The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel

by Justin Go

  It was raining this morning, but I was out on the highway by six o’clock. Twenty minutes later I was picked up by an electrician in a white van who was going all the way to Reykjavík. My luck had changed again. In the afternoon he dropped me off on the highway to Keflavík Airport, and with the steady stream of traffic it only took me a few minutes to get a ride.

  By the time I reach the airport ticket desk I’ve missed the day’s flight to Paris. But the agent says she can get me there for 22,000 krónur if I change planes in Copenhagen. The flight leaves in ninety minutes. I have no idea if Mireille will come to meet me.

  I unfold the banknotes from my pocket and lay them on the counter along with a ziplock bag heavy with coins. I count it all out, but I’m almost two thousand krónur short. The agent looks at me suspiciously.

  —You don’t have a credit card?

  —It’s maxed out.

  I dig into my backpack and pull out a twenty-pound note I’d hidden in the lining against the frame. Then I run to the Landsbanki exchange counter and trade the note for 2,500 krónur. I buy the plane ticket and go through security. At a pay phone near the gate I call Mireille, but it goes straight to her voice mail. I leave a hurried message.

  —It’s Tristan. I’m coming back. I’ll be at Charles de Gaulle at five fifteen, Terminal One. It’s the SAS flight from Copenhagen. I hope you’ll come—

  I hang up the phone and run through the terminal to my gate. The airplane is half empty and I have a row at the back all to myself. A stewardess announces the safety procedures in Icelandic and Danish as I buckle my seat belt.

  I’m glad there’s no one sitting next to me, because I’m dirty and unshaven and it feels like I haven’t slept properly for months. My skin is chapped from the Icelandic wind. My hair needs cutting, and my clothes are soiled and wrinkled from weeks stuffed in a backpack, everything scrubbed in hostel sinks with only a hard cake of soap. I wonder if Mireille will come and how she might look at the airport. But the more I try to imagine her the more I get a bad feeling about it, so as the plane lifts off I focus on the things I can be sure of. I try to picture Paris and its parks and boulevards, but it’s hard to ignore that in four hours I’ll be landing there with no money and nowhere to stay.

  At Copenhagen Airport I call Mireille again. Again she doesn’t answer. I leave another message and type her an e-mail on a coin-operated terminal beside the food court. Then I sit at my gate and watch the plane to Paris being unloaded and refueled, my hand in my coat pocket. I can feel the cold silver of the brooch.

  —Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce boarding for SAS flight 559 to Paris Charles de Gaulle—

  I find my seat in the second row of the airplane. The middle-aged woman in the aisle seat watches me stuff my backpack in the overhead compartment and squeeze by her to the window. A few minutes after the plane takes off, she closes her magazine and asks me where I’m from. Her accent sounds Irish.

  —An American in a German coat, she says, backpacking all over Europe. I’ve heard about these kinds of trips. If it’s Tuesday it must be Paris, that sort of thing?

  —Sort of.

  —It sounds exciting. What do you think of Europe so far?

  I look out the window at the clouds below.

  —Of course, the woman adds, it’s not for everyone—

  —I love it here.

  At Charles de Gaulle I’m the first one off the airplane. Outside the baggage claim there’s a dense line of people waiting behind the barricade. Mireille is there.

  She leans forward with her elbows propped on the rail, her face in her hands. When she sees me she straightens up and her mouth opens, but she covers it with her hand as if embarrassed. She runs along the railing beside me, appearing and disappearing behind the families with strollers, behind the chauffeurs holding placards with names on them. Mireille comes around the end of the barrier and takes my hand.

  —Suis-moi.

  She leads me out of the terminal through the automatic doors. The autumn air is cool and we walk quickly down the sidewalk. Cars and buses go past us, stopping to pick up passengers and pulling out again. Mireille takes me to a niche behind a potted tree. I put my arms around her and pull her close. I kiss her. Her lips are warm. She smiles and wipes off a tear and laughs, whispering my name. I put my hand on her face and kiss her again. A line of Mercedes taxis go past us, then a worker pushing a huge train of luggage carts.

  Mireille is holding my hand and she feels the thin cut on my palm. She frowns, stroking the wound.

  —You hurt yourself.

  —I fell down in Iceland. There was lava on the ground. It was pretty sharp.

  Mireille lifts my hand and kisses it playfully.

  —I’m sorry I wasn’t very good at waiting. I just worried you’d never come back. But you did. So you don’t have to explain anything—

  —I didn’t get the money.

  Mireille looks at me. Her hair has grown out in the last month and it goes over her ears now. Her gray eyes are pale in the sunlight.

  —You were too late?

  I shake my head.—It wasn’t mine after all.

  Mireille nods slowly. She glances at the taxis going past and weaves her fingers into mine, turning back to me. We start down the sidewalk toward the RER trains for Paris. Finally she says,—Then you were right. You got your answer in the end.

  —I guess I did.

  —What was it?

  I reach into my coat and pull out the rest of my Icelandic change, thick brass coins with the image of a fish on the reverse. I hand them to Mireille.

  —What’s this?

  —Three hundred and fifty krónur. Around four euros. It’s all I’ve got left in the world—

  —That’s not true.

  Mireille puts the coins in her pocket. I put my arm around her.

  —What’s the winter like here?

  —Dark and cold, she says. But we’ll survive.

  EPILOGUE

  The storm that killed Ashley Walsingham was not related to the monsoon. It had formed three weeks earlier as a low-pressure disturbance above the jewel-green waters of the eastern Mediterranean.

  The storm traveled far to meet the expedition. It sailed eastward over the arid plateau of northern Arabia; it crossed Afghanistan, brewing above the snow peaks and Silk Road passes of the Hindu Kush. It skirted the formidable summit of K2 along the border of the Republic of China and the Princely State of Kashmir and Jammu, continuing southeast over the glaciated ranges of the Karakoram.

  In late May the disturbance swept east over the immense Himalayan massif, flowing above the peaks now known as Annapurna and Ama Dablam and Makalu. None of these mountains had yet been climbed or even set foot upon by a European. The storm released thick snowfalls and howling blizzards throughout the ranges of the western Himalaya. On June 7, 1924, the storm’s full measure reached the northeast face of Mount Everest in the self-proclaimed sovereign Kingdom of Tibet. Mount Everest was the tallest known mountain in the world.

  On the same day at the Alipore Observatory in Calcutta, 385 miles south of Mount Everest, the resident meteorologist Dr. S. N. Sen walked outside to take the afternoon’s temperature readings, pencil and logbook in hand. It was six minutes until four. The air was sweltering.

  Crossing the observatory’s back lawn, Sen patted the sweat from his neck and brow with a linen handkerchief, glancing skyward. A few threads of cirrus fibratus strung the eastern sky; the rest was a crystalline azure.

  Sen’s thoughts returned to the onset of the Asian monsoon. Each day he telegraphed the Mount Everest Expedition with new data, forecasting the probable date of the monsoon’s arrival. It was a difficult question. He had to take into account, for instance, the complex interaction of Himalayan and African and equatorial air masses; the retrograde motion of cyclones near the Bay of Bengal; the passage of western disturbances across the subcontinent. One such disturbance ought to reach Mount Everest very soon. Sen had taken lunch at his desk to study the prob
lem, the morning weather telegrams fanned out before him, freshly wired from a dozen surface and upper-air weather stations throughout the Himalaya.

  —The fourteenth of June, Sen murmured. No earlier.

  Sen reached the Stevenson screen where the thermometers were held, a case of enameled pine with double-louvered walls. He opened the padlock and squinted at the four thermometers inside, appraising tiny gradations between the black bands of the temperature scale. It was 91.2 degrees Fahrenheit.

  At the Mount Everest Expedition base camp at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier, at an altitude of 18,190 feet, Dr. Hingston took the afternoon’s meteorological measurements at 4:00 p.m, as he did every day. Hingston was the expedition’s medical officer, but he was also a naturalist who observed the climate with genuine interest.

  Hingston kept a pair of maximum and minimum thermometers on a wooden provision box under his tent fly, the thermometers fitted in a snap case of morocco leather. He eyed the floating index inside the glass cylinder of the maximum thermometer, the wind lashing the canvas tent fly against his back. Earlier the thermometer’s filament had been pushed up to 33 degrees, but the mercury had since fallen to 11. Hingston logged the figures in neat numerals on the green-columned sheets of the meteorological diary.

  Next he cradled the cold tube of a Kata thermometer under his armpit for several minutes. He hobbled out among the dirt and gravel, watching the red fluid dive in the wind with one eye on the sweep hand of his pocket watch. Finally Hingston placed a swatch of dark fur on a large stone, suspending a black-bulb thermometer above it. He rested the toe of his boot on the fur and waited for the mercury to rise.

  Hingston surveyed his surroundings. The boulders around him had been sculpted by wind over centuries, their surface scarred and striated on the windward side, smooth and glassy on the lee side. They reminded him of coral. Hingston marveled at the diverse conditions that shaped animate and inanimate objects, the legion adaptations of mammal and insect and bird life to this hostile world.

  The signs were everywhere. The finches and sparrows that shelter between stones or village walls, or in the warm underground dens of mouse hares, protecting their delicate plumage from the wind; the red-billed choughs that stand with their heads facing scouring gales, anchoring themselves long enough to pick at meager grass. Himalayan butterflies inhabited the most godforsaken places, barren wastelands up to 17,000 feet: these species of Parnassius were ill-suited to such elevations, save that they could cower their wings low against the wind, and knew to only fly when the air was calm. Hingston had even seen Pseudabris beetles that played dead. Thrown off green stalks of vetch or iris by gusting wind, the beetles would collapse upon the soil as if dead, only to spring buzzingly to life when the weather abated.

  Hibernation was a rule here. When the expedition reached the Tibetan plateau in April, the country appeared gray and moribund. But it was only sleeping. A minute universe was saving itself for fairer climes, and Hingston had shown this to the climbers, lifting stones and turning soil to reveal curled caterpillars; dozing colonies of ants; arachnids reclined in hollow snail shells. The design of nature was flawless; the signature of its perfection pervasive.

  He raised the thermometer to his face, squinting to read the scale.

  —Thirteen point three.

  Hingston was very cold. He would soon call for Kami to brew tea.

  At Camp III, four thousand vertical feet above Hingston, Colonel Norton lay in his quilted eiderdown sleeping bag composing dispatches to be couriered and telegraphed to The Times of London. The wind outside was howling. Suddenly the colonel glanced at his wristwatch.

  —Four o’clock, he bellowed.

  —Bloody freezing, Somervell called from the next tent. Isn’t that specific enough?

  —Not for South Kensington.

  Somervell hacked out a cough in reply. He crouched in the tent’s flapping vestibule and studied a pair of thermometers. He glanced at the red sliver of fluid in the bottom thermometer, then inverted the case to reset the instruments. The metal indices plummeted in the glass.

  Somervell recorded the temperature as minus seven degrees Fahrenheit. He estimated the wind speed at fifty miles per hour, which according to Beaufort’s numbers would be a force nine gale. It was a blind guess. Somervell knew that winds at sea were hardly comparable to those on a mountain, just as low temperatures in the Arctic were not half so severe as those on Mount Everest, where the oxygen-starved body had no power to warm itself.

  Somervell lifted his face to the mountain above. Fractocumulus clouds had swirled over the upper pyramid, sheathing everything in white. Walsingham and Price were somewhere among those clouds. Somervell thought the high camps would drop to at least twenty below in the nighttime, which meant fifty degrees of frost, excluding the tremendous wind.

  Several hours later Hugh Price staggered down the north ridge of Mount Everest, searching for Camp VI in failing light and whirling snow. At 26,800 feet the camp was the highest bivouac ever made by men. Price’s vision was blurred and doubled by a mild case of snowblindness, and he did not see the tent until he was very close, a sagging blotch of green canvas on a shelf of jagged rocks. Price tore open the tapes and dived inside, panting. There was snow everywhere. The canvas walls were screaming in the wind.

  Price pulled off his boots and tried to fasten the door flap. It was dark now and it took him ten minutes to knot the tapes, grasping with numb fingers in the blackness. He knocked chunks of ice from one of the eiderdown bags and pushed his legs inside. Snow and ice covered Price’s clothing and the lining of the sleeping bag; if his body warmed, the ice would melt and soak him. Ashley’s sleeping bag lay beside him in a frozen heap. Price wondered dimly if Ashley could have made the summit. It seemed impossible in this blizzard.

  Price sat up and rummaged in the darkness for matches. He must light the lamp and burn magnesium flares to help Ashley find the tent. He felt a tin of café au lait. A compass. An empty water flask. He gasped and burrowed back into his sleeping bag. He was too cold. He must eat something to gain strength, but he felt no hunger, only terrible thirst. There was no water and he was too weak to melt snow on the stove. Price thought of the coming hours and the agony of sleepless visions, the long ticking nightmare of unquenchable thirst and chills and fatigue. He wondered if he would survive it. The second eiderdown bag lay beside him.

  When Ashley returns, he thought, I will give him his bag.

  Price wriggled his sleeping bag into Ashley’s and sank toward sleep.

  The diary of the head lama of Rongbuk Monastery records that in the third month of the Wood Rat year of the fifteenth rab-byung, a party of thirteen European gentlemen arrived accompanied by a hundred porters and three hundred pack animals. The gentlemen bestowed fine gifts upon the lama. They requested his blessing upon their expedition, which sought to climb the tallest mountain on earth for the fame and honor it would bring them. The lama warned the climbers that his country was a very cold one, and only chaste and pious men could survive in such a harsh domain. Nevertheless the Europeans persevered for weeks at their strange errand, erecting seven tents in succession toward the summit. They used iron pegs and chains and plates to challenge Chomolungma, but still they failed. The Europeans returned to the monastery to request a funeral benediction for a comrade who had died upon the mountain. The lama performed the service with great sincerity, knowing that the dead European’s soul had suffered untold difficulties for the sake of nothing.

  Ashley Walsingham’s body has never been found. It is not known whether he died of a fall or if he was benighted on the mountain. There are hundreds of bodies on Mount Everest and they cannot be brought down from their great height. Walsingham did not reach a record elevation, nor did he set foot on untrodden ground. His name is recorded only in the thicker annals of human exploration, and only then as a footnote. Of late these volumes are seldom read and never admired.

  It would be decades before men would scale Mount Everest. These men would be
a breed apart from the climbers of 1924. They would reach the summit by a different route on a morning of vivid sunshine. They would know the names of their predecessors, but little else of that vanished world, and they would bring to the mountain no magnum bottles of champagne, nor anthologies of poetry or prose, nor stockings or sweaters handknitted and darned, nor scraps of fabric safeguarded through the trenches of Picardie and Ypres. The men who finally climbed Mount Everest would find the mountain less strange than those who had come before, and so it would go on with each generation in turn, until the mystery would shimmer briefly, a last green flash of the setting sun, then cease altogether.

  Acknowledgments

  Dorian Karchmar, Marysue Rucci, Simone Blaser, Emily Graff, Elizabeth Breeden, Jonathan Karp, Richard Rhorer, Andrea DeWerd, Cary Goldstein, Sarah Reidy, Loretta Denner, Jackie Seow, Ruth Lee-Mui, Christopher Lin and the entire team at Simon & Schuster. Raffaella De Angelis, Jason Arthur, Cathryn Summerhayes, John McGhee and Jeff Kleinman.

  Marlene Dunlevy, Ryan Bowman, Eric Bain, Ben Urwand, Emily Cohen, Ryan Wilcoxon, Elizabeth Beeby, Adam White, Leslie Henkel, Alice Brett and Catherine Foley. My father and mother; my siblings Brandon, Alyssa and Lucian.

  This is a work of fiction, but it owes its existence to the many lives that inspired it. Wilfred Owen, George Leigh Mallory, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, T. Howard Somervell, J. B. L. Noel, Geoffrey Winthrop Young and F. S. Smythe are among the scores of individuals whose experiences—captured in their letters, memoirs, diaries, poems or other accounts—made me write this book. I hope I can be forgiven for taking certain liberties with historical events and geography, as well as the people and military units mentioned in these pages. Although I have endeavored to be as faithful to the past as possible, fiction ultimately diverges into a world of its own.