Ashley makes a squeezing motion with his hands. Llakpa Chedi smiles benignly.
— Too tight, Ashley mutters. You’ll constrict your blood. Frostbite.
Ashley loosens the stiff leather strap and refastens the buckle a few eyelets lower. Ashley looks up at Llakpa Chedi’s glittering onyx pupils, his smooth tawny face unmarred by the sun.
— You won’t be grinning, Ashley wheezes, when you lose your toes.
Price commands the porters to remove the colored woven garters from their legs. He makes a show of mixing the garters in an empty crate, then lays a garter on each load. The porters heft their burdens, tossing huge rucksacks over their shoulders, crouching and fastening leather straps over their foreheads, entire crates balanced on their spines. The old barefoot porter coos and breaks into song. Price calls to Ashley from the front of the line.
— I’ll lead. You bring up the rear.
The colonel barks encouraging words in Nepali, brandishing an aluminum tent stake like a swagger stick. Ashley stands beside him as the long column threads by, khaki-clad forms disappearing through a cleft in the ice wall.
— Do you ever think, Ashley asks the colonel, that they know something we don’t?
— Such as?
— Hard to say. But they seem surer of something.
— What on earth could they know?
— They’ve all kinds of ideas. They say Price is marked for death. Only Sembuchi will walk behind him and only because Sembuchi’s madder than a march hare—
— Rubbish, the colonel retorts. Even you know better than to spread such rot, even in jest.
— Sir.
The colonel sets off toward his tent, the stake clasped behind him. Suddenly he stops and looks back at Ashley.
— Walsingham.
— Sir.
— The porters know they are paid to do this, the colonel says. But we do it for sport.
The line of porters snakes along a valley of white shark’s teeth, perfect pyramids of sun-bleached ice. Ashley walks behind the swaying basket of the final porter, the load dwarfing the tiny man as it bobs stride by stride. They have entered the trough. The pinnacles begin as mere stumps at the tip of the valley; flowing down they are shaped by sun and wind, evaporated and sculpted into towering spires, their blue-green glimmer never intended to meet the eyes of men.
The party struggles to find a path. In stifling air they grope for direction, halted by the lip of a bottomless black crevasse. They thread a line among an oval-shaped cathedral of emerald spires, the mirrored surfaces reflecting all bearings back upon them. Abruptly the column halts and Llakpa Chedi runs down to the line to Ashley, breathing heavily.
— Price Sahib says to come.
Ashley ascends the long column at double pace, his heart heaving in spasms. The porters stand with their burdens, sweat streaming down their faces, their eyes following Ashley as he passes. Price waits in the shade of a towering fang-shaped berg, Corporal Tebjir panting beside him.
— Rather far enough for the porters, Price says, don’t you think?
— I’d say.
Price turns to Tebjir.
— The porters can rest here. Walsingham and I shall flag the rest of the route and come back down. Mind they don’t get too settled.
Price and Walsingham set off alone. They follow a route over black moraine, then a field of powdery snow. Finally they step with crampon spikes onto the arrested river itself, a long azure tongue of ice. Ashley runs his hand along a pinnacle, his damp fingers sticking to the ice. Beneath the crystalline surface are shafts of milky white. He wonders if these are the supporting beams of the spire or mere fissures, the signature of countless tons bearing down upon the trough. Price points his ice axe between a pair of huge seracs.
— This one should go.
The climbers rope on to each other, Price in front, Ashley fixing his waist loop. Suddenly Ashley grins.
— The trouble is that I’ve left everything to you in my will, Hugh. If you drag me into a crevasse—
— Hush.
They push forward, searching for a route through a maze of obstacles. They stop before vast bergs dropped in the center of their path; they ascend ice cliffs with strange enthusiasm, pleased by the rare challenge of genuine climbing. They hammer wooden pickets up ice walls and string rope through the eyelets, spiking red flags to mark a path. The pennants hang limp in the dormant air.
A searing light reflects off all the ice, the rays passing through the smoked lenses of Ashley’s goggles, grinding at his brain in tandem with a sharp altitude headache until the effects are inseparable. His head is humming. It melts in time with the thousand-ton pinnacles, drips in sync with the great icicles, drifts along with the imperceptible slide of the glacier.
They stop to rest among a forest of giant seracs, Price unroping and pulling off his smack. Ashley spikes his ice axe in the snow and sits on a heap of dark moraine.
— Something’s on your mind, Price says. You’ve hardly spoken since breakfast.
— Not worth the effort.
— Come now, Price insists, something’s grating on you. What is it?
Ashley swigs greedily from his flask. He corks the flask and wipes his brow, speaking in a dry whisper.
— You remember that first lecture at Kensington Gore? During the war.
Price looks at Ashley with surprise.
— Not very well.
— You were on leave. After the lecture you introduced me to a pair of sisters. Soames-Andersson. I spoke with the younger one. It was right before I went to France.
Ashley throws one leg over his knee and chips the ice from the sole of his boot, testing with bare fingertips the sharpness of his crampon spikes. He says nothing more. Price frowns and peers up the glacier, the summit pyramid looming above.
— Something happened with her? You never told me.
— It didn’t last. We had a week together and after I got to France we wrote every day. When I was wounded she came to see me in hospital in Albert. We had a row. She left England. One could say she left to get away from me. That was eight years ago.
Ashley blots his forehead with the sleeve of his wind suit.
— I’ve wondered what it’s like to have it with you every day. I wonder if you live with it, if it becomes familiar and you take it for granted until it isn’t love anymore.
Price shrugs. — It’s like this place. Some days it’s too damned familiar. Other days it’s strange and wonderful.
Ashley shakes his head.
— A fine bloody waste, isn’t it? Wanting something you can’t have. Not wanting what you’ve got.
— You’ll get past it.
The climbers rise and pick up their ice axes.
— Shall we rope up? Ashley asks.
— Probably no need—
— Then let’s not bother.
Price looks up the glacier.
— I never knew about the girl. What was her name?
— Imogen.
Price nods. — You never told me.
THE QUESTION
Once an hour I leave the hostel and walk to the pay phone in the middle of Rosenthaler Platz to call Mireille. My flight to Reykjavík leaves at eight in the morning, but I didn’t get her e-mail until after I’d bought the plane ticket. Call me as soon as you get this, whenever you get this. So I go on calling every hour all night, because if I didn’t call on the hour I’d call more often.