser threads in that tapestry, namely his brother, doesn’t behave precisely as he ought.

  Back at Base, I took him aside and asked him why his nose was out of joint. ‘Ye gods, Kits, we’re not in competition! I know you’re a better climber than me, but why shouldn’t I have a shot at the summit as well as you?’

  ‘Because you’re not good enough,’ he said flatly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not good enough.’

  ‘That’s for Cotterell to decide, not you.’

  ‘Come off it, Bodge. I wouldn’t have asked you along if you weren’t a jolly decent climber – but this is Kangchenjunga! You’re not up to the summit!’

  He’s always done this. If I ever come close to equalling him, he slaps me down – although always, of course, for the best of reasons.

  ‘You know as well as I do,’ he went on, pulling his mouth down like a pompous bulldog, ‘that one must be able to rely on one’s fellow climbers a hundred per cent—’

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means you’re not prepared.’

  ‘What? I trained for weeks on the ship, I’m every bit as fit as you—’

  ‘I don’t mean that, I mean you haven’t bothered to study Lyell’s route. It’s not hero-worship that made me read him till I know it backwards, it’s common sense! When we were discussing Camp Two back there, you didn’t even know that the site you suggested is where Lyell was snowed in! Hardly the luckiest place for us to camp, eh? Garrard and Cotterell knew. They were embarrassed for you.’

  I stared at him. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me at the time.’

  He snorted. ‘What do I care if you make a fool of yourself?’

  I opened my mouth to reply, then shut it again. For a moment, we regarded each other coldly, like strangers, and the rocks that are always beneath the surface felt very close indeed. One word from me would have sparked a row – and that would have been disastrous. So instead, I turned on my heel and walked away.