‘We are also scientists,’ said the Chinese. ‘Make weather prediction.’ He struggled to add, ‘Meteorology, yes?’
‘Is that so?’ said Cody. ‘One of the members of our expedition is a meteorologist. This is Dr. Henze.’
Jutta smiled and said, ‘Would you like some American cigarettes?’ She opened her jacket and offered a pack of Marlboros.
‘Xiangyan,’ breathed the English speaker with keen appreciation. ‘Yes, please. We have run out.’
‘Sure,’ said Cody. ‘Xiangyan, y’know?’
‘Keep the pack,’ said Jutta.
‘That is very kind of you,’ said the English speaker.
The other men came nearer and shyly accepted Jutta’s cigarettes, which she lit with a storm-proof lighter.
‘We thought we were the only people up here,’ said Cody. ‘How many of you are there?’
‘Just small team. Six of us is all. You like cha?’
‘Cha,’ said Jutta. ‘Cha would be good.’
They stayed drinking tea for about half an hour before making their excuses, promising to come again with whisky and more cigarettes and their own party’s meteorologist.
‘It’s nice to know we’re not the only ones up here,’ said Cody as they waved goodbye.
‘What do you make of them?’ Cody asked Tsering as they walked back to MBC and the place where they would turn west in the direction of ABC.
‘They have no Sherpas,’ said Tsering.
‘Yes, I wondered about that,’ said Jutta.
‘If they had hired Sherpas, I would have heard about it. In which case, they may be in my country without proper permission. The border with Tibet is less than forty kilometres to the north. I think they are Chinese army soldiers.’
‘Deserters, maybe?’ suggested Jutta. ‘I didn’t see any guns.’
‘Deserters don’t normally have a satellite dish,’ said Cody.
Sixteen
‘It was on all fours and it was bounding along very quickly across the snow, heading for the shelter of the cliffs. That was the point at which I thought, That thing is an ape or apelike creature.’
The second that Swift disappeared over the edge of the crevasse, Jack threw himself onto the ice before the rope could yank him after her. He was hardly surprised that she should have been unable to stop her slide. He had yelled at her to lie on her back and dig in with her crampons and her ice axe, but self-arrest was not an easy technique to master. Like most mountaincraft, it needed practice. As a young climber he had learned ice-axe braking on a concave slope, with a safe run-out and sufficient time to perfect the skill. He fell feet-first, on his back, and rolled toward the hand holding the axe head rather than toward the spike. As he started to bring his own weight to bear on the pick and to spread his legs, trying to dig the toes of the crampons into the ice to add to the braking effect of the axe. Swift hit the end of the rope.
Jack gritted his teeth as the sudden impact of her weight threatened to snatch the ice axe out of his grasp. With arms at full stretch, he pressed his face against the ice and prayed that the muscles in his arms and shoulders would take the strain. And that the unbuckled chest harness would stay on — it was only his rucksack that had stopped the harness being torn off his shoulders when Swift fell.
When at last he stopped moving and risked looking back over his shoulder he saw that his feet were just under a metre short of the crevasse. Another second and they would have both been dead.
From inside the crevasse he heard Swift’s screams grow quieter as she struggled to gain control of her fear. He took a deep breath and called out to her.
‘Swift? Are you okay?’
There was a long pause until finally she said in a nearly inaudible voice:
‘Yes, I think so.’
Jack cursed his own stupidity, telling himself he should never have unbuckled the harness without first having secured them both to a separate rope anchor and that he should never have made her walk up from the Rognon. It would have been better to have taken Miles or Mac. She had been more tired than he had thought.
He looked under his chest, searching for the radio to call for help from the other two at Camp One. But the radio was gone. He had been about to call them at Camp One when she fell and he must have dropped it. Looking desperately around he saw that it had fallen on the ice several metres away, next to Swift’s own ice axe, and well out of reach.
He would have to pull her up by himself. Now if the harness could only hold long enough for him to be able to get the rope securely in his hands... as if awakened by this very thought, the karabiner holding the rope began to slip over his shoulder, pressing down the padded strap of his rucksack.
‘Okay, don’t lose it. I’m going to try and get you out of there.’
For what seemed like an eternity Swift just hung there, turning on the rope, eyes closed, and hardly daring to look up for fear that she should find Jack slowly dragged down into the crevasse after her. But when she felt herself drawn several centimetres up the crevasse. Swift opened her eyes.
Gradually her sight adjusted to the frigid gloom, and her immediate thoughts upon seeing the cold abyss beneath her redundant feet had to do with the breaking strength, elongation, elasticity, impact force, number of falls sustainable, and water absorption inability of the rope holding her. She had seen enough movies to have in her mind’s eye a picture of a rope slowly fraying on the edge of the crevasse above her as Jack struggled to pull her up before it finally snapped.
Trying to clear her head of these images, she attempted to help Jack by telling him how much rope he would have to haul, and she perceived that she had fallen about six metres down inside the chasm. With this came the realization that it would probably take him as long as an hour to haul her out of there.
‘Jack? I’m about six metres down,’ she reported loudly, her voice already sounding like it belonged to something dead, a plangent soul lost in that unfathomed space. ‘Is there anything you want me to do?’
Slowly, he began to draw himself toward the head of his ice axe and farther away from the edge of the crevasse. The dead weight on the rope’s end was almost too much for him, and the karabiner was now halfway down his arm, but gradually, he got his head level with the shovel-like end of the axe that was the adze. When he was quite certain that he was secure, he twisted out the pick and then swung it at arm’s length, hammering it fast into the ice above his head, before drawing himself up the length of the shaft once again.
Jack repeated this manoeuvre until there were at least six metres between himself and the crevasse. Only then did he slowly turn onto his back and feel around for the rope, ready to begin the laboriously slow, backbreaking task of hauling Swift up and out of the crevasse.
The very next moment he felt something separate under his shoulder. Like buttons popping on a shirt.
The harness was of a type that enhanced the safety of climbers when a large rucksack was being carried as it helped prevent a climber from inverting in the event of a fall. Buckled securely, the load of a climber’s weight was evenly spread around the whole harness. But with the whole weight of the rope holding Swift brought to bear on only half of the harness, the integrity of the stitching on the flat webbing shoulder strap could only last a short while.
Jack guessed in an instant what was happening. Desperately he lunged for the rope and missed. He cried out as the strap holding the karabiner unfolded like a tiny fist, and the rope holding Swift disappeared into the crevasse.