16

AVALANCHE?

Advanced Base Camp, Mountain of Shishapangma, Nyalam County,

Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic of China

October 9, 2014

A sullen Snowdonia Ascents team packed the next day, only for it to emerge that the Czechs and the other big group were already booked to leave so there was not the full complement of yaks available to ferry out all the team’s gear to the roadhead in one go.

The already dour mood darkened further on the news. Reassured by Gelu that more yaks would be returning the following day, Quinn sent the team on ahead with all of the Sherpa, except for Nima, to assist. The walk out to the roadhead was just over twelve miles. There were some built facilities there. It would at least get them all moving toward home with their essentials and hopefully focus their minds on happier things than bitching at an empty camp.

Quinn saw them off, unable to deny that he was looking forward to an evening’s peace and quiet in the deserted camp. Leaving Nima to amiably sort the bulkier expedition kit for when the yaks did return to collect it, he turned in early to his personal tent, thinking that once the trip was finished in Kathmandu, a two-week detour to Goa was the necessary reward for spending the best part of six weeks shepherding the charming Rasmussen and friends up and down the sides of Shishapangma.

Neil Quinn was treading a wave-lapped beach when, with a rending groan, the golden sand erupted as if he had trodden on a land mine. Instantly blown back into the freezing pitch of a Himalayan night, the ground beneath him seemed to have liquefied, rippling and rolling as rocks rattled and crashed around his tent. Blind in the dark, Quinn’s instinct screamed, Avalanche!

Slapping around for his headlamp, his brain ordered, Get out! If one of those boulders hits . . .

His hand made contact with his phone.

Squeezing it, the screen faintly illuminated the thin fabric of his domed tent bowing and flexing wildly around him, ice crystals sparkling and falling from the inside.

Trapped inside a snow globe, Quinn struggled from his thick sleeping bag, determined that it not become his feather-lined coffin. Still on hands and knees, he crawled toward the tent’s zippered door, snatching at his cold-weather gear as he went.

Before he could reach his boots, the ground shuddered violently another time. The Englishman was flung forward onto his face as outside another barrage of rocks released down the steep scree slope that overlooked the west side of the camp basin.

Quinn thrust himself up again from the thick material of the sleeping bag as a metal point stabbed into the tent’s nylon skin. Flashes from the falling, sparking boulders illuminated a dark silhouette beyond. The razor-sharp metal sliced the Englishman’s left ear. Warm blood spurted onto his cold cheek and down his neck.

“What the fuck!” Quinn shouted, jerking himself away from the long rectangular blade continuing to slice through the tent’s double skin in a single sideways arc as if it was paper.

A gaping hole opened in the side of the tent.

A hand thrust in to snatch at Quinn’s head, the fingers digging into his bloody hair like a claw.

With an immense pull, it wrenched him free.

Sprawled in the dirt, Quinn found himself looking up at the face of the old Asian climber he had seen before, now holding a gleaming knife that resembled a short samurai sword.

Quinn tried to speak but the man just shouted, “go!”

The viselike grip tugged Quinn up onto his bootless feet and into a run just as a rock smashed into the remains of the tent, crushing it.

Stumbling and tripping in just his socks, choking on the cordite stink of broken rock, Quinn raced after his rescuer. As he fled, he caught a glimpse of Nima also running for his life, his right arm clamped close to his body by his left, his face twisted in agony as he too fled.

Relentlessly, the pale figure led Quinn and Nima beyond the camp area, across the wide but shallow river that filtered from the snout of the glacier and into the dark shadows of the moraine fields beyond.

Finally, the man stopped at what resembled, in the dark, a low burial mound. Quinn, head spinning, lungs heaving, socked feet battered and freezing, dropped to his knees exhausted. The young Sherpa fell to the rubble next to him and passed out.

Their rescuer soon loomed over the both of them and pointed Quinn around the steep side of the hump. “Not stop here, Quinn,” the stranger said in heavily accented English. “We must get the Sherpa boy to other side first.”

Together they lifted Nima and carried him around the hump. There, Quinn saw in the shadows that the mound was naturally hollowed and edged by what remained of a low wall of stones, no doubt erected by nomads sheltering from that place’s harsh wind and weather. Between the ring of rocks was stretched a tarpaulin that, even in the dark, Quinn could see was blotched and patchy, seemingly camouflaged to the rocky terrain.

The Asian man pointed Quinn under it and said, “Okay. Safe here. For now.” He then reached in himself to pull out a small gas lamp that he quickly lit. As the light grew, Quinn saw there was a tent set up beneath the tarp. Together they helped the Sherpa inside and onto a sleeping bag that the man took from a high pile of equipment that blocked the far end of the tent. Despite all their pushing and pulling, Nima remained unconscious, his pulse and breathing weakening, shock consuming his broken body.

The other man returned to the pile of equipment to pull out a thick pair of socks and a medical dressing that he gave to Quinn, pointing at the Englishman’s feet and head before quickly setting to work tending Nima. When Quinn had covered his cut ear and massaged his numb broken feet back to some semblance of life, he recovered himself enough to say to the shadowy figure, in part statement, part question, “You saved us?”

The man said nothing in reply.

“Who are you?”

Still the man ignored Quinn, his bare hands moving lightly and quickly to help the Sherpa. In the flickering gaslight, Quinn could see that the ring and little finger of the right hand had been amputated at the second knuckle. That sight, the man’s Asian accent, the fact that the hands were also heavily tattooed, made Quinn think of the Yakuza even if, in this case, the finger-shortening was more likely from frostbite than vengeful Japanese gangsters. He wondered, however, if this man was Japanese.

Quinn saw that each knuckle was tattooed. The ink had leached with time like a letter left out in the rain, but with difficulty, he could still make out the Western letters that ran across the stunted hand.

I . . . .B . . . E . . . T.

When the hand closed into a fist, Quinn saw another T on the thumb.

T I B E T

The other hand, fingers intact, was similarly marked, but with different letters.

E K K L M

Those meant nothing to Quinn.

Looking around he saw something else written on the inner skin of the tent. He squinted to pick out what it said in the shadows.

property of snowdonia ascents expeditions

Quinn began to say, “But this tent is . . .” but the mutilated hand raised to stop him talking.

“Enough questions, Quinn-san. I must concentrate.”

The man turned his attention back to Nima, taking off his dirty down jacket and using it to make a pillow for the Sherpa. Beneath he was wearing a gathered white robe, woven and pleated. Over it hung a thin red surplice of embroidered silk material, each strip to the front embellished with two wheels of gold. The collar was joined at the bottom by a looped length of thick red rope. Another was double-tied around his middle.

Quinn was completely dumbfounded by the sight of the strangely attired figure slowly chanting over the unconscious body of the Sherpa. At first, it was little more than a whisper, a repeated sound that seemed to echo in a faint rising and falling sigh from the end of the tent. The utterances then changed, sustaining and growing into prolonged vibrations, impossibly low, from somewhere deep, deep inside the man. Other sounds from the same pair of lungs began to intermittently puncture the drone.

“En . . .

“No . . .

“Gy . . .

“Oja.”

Suddenly the sound stopped.

The man was consumed by a fit of coughing that seemed to momentarily tear him open, his eyes rolling back into his head to release fast-falling tears while one of the tattooed hands shook uncontrollably as it tried to cover his mouth.

Only slowly bringing his body back under a shaky control, the man reached for something at the back of the tent, digging deep into the stack of equipment before quickly returning to his mouth. He wiped away the trickle of blood that had formed at its corner with the back of the same trembling hand, then took a long drink of water from a flask.

Quinn understood that the man was taking some type of very necessary medicine as the disturbed pile of equipment that filled the end of the tent rustled—then shook, threatening to topple.

The tattooed hand returned to gently pull it over, letting the wall of kit fall as if releasing something. The man spoke quietly, then recommenced the chant; first, as a still breathless muttering but slowly becoming stronger and louder.

The sound seemed to expand the very volume of the tent, ballooning it out into the troubled night. The man’s inked hands linked above the still-unconscious, trembling body of the Sherpa, beginning to twist and turn in strange couplings that ended in a slashing cut of the chill air. Quinn noticed that he himself had begun to shiver violently from the freezing night beyond the tent.

Nine times the man made such a move then he stopped, becoming perfectly silent and still.

Time passed.

Sweat began to glisten and bead on the weatherworn face.

An intense heat grew, filling the tent space.

The warmth seemed to reach inside Quinn, exorcising the cold from his frozen feet, his numb fingers, his face, his heart.

Feeling drowsy, his eyes began to involuntarily close.

He forced them back open to vaguely take in that the man was now stripped of his robe to the waist. The totally tattooed torso was almost inhumanly pale, like engraved ivory. The creatures in the designs, the snakes, the dragons, seemed alive, twisting and coiling under the wet skin. Amongst them monks, warriors, geishas, wild-haired deities with piercing, almond-shaped eyes, and screaming mouths stared at Quinn.

Quinn looked away to see another face, another set of eyes staring at him from within the pulled-apart pile of equipment at the end of the tent. They were those of a small child sitting cross-legged, one hand resting on its right knee, the other in its lap. The infant’s gaze was locked on Quinn as if scrutinizing his very soul.

The heat inside the tent was becoming suffocating.

Quinn’s head began to spin.

Everything around him, everything he was seeing merged into a single spiraling vortex of shadow and light, his ears roaring with a sonic thunder.

Unsure if anything was real, Quinn tumbled face-forward into the Asian man’s discarded down jacket.

Out, but not cold.