‘I say we listen to the colonel, Captain,’ Duggy said softly.
Peter was about to retort, but changed his mind and walked away, muttering.
Susan looked at the other two men anxiously, but they seemed quite unperturbed. She got up and followed Peter.
‘This is crazy!’ he told her through clenched teeth. ‘We’ve got to stop the colonel. We could end up spending days hiking in the mountains, looking for this pathway. He’s seen it in a dream, that too, when he was delirious for two whole days, for Christ’s sake! It’s probably the sickness; it’s got to him. I say we wait up here, until the tribesmen return.’
Susan nodded uncertainly.
Duggy approached them and said, ‘I’ve talked to the colonel again and I believe him. He can get us through the Gate.’
‘What do
you
think?’ Peter asked Susan pointedly, demanding a straight answer.
‘Let’s give it a try,’ she suggested, going up to Peter and placing a hand on his arm, which he brushed off abruptly. ‘Please, Peter,’ she implored, ‘don’t get angry. Let’s just give it a try.’
‘Do you know, you want this so bad that you’ve just gone crazy!’ he said coldly.
The other two made no reply, but stood there. Finally, Peter’s shoulders slumped. He fumbled for a cigarette which he fished out and lit, smoking it in quick, nervous drags.
‘Well, okay,’ he said tiredly, ‘if everyone wants it, we’ll do it. You lead; I’ll follow.’
Duggy went to give Ashton the news. A while later, the Englishman came up and joined the rest of the group.
‘So we are now going to find this pathway in the mountain, are we?’ Peter asked him.
Ashton nodded.
‘And how will we know it’s the right one?’
‘There will be an elephant, I think,’ Ashton replied, lost in thought as he tried to remember the details.
‘An
elephant
? Why on earth should there be one and in these mountains of all places?’ Peter countered, not bothering to hide his scepticism and irritation.
Ashton remained silent, looking uncomfortable.
Duggy, who had been listening to their exchanges, suddenly barked at Peter, ‘Now that you’ve heard the colonel, sir, are you going to get off your blooming arse and load up? Or are you going to sit around there all day asking ninny questions like a frigging fairy queen?’
Startled, Peter spun around and saw Duggy standing there, hands on hips, and glaring at him. Without another word, the younger man quickly turned and moved towards the mules.
‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ Ashton said quietly to Duggy as both men watched Peter move away.
‘That’s all right, sir,’ Duggy replied, before shouting orders to Susan and Peter who hurried about, closing camp.
You always need a sergeant to get a move on
, thought Ashton,
even at the very edge of the Little Pamir range at the base of the Karakoram mountains
.
They followed the stream to its source in a huge ice wall encasing the mountain face. From this point onwards, Ashton followed the base of the mountain. Two false starts and four hours later, the team was standing in front of a fissure. Ashton heard his heart pounding. This was it! This was the ‘Western Gate’. Ashton had to concede now that he had been secretly worried about Peter being right; this was, indeed, a huge mountain and exploring its entire base to find the pathway might have taken days, possibly weeks.
Susan came up to Ashton now and followed the direction of his gaze. She noticed the fissure and the small ice cave on one side of its base and asked, ‘So you think this is it?’
‘Yes,’ Ashton said simply.
Peter came up and joined Susan as she moved closer to the ice cave and stood looking at a stalagmite at the base, formed by thousands of years of deposits dripping from the roof; it was in the shape of a large mound, with a smaller appendage protruding at an angle from the front.
‘The elephant,’ Peter observed in wonder.
‘The wisest of all animals, which stands silently for a hundred years, contemplating its previous births,’ Susan murmured, almost to herself.
‘What’s that?’ asked Peter.
‘A Buddhist saying,’ she explained. ‘Remember, you had asked why an elephant?’
They stared at the ‘pathway,’ which was some fifty yards wide, its walls rising sharply and soaring so high above them that clouds obscured their tops. Piles of stone and ice lay on the path which sloped upwards. If they moved ahead along this route, they would have a rough climb ahead of them – on all fours.
‘Any idea about the distance this route covers?’ Susan asked, but knew, even as she spoke, that her question was rhetorical.
None of the others hazarded a guess.
Looking around him, Peter failed to find even the remotest traces of anyone else having travelled the same route. But then, with the wind and snow constantly sweeping the area, any tracks, unless very recently left, would be erased.
‘Do we go ahead today?’ Ashton asked his team members.
‘As good a day as any, Colonel,’ Duggy replied. ‘We still have six hours of daylight left. We could spend the next two hours going up and if it looks like we won’t make it, we could either try camping or head back.’
And so they had gone ahead. They had been walking for an hour now and with the passage becoming narrower and steeper as they progressed, they were forced to urge their mules to climb in single file. The route twisted and turned so sharply as they moved ahead that they could no longer see the mouth of the fissure when they looked behind them. There had been a marked drop in visibility from the time they set out and they could hardly see through the murky haze, though they knew it was not yet afternoon. It was colder than anywhere they had been so far; so agonizingly cold, in fact, that their many layers of clothing did little to cushion its impact, their breaths emerging in painful gasps.
Susan, who had kept her head down all this while as she focused on placing one foot in front of the other, looked up and noticed that the passage was now only a few metres wide. The route must have taken another sharp turn ahead, because she could no longer see Duggy who had been in front of her. She looked up at the jagged black walls of the mountain face, with their patches of ice stuck crazily on the sheer rock on both sides. She suddenly felt as if those dank black walls were about to collapse on her, that she was being trapped in a gigantic freezer. A wave of panic swept over her. She wanted to throw up and bent over, retching, but nothing came up.
You’re going to die,
her mind screamed at her. Peter, who was just behind her, put a hand on her shoulder.
‘Breathe!’ he shouted, his voice echoing in the narrow confines of the fissure. ‘Inhale deeply!’
Susan forced herself to do so, willing the panic attack to pass. Peter shook her gently. She looked up at him and saw that he was pointing at something on the wall. Etched on the rock face was a petroglyph of a woman with wild, flowing hair and a spear in one hand seated on a tiger. Strangely enough, the moment her mind concentrated on the rock etching, the wave of nausea subsided.
‘Lhamo, the wrathful deity, guardian of Tibet,’ Susan said hoarsely. ‘The “Queen Mother of the West”.’
She could see that the wall was blackened, probably from the incense previous travellers had burnt or the lamps they had lit while passing this way to propitiate the goddess before continuing on their journey.
‘So we
are
on the right path!’ Peter panted, his teeth flashing through the ice on his beard.
She nodded and they continued on their way. Not long afterwards, the passage mercifully opened up. As they both trudged ahead, they saw Ashton and Duggy waiting for them. High above them, through a small chink in the clouds, a ray of weak sunlight shone through. About a thousand feet above them, the top of the rock face was visible on both sides.
As Susan and Peter joined the older men, Duggy asked, ‘Did you see the etching on the rock?’
‘Yes,’ Susan replied, giving a thumbs up.
‘So what do you say?’ Ashton asked Peter.
They had to take a decision: would they climb further or head back?
‘I think we’ve got to keep going, Colonel,’ Peter decided. ‘It’s going to be a bitch trying to do this all over again.’
He refrained from telling Ashton that descending without ropes and crampons would be twice as difficult, with a high risk of falling and injury.
‘That’s right,’ Duggy agreed. ‘And it would be impossible to camp here; we would simply freeze at night when the temperature falls.’
‘We need to just try and keep moving till we reach the crest,’ Peter said. ‘We’ll be out of the fissure in a while. The going’s got to get better.’
‘You think we’ll make it?’ Ashton asked, his eyes closed, his breathing laboured.
They were all struggling for breath now in that oxygen-depleted air.
‘Sure we will, Colonel,’ Peter replied, bringing all the enthusiasm he could muster into his voice.
We have to or we’re dead.
Another fifty yards and they came to a natural rock ledge about a yard wide. They walked on and saw that it was rising steadily above the floor of the passage until they were about a hundred yards above floor level. On both sides, there was a loose rock fall, with small, fist-sized rocks tumbling randomly from time to time. As they looked up, they saw more open sky, bleak and murky, but still
sky
! However, any joy they may have experienced was diminished by the sight of the rock face above which threatened to sweep them off the ledge in a wave of rock and rubble. The howl of the wind, whose pitch rose with every step they took towards the crest, was the only sound they could hear.
They were now all in the middle of the ledge – Ashton and Duggy ahead, with Peter and Susan following some twenty yards behind. She shuffled along, her back to the mountain face, desperately trying to keep her eyes from straying downwards. She saw Peter walking calmly, leading the mules by their reins. Suddenly, she felt the earth wobble under her feet.
Another tremor!
Peter pushed her down violently and flung himself on top of her so that she was crouched with her head towards the mountain face. One of the animals reared up in fright, lost its balance and toppled over the edge. There was a tearing, wrenching sound. Susan looked up along the path and watched numbly as a rock, the size of a small fridge, rolled down towards them, slowly at first, and then with increasing momentum, buffeting the other rocks and triggering off an avalanche. The team remained frozen, trapped in their places on the narrow ledge, staring in horror at the rock as it bounced in ever-increasing arcs and hurtled towards them.
Susan watched the rock land just above the point where Ashton and Duggy lay huddled together, pressed against the mountain face. Duggy, who had been following the rock’s trajectory, had thrown himself forward and pushed Ashton out of harm’s way at the last moment. Then the rock bounced once more and passed them, hurtling to the bottom of the fissure. Susan craned her neck to see Ashton and Duggy.
Thank god they’re safe
, she thought. At that very moment, another wave of smaller rocks engulfed them, obscuring them from view. Another animal went down, knocked off the ledge. Then she saw Duggy crumple and fall raggedly on the ledge, his face covered with blood. Before Ashton could reach forward and pull him back, he toppled off and plunged down, his body thumping once against the side of the mountain before being lost from sight.
When Peter and Susan reached Ashton, he was crouched on the ledge on all fours, looking down. Peter pulled him back and looked at him. The Englishman’s eyes stared sightlessly into the distance; saliva dribbled uncontrollably from his mouth.
‘The voices!’ Peter heard him scream, his voice hoarse, nearly incoherent, yet audible over the howling wind.
‘She asked for blood!’
They were words he would repeat over and over again.
Of the Sacred Mountain
T
HE
Y
EAR OF THE
T
IGER IN THE 16TH
R
ABJYUN
(T
IBETAN CALENDAR
),
AROUND 1986
In the Palaeozoic Era, some 250 million years ago, which pre-dates even the age of dinosaurs, the dominant life form was the invertebrate and Trimukha, the three-faced hill on which the monastery would come to be built aeons later, did not exist. In its place was a beach, lashed by the waves of the ancient sea of Tethys. It was across that vast expanse of water that the land, which would later be known to all as India, began to move inexplicably towards the rest of Eurasia, the two finally coming together and prompting geologists of the future to refer to the area of collision as the ‘Palaeozoic suture’. The section of land thrown up by the colliding land masses would come to be known as the Pamir mountains.
When the land masses collided, the land which would later become India slid under the Eurasian land mass, forcing the continental slab down hundreds of miles to the centre of the earth, till it had entered the hard mantle of the earth’s core – a phenomenon geologists describe as the action of plate tectonics at the subduction zone. This penetration of the earth’s crust triggered chaotic movements in its liquid core, leading to what geologists term a geomagnetic excursion – a localized but significant change in the strength of the earth’s magnetic field, as the name would suggest.
The Indian land mass also had an almost solid bed, spreading over a few square miles, of the mineral sphalerite, a zinc sulphide. On colliding with Eurasia, it became separated by a few miles of intervening soil from an equally rich bed of cuprite, an oxide of copper – one of those coincidences which are inevitable, according to probability theorists. The difference between zinc and copper on the electrolytic scale is considerable; in fact, the two elements are used as cathodic and anodic plates in batteries. Something very similar is believed to have happened deep below the soil in the area in which the monastery was located. Telluric current – the geological term for ‘earth current’ – began to flow. It was not a significantly powerful current, but it was present all the same.