Seventeen

It is early on the mountainside. The two Sherpas lower their eyes until they see the Englishman. All three bodies fall still again. Time passes. It’s hard to say how much. Or how. Until the young Sherpa gets distracted: Naval engineering? Why not? It strikes him as a good idea. He has a mind like a sponge when it comes to maths. His teachers have told him this. He makes a quick calculation: he’ll finish high school in a year, then go to university in Delhi, or in Dhaka, or at the Bombay Institute of Technology; he’ll get his diploma four years later; he’ll go to graduate school, specialised training in London, or Tokyo. At twenty-six he could be working a port in the Indian Ocean. Or in the China Sea. Even Europe. His English isn’t bad. Neither is his French. He has a gift for languages, all his teachers have told him so. Naval engineering… I could work in the port of Lisbon, he thinks. He doesn’t know a word of Portuguese; he doesn’t care. Lisbon: he imagines it open, cast into the Tagus estuary, exotic and wild.