‘Not some local mountain maharishi,’ said Jameson. ‘She’s right. Jack.’
Jack glanced at Mac, who was taking the sirdar’s photograph. ‘Mac? What do you say?’
Mac shrugged. ‘I say we do what we planned. We carry all this gear up to the top of the Rognon. While two of us establish Camp One, the other two can follow the trail. The weather’s good. So’s the forecast. There’s still plenty of daylight. The lady’s right. Jack. We might never get a better chance. This is what we bloody came for.’
Jack asked the sirdar if he felt up to returning to ABC on his own.
‘I think yes.’
‘What about the families of those men who died?’ asked Swift. ‘Someone will have to tell them.’
‘I will do it,’ added the sirdar.
Jack caught Hurké Gurung’s eye and looked uncomfortable.
‘You’d better make sure they’re aware that it was running away that caused their deaths. Not the yetis,’ he said. ‘And you can tell them that they will receive the proper compensation.’
‘I understand, sahib. And you must not be reproaching yourself. It was not your fault, Jack sahib. No more than last time. It is as you say. Sherpas should not have run away. But instinctively you would wish to do so. Yeti is a pretty terrifying fellow. And what is more, he is smelling abominable, just like Boyd sahib is saying to us.’
Mac sniffed the air suspiciously. There was still a faintly musky smell hanging around the area where they had found the sirdar.
‘That’s the smell I remember from Nuptse,’ he said.
‘And you say he ate his own dung?’ asked Jameson.
The sirdar grimaced.
‘Yeti very dirty fellow. Him eat his own shit, yes. Like very raagako maasu dinner.’
‘That would certainly explain why no one has ever found any yeti excrement,’ observed Swift.
‘Most great apes are coprophagous,’ explained Jameson. ‘It enables the animal to absorb some extra nutrients beyond what is available in its normal diet. It’s simply a matter of squeezing every possible mineral and vitamin out of the food it eats. If you see what I mean.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ said Jack, ‘next time I’m hungry.’
‘The fact that it had a shit at all would seem to indicate that the animal was probably as scared as poor old Hurké.’
The sirdar shifted awkwardly inside his trousers.
‘I not think so, Jameson sahib. Besides I do not think yeti is an animal. He look much more Like a man. Behave like ape, maybe. But teeth not as sharp. No big dog teeth. And face not as flat as ape. Before I see him up close, face to face, I think that yeti was an animal. But now I am no sure. He is, as people say, a snowman. And now I think that is why some Sherpas are calling yeti by a different name. Teh is the name of this creature, sahibs. Yeh is meaning rocky place. Yeti means rock creature. Only some Sherpas call this fellow Maai-teh. Miti. Maai means a man. So not Yet-teh, but Maai-teh. I think this maybe a better name for what I have seen. Miti. For he was like a very big man, sahibs. A very big man creature.’
The sirdar finished his cigarette and tossed the end into the nearest crevasse. Jack lit him another and then handed him his own radio. Turning to the others, he said:
‘Okay, you asked for it. To the top of the Rognon is a straight pull of about three hundred metres. Not much more than a bit of simple hill walking if you were at sea level. But at almost five thousand metres it will seem a hell of a lot harder, believe me.’
At Jack’s request the sirdar helped him to shoulder a large box that had been discarded by one of the dead Sherpas.
‘And with a fifty-pound load on your back?’ He grinned cruelly. ‘Well, let’s say that you’re about to have an object lesson in just how tough Hurké and his people have to be. Guys? You’re going to learn what it takes to be a Sherpa.’
Halfway up the icing-sugar slope. Swift stopped and tried to think beyond the endless effort of her ascent of Machhapuchhare’s Rognon. She had not thought it possible to feel quite so exhausted and still force herself to go on. More than anything, she wanted to drop the load off her aching back, only she knew that she would never find the strength needed to pick it up again.
The one thing that kept her going was the certainty that she was close to finding her own particular holy grail — Esau. The zoological find of the century. And she was going to make it. It would be in every science magazine and in every newspaper. She might have smiled if she hadn’t thought the extra effort would cause her to have a heart attack. It was just a question of following Jack’s route in the snow. All the way up the Rognon. Right to the top.
How did the Sherpas do it? How was it possible that people so much smaller than herself could carry such loads and still make faster progress than any Westerner burdened with not so much as a bumbag? Jack was right. A new respect for these tough little men could hardly be avoided: She felt it in her chest, in her thighs, in her shoulders, in her back every time she took another step. Her muscles felt as if they were saturated with lactic acid.
‘Are you okay?’
Jack and MacDougall had long disappeared over the crest of the Rognon. It was Miles Jameson, about fifty metres up ahead of her.
‘Yes,’ she gasped. ‘I’m just too tired to breathe, that’s all.’
She waited until the throbbing in her head seemed to diminish a little and then slowly plodded on. The grind of hauling her load up the Rognon quickly drove all thoughts of the yeti out of her mind. And she had long since ceased to pay very much attention to the tracks that the two creatures had left during their own descent and ascent of the Rognon. She had only one thought now, and that was the desperately slow, tedious business of getting up Machhapuchhare’s lowest slope.
When at last she reached the top, drenched in sweat, her lungs feeling as raw as if she had gargled with acid, she found that Mac and Jack had already erected one of the Stormhaven tents. Jameson had set up a paraffin stove and was boiling water for some tea. Swift slumped down onto the snow and let Jack remove the dead weight from her shoulders. When the load was gone, she rolled to one side like a dead body.
‘Proud of you,’ said Jack. ‘That was a hell of an effort you put in.’
Mute with fatigue. Swift nodded and lay back in the snow, staring up at the face of Machhapuchhare which, much closer now, towered over the Rognon like the ramparts of some enormous white castle. Something built by that mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. There was indeed a fairy-tale aspect to the mountain, as if it might indeed be magical. The peak was so sheer that only the actual summit was covered in snow, like the Paramount Pictures logo. Or was it Columbia? The biting Himalayan wind had airbrushed the snow so delicately that the peak seemed to be trying to tear itself from the greater mass below but could not break away from the white membrane that held it fast like glue. Shiva’s mountain looked so much more impressive on top of the Rognon than it did five kilometres away and six hundred metres farther down the glacier at ABC. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself back home in her bed in Berkeley, or in a hot tub, but as Jack was already giving orders, it was a short reverie.
‘Mac? You and Miles stay here and finish making camp. As soon as we’ve had that tea. Swift and I will push on after the yetis. We’ll try and follow those tracks for a while, and then get back here before dark.’
Something bloody lying near her in the snow made her recoil with disgust. It was the corpse of a small furry animal, about forty-five centimetres long — and it had been eviscerated.