— Not half bad.
They pass the bowl around and Somervell picks a book off the floor. Three Tragedies. The leather binding is soft from use, the gilding nearly worn off the page ends.
— Surely it’s Walsingham’s turn?
Ashley shakes his head, touching his throat.
— Not over this racket.
Somervell flips to where they left off in Hamlet and begins to read, his voice rising and falling not for theatrical effect but to overcome the changing volume of the wind. Ashley watches Somervell’s hand tremble as he reads. They are all shivering.
The wind returns to its previous strength and they can no longer hear. The three men lean into the windward side of the tent, the wind lashing their backs as it rises to a deafening howl. The lamp blows out. It is pitch-black inside, the canvas snapping and fluttering as the Sherpas call anxiously from the next tent. Price yells back in Nepali.
Something hard strikes Ashley’s shoulder through the canvas, stunning him. A rock or a piece of ice. He wonders if the tents will tear and he pictures the scene: huge flurries of snow pouring in, the swirling maelstrom of sleeping bags and foodstuffs and equipment, then the tent itself gone, carrying off the climbers or leaving them naked beneath the glow of the clouded moon. It would be death. They are so far from base camp, and base camp so far from civilization, that they might as well be the only men in Tibet, the only men in the world. Price bellows to the other climbers.
— Sounds like Fritz has brought out his Maxim.
Ashley yells hoarsely in the darkness.
— We’ll never get to the third act.
Hours pass before the wind calms and Somervell returns to his tent. Ashley lies on his back in the dark, his eyes open. He feels the rock below him jutting into his shoulders. He gets up to realign his kapok mattress, replacing the sleeping bag on top. He lies back down and curses.
— I swear there’s a fucking boulder right under me. Who cleared the ground here?
Price chuckles in his sleeping bag.
— It wasn’t any sahib. Want to swap places?
— No.
Ashley closes his eyes, listening to the flapping of canvas, a sound of clinking metal. A guyline must have broken from its anchor, freeing the metal fitting to flail among the stones.
— Someone ought to anchor that, Price whispers.
— They certainly ought to.
They fall silent. The unanchored canvas keeps flapping.
— Bloody freezing, Ashley mutters. I don’t suppose there’s a spare fleabag in the other tents?
— I doubt it. Would you fetch it if there was?
Ashley turns onto his side, trying to avoid the sharpest stones beneath him. Occasionally the wind looses a clump of snow upon his face and he sweeps it off clumsily with a wet mitten.
— You remember, Ashley says suddenly, the girl I was talking about. Soames-Andersson.
— Of course.
— It was my fault she went off. I didn’t know what I had, nor how to keep it.
They hear footfalls outside their tent, Somervell walking by to fix the guyline. The flapping ceases. The footsteps pass by again.
— I only wanted to say that, Ashley adds. I’d never said it before.
— All right.
Ashley coughs for a spell and sits up, taking the canteen from inside his sleeping bag. He tugs the cork out and inverts the bottle, but only a few drops trickle into his mouth. The snow has not yet melted. He plugs the canteen and lies down.
— There’s more, Ashley wheezes. Something happened before we sailed.
— The girl?
— She sent me a telegram. I hadn’t heard from her in years.
— What did it say?
— Hardly anything.
Price shifts in his bag. — Are you all right? Shall I light the lamp?
— I’m fine. I’ll clam up.
Ashley has another coughing fit. He hacks some fluid into his handkerchief and lies back down, breathing more freely than he has for hours.
— Maybe you ought to go after her, Price says.
There is a long pause.
— It wouldn’t work.
— Perhaps you ought to try anyway.
— Perhaps.
— We really ought to sleep.
— I know.
Ashley coughs and turns onto his back. He feels the sting of an ice fragment melting through his silk undershirt into his ribs.
— How old are you, Ashley? Twenty-eight?
— Twenty-nine.
— That’s still young.
— It doesn’t feel young.
— Of course it doesn’t, Price says. But it might if you let it.
Ashley laughs and the laugh turns into a wheeze. He says good night to Price and pulls up the collar of his sleeping bag, trying to recall the exact words of the telegram. There is the sound of flapping canvas again and he knows another guyline has come loose in the wind.
THE ISLAND CITY
The flight lands at Keflavík Airport, thirty miles from the Icelandic capital. I look out the window as the airplane taxis slowly across the tarmac. The runway is slick with rainfall, the grass a deep rich green.
The halls of the terminal are silent. There are huge circular windows, portholes to the wild country beyond. Collecting my bag from the carousel, I pass through an empty customs gate. At an ATM I withdraw nearly the last of my savings in a currency I’ve never seen before.
I step outside the automatic doors into the open air. It’s bracingly cold. In one day I’ve gone from autumn to nearly winter. I board an express bus for the city center, but halfway through the journey the driver pulls onto the shoulder without explanation.
The passengers get off and stand around the barren strip of highway, smoking cigarettes or talking in low voices. From each side the black asphalt drops to fields of broken lava crowned with moss and lichen. I pass from the shelter of the bus and the wind strikes me, flapping my jacket and nearly toppling me. The driver leans against the bus behind me lighting a cigarette. He sweeps his hand forward, signaling I ought to walk on.
I step off the road onto jagged slabs of lava, straining to keep my balance as I hop from one stone to another. The fragments are jet-black, the lichen green and brown and orange. I walk twenty yards, then fifty. I swivel around. The lava and lichen stretch out the same in every direction.
Reykjavík is a strange and lonely place. It seems barely a city at all, only an arrangement of colorful houses perched around a bay, their corrugated roofs standing sentry against the driving wind and rain. Dark and savage hills loom above, foreboding the wildness of the country beyond.
One walk along the windswept harbor and I know I’ll need a warmer coat. I rummage through an indoor flea market, choosing an olive green German army parka. The elderly vendor accepts my money and peers knowingly at me through thick glasses, as if we share some deep secret.
— It is very warm, she confides.
But when I step outside, I realize the coat barely protects me from the freezing wind.
I’m staying at a new youth hostel on a hill, spotless and shining. On a dining table in the glass-enclosed kitchen I make a list of all the ways I might progress in my search. The list has twenty-three items. I have eleven days until October 7.
I speak to jewelers and antiques dealers, even a curator at the National Museum of Iceland. They tell me little of Ísleifur Sæmundsson, only the same few anecdotes that appear in auction catalogs and surveys of Icelandic crafts, none of which I can read myself. These sources record that Ísleifur was born in 1872 and died in 1936. He made elegant pieces of jewelry heavily influenced by the late Urnes style, but produced few works and seems not to have made his living as a jeweler. He was born in a village called Seyðisfjörður in the Eastfjords — a collection of remote inlets on the far side of the country — but the place of his death isn’t recorded, nor the location where he produced his work.