‘Not everyone from Scotland believes in the Loch Ness monster any more than all Yanks believe in Santa Claus.’
Mac snatched a packet of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and lit one with an angry snap of his lighter.
Boyd raised his hands peaceably.
‘Hey, what the hell do I know? Me, I don’t even believe in evolution. If you ask me, it’s all there in the Bible.’
‘The Bible?’ Mac laughed harshly. ‘The Loch Ness monster and the yeti look bloody ordinary compared to what’s in the bloody Bible. Christ, I’ve read kids’ comics that seemed more probable than the Bible.’
‘You don’t believe in evolution?’ Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘That’s a strange thing for a geologist to say.’
‘Recent research into the age of the earth has produced evidence that our planet may be a lot younger than the Darwinists have argued,’ said Boyd. ‘Perhaps as young as 175,000 years. Many geologists, myself included, believe that only a catastrophist model of development can account for the way the earth is now. And that many of the important assumptions on which Darwinism rests may be wrong.’
‘Darwin has been killed dozens of times,’ smiled Swift. ‘And yet still he refuses to lie down and be buried. With views like yours, Jon, I’m not surprised you chose to become a climatologist.’
‘As it happens you’re right,’ he said. ‘Except that I didn’t exactly choose to become a climatologist. I was kind of forced into it. Because of the perceived heresy of my geological views. In my opinion, contemporary Darwinists are no less intolerant than the Spanish Inquisition.’
Byron Cody cleared his throat in an effort to head off disagreement.
‘Perhaps, under the circumstances,’ he said, nodding his head and grinning, ‘it would be best if we left this discussion for another time?’
Cody kept on nodding his head and grinning affably. It seemed a suitably simian kind of behaviour for the Berkeley primatologist.
Swift looked around the clamshell at the faces of her team. Cody was right. Morale would not be well served if they had some kind of argument now, albeit a scientific one. Perhaps, she thought, as the person most responsible for bringing everyone here, I ought to say something, formally, to them all.
‘Okay, let me tell you why I think our expedition stands a reasonable chance of proving that the yeti exists, where others have failed, most notably the British expedition sponsored by the Daily Mail in 1953. They chose the Sherpa district of Sola Khumbu in northeastern Nepal, to make their search.’
‘It’s near Everest,’ said Jack. ‘Rough country.’
‘This isn’t exactly the Hamptons,’ said Lincoln Warner as the wind reached a new crescendo.
‘No, that’s true,’ said Swift. ‘But I believe they were unsuccessful for a number of reasons, not the least of these being that this was over forty years ago, and the Himalayas were more of a mystery than they are today. We’re much better equipped to find the creature than they were back in 1953.’
‘And how,’ murmured Jack.
‘I also think that some of those other expeditions must have failed because they came at the wrong time of year. Remember, this is most likely a very shy animal. Probably much more shy than a giant panda or a mountain gorilla.’
‘A gorilla,’ said Cody, ‘will go a long way to avoid making contact with human beings.’
‘During the spring, summer, and fall months,’ Swift continued, ‘the animal might just stay higher up, away from the tourists. Perhaps it’s only during the winter that the creature feels bold enough to venture lower down. When there are very few tourists. And of course now, with the tourist industry in Nepal dead on its feet because of the threatened war in the Punjab, it could be that the Himalayas are as quiet as they’ve been in over fifty years. Perhaps since people like us started coming, which might just be the best thing this expedition has going for it.’
‘It’s only a good thing so long as they don’t do it,’ said Warner. ‘So long as those assholes don’t start throwing nukes around.’ He shook his head nervously. ‘No telling what might happen then. Might not just be the yeti’s ass that’s hard to find. Might be ours too.’
‘Which makes it fortunate,’ she said patiently, ‘that they have a cooling-off period. Our window. Three months. Enough time to make a thorough search of the area and then get out and go home.’ She paused and glanced at Jack.
‘But there’s another factor that may give us an advantage. The Nepalese authorities think we have come here to search for fossils on Annapurna. But as some of you already know, we are in fact going to centre our search on a different mountain altogether. Machhapuchhare. Or Fish Tail Peak, as some climbers call it. Machhapuchhare and its surrounding area are forbidden to climbers, but since we’re not actually planning to go very far up the mountain, probably no higher than about four and a half to five thousand metres, we believe that we’re not so much breaking this injunction as bending it a little in the name of science. We’re going to be searching an area that we know no one has ever searched before but where there have been three separate sightings of the yeti during the last twenty-five years. And several others within the Sanctuary itself, not to mention the bones that Jack found on the slopes of Annapurna.
‘It may seem like an enormous piece of optimism to just turn up here and expect to find a yeti, especially when you think about how long the creature must have remained undiscovered. But when you add up all of the factors I’ve mentioned, I think we stand an excellent chance of success. Better than anyone before us. And don’t forget that by discovering the skull only two kilometres or so from where we are now. Jack has already come up with more evidence of the existence of this creature than was ever found before.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, if we don’t find it,’ Swift added finally, ‘then I don’t think anyone will find it.’
Jack and Swift were the last to leave the clamshell that first night. After the others had gone to bed, the two stayed up with no other purpose than to be alone. At Swift’s suggestion. Jack had agreed that they should bunk separately, accepting her argument that they needed to be completely focused on the expedition and that any intimacy between them could only be a distraction. So he was surprised when she put her arms around his waist and hugged him tightly.
‘I can’t believe we’re actually here,’ she told him. ‘Thanks, Jack. Without you it wouldn’t have been possible.’
‘I wish I could say it felt good to be back here,’ he confessed. ‘But the place makes me nervous. Like there’s something I’m not doing. Maybe it’s the fact that I know I’m not going to be doing any climbing. It’s weird, but I’d feel a little more relaxed if I knew I was going back up that southwest face tomorrow morning. I guess it’s like a racing driver going to a Grand Prix knowing he’s not going to be driving.’
He shook his head and smiled at what he had just said. He almost convinced himself.
‘That was a good speech you made. Swift.’
‘You think so? I felt I needed to say something after that arsehole Boyd started mouthing off about not believing in the yeti.’
‘He’s not so bad. You two just rub each other the wrong way.’
‘Maybe. You didn’t think I sounded a little too much like a candidate? Say anything to get elected, y’know?’
‘You believed what you were saying, didn’t you?’
‘Oh sure. But y’know... did they?’
Jack shrugged. ‘Sometimes when you’re leading an expedition like this, you have to say whatever you can to keep people on your side. Doesn’t matter if people believe what you say or not. They need to see that you believe it. That’s what leadership is about. That makes it the right thing to do.’