The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel (53 page)

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

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.

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.