I must be upside down, because I gaze downwards, but I see an endless blue sky. I can hear the wooden frame of the aircraft creaking and groaning.
“Everyone – keep still. I’m working out what we must do.” Rufus’s voice is loud and clear, cutting through my jumbled mind. I grip the side of the fuselage next to my seat; he shouts again.
“No-one must move an inch. There’s a crevasse below us.”
I look again. The blue I can see isn’t sky. It’s smooth, ultramarine walls of ice. I’m not upside down; I’m looking not up but down, into endless, invisible depths. The plane is hanging in the jaws of a crevasse. On either side, the wingtips rest on snow, but the fuselage hangs above empty space.
Rufus turns in his seat and directs us. “Sirko! The aircraft is under strain; every pound of weight is pulling it down. You’re the heaviest: get off first. Then you can help the rest of us get to safety.”
Yuri nods. Rufus shouts at him again. “Now, follow my instructions. Climb out of your seat, over the edge of the fuselage, down onto the left-hand wing. Then lie flat, to spread your weight, and crawl along. Prof, you’re next. But wait until Sirko’s onto the snow. We must go one by one, so as not to put too much weight on that wing.”
Yuri clambers down onto the wing as gently as he can, but it bounces under the first impact of his feet. Its wooden frame shudders and squeals, like an animal whimpering in pain. He bends his knees to soften the impact, then lies down flat on the wing. I see him shuffling along, writhing his way underneath the engine casing, then along the outer wing to the tip. It seems an eternity before he finally steps onto the snow.
Axelson is next. He’s more awkward and slower than Yuri, but bit by bit he inches towards safety. As he steps off the wing onto the ice, a gust of wind catches the airplane and shifts it. I glance in the opposite direction, across to the end of the right-hand wing. My mouth drops open in mute shock, as I see that the wing has moved. Only a few inches of its furthest tip is now resting on the snow.
Rufus has seen the wing slide too. “Agnes, Mariam – both of you go at once. Quickly.”
I lift Mariam out of her seat and onto the left-hand wing. She knows exactly what to do: she lies down as I’m climbing out onto the wing behind her. She’s crawling along, just ahead of me; Yuri and Axelson reach for her arms. But the wing is moving, like a living creature, below us. The wind is catching it again and it shakes, moves and lifts under my elbows and knees, as I try to slide along. I glance over the edge of the wing into the indigo depths of the crevasse, and shudder. I don’t look down again, and concentrate on trying to lever myself forward.
Yuri plucks Mariam off the wing: I feel the professor’s hands gripping mine. There’s a pull on my arms. My feet plant down solidly into the snow.
I look back at Rufus.
He’s climbing out of the cockpit, but I hear wood snapping. The plane is starting to break up. Rufus’s feet bump down onto the wing, and it shakes like a leaf. Freezing gusts of wind howl in our ears.
Rufus slides himself along the wing, shuffling below the engine casing; it looks like he’s moving in slow motion. Yuri’s about to shout to him, but suddenly all sound is lost in a furious blast of wind. The airplane shifts once more. The far wingtip slides over the lip of the crevasse.
We see the falling wing grazing and scraping down the wall of ice. Rufus is standing up, next to the engine casing, looking at us. He’s like a sprinter out from the blocks; he’s running along the wing towards us as it tilts, steepening faster and faster into the depths.
There’s a hideous tearing, cracking sound; the plane is breaking as it falls. The wings fold together, like some great insect. The falling fuselage strikes a huge blue spike of ice in the crevasse, and crumples as if made of paper. The whole airplane is a mashed ball of debris, dropping into blue-black nothingness. We look down: it’s completely vanished.
“Well, that was a close shave.” Rufus stands beside me. He looks rather pleased with himself.
I’ve never felt so tired in my life. For the last ten hours we’ve been descending. At first we were in a world of white, threading our way through the crevasses that yawned like open blue mouths among the snowfields. Then, very gingerly, we inched step-by-step down the steeply sloping snout of a glacier into a wet mess of gravel and mud. After that, we clambered onto the smooth slabby surface of a lava flow, and below that we came onto endless slopes of boulders and rubble. Now we’re on yet another lava flow, and it’s late afternoon. This morning my teeth were chattering with cold: now, sweat drips into my eyes from the broiling rays of the sun. Hot light bounces off every bone-dry surface.
“Is that a cave? We could rest in there.” I point towards a strange circular mouth in a wall of rock.
The professor glances at the hole. “It’s a lava tube, Miss Agnes. We should not go into it: we have no idea where it leads. Tubes like that are formed when lava flows down the flanks of a volcano, like a river of syrup. The surface of the lava river cools and solidifies, turning to solid rock. But inside, the lava stays hot and liquid and flows away, leaving an empty tube. At the Lava Beds in northern California, there is a whole network of tubes that you can walk through.”
Rufus sniggers. “You’re a mine of useless information, Prof!”
“I agree, Mr du Pavey. My knowledge is extensive, but none of it can help us in this present situation.”
Yuri looks round. He’s carrying Mariam on his shoulders. “I think we ought to try to get lower before we stop. Without food or water, stopping to rest is just delay.”
“Is that a sheep?” I hear Mariam’s voice from above Yuri’s shoulders. She is pointing straight ahead.
There’s a whitish dot on the slope far below us. As we stumble and slip our way down the sloping natural pavements of the lava flow, we see there’s several white dots. They’re in a line, stretched out ahead of us. Beyond and below them, the slopes of the mountain turn green.
The professor looks at Rufus. “Can you guess our altitude?”
“We landed – well, crashed – at around fourteen thousand feet. We’re now at around eight thousand. Look across there to the left; we’re level with the saddle between the two Ararat peaks.”
“What altitude are the villages?”
“Around six thousand.”
Mariam shouts out. “They are sheep! And I can see a shepherd!”
Rufus is suddenly animated. “Well done, Mariam! You’re right!”
We wave, and the man waves back. We make our weary way down the hillside towards him. Fifteen minutes later we hear a shout “Barheev!”
Mariam shouts back; in a few moments we’re shaking hands, and Mariam’s talking, explaining.
“He’s called Arman. He says we were lucky to see him; he was just about to go back down the hillside to the village. There’s a wedding on today.”
Soon, we see below us a huge bowl-shaped valley, two or three miles across. The late afternoon sun glows on golden stubble in recently harvested fields. The farmland is patched like a checkerboard; the crops alternate with lush grazing pastures for sheep and cows, the green lines of vineyards, and squares of deeper green; orchards. I can even see the red glints of September apples among the leaves of the orchard trees. But beyond the fields, the land suddenly drops away into unseen, deep-shadowed depths, like a great canyon. The fertile farmland hangs on a shelf on the side of the volcano, high above the main valley.
Among the greenery are groups of stone-built houses, spread across the width of the cultivated land. There are six large villages, linked by a dirt road that threads its way through the fields and orchards. A round church tower, crowned with a conical roof and a crucifix, rises above the largest of the villages. I recall the cluster of six names ‘Armenian’ on the map in Kılıç Pasha’s office. Yes, this is the place.