Swift nodded silently. Then she groaned and squeezed her temples.
‘Headache?’
‘Mmmm. I don’t know whether it’s the altitude or that bourbon.’
‘Probably the altitude. You should drink plenty of water before you go to bed.’
She yawned. ‘Maybe I’ll be acclimatized in the morning.’
Jack laughed.
‘I doubt it. Full acclimatization to a height takes seven weeks. If you don’t feel better in the morning, we’ll give you some Lasix.’
‘If you don’t mind my saying Doctor, that sounds a little hit and miss.’
‘Up here there are really no hard-and-fast rules,’ he explained. ‘Everyone will have to find out what works best for him- or herself. Right now, a good night’s sleep is probably just the ticket. If I were you, I’d take a couple of Seconal and go to bed.’
‘Okay,’ she smiled. ‘I’m convinced.’
They pulled on their storm-proof outer clothing and ventured into the freezing night and a wind so strong it almost bowled Swift off her feet. Eyes closed against the wind, she held on to Jack’s clothing for support. He shouted something at her, but whatever he said was borne quickly down the glacier in the general maelstrom of sound and air. After several laborious minutes’ walk along the rope handrail, they reached the open snow shaft that led straight down to the lodges. Jack motioned her to go first and then followed her down the ladder.
At the bottom of the shaft. Swift kissed him good-night before going into her cold, dark room. Having taken a Seconal with a large glass of water as Jack had instructed, she removed her outer layer once again and then climbed up onto her bunk and into her sleeping bag, feeling a little like a premature burial in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. Jutta Henze, lying on the bunk below, was already asleep, apparently untroubled by any of the feelings of claustrophobia that Swift found herself trying to overcome. As she waited for the sleeping pill to take effect, she listened to the wind and tried to distinguish the many different sounds she could hear in it: the roll of kettledrums; a large bath towel pegged securely to a clothesline; distant gunfire — El Alamein; a newspaper shaken and folded in half; a train rushing past an empty platform. The Himalayan wind, it seemed, was a living thing of air and could even become a voice — a crying child, a screaming peacock, or a soul in limbo — and sometimes, if she tried really hard, she could hear the howl of a mythical ape-man of the mountains.
Eleven
‘I was impressed and mystified by these prints. But my Sherpas looked and had no doubt. Sonam Tensing, a highly sensible fellow who I have known for many years, said, ‘That is the Yeti.’ I have an open mind. I have formed no opinion. But my Sherpas looked and had no doubt.’
The day dawned brightly after the stormy night, with a sky as blue as the Buddha’s eyes and the sun turning snow and rock to precious gold. But any feeling of warmth was purely aesthetic, for the wind still blew periodically in short, buffeting gusts that were cold enough to finish a sentence, close a watery eye, or turn a back and helped to keep the outside temperature down well below zero.
Jack was one of the first out of the lodges to inspect the campsite for damage. The northern edge of the clamshell was buried in snow, as were several boxes of supplies too large to have gone down the shafts and into the lodges, but otherwise everything seemed to have survived intact. Jack took a deep, euphoric lungful of frost-chilled air, as if here, in one of the world’s most incredible glacier basins, life’s breath had a special sweetness for him.
To his left, forming the southern portal of the Sanctuary, was Hiunchuli; at six thousand four hundred metres, one of the smaller peaks of the Annapurna group. It was, he thought, a shapely looking mountain, reminding him most of the head and beak of some enormous bird of prey: Spindrift blew off the summit like a crest of snow-white feathers, and a sharp wing of an ice ridge curled toward Modi Peak, also known as Annapurna South.
Jack was still enjoying the air and the scenery when he heard a shout from further up the glacier basin, at the foot of the Hiunchuli ridge. Shielding his eyes against the blinding glare of the sun on the snow, for he was not yet wearing sunglasses. Jack saw a figure waving at him. Lifting the small Leica binoculars from the cord around his neck to his eyes, he saw a camera tripod and realized that the figure was MacDougall.
Jack waved back and started toward him.
An excited-looking Mac met Jack halfway, by then it was obvious to the American what it was that had so thrilled the small Scotsman: Leading down the otherwise pristine slope of the ice ridge, well beyond where Mac might have walked himself, and leading east around the campsite toward the Sanctuary’s exit, like a long black zipper, was a trail of footprints in the snow.
‘Has anyone else been out this morning? One of the Sherpas maybe?’
‘No, I was the first,’ insisted Mac. ‘I wanted to come out and catch the sun on film as it came up over the mountains. And there they were.’
They walked back toward the line of tracks.
‘For a moment I thought they were my own footprints, and then, when I saw how far up they went, I realized they couldn’t be.’
The two men stopped just short of the trail. Jack dropped down on one knee to take a closer look as Mac snatched the lens cap off his Nikon and began to fire off shots.
‘What do you think. Jack? It looks like it, doesn’t it?’
‘Could be, Mac.’
‘Isn’t it brilliant? I mean we’ve only just got here, and now this. It’s like winning the lottery on your first bloody go.’ He glanced at the f-stop on his camera and then at Jack. ‘Whatever it was came right over the ridge and virtually straight through our camp.’
‘Maybe Cody heard something last night after all.’
‘Yes, of course. I’d forgotten that.’ Mac shot some more film. ‘Thank Christ for all that snow. The whole Sanctuary’s like wet concrete. Just look at these tracks. They’re perfect. Couldn’t make a better picture if I’d styled and art-directed it myself.’
Jack lifted the GPS radio up from his chest and tilted his head toward the microphone. It was the sirdar who answered.
‘Hurké? What’s everyone doing right now?’
‘Breakfast, sahib.’
‘Well, tell them to finish their Cheerios and get their asses out here. And someone had better bring a tape measure. We’ve found some tracks. It looks like we almost had ourselves a visitor last night.’
Miles Jameson extended the tape measure across the length of one of the tracks in the snow, a tiny yellow metallic bridge over a pear-shaped crevasse.
‘Thirty five and a half centimetres long,’ he said to Swift, who was taking notes. Still holding the tape measure in place, he leaned back to let Mac take some detailed photographs for scale.
‘Brilliant,’ chuckled the Scotsman.
‘None of the porters would come and look,’ said Jutta. ‘Are they frightened, Tsering?’
‘Certainly, memsahib,’ said the assistant sirdar. ‘They are all rather superstitious, I’m afraid, and believe that to see a yeti or even hear one call signifies a bad omen. Do not be surprised if some foolish ceremony is now performed to ward off any bad luck.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘Such is the character of my people.’
‘If they’re like this now,’ said Swift, ‘what will they be like if we’re lucky enough to capture a living specimen?’
‘American dollars can overcome any amount of potential bad luck,’ replied Tsering.