They thought this was most amusing. While my new flightdeck crew tapped gauges, scratched their heads and whistled worriedly through their teeth, I stuck my nose as close as I dared to the suspiciously smeared surface of the window and watched the sleekly gleaming Lear swivel its electronics-crammed nose round, briefly gun its twin jets and taxi towards the end of the runway. I suspect my expression at that moment would have displayed the same despairing regret of a woman who has in some moment of utter madness just swapped a case of vintage Krug for a litre of Asti Spumante.
'You want we leave the door open?' the co-pilot said, leaning round in his seat. He'd been eating garlic.
'Why would you do that?' I asked.
'You get better view,' he said.
I looked out between him and the captain at the tiny windscreen, only a metre and a half away, imagining it entirely full of rapidly approaching snow and rocks. 'No, thanks.'
'Okay.' He pulled the door to the flight deck shut with an uneven, flapping thump. The sun visor on your average family saloon gave a greater impression of solidity.
'Uncle Freddy?'
'Kathryn. Where are you now?'
'In a flying transit van heading straight for the highest mountains on Earth.'
'Thought it sounded a bit noisy. In Tarka, are you?'
'Tarka?'
'Oh, no, wait, that was the plane before this new one.'
'This is the new one?'
'Oh, yes. Tarka crashed years ago. Everybody killed.'
'Well, that's encouraging. I hope I'm not disturbing you, Uncle Freddy.'
'Not at all, dear girl. Sorry if I'm disturbing you.'
'Don't worry. I won't pretend this isn't partly to take my mind off the flight.'
'Quite understand.'
'But also I forgot to ask about the Scottish thing we discussed, remember, when we were fishing?'
'Fishing? Oh, yes! Who'd have thought you could nab a trout at this time of year, eh?'
'Who indeed. You do remember what we were — ah! — talking about?'
'Of course. What was that?'
'Air pocket or something. Hold on, a mail sack's just landed on my lap. I'm going to strap it into the seat beside me…Right. Did you get in touch with Brussels?'
'Oh, yes. Your man is on his way to, umm, where you were.'
'Good. Jesus Christ!'
'You all right, Kate?'
'Mountain…kind of close there.'
'Ah. Yes, it is a rather spectacular flight, isn't it?'
'That's one word for it.'
'Your pal Suvinder back there yet?'
'Apparently not, he's in Paris. Back in a few days. I may leave before he arrives.'
'Don't forget to watch out for the prayer flags.'
'What?'
'The prayer flags. At the airport. All around it. Terribly colourful. They put flags wherever they think people need spiritual help.'
'Really.'
'Still, it's true what they say, isn't it? You're more likely to be killed in a car than a plane.'
'Not when you're in the plane, Uncle Freddy.'
'Oh, well, I suppose. If you're going to look at it that way.'
'Right, just thought I'd check. How are things in Yorkshire?'
'Bit rainy. GTO needs a new big end.'
'Does it? Right. Okay.'
'You sound a bit tense, old girl.'
'Ha! Really?'
'Try having a snooze.'
'A snooze?'
'Works wonders. Or get absolutely filthy drunk. Of course, you have to do that a good while before the flight.'
'Uh-huh?'
'Yes. Equip yourself with such a bloody awful hangover that a fiery death in the mangled wreckage of an aircraft seems like a merciful release.'
'I think I'm going to ring off now, Uncle Freddy.'
'Right you are! Get some shut-eye. Good idea.'
The final precipitous roller-coaster descent into Thuhn was even more terrifying than I remembered. For one thing, I could see it this time; on the previous occasion we'd been in cloud until the last thousand feet or so and I'd ascribed the wildly uneven flying of that part of the flight to yet more severe turbulence. Approaching in mid-afternoon on a clear day, it became all too obvious that going into a succession of stomach-churning nose-dives and standing the Twin Otter on its wingtips was simply the only way for the tiny craft simultaneously to lose enough height and avoid a succession of towering knife-sharp obsidian cliffs and seemingly near-vertical boulder fields full of vast rocky shards like ragged black shark's teeth.
It was probably just as well there was an air of unreality about the flight. I felt woozy. I had the beginnings of a headache; it was probably the altitude and the thin air. They said it was better to take your time getting to somewhere as high as Thuhn; drive up, or take a donkey, or even walk. That way your body adjusted gradually to the thinning air. Flying in from sea level was precisely the way not to do it. Still, at least we were. descending now. I shivered. I'd dressed in jeans and a cotton blouse and kept a few clothes by my side which I'd gradually put on during the flight — a plaid shirt, a jumper, gloves — but I still felt freezing.
The plane levelled out in that last thousand feet of its approach, if you can call hurtling down at an angle of about forty-five degrees levelling out. I watched a stone shrine, a stupa, flashing past the window on a spur of rock level with the plane. I looked down. If we were at forty-five degrees, the slope was at about forty-four. I did not need to be a geometrician to know that the brown blur of broken ground was getting closer all the time.
The shadow of the plane — worryingly sharp and close to life-size — flickered over rocks, lines of prayer flags and straggling walls made from rough round boulders. Some of the tall bamboo masts anchoring the lines of prayer flags were about twice as far off the ground as the Twin Otter. I pondered Uncle Freddy's words about the siting of prayer flags, and the possibility of dying in a plane crash caused by well-meaning believers hoisting a fresh set of flags in the last obvious space around the airport, only to snag the plane and cause the disaster they were hoping to avert.
Suddenly there were buildings underneath, opposite and above us — I glimpsed an old man looking down at us from a window and could have told you the colour of his eyes if I'd been paying attention — and then I was terribly heavy, then light, and then there was a thump and a furious shaking and rumbling that meant we'd landed. I opened my eyes as the plane rattled and banged across the landing ground, raising dust.
There was a cliff edge about three metres away, and a drop into a deep, wide valley where a white-flecked river wound through sinuous fields of grey gravel, its banks terraced with narrow fields and dotted with sparse trees. Grey, black and then utterly white mountains rose beyond, their peaks like a vast white sheet hooked in a dozen different places and hauled sharply up to heaven.
The plane wheeled abruptly, engines roaring and then cutting out. That left only the roaring in my ears, then. The co-pilot appeared, looking pleased with himself. Through the plane's windscreen, not far in front, I could see a set of soccer goalposts. He kicked open the door, which whammed down and jerked on its chain like a hanged man. 'Here we are,' he said.
I unbuckled, rose unsteadily and stepped out on to the dusty brown ground. I was suddenly surrounded by a sea of knee- and thigh-high children kitted out to resemble small cushions, while a crowd of adults dressed in what looked like colourful quilts appeared and started congratulating the flight crew on another safe landing. The terminal building was still the fuselage of a USAAF DC3 that had crash-landed here during the Second World War. It was closed. A wind as cold and thin and sharp as a knife cut across the landing strip, raising dust and goose pimples. I patted a selection of worryingly sticky little heads and looked up past the jumbled buildings of the town to the steep slope of chaotically fractured rocks over which we had made our final approach. Prayer flags everywhere, like bunting round a used boulder lot. Beneath my feet were the markings for one of the football ground's penalty boxes. One of the male quilt-people came up to me, put his hands together as though in prayer and bowed and said, 'Ms Telman, welcome to Thuhn International Airport.'