The Doomsday Testament(86)
‘What happens when we get there?’ she asked.
‘I flew the camera team in to Joshimath two days ago. They’re in touch with a group of Tibetan dissidents. You’ll be going in over an old smugglers’ route across the Mana Pass, then up towards Ngari, way up there.’ He pointed ahead, where a wall of white dominated the horizon.
Sarah looked out of the helicopter window at the hostile terrain a couple of thousand feet below and felt a shiver run through her. They were still fifty miles short of the Tibetan border and the mountains soared to either side, craggy green-flanked slabs which fell away sheer to rock-strewn river valleys that twinkled deceptively. The snow-capped peaks to their front must be three times as high.
‘This isn’t going to be a picnic, then?’
‘Ma’am,’ the pilot said seriously, ‘I hope somebody explained to you that you are going into the most inhospitable place on the planet. You can die of thirst in the Sahara or freeze to death in the Arctic, up here you’ll get the chance to do both while little slanty-eyed men with automatic weapons shoot at you. The Chinese have been here since nineteen fifty and they have the place sewn up real tight. The only way to enter Tibet legally is through Lhasa. You need a permit to do that and your movements are carefully controlled while you’re there. So to get wherever you’re going to make this here film, you need to go in illegally, which means on your hind legs. There are no physical barriers, because both sides rely on the terrain, but you’ll have to sneak past army garrisons who like nothing better than hunting human meat and harmless-looking shepherd boys who’ll turn you in for less than a dollar a head. The air is so thin even the birds have to walk and the only thing to drink is yak butter tea that tastes like sediment from the Hudson River. Now, you look in pretty good shape, I see you’ve got the best of equipment and they’d fire me for saying this, but you and your young fella would be advised to tell that documentary director to go to hell and Vanderbilt to stick their money up their ass and head right on back to Meerut. We could be having a beer on the deck by sunset?’
Jamie turned to Sarah. ‘Maybe he’s right. You stay with the helicopter and I’ll go?’
She gave him the kind of stare she usually reserved for overly persistent door-to-door salesmen. ‘No thank you.’
The pilot laughed. ‘Thought not. You don’t look like a quitter. Here we go.’ He twisted the helicopter down towards an insignificant settlement in the valley away to their right. ‘Thank you for flying Pelican Airways and have a nice day, y’all.’
XLIV
‘WHY ARE YOU wearing that crazy scarf?’
‘Because I thought it might be cold, and I was bloody right!’
Sarah studied the lurid purple and white striped monstrosity with distaste. ‘You might as well paint an archery target on your chest and wave a placard that says: I’m here.’
‘It’s my college scarf, and I’m rather proud of it.’
‘Well, be proud of it somewhere else, Don Quixote. I’d prefer not to get hit when they’re shooting at you. Ganesh thinks you must have altitude sickness.’
Jamie looked at their interpreter, who grinned uncertainly. He tucked the long scarf into his Gore-tex jacket and down into his trousers and the other man nodded vigorously before walking back to check on the few porters the film crew had persuaded to make the trek into occupied Tibet. Jamie had quickly formed an enormous respect for the wiry mountain men. Without them, he knew the expedition wouldn’t have lasted twenty-four hours. They were small men, but their slight frames were packed with incredible strength and endurance, and each of them carried a load that weighed as much as the porter himself.
For the first two days they had trekked through an almost alpine landscape of conical hills cloaked with oak, birch and rhododendron, twisting valleys that carried foaming, swift-flowing streams and across broad, flower-carpeted meadows. Rare red pandas, brown bears and even snow leopard roamed these Himalayan foothills, but the only thing they glimpsed was a small troop of squalid-looking monkeys which sat in a tree beside the road and threw rotting fruit at them as they passed. Jamie hoped it wasn’t an omen. Narrow, precipitous paths zigzagged up mountainsides making the steep inclines bearable and allowing them to acclimatize for the tougher terrain ahead.
It was only on the third day, as they climbed higher and their guide told them they had crossed the border into Tibet, that Sarah began to feel her lungs fighting to extract oxygen from the air. How could she have taken breathing for granted? What she normally breathed in London had the consistency of chicken soup compared to this. Altitude sickness was a real danger and Jamie insisted they take their Diamox tablets every day, but that still didn’t do anything for the splitting headache that had started on the second morning and never left her. Now, they were in the Himalayas proper, two miles and more above sea level, between the tree line and the snow line. The sharp-set, scenic grandeur with its ethereal light and fantastic colours overwhelmed and awed them, but Jamie found the terrain, a rock-strewn moonscape enlivened only by occasional strips of faded, wind-worn prayer flags, eroded his resilience with every step and the long climbs stretched him to the brink of endurance. Flimsy, double-skinned tents provided the only shelter and they slept on wolfish rocks that clawed their way through bedroll, sleeping bag and spine. Tibetan nights were long and chill; plenty of time for talking and thinking and wondering before exhaustion overcame the body’s hyperactivity. Each day was a never-ending Calvary of steep, scree-scattered scarps that set their calf muscles on fire and turned their feet into blistered, pain-filled sacs. Jamie marched in a dream, cocooned in his own breathless bubble of discomfort, knowing Sarah was less than twenty feet behind suffering just as much, but without the energy to communicate with her. It was only when the little caravan halted beside a small lake of the most astonishing, opaque, almost toxic blue that they had the chance to speak.