Among the exponents of the “modern revival” style was Ísleifur Sæmundsson, a silversmith from the remote eastern fjords of Iceland. Working at a great distance from the art centers of Europe, Ísleifur was notable for fusing modernist influences with Viking age motifs. In his brief career (c. 1925–1937) Ísleifur produced work ranging from sleek Art Deco — influenced jewelry to relatively faithful interpretations of Ringerike and Urnes museum pieces.
I had no business dredging up other people’s past. And there was nothing I could do eighty years later about two long-dead lovers who ought to have been long forgotten. Maybe it was kinder just to forget about it, to let everything go to dust. Maybe that was how the world softened a cruelty like Ypres, because Ypres and Regent’s Park would look the same after eighty years under the Flemish mud.
I throw back the cover from my bed. I take out my notebook.
What I know for sure:
1. In 1916 Imogen wrote to Ashley mentioning the carvings at Urnes — something they’d evidently already discussed.
2. Sometime in the 1920s–30s an Icelandic silversmith named Ísleifur Sæmundsson made an Urnes-style brooch.
3. The brooch was engraved with Charlotte’s initials.
4. Someone gave Charlotte the brooch.
5. It’s September 24. I have two weeks left.
Dressing in the dark, I take my wallet from my backpack. I go downstairs to the computers and buy a one-way ticket to Reykjavík.
5 May 1924
5 May 1924
Camp II, 19,800 feet
East Rongbuk Glacier, Tibet
The sun ratchets above the valley walls, glinting off the fifty-foot ice cliff that dwarfs the camp. Seated on a circle of packing crates, the climbers breakfast on hot tea and tinned biscuits, the green canvas pyramids of the tents swaying beside them in the wind. Ashley takes a tiny bite of biscuit and marmalade. He starts to gag and gulps from a tin of café au lait to get it down. Beside him the colonel composes a press dispatch into a notebook in small, precise longhand.
Price and Mills chew their biscuits quickly. Price dons the oxygen apparatus for testing, looking alien in his pith helmet and glacier goggles and rubber face mask. He sucks at the gas, grasping the length of India rubber tubing as Mills studies the glass-enclosed pressure dial. Mills cranks the wheel atop the steel cylinder.
— Sixty atmospheres. A wonder it’s only half leaked. Feel any different?
Price lifts a mittened hand tentatively. He shakes his head and breathes in deeper.
— Bloody sorcery, Ashley croaks.
The colonel looks up from his notebook.
— You know, Walsingham, when we were last up here Price was forever talking about this chum of his. A climber who was up to all kinds of adventures in Arabia. I could swear I heard he’d discovered the pyramids of Giza.
— Is that so?
— And yet, here we are, a thousand miles from civilization, listening to Noel’s bloody tales over and again, and I haven’t heard you so much as mention the desert. And I’ve promised The Times twenty dispatches from the mountain, and it’s twenty dispatches they’ll get, even if I have to write profiles of everyone from Price to the bloody cobbler. So give me the facts. Were you there or not?
— I was.
— Where?
Ashley clears his throat with a hacking cough.
— All over. From Syria to Aden. A touch into Persia. But the interesting bit was in the south, around the edges of the Rub’ al Khali desert. The empty quarter.
The colonel copies this into his notebook, carefully taking down the correct spelling of Rub’ al Khali.
— Good. And what were you doing there? Archaeology?
— I wouldn’t call it that. Epistemology would be more accurate. A bit of metaphysics—
The colonel waves his pencil threateningly.
— Don’t toy with me.
— The trouble is that it’s hard to explain.
— You give me the facts, I’ll do the explaining. Now why’d you go to begin with?
— I went to Arabia, Ashley sighs, more to get away than to get somewhere. I was sick of Kenya and didn’t want to return to England. When I got to Arabia I knew no one, didn’t speak the language and didn’t know what I was looking for.
— But you were, the colonel insists, looking for something.
— Later on, yes. I was looking for Iram, supposedly a city of a thousand pillars, lost somewhere in the empty quarter. It’s mentioned in the Arabian Nights and the Qu’ran—
— Slow down. I need to get this down.
— There’s nothing to say about it, Ashley protests. I didn’t find anything. It was a farce.
— You needn’t be testy. I only want the facts.
— The facts, Ashley repeats with a grimace. The fact is that I went after something that doesn’t exist. It’s as if we went to all the trouble of climbing this mountain, nearly killing ourselves and spending piles of money, and when we got to the top there turned out not to be any summit. Not even a mountain, in fact. Not merely that the summit vanished, but that it had never existed, had been only the product of one’s vanity. And I knew I was a damned fool and should have stuck to climbing. It’s hardly a story for the papers.
The colonel shuts his notebook. He raps his fingers on the oilskin cover.
— I’m not coming up to Three today, he says curtly. You and Price take the porters up with Corporal Tebjir. Mills and I follow tomorrow. For God’s sake, don’t let the porters tear the equipment to hell with those crampon spikes. Mind they keep their feet up as they go.
— Sir.
The colonel squints up at the sun and pulls back his jacket sleeve to consult his wristwatch.
— You fellows had better get moving. As it is, you’ll be in the trough at midday. Bloody time to be there, but I suppose it can’t be avoided.
The colonel looks dubiously at Ashley’s broad-brimmed felt hat.
— You ought to wear your topee.
— I’ll make do. I’ve been in glacier troughs before.
— Not this one. No atmosphere up there. That trough catches the noon sun and reflects it right back at you. Air doesn’t move at all. Does odd things to you.
— All right.
— One more thing, the colonel adds. You’ll think of something for me to write about you in the paper, and send it down with the next runner. If you don’t want Arabia, fine. But you will give me something, whether it’s planting coffee in Kenya or collecting bloody postage stamps.
Ashley and Price unscrew crates of equipment for the journey to Camp III, counting out coiled ropes and crimson flags and hollow wooden stakes. A Gurkha corporal summons the porters for inspection, the line of small and sinewy men standing at attention with puffed chests. Many are missing equipment, supplies lost or stolen hundreds of miles behind in snowblown passes or humid jungles. Two porters have no glacier goggles. Several are without stockings in their boots, and one wizened Bhotia stands barefoot in the snow. Ashley issues new equipment from reserves and gives each man a pair of steel-and-leather crampons.
Price stands on a crate to demonstrate the fastening of crampon straps over his boots, the Gurkha translating all the while. The porters fasten the buckles in unison. Ashley circles among the men. Kneeling and tugging Llakpa Chedi’s crampon strap, Ashley grimaces in disapproval. Llakpa Chedi is one of the “Tigers,” the strongest porters earmarked to carry loads to the highest camp. At this altitude Llakpa Chedi is a stronger climber than Ashley and both men know this.