The assistant sirdar, Ang Tsering, lacked the older man’s experience, but having attended the Sir Edmund Hillary School, he could read and write, and had even visited America. Like Gurung he spoke a Sherpa dialect of Tibetan, Tibetan proper, and Nepali. His English was better than the sirdar’s, although he spoke it with such archaic formality that he sometimes sounded like a character from a novel by Henry James. He also spoke some German, which Jutta Henze, the expedition doctor, was determined to help him improve. Tall, slenderly built, with a sea urchin haircut, almost lidless eyes, a broad nose, and an uncertain smile, Tsering was a cautious-looking man. In the smart new winter clothes he had been given for the expedition, and with a Yak cigarette rarely absent from his mouth, he reminded Swift most of some cocksure French ski instructor. Jack told her that this was not so very wide of the mark, as Tsering had no experience of mountaineering or scientific expeditions, only of guiding tourist treks, and that the Western women who went walking in the Himalayas often had affairs with their guides.
Jack thought that Jutta Henze was just the type to pick and choose the men with whom she had affairs. Powerfully built with strawberry blond hair and a shower of russet freckles, she was a terracotta warrior of a woman, a neoclassical ideal of what a heroine on the grand scale ought to look like. The eighteen-month widow of Gunther Henze, the famous German mountaineer killed on the Matterhorn, Jutta was an experienced climber in her own right, with a steely aspect in her blue-jade eyes that seemed to speak of both tragedy overcome and devotion to her sport and the freedom it provided. Swift thought the big German looked ruthless, as if, like Liberty leading the People, Jutta might not care if her way ahead lay across the bodies of the dead and the dying. Swift also thought her an unlikely looking doctor, but Jack told her that as she came to know Jutta better, she would understand that it was this same determination that made her such an excellent choice as the expedition’s medical officer. Every member of the team was a strong personality, inclined to make light of any ailment, and it took an even stronger personality to give the kind of doctor’s orders that were obeyed at all times and without question. Byron Cody, the team primatologist, and Lincoln Warner, a molecular anthropologist, were cases in point. Upon their arrival in Khatmandu, both men had contracted a severe form of dysentery, and Jutta had ordered them confined to the CIWEC Clinic in Baluwatar until they recovered, which meant they were a day behind the main party in leaving Chomrong for the Annapurna Sanctuary.
Dougal MacDougall was the expedition cameraman. A working-class Scotsman from Edinburgh, MacDougall had left school at sixteen to become a joiner until, deciding improbably to make a career in films, he had managed against all the odds to get a place at the London Film School. Despite never having climbed before, his first assignment for the BBC had been to join an expedition to climb the Carstenz Pyramid in New Guinea. Since then, MacDougall had established himself as a first-class climbing cameraman and all-around photographer of international repute.
Swift thought the Scotsman was more interested in money than in anything so creditable as a professional name. To her, he appeared a stereotypical Scot: crudely tattooed, chain-smoking, hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, argumentative, and generally deficient in manners, patience, and anything that might pass for pleasant conversation. Jack greatly admired him however, having climbed both Everest and the Kangchenjunga North Ridge with the diminutive, brick-faced Scot, and he told Swift that he hoped she and the rest of the team might never find themselves in the kind of tight spot where MacDougall could be relied upon to perform at his very best.
Miles Jameson owed his place on the team to Byron Cody, although as director of the Chitwan National Park in southern Nepal’s lowland Tarai region and as a qualified doctor of veterinary medicine, he would have always been a natural choice. Jameson had been senior DVM at the Los Angeles Zoo when he first met Cody in connection with Cody’s best-selling book about gorillas. Before that, the thirty-eight-year-old white Zimbabwean had worked with Richard Leakey in the Kenyan Wildlife Service. Like Leakey, Jameson also came from a distinguished East African family. His father. Max, was the director of parks and wildlife in Zimbabwe, while his sister Sally had made a name for herself protecting the elephants at Zimbabwe’s Whange National Park. Big cats were Jameson’s special area of expertise, and more especially, L.A.’s collection of koalas and white tigers. Tigers were also Chitwan’s most important attraction for the Park’s fifteen thousand visitors a year, and it was said that Prince Gyanendra of Nepal had been so impressed with what Jameson had achieved in L.A. that immediately upon meeting the young Zimbabwean, he invited him to take over the administration of Chitwan, not to mention the command of a force of fourteen hundred soldiers that existed to protect the Park’s tigers and rhinos against poachers. Chitwan had seen very few visitors since the beginning of hostilities between India and Pakistan, and when he heard about the real purpose of the expedition, Jameson had pressed to join it. Tall, fair-skinned, with dark hair and blue eyes, Jameson had the impeccable manners of a diplomat, which made it all the more surprising to everyone that he and MacDougall should get on so famously. They laughed at each other’s jokes, discussed trout fishing with endless enthusiasm, and bunked together in the Hotel Paradise Garden Lodge, where their loud laughter and incessant smoking could disturb nobody but themselves.
Byron Cody preceded the last person to arrive at ABC — who was also the most academically distinguished — by almost sixty minutes. Lincoln Warner was professor of molecular anthropology at the University of Georgetown in Washington and adjunct research scientist at the Smithsonian. He looked exhausted, having carried his own pack all the way from Chomrong, unlike Cody.
‘What the hell did you want to do that for?’ said Jack. ‘You should have gotten a porter to carry your gear. Professor. That’s what they’re for.’
‘That’s what I told him,’ shrugged Cody.
The tall black man shook his head and dumped his rucksack on the snow outside the clamshell.
‘No way,’ he said. ‘A porter is just a slave by another name.’
‘Slaves don’t get paid ten dollars a day,’ remarked Cody.
Lincoln Warner glared at the older man, and it was obvious that the two had already argued about porterage.
‘I think that a man ought to carry his own load in life,’ said Warner. ‘Know what I’m saying?’
‘Oh, and I suppose that computer of yours just walked up here all by itself,’ said Jack. ‘Everyone else is using an extra-lightweight laptop. But you have a desktop PC.’
‘I can’t do my job without that UVP. If there were a laptop powerful enough for my requirements, I’d have brought it. There isn’t. But the point I’m making is that I don’t see why I shouldn’t carry some kind of load — anything at all — when all these other men are carrying something.’
‘Well, Professor, I guess that’s your choice,’ said Jack. ‘But the point I’m making is that you did a man out of a job. People around here need the money badly, and carrying heavy loads on their backs, which they’re very used to doing and which they do damned well, is about the only way that they can earn it. So there’s no need to feel guilty about letting them. Lots of Westerners coming here make that mistake. Fact is, the Nepalese don’t understand a man who can afford to pay and yet carries a load himself. They don’t think you’re a good guy or a good democrat or whatever. They just think you’re being mean. Isn’t that so, Hurké?’
The sirdar nodded solemnly.
‘It is just so. Jack sahib. Carrying loads mean plenty big money for porters. Special with not much tourists right now. For man with family this maybe biggest money all year round, sahib. Ten bucks a day make sixty from Chomrong.’