Darkness descends. Our bones rattle with the cold. The women endure it, uncomplaining. At night Biscuits sleeps barefoot, with her foot-wraps round her chest to dry, burying her soles for warmth against another girl’s belly, for whom, beneath her own pettu, she performs the same favor. She has me protect my hands under the tucks of her arms. We learn to site our sleeping hole out of the narrow gorges, where gales howl. It’s better in the wide parts of the trail, or in the lee of an outcrop if you can find one before your mates do. Nights are unbearable, no matter what you do.
“Only eight more wake-ups,” says Flag.
Dawn: Stephanos has the Macks fall in under arms. We roust the male porters from their snowholes. Before they can issue the next ultimatum, Stephanos publishes his own: Get out! Hell take you-and your loads. At spearpoint, we drive the mob back down the trail. They want food. Indeed, answers Stephanos, I’m sure you do. We want our fleeces and shelters, they cry. “Come and take them,” replies Stephanos, quoting Leonidas.
The porters yield. Stephanos harangues them. Press on to the Khawak! Downhill from there! Bonuses for all in Bactria!
We make a good day, and another after that. Where is the summit? We have lost touch with the column in front and behind. Our shikaris are useless; they don’t know the mountain. Each storm buries the trail deeper. Sun is worse. Its heat spawns avalanches. None have threatened our section yet. But their great falls, plunging ahead, wipe out the trail. It takes hours to break a new one and when we emerge on the far side, only prayer reassures us we have not lost our way.
The seventh day, fodder runs out for the mules and horses. We ourselves have been on half rations since the fourth dawn. My belly echoes like a hollow tank. Each step has become agony. “Tollo,” I say, laboring beside him. “Should we be getting worried?”
“Put your faith,” he says, “in the benevolent gods.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in the gods.”
“I don’t.”
We hear no more talk of mutiny. Porters trek tight beside us. We will live or die together.
This is the way peril overhauls you. One hand’s-breadth at a time. Suddenly you’re in it. I glance to Lucas. Even in his pinpointers, bundled like a bear, I read his apprehension. The issue is no longer war. It has become survival.
Night seven: Two rangers stagger into camp, sent back from the section before us to guide us on. A village! Just three miles ahead! The natives’ bunkers, beneath the snow, hold food and fodder. We survive another interminable siege of darkness, succored by hope.
All next day the section treks in a stiff gale. This is good; it means we’re near the summit. Around noon we spot fresh graves. Our own countrymen, from the sections ahead. With shame we welcome the sight. It means we’re still on the trail. Mountain sickness adds to our woes. No one can eat; you can’t keep anything down. We are weak and disoriented. The simplest chore becomes monumental. You recall, say, a chunk of jerked meat in your kit. Now try and get it. To wring one mitt off your fist takes the count of fifty. By then you’ve forgotten what you took it off for. Two fellows put up their pinpointers and forget to tug them down; they go snow-blind. They must be roped and led.
We put our heads down and march. Each man recedes into his own cylinder of pain. You see your own feet and hear the crunch of your tread. Where are our guides? The rangers told us that men have been posted along the trail to wait for us and steer us in. Lucas works up beside me as we trek. “Something’s wrong.” He indicates the sun. “We’re heading northeast.”
“Where should we be heading?”
“I don’t know. But not there.”
The trail twines in so many directions, turning up switchbacks and across shoulders and ridgelines. Who can tell anything?
Traversing such a wilderness, you find yourself naming landmarks. A knife-edge crest: “The Clothesline.” “Two Towers.” “The Ice House.” Where is the village? Can there really be mooch ahead? Will we have a fire?
Postnoon. We trek a ridge of slate and shingle. A glacial moraine, gouged by the great frozen river that has cut this basin. Glare is fierce; gaps open in the column again and again. The event becomes normal, prompting no alarm. We’re blind anyway.
Suddenly a commotion ahead. The village? A line of our countrymen churns past us in the opposite direction.
Wrong way, brothers.
We’ve lost the trail.
Gone up the wrong valley.
“Brilliant work, mates!”
“What genius is in charge of this bung-fuck?”
Men and animals beat past us, heading back down the way we came. I grab Lucas. “This is serious.”
No one has panicked yet. But we feel chaos coming. We turn back down the track. The column becomes even more dislocated, as some litters countermarch, cutting into the line hastening back down the moraine. Bad luck never arrives in isolation. Now: a fresh storm. The heavens go purple; gales howl; the cold hits us like a wall of ice.
Men are shoving and heaving. Troops push past in mounting terror. The mules and horses have caught fright too. “Halt in place!” Stephanos bawls, striding the length of the column. “Brothers, get ahold of yourselves!” He calls mates by name, summoning them to order. It works. March integrity is restored.
The women are the strongest. Not one dumps her load or makes a move to bolt. Biscuits and Ghilla stay tight to me and Lucas. “Ka’neesha?” I shout into the gale. Are you all right? They nod, muffled from sole to crown. The column starts again. Three hours till darkness. No orders have been passed, but every man understands: We must regain the trail and find the village. No one will survive a night in this storm.
Down we go. Past the Ice House. Past the Two Towers.
Now the Clothesline. An exposed backbone crest, five hundred paces end to end. A plume of snow blasts laterally, driven by the gale. We must trek in the lee, meaning blind in the blow-off. “Rope up! No exceptions!”
The column traverses the spine by steps cut from the ice during our earlier crossing. Use your half-pike. Plunge it, butt-spike-first, into the slope; give it the count of two to set; then haul yourself forward. Two steps, then plant again and belay your mate behind you. Everyone together. Amazingly, we make it.
“The trail!”
Joy flashes the length of the column. Our guides cry from ahead. Shelter! Shelter by nightfall! In jubilation we pound each other’s bundled shoulders and backs. Head count! The column forms up to start again.
“Where’s Tollo?”
It’s Flag, checking the roster.
“I saw him,” Little Red points back, “just before we crossed.”
“Where is he now?”
No one knows.
Flag works back along the column. Pulling off mufflers and pinpointers. Examining every face.
“Was he roped? Who saw him rope up?”
The column has gotten off the pitch now. Out of the gale. A face of the mountain protects us. We feel almost warm.
Behind us the Clothesline howls in the open.
Flag comes back. He hasn’t found Tollo. “Go on!” he commands, driving us forward in the direction of the village.
“What about you, Flag?”
“Get moving!”
Lucas and I hold up. We can see Flag and Red go at each other. We can’t hear much. Red points down the ice face.
“…if Tollo’s down there, he’s bought his ticket!”
Flag turns away. We can see him hauling rope and a hatchet from the pack of a mule. Red rejoins the column, moving on. The mass shuffles forward, toward the village. Lucas and I look at each other.
“I’ll stay,” he says.
I look in his eyes. He’s worse off than me. He’ll freeze in an hour.
“No.” I’m an idiot. “You go on.”
A push gets Lucas started.
“Save me something warm.”
17
Flag and I find Tollo five hundred feet down, alive and delirious.