Both Cody and Jutta found their own field glasses and pointed them at the figure. For a moment they thought that the Sanctuary must be teeming with yetis until, a little farther to the north, they saw two little black triangles. They were tents.
It was another camp.
Running between the two branches of the glacier, the corridor was marked by snow walls to their right and icy rubble to their left, and the route brought them nearer to the sheer cliff that had impeded the perennial progress of the eroding ice. Overawed by the proximity of the mountain and the uncanny silence. Swift walked in the tracks of the two yetis, as she had been advised, with the caution of one who half expected their creators suddenly to appear from behind a heap of snow and attack her with all the ferocity of a tiger defending its territory.
But there was something else too. An uncomfortable feeling that they were being observed, that they themselves were being tracked. And so far from ABC, in such inhospitable and overwhelming surroundings. Swift realized that she was afraid. A couple of times, she had to stop and look around, just to make sure that Jack was still roped to her, for the glacier and the mountain and the nature of their quest had reduced them both to silence.
When, after an hour’s walking, she stopped a third time, it was not because of her fear of finding herself left alone in such a place but because the tracks suddenly deviated from the main corridor and led three metres up and over the glacier wall to their left.
Catching up to her. Jack glanced up at the icy wall and instinctively picking out a route, quickly climbed to the top.
‘Maybe they thought they were being followed,’ she said, only half joking.
Searching for the trail. Jack grunted. Then finding it again, and seeing where it led, he said, ‘You could be right. You’d better come up and see this for yourself.’
Worried less about falling than about the ice wall collapsing on top of her, he sat down and, trying to spread the load of his body on the icy platform, kept the rope taut until she was sitting alongside him. Helping her onto her feet, he said, ‘Be careful now. The glacier’s very broken up here, and one false step, you could find yourself—’
‘I know, I know,’ she said irritably, for by now she was feeling very tired. ‘I’m history.’
‘That’s right. Pure theory. No fossil.’
He turned carefully and led her across a short slope of jumbled ice and snow, to where the tracks ended at the curling blue-and-white lip of an enormous crevasse.
Gingerly they approached the edge and, with a growing sense of bafflement, stared first across the gaping black chasm and then into the frozen resonance of its hidden depths.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Swift, searching around her feet. ‘The tracks stop right here on the very edge. Did they jump across, do you think? It must be six metres.’
‘Seven and a half,’ admitted Jack.
Finding his binoculars, he surveyed the opposite side of the crevasse. There were no tracks to be seen, and the snow on the far side looked as pristine as if it had been manufactured for a magazine. Jack shook his head.
‘Is this the Twilight Zone or what? Not even a fingerprint.’
‘Could their tracks have been somehow covered up by something, maybe more snow?’
‘On just one side of the crevasse? That’s a little too peculiar, even for the Himalayas.’ He looked all around them, as if searching for some kind of clue. ‘It’s like they just disappeared.’
‘We both know that isn’t possible.’
‘Chasing around after a myth and a legend, who knows what’s possible and what isn’t?’
‘As I see it, there are just two possibilities. One, they jumped into the crevasse.’
‘Like lemmings, you mean,’ shrugged Jack. ‘Suicide.’
‘Two, they’re smarter than we thought. Perhaps they sensed they were being followed and somehow they backtracked, Indian style, placing their feet in their own tracks.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But there has to be a logical explanation.’
Jack nodded.
‘Either way, we’ve got zip,’ he said. ‘We might as well go back.’ He tried to unhook the radio from his jacket but found it was stuck under the chest harness buckle. Jack unclipped it and tugged the radio free. ‘I’ll let them know we’re coming.’
Swift did not disagree. Her headache was no better, but not wishing to take any more acetazolamide, she had decided to try to walk through the pain. Keen to be returning to Camp One and a lower altitude where her headache might improve, she retreated from the lip of the crevasse and then turned too quickly, spiking her other crampon’s binding.
‘Let me do it,’ said Jack. Momentarily pausing in his attempt to rebuckle the harness, he bent forward to free her binding, but Swift had already automatically lifted one foot clear of her boot and, tired, simply lost her balance. The next second, both feet had disappeared from underneath her and she hit the ice, landing heavily on her hip.
She felt no pain. What little discomfort there was became instantly absorbed by the realization that she was still sliding. Failing to hear what Jack shouted to her, she turned instinctively onto her stomach, which merely seemed to accelerate the speed of her descent, and as she perceived that she would fall into the crevasse, she felt her heart leap back up the slope, as if by its very motion it might help to propel her forward again.
The scream leaving her chapped lips became instantly amplified as she found herself swallowed up in a great blue-black void of snow and ice.
Marching into the ill-equipped little camp, Cody, Jutta, and Ang Tsering were met by a dog — not the kind of cur that Cody had grown used to seeing in Nepal, but a reasonable-looking animal wearing a proper collar. Upon hearing the dog bark, a powerful-looking Asian emerged from one of the dirty-looking tents. Ang Tsering pressed his hands together in a courteous way, bowed slightly, and began to speak to the man.
‘Namaste, aaraamai hunuhunchha?’
The man said nothing.
‘Tapaai nepaali hunuhunchha?’ said Tsering, bowing once more. When the man shook his head, Tsering added, ‘Tapaaiko ghar kahaa chha? Where do you come from, please?’
The man grunted and said, ‘Chin.’
‘Achchhaa.’
Tsering turned to Jutta and Cody. ‘He is Chinese.’ Then he shook his head. ‘I don’t speak Chinese.’
‘I speak a bit,’ said Cody, and stepping forward, he tried a little Mandarin.
‘Ni hao,’ he said, smiling. ‘Nin hao Byron. Wo Xing Cody. Nin gui xing?’
‘Wo xing Chen,’ growled the Chinese, still none too friendly.
‘Wo shi meigno,’ said Cody. ‘Ni zuò shénme gõngzuò?’ What do you do?
The Chinese frowned and thought for a moment.
‘Wo bu dong,’ he said finally. I don’t understand. ‘Qing ni zài shuo yibiàn?’ Would you say that again, please?
‘Keyi,’ said Cody. Sure.
Other men had appeared now. Cody counted four. Three of them regarded Tsering and the two Westerners with obvious suspicion, but the fourth advanced and bowed politely.
‘Nin hao,’ said the fourth man. ‘Yes, I speak English. Welcome.’
‘Excellent,’ said Cody. ‘We’re scientists. We’re based farther up the glacier, near Annapurna.’