The Hidden Oasis (69 page)

Already some way behind the other two, he pushed on as fast as he could, trying to make up some of the intervening distance, the ground dropping away below him, the ladders creaking and groaning with his weight. Every now and then Freya would stop and lean out, looking down. He waved her on and continued climbing, trying to ignore the approaching cliffs and the trembling of the rock face and the burning in his lungs and arms and legs, to focus all his energies on just keeping moving.

For the first thirty or so metres the ladders ascended in a perfect vertical line, one directly above the other, and he made rapid progress. Then, at the top of the eighth ladder, the line suddenly stopped dead. A horizontal rope led away to his left, taking him along a narrow ledge – not much more than the width of a cigarette packet – to the base of a second set of ladders. This climbed for a further fifteen metres before also coming to a halt, another rope taking him along another, even narrower ledge – this time towards the right – and onto another brief run of steps. Which is how it went on, the ladder trail now zigzagging its way back and forth across the cliff face. At no point did it ascend more than three or four ladder-lengths at a time before breaking off and recommencing in a different place, the gap between each run of steps traversed by heart-stopping, rope-assisted shuffles along ledges and cracks.

Why the ancient Egyptians had arranged the whole thing in this way, staggering the ladders rather than allowing them to climb in an unbroken vertical, Flin had no idea. Probably because they were having to work around stretches of bad rock, he guessed, where their bronze anchoring spikes couldn’t get a proper hold. Whatever the case – and he didn’t give it more than the most fleeting of thoughts – his upward progress was dramatically slowed as he was forced into a succession of diversions to left and right, edging his way nervously from one set of ladders to the next.

Behind him the implosion of the oasis appeared to be gathering pace. The temple platform was now nothing more than a crumbling, dust-shrouded wedge of rock, the magnificent buildings a jumbled heap of ruins from the midst of which the Benben continued to emit spectacular, laser-like shafts of crimson lightning. The scene was apocalyptic, like some medieval artist’s depiction of Hell. It barely registered with him, so intent was he on working his way back and forth across the cliff, his hands and feet slipping and sliding as he drove himself on ever faster, taking more and more risks in his desperation to keep ahead of the walls closing in to either side.

Once he slipped while manoeuvring along a rope-line between ladders, dangling for a moment with a hundred metres of empty space looming vertiginously beneath him before he managed to regain his footing and scramble along to the next set of steps. On another occasion one of the ancient ladder rungs snapped, the splintered wood slicing a deep gash in his calf, causing him to howl in agony, blood streaming down his leg and into his boot.

He almost gave up hope, convinced there was no way he was going to make it; that the gorge’s jaws would snap shut around him before he could reach the top and clamber out to safety. He kept moving nonetheless, refusing to be beaten, zoning out the pain and the exhaustion and the throttling sense of vertigo, summoning every last vestige of strength to push himself on. The valley floor dropped ever further behind him – now completely lost in a fog of debris – the summit of the cliff drew closer above, and eventually despair gave way to hope as he traversed a final short ledge and there above him was a straight run of five ladders taking him directly up to the top.

Freya and Said had been hanging back on the upper part of the climb, not wanting to leave him too far behind. Now they were just below the summit, shouting and gesticulating, encouraging him onwards. He shouted back at them, telling them to get the hell out, and after a brief pause to drag some oxygen into his aching lungs, started on his final ascent. The walls of the gorge were now claustrophobically close. He covered the first of the five ladders, every muscle in his body screaming out in protest. Then the second ladder; the third. He was halfway up the fourth, just five metres from the summit, an excited surge of adrenalin sweeping through him as he realized he was almost home and dry, Freya’s screams of encouragement now clearly audible from above, when a jarring tremor ran through the cliff face. Locking his arms around the ladder, Flin waited for it to pass so that he could begin climbing again. As he did he felt the ladder lurch beneath him as first one and then another of the pinions holding its upper end to the rock face started to work free from their housings. He
stopped, the steps settled, he moved up another couple of rungs, the ladder lurched again. Now he could see the bronze spikes slipping, inching their way out of the stone, the top of the ladder moving with them, pulling slowly away from the wall. He scrambled, but it was hopeless. As he clawed desperately for the bottom rung of the next ladder up, the pinions came completely free and there was no longer anything to hold the steps in place. For a brief, surreal moment everything seemed to stand still and he had the curious impression he was in one of those old silent movies where Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton engage in gravity-defying stunts high above the earth. Then, with a sickening sway, the top of the ladder arced backwards and away from the wall and he was falling helplessly through space, hands still gripping the wooden rung, a hysterical scream ringing out above him.

Freya should have known by now that the moment it looked as if things were going to work out OK, something would invariably happen to ensure that they didn’t.

As soon as she and Said had topped out – clambering their way onto the flat ground at the head of the cliff – she had swung round and looked down to check on Flin’s progress. The gorge had now narrowed to little more than the width of two tennis courts, its floor no longer visible, nothing visible save for the brilliant, burning ember of the Benben as it continued to shoot streaks of fierce red lightning up through the dust clouds into the sky above. In any other circumstances she would have been transfixed by what she saw, by the sheer impossibility of it. But her eyes were locked on Flin, watching intently as he worked his
way up the final run of ladders, her confidence rising with each step he took.

‘Keep going!’ she yelled, hope surging within her as she realized he would be OK. ‘You’re going to do it! You’re almost there! Keep going!’

Even as she shouted the ground beneath her feet had given a sudden, jarring lurch and the ladder Flin was climbing – Christ, he was so near, just a few metres off the summit! – started to pull backwards away from the cliff face. For a few brief, heart-stopping moments it had looked as if he might still be able to scrabble his way to safety. But then the pinions holding the top of the ladder
in situ
popped from the wall and the whole thing had toppled backwards, taking Flin with it.

‘No!’ she had screamed, burying her face in her hands. ‘Oh God no.’

She was distraught, shattered, unable to believe that after everything they had been through these last few days, all the dangers they had faced and overcome, it should end like this, at the very final hurdle. So distraught and shattered that when, a few moments later, she caught a distant cry of ‘Hello!’ she dismissed it as a shock-induced trick of the imagination. Only when the cry came again, more insistent this time, percolating upwards through the reverberating crash of shunting rock, and at the same moment Said grasped her shoulder, did she realize that it wasn’t her mind playing games. She snatched her hands away from her face and looked over the edge of the precipice.

‘Flin! Flin!’

He was standing below her, about ten metres down,
clinging to a ladder while another – the one that had fallen away from the cliff – now dangled limply beside it like a shattered arm. She saw immediately what had happened: while the spikes securing the top of the upper ladder had failed, those holding its bottom end – or at least one of them – had somehow held firm in the rock, the steps performing a sort of twisting back flip and slamming into the cliff face below.

By some miracle the impact hadn’t knocked Flin loose and he had managed to clamber onto the relative safety of the lower ladder. Freya felt a euphoric rush of joy and relief. It lasted perhaps a couple of seconds, then evaporated as the full picture started to come home to her. He was alive, but certainly wasn’t going to be for much longer.

It wasn’t simply that the gorge walls were getting nearer by the second, pressing in on him like a gigantic pair of hands about to crush a fly. There should still have been just about enough time for him to climb out of the oasis. The problem was he had nothing to climb up. Between the top of the ladder on which Flin was perched and the bottom of the one that would bring him up to the cliff’s summit there were now five metres of empty space. For a brief moment she thought they might be able to get the fallen ladder back in position to bridge the gap, but as she watched the last remaining spike slid out of the cliff face and the ladder plummeted away into the maelstrom beneath.

‘Shit,’ she hissed.

There was a pause, all of them standing frozen, no one knowing what to do. Flin shook his head as if to say: ‘It’s no good, there’s no way up,’ whatever slim chance he might have had growing slimmer with each passing second. Then,
knowing it was futile, but also that she at least had to make some attempt to help him, Freya swung herself onto the topmost ladder and started back down into the gorge. Said tried to stop her, insisted he should be the one to go, but she knew that she stood the best chance. Shrugging away his hand, she continued her descent.

Even the most experienced climber feels fear, and Freya was no exception. Sometimes it is low-level, nothing more than a speeding of the heart or a tingling in the gut. Other times it can be more intense, your entire being seeming to recoil and shrivel as you teeter on the brink of your own mortality. Freya had known both extremes and most things in between. But never, ever had she been as frightened as she was now, the ladder jolting beneath her, the approaching cliffs swamping her peripheral vision. Somehow she managed to keep the fear at bay, stowing it in the farthest corner of her consciousness and pushing herself downwards, moving from rung to rung until she had reached the foot of the ladder.

‘Don’t be fucking ridiculous!’ Flin was bellowing, waving her away. ‘Go back! Go on, get out!’

She ignored him. Bouncing a couple of times to ensure the ladder was still secure, she hooked a leg through its bottom rung, grasped the next but one rung above and leant out, hanging practically upside down, reaching towards him. Still yelling at her to get away, Flin mirrored the movement, climbing almost to the top of his ladder and extending his hand towards hers. Even at their fullest and most desperate stretch there was still the best part of a metre between their fingertips. They tried again, and again, giving it everything they could, adjusting their positions, elongating their arms
until it felt as if the tendons were going to snap, but it was no use and finally they were forced to admit defeat. Flin descended a few rungs, Freya pulled herself upright again.

‘There’s nothing you can do,’ he yelled, glancing to left and right. The advancing rock walls were now at the outer limits of the ladder trail, the wooden steps starting to snap and shatter as a million tons of solid stone slowly ground over them. ‘Please, Freya, it’s over. Just get out. Save yourself. Go! Please go!’

Again she ignored him, leaning back out and examining the rock face below, trying to see if there was any way of getting closer to him, of bridging that extra metre of space.

There was a clear foothold just beneath her, a jagged hole ripped in the stone when the pinion securing the top of the missing ladder had torn itself free. If she could ease herself down onto that, keep a grip on the bottom rung of her ladder, that would bring her a bit nearer, give her some extra reach.

It still wasn’t enough. Frantically she scanned back and forth, searching for something – anything – that might help. A horizontal crack ran across the rock face about two metres above Flin’s ladder, just about sufficient to provide a secure finger-hold. Even if he managed to get himself up there, that still left at least twenty centimetres between the crack and the very farthest she could stretch her hand towards him. She howled in frustration. It might as well have been a kilometre. There was no way they were going to make it.

‘I’m sorry,’ she cried. ‘I’m so sorry. I just can’t …’

She broke off as something caught her eye. Above Flin and a little to his left: a thin flake of what looked like flint protruding a couple of centimetres from the cliff, exactly
the same colour as the surrounding stone which is why she hadn’t spotted it before. Maybe, just maybe …

‘Listen,’ she cried, struggling to make herself heard above the roar of pulverizing rock. ‘You have to do exactly as I tell you. No questions, no arguments, just do it!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Freya!’

‘No arguments!’

‘You’re wasting—’

‘Just do it!’

He gave an exasperated wave of the arm, then nodded.

‘You have to get yourself up to that crack,’ she called, lowering her foot into the hole the pinion had torn, grasping the bottom rung of her ladder and leaning down. ‘You understand? You’ve got to get your fingers into that crack.’

‘There’s no way …’

‘Do it!’

Glaring at her, muttering, Flin started to climb. He got himself onto the fourth rung from the top of his ladder, then the third, then the second, reaching his arms out, pressing his body flat against the stone, hugging it, sliding his way up the cliff face inch by inch.

‘I’m going to fall!’ he bellowed.

‘You’re going to fall anyway in a minute. Keep going!’

He remained where he was, cheek pressed hard against the rock face, wincing, eyes closed, seemingly unable to go any further. Then, with a supreme effort of will and a roar of ‘Bollocks!’ he forced himself up onto the top rung of the ladder and clawed towards the fissure, stretching, straining, wobbling. For a split second it looked like he wasn’t going to make it, was going to lose his balance and fall. Then his hand made contact with the crack and he was able to force
his fingers inside, clinging to it for dear life while his feet balanced unsteadily on the ladder rung as though on a tightrope. Exhausted, dust-covered, terrified, Freya gave an ecstatic whoop.