I
1937, Changthang Plateau, Tibet
ERNST GRUBER SQUINTED into the ice-flecked wind, gritted his teeth and kept his eyes firmly on the retreating figure ahead. The muscles in the backs of the German’s legs felt as if they were on fire and his chest like he was breathing hydrochloric acid, but the pain gave him a certain sense of masochistic satisfaction. If he was suffering, how much more so were the lesser men following the near vertical scar in the sterile, corpse-grey rocks that provided them with a path up the mountain?
Not the Drupka guide, Jigme. Like all his people, the nomads who scratched a living in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth, he was a wiry urchin of a man capable of incredible feats of endurance. His metronomic step didn’t falter – no matter how steep the incline or difficult the footing. It had been five days since the expedition set out from their base camp by the freshwater lake. Today they had already marched for four ankle-crushing hours across country devoid of either water or vegetation, but still he showed no sign of tiring. Gruber, a vastly experienced explorer who had climbed some of the highest mountains in the Himalayas and ten years earlier had led the first German expedition across the Gobi Desert, delighted in testing himself against such men, but he knew his companions would be destroyed if they maintained this pace.
‘Bkag pa! Gcig chu tshod.’ He shouted the order to halt for an hour, but it must have been lost in the wind for the guide maintained his pace, or perhaps he just didn’t want to stop. These people were like that. Stubborn. Like a donkey he would plod on until his stomach told him it was time to eat one of the barley dumplings that were the only sustenance he appeared to need. Gruber increased his pace until he was close enough to grasp the Drupka tribesman by the arm. ‘Bkag pa!’ he repeated.
The guide grinned and nodded, although he was puzzled why the loud European with the frightening eyes and unhealthy red face persisted in addressing him in his unintelligible Tibetan. ‘We stop soon. Very close,’ he assured Gruber in bastard English.
‘No. Stop now,’ the German ordered.
The grin didn’t falter, but Jigme wondered again what had made him agree to take these demanding, ill-mannered foreigners to the special hole in the ground. His cousin, now a Buddhist monk in far-off Lhasa, had told him of it when Jigme had made his solitary visit to the Tibetan capital on a pilgrimage to the Jokhang Temple. The Germans had sought him out at his village because of the English he had learned from a Yakshir holy man who had been trapped for a season on the plateau and died of hut fever wishing he was back in a country called Leds. Normally the parties he led were only interested in finding special rocks to hit with their little hammers, or to shoot the gentle Kiang, the wild ass which didn’t have the sense to run away from a man with a rifle. The Germans were different. They had asked him about the old people, which amused him because, in the village, they had been surrounded by old people. It took time before he realized they meant the enlightened ones, who had passed beyond life, which was even more amusing because the enlightened were spirit creatures now, their earthly bodies exposed and consumed by the vultures, the buzzards and the foxes. How could one find a ghost, especially if the ghost didn’t want to be found? But the large foreigner insisted that these old people had lived in holes far below the ground. Did he know of any such holes? Now they were a few hours from their goal and he wanted to stop. Truly they were beyond comprehension.
‘Stop now,’ he agreed at last, pointing to a piece of stony but relatively flat ground just ahead on the left. ‘You rest, eat, look at rocks.’
Jigme carried on a few paces before settling comfortably on the steep path with his pack beside him. He sat, cheerfully considering the twenty goats he had been promised, and the handsome wife they would bring him. The wind had dropped now and a watery sun blinked myopically through the thin cloud, showing the surrounding hills in all their arid magnificence. Far to the south-east was just visible the vast, snow-crusted bulk of Quomolonga, which the Europeans spoke of as Everest. One by one, the five members of Gruber’s research team staggered to the rest area, leaving the porters, carrying their sixty-pound loads of supplies and equipment, to crouch where they halted.
Gruber assessed his companions as they passed, searching for signs of weakness or injury that would slow them down later in the day. The group had been put together to provide a broad range of expertise. As well as being the expedition leader, Ernst Gruber doubled as the team’s zoology and mapping specialist. Berger, the ethnologist; Rasch, the anthropologist, and Von Hassell, the cinematic cameraman, were all reliable mountaineers and experienced explorers, wiry, tanned and bearded. After them came Junger, the security man who always had something to smile about, even if the smile never quite reached his pale eyes. A few yards behind, and looking like a city accountant who’d taken a wrong turn, struggled Gruber’s deputy, Walter Brohm.