‘That just has to be some kind of great ape,’ said Mac. ‘It can certainly move.’
‘The other one’s moving as well, now,’ said Swift. ‘They seem to be heading straight for the ice field and the Sherpas.’
Aware of some kind of commotion at the sirdar’s end, Jameson pressed his talk button and said:
‘Ke bhayo, Hurké? What’s the matter?’
Now he could hear the raised voices of the other Sherpas and then the sirdar’s shouting.
‘Roknu, roknu. Stop. Aaunu yahaa. Come here. Hera. Hera!’
‘Hurké, come in, please. What the hell’s going on there?’
For a moment he heard a whistling noise that he thought might be feedback between his own radio and Jack’s, and he glanced around to see that Jack was holding the binoculars again.
The whistling noise came across the radio again, and this time he recognized it for what it was. Not radio feedback, but like a big seabird wheeling over a windswept harbour. It was the sound of a large mammal.
When the Sherpas overheard Jameson telling Hurké Gurung on the radio that two yetis were descending the slope of the mountain and heading for the ice field, they were terrified. Terror quickly gave way to panic as they heard the snowman’s distinctive call echo among the ice towers.
Hurké Gurung shouted at them to stay where they were and even cursed them as cowards. But by then they had already dumped their loads and turned on their heels, running back the way they had come.
The ice field below Machhapuchhare, like the larger one at the foot of Annapurna, was a frozen cataract, a river whose source was to be found on the slopes of the mountain itself. Entering this frozen chaos was like walking into a minefield — something you did only with extreme care. Anyone foolish enough to rush into such a lethal obstacle did so at his immediate peril, as the many deaths in ice falls throughout the Himalayas had proved.
The first man to run was Narendra, the son of one of the other Sherpas back at ABC — a Tiger named Ngati. The last the sirdar saw of Narendra was when he darted across instead of around a space marked by three bamboo poles. It was not fifteen minutes since Hurké had probed the snow covering the space with one of the poles and guessed at the existence of a hidden crevasse. His guess had been a good one, and as soon as he ran onto the snow, Narendra disappeared screaming into the unseen chasm below.
The man behind, Ang Dawa, seeing Narendra fall to his death, veered abruptly to his right and barged into a tall and precariously balanced pinnacle of ice. The next second, Hurké heard a dull thump, and several tons of snow and ice engulfed Dawa and two others, Wang Chuk and Jang Po. A fifth man, Danu, leaped out of the fatal path of the falling serac only to find that his almost superhuman jump had brought him to the lip of yet another crevasse. For a brief second he swung his arms like a windmill as he tried to regain his balance before his feet slipped from under him, and emitting a cry of horror that lasted for several seconds after he too disappeared from sight, the man fell to his death.
Trembling, sick to his stomach, the sirdar sat down heavily on the snow and watched helplessly as a huge cloud of ice particles, like the vapour from some enormous explosion, mushroomed above the fallen tower and then slowly dissipated.
Jack’s voice on the radio jolted him from his stunned contemplation of the disaster that had befallen his men.
‘Hurké? Come in, please. It’s Jack.’
‘Jack sahib.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘Not okay, sahib. The men are dead. They ran away, sahib. They ran back into the ice field and now—’
He stopped talking and looked around. A loud, vocalized sound on the slope above him — like a series of sustained belches followed by some harsher, staccato grunts that sounded like the pigs feeding in his village, and then a sharp whistle — reminded the sirdar why the others had run in the first place.
‘How many did he say were dead?’
‘Five men,’ said Jack grimly.
‘Jesus Christ. Five?’
‘Hurké? Are you still there? Come in, please. This is Jack calling. Over?’
The radio stayed silent for a moment.
‘What the hell’s the matter with him? Why doesn’t he answer? Hurké? Come in, please.’
Then Jack heard a whisper.
‘Jack sahib, shut up, please. Don’t say anything at all, for my pity’s sake. They’re here.’
Swift jumped down from the snowbank and started along the trail marked by the unfortunate party of Sherpas.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘There’s no time to lose.’
With long stooping strides, their powerful arms hanging down by their sides, the two creatures came down the slope of the mountain and were about to enter the ice field when they caught sight of the sirdar and stopped. No more than a thirty metres separated the two yetis from Hurké Gurung. The first and only other time he had seen a yeti, it had been at a distance of at least a hundred metres with the animal moving away at speed. But now he was close enough to see that each creature was a big male, at least two metres high, very thickset, and the general shape of a human being, like a gorilla, but covered in short, reddish brown hair that was more like an orangutan. The head was very large and pointed, the face bare and flatter than a man’s, although not so flat as an ape’s.
Instinct told the sirdar to remain quiet and still, for it was plain that both the yetis were immensely strong, and he had the impression that he had only to make a sudden move and they would tear him apart. The sirdar desperately wanted to run away. But even if he did manage to get a few metres’ start on them, what then? His only escape route was back through the ice field, and the way it had been marked with bamboo poles was now a shambles. It seemed certain that by running away, he could only end up like the rest of the Sherpas, buried under a tower of ice blocks or falling down a hidden crevasse. So he remained where he was, feeling more terror than he had ever felt before, and he prayed to every god he knew that the two yetis might lose interest in him and move on.
Fourteen
‘...a monkey converted to Buddhism lived as a hermit in the mountains, and was loved and married by a demoness; their offspring also had long hair and tails, and these were the mi-teh kang-mi, the “man-thing of the snows” — the yeti.
Lincoln Warner looked at all the computers and laboratory equipment that had been set up under the clamshell, feeling irritable. He thought of the numerous facilities available to him in this remote part of the world — mapping, linkage, gene expression, DNA sequencing, remote spectroscopy, microphotometry, quantitative fluorescent imaging, and many more besides — and let out a sigh. He was bored. In the three weeks he had spent in the Sanctuary he had set up the Gel Analysis software and checked the concentrations of his DNA and RNA isolation reagents. The rest of the time, he occupied himself with playing chess on the computer, listening to music on his portable CD player, reading books, walking on the glacier, and generally hoping that the rest of his colleagues might make the zoological find of the century that would provide him with some material to work on. But he was beginning to think the odds were surely stacked against something so remarkable. Probably the best they were going to come up with were a few minutes of film shot from a distance of several hundred metres that might or might not show some kind of Himalayan anthropoid. He was beginning to regret not having resisted the pressure on him to come. The chances were that the duration of the expedition would improve his chess game and not much else. About the only thing he had achieved so far had been his mastery of the PASS program.