‘You’re the only person I know who really gives a shit,’ Luca said, dunking a biscuit into his coffee.
‘Well it’s good to know I’m top of a long list,’ Jack laughed, creasing the deep-set lines at the corners of his eyes. ‘So go on, tell me everything. Makalu must have been quite something.’
There was a pause. As his nephew remained silent, Jack stopped smiling.
‘Is something up?’
‘Everything’s fine. Except Bill got altitude sickness and we missed the summit by a couple of hours. We sort of fell out on the way back down and I’m not sure we’re on speaking terms right now.’
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Jack softly. ‘I know how much time you two put into it. But I’m sure you’ll sort out things with Bill. You’ve been friends far too long to fall out for long.’
‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
‘Come on, Luca. Nothing can have been said that can’t be taken back.’
Luca shrugged. ‘Is it all right if we don’t talk about this?’
Jack’s brow creased further as he took another gulp of coffee. ‘Sure. So are you going to tell me some more about this pyramid mountain?’
Luca smiled, his face lighting up.
‘I wish you had been there to see it, Jack. It was incredible. And set in the middle of a stunning ring of mountains. Have you ever heard mention of it?’
‘No,’ Jack said, standing up and walking over to his desk. ‘After you called, I dug everything we have on the area east of Makalu from the departmental library. Took me a while to find these and blow the dust off them. Not exactly the world’s most sought-after documents.’
He carried the maps over to the low table and knelt down. Fishing out his reading glasses from his breast pocket, he held the first map up to the light.
‘This one’s about six months old — the most recent.’
He pulled it a little closer and studied the grid references, drawing a finger over the contours of the Himalayas. He stopped suddenly and prodded. ‘There’s Makalu.’
Luca moved round the table so that they were shoulder to shoulder and peered more closely at the markings. The map showed a vast swathe of the Himalayas, with swirling currents of cloud bending round the massive peaks and valleys.
‘I’m guessing it would be forty kilometres or so east of that,’ said Luca. ‘Somewhere over here.’
Simultaneously their eyes swept over the map until they alighted on a small cluster of peaks, bent round in a perfect circle.
‘That’s them!’ Luca said, feeling a strange lift of excitement. Part of him hadn’t expected them to exist at all.
‘It’s strikingly symmetrical, I’ll admit,’ said Jack, adjusting his reading glasses and leaning forward to examine the formation more closely. ‘But you say the most interesting mountain was the one in the middle? All I can see is cloud.’
‘It was right in the centre, Jack. It sounds odd, I know, but it was like a kind of a pyramid, perfectly proportioned, as if someone had been up there with a chisel. I only caught a glimpse of it when I was high enough on Makalu.’
‘A pyramid-shaped mountain,’ repeated Jack, immersing himself in the twisted contours of the map. He had studied maps all his working life and was able to interpret the graphite markings as if staring down on each peak for real. ‘If it’s anywhere near the same height as the others in that range then that would make it nearly seven thousand metres high — which, as you know, would make the Matterhorn look like a molehill.’
Luca nodded. Between the ring of mountains, all he could see was a thick belt of cloud twisting in between the peaks. He leaned closer, searching for the slightest sign of the pyramid mountain. There was nothing.
‘Any other maps of the region?’
‘Sure,’ said his uncle. ‘We have nine or ten of these satellite images, going back a few years. One every six months or so.’
Together, they lifted the first map off the table and laid it on the floor. Luca quickly bent over the next one, his face furrowed in concentration. Jack glanced over at his nephew, feeling a flicker of concern to see that light in his eyes. It was no accident that whenever Luca worried him the most, it was when he reminded Jack of himself. It was not something he would ever put into words, but he was pretty sure his nephew had inherited the same dark, addictive streak.
‘Shit!’ said Luca as he traced his finger across the region. ‘Still cloud.’
They went through each of the maps in turn. Discarded, the massive sheaves of paper covered most of the study floor, their edges curled up like giant scrolls.
‘Always the same: cloud covering the entire region. How is this possible?’ Luca said eventually, staring directly at Jack. ‘There’s not a single break in any of these images.’
Seeing his frustration, Jack sighed. Wincing slightly as his knees cracked, he began gathering the maps off the floor.
‘You have to understand that some mountains create their own weather systems. They reach so high into the atmosphere that they actually change the weather around them. In this particular case, they create a lot of cloud.’
Luca had heard the theory before. The great summits of the Himalayas could cause moisture in the atmosphere to condense around them and collect along their massive flanks. The invariable result: cloud.
‘But why can’t the satellite penetrate the cloud? Can’t you switch to infra-red or something and see through all that kind of stuff?’
Jack lifted an eyebrow.
‘Sure. If you change bandwidths, you can cut through any weather you like. The military do it all the time. But who the hell is going to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for something like that in the middle of the Himalayas? The Geology Department can barely afford to get me out of this damn’ office once a year, let alone source mat-erial like that.’
He paused before adding, ‘And even if we had the money, the Chinese and Indian Governments get very touchy about satellite imagery along their borders. We wouldn’t even get a response if we tried to go through official channels.’
‘What about other maps? Is there anything else we could try?’
‘That’s everything we’ve got. Look, you’ve got to understand that this is an area the size of Spain and vast sections of it remain almost completely unmapped. This is one of the last untouched regions on the entire planet. You, more than most, know what it’s like out there. There’s nothing as far as you can see: no people, no animals, just snow and rock. And it’s only us tired old geologists who get excited about that. Everyone else just sticks to the glamorous peaks, like Everest and K2 — and, of course, Makalu.’
Luca acknowledged the dig. Jack was right. Few but geologists cared about the smaller, less well-known mountains. He looked across the last map, at the vast tracts of peaks it depicted and marvelled at how much of the Himalayas remained totally unexplored. Like the human brain, the majority was uncharted territory.
Jack stood up and gingerly lowered himself back into his armchair.
‘So, Prodigal Son. Dare I ask if you’ve called your father since you’ve been back?’
Luca frowned. ‘I just got in a few hours ago, Jack, give me a break. I’ll go and see him some time in the next few days.’
His uncle started to say something but Luca broke in.
‘You are going to spare me the lecture, aren’t you, Jack?’ he said with a slight edge to his voice. ‘If I’d wanted that, I would have gone straight home.’
Jack shrugged and drank some more coffee.
‘Well, I’m hardly one to give advice on family matters. Especially with your father. I blew that a long time ago.’
‘Come on, Jack, I’m here to talk about this mountain,’ said Luca. ‘If the pyramid is as perfect as I remember it, it could be one of the most exciting things anyone’s discovered for years. Surely there’s some way of tracking down more information about the area?’
Jack nodded. Leaning forward in his chair, he scrawled a couple of names on the back of a used envelope.
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‘There are a couple of ways I can think of, but both are long shots so I wouldn’t get your hopes up. There’s a Department of Asian Studies somewhere around the back of the Fitzwilliam Museum. There should be someone there who can point us in the right direction… and help us find someone who specialises in Tibetan geography or something similar. But your best bet will be the University Library. You should see if any of the early British explorers went near that region. Their accounts are usually pretty detailed.’
He paused, then after a moment’s thought, added, ‘Try around the eighteen hundreds, during the time of the “Great Game”. That’s when the British were paranoid about the Russians invading India and sent lots of spies up into the border regions. They mapped it all covertly, measuring distances by counting their own steps.’
He leaned over and took a swig from the dregs of his coffee, considering the idea of walking the breadth of the Himalayas while counting every single step.
When his gaze swung back up, it seemed to include Luca.
‘Crazy bastards,’ he said softly.
Chapter 7
Behind the vast, grey-brick façade of Cambridge’s University Library lies centuries’ worth of learning. Over seven million books, manuscripts and maps are contained in this giant edifice, the most precious being stored in the great tower which sticks up above the main structure like a factory chimney. Casting a long shadow over all who enter, it is a solemn reminder of the sheer weight of knowledge stacked inside.
Luca halted in front of the imposing entrance, fishing out Jack’s pass from the back pocket of his jeans. It was here, if anywhere, that he would find a reference to the pyramid mountain.
Following a group of students through the main lobby, he walked up echoing stone steps that smelled of floor wax into the index room. Row after row of worn, faded drawers lined the room, each containing ranks of neatly numbered and annotated cards.
Luca pulled out a few at random, not having a clue where to start. There were no signs or explanations as to how it all worked, just thousands of seemingly identical cards. What was it about highbrow institutions that made them still persist with such archaic systems? What was wrong with using a damn’ computer? Was it some sort of initiation test, to keep the unworthy philistines at bay? Here he was, in one of the greatest libraries in the world, and he couldn’t find a single book.
A couple of girls stood a few feet away from him, hugging books to their chests. One of them had hazel eyes in a round, pretty face. He caught her eye.
‘I don’t suppose you could give me a hand?’ he asked. ‘I’m completely lost.’
‘Sure,’ she answered, moving round and looking down at the drawer he’d pulled out. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘Well, that’s the problem, really,’ he said, smiling apologetically. ‘It’s not exactly specific…’
Fifteen minutes later they had drawn a blank, and it was obvious from the strained smile on the girl’s face that she was regretting having agreed to help in the first place.
‘Look, I really think you’d better talk to a librarian,’ she said, flicking back her hair impatiently. ‘They take a while to pin down but, like I said, they really know their stuff. Sorry, but I have to run to a supervision…’
Twenty minutes later, Luca was leaning over the issue desk with a distinctly less attractive woman. She wore bracelets that jangled each time she flicked through the long line of reference cards, and an overpowering perfume that hung in the air between them like a cloud. But despite it all, she obviously knew her stuff.
‘OK, so that’s seven books that cover the region,’ she said briskly. ‘Five of them we have here, the other two you’ll have to call up from the basement.’ She gave Luca a disparaging glance, taking in his suntan and faded sweatshirt. ‘Would it be simpler if I ordered them for you myself? I’ll get you a photocopying card while I’m at it.’
Finding a spare desk, Luca was soon hunched over a pile of books in the hushed, cavernous reading room. The librarian had cross-referenced nearby villages and landmarks, pulling out any books by or about explorers who had ventured anywhere near the region in the last hundred years.
For the next few hours he worked steadily through them, occasionally making notes in the small Moleskine pad that he and Bill always took with them on expeditions.
It proved to be frustrating work. None of the explorers had got much farther than the Indian border and Luca had skimmed through three of the books, his pen poised, before one scruffy-looking volume began to show more promise.
In his introduction, the author, Frederick Bailey, a British officer serving in India at the beginning of the twentieth century, described how he had decided to enter Tibet illegally, heading north over the Himalayas in search of a ‘mighty river gorge’. On first inspection of the hand-drawn map at the front of the book, Luca immediately realised that Bailey’s seemingly random route put him about fifty kilometres east of Makalu.
The prose was typically Edwardian, slightly pompous and emotionally stilted, but within a few pages Luca had been sucked into Bailey’s account. In 1913 he and another officer called Morshead had worked their way up and across the Indo-Tibetan border to reach a fabled waterfall in the heart of a river gorge. The journey sounded difficult as well as clandestine. There were jungles with trees a hundred feet high, mountain passes and murderous Abor tribesmen to negotiate. Luca was amused at the classic British stoicism and how they kept stiffening their upper lip to ‘muddle their way through’.
After escaping from one village under a hail of arrows and spears, the pair recouped in the dense jungle. Morshead had been hit no less than eleven times, with Bailey’s only further comment on this being a terse: ‘What a sanguine reminder it was of how hard it is to kill a man in sound health.’
Luca’s smile faded suddenly. God, what had happened to explorers nowadays? One dose of malaria, or a toe lost to frostbite, and they called in the helicopters. In the old days, explorers would disappear from the face of the earth for years. And they literally did disappear. They weren’t calling in every five minutes from a satellite phone or updating their website with the latest news. These men struck off into the wilderness, alone and utterly cut off from the rest of the world. They pioneered the trails. They drew the maps.
Somehow life today had become so tepid. It took such an effort to actually get away from anything familiar that escape itself became the point of the expedition, rather than any discovery that might arise from it.
Something was catching the corner of his eye. Luca looked up to see that his mobile was flashing silently on the desk. Picking it up, he saw that it was his father calling. With a sigh, he put it down again. He must have heard the news that he was back — either that or it was a very lucky guess. Then again, his father always did have a sixth sense for that kind of thing.
Turning his phone face downwards, Luca exhaled before looking down at the book again.
Despite a tantalising reference to ‘that vast, unmapped region east of Makalu’, there seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary about the mountains Bailey and his companion had gone hiking through. A few pages later, Luca was skimming through the explorers’ experiences with a more benign tribe, the Monpa, when he nearly missed a brief diary extract: The local Monpa describe the Tsangpo river gorge as a ‘beyul’. After much vague discussion with the chief, we discovered this term to mean some sort of highly sacred sanctuary, but from what it was impossible to discern. On further discussion we were told that there are many such sanctuaries throughout Tibet, hidden in the most inaccessible regions.We enquired as to the whereabouts of these other sacred places and only after much cajoling (and nearly half our supply of expedition gin) did the little fellow let on. Drawing a picture of a lotus flower in the dirt, he described a group of mountains, formed into a circle. At their centre, another mountain, which is supposedly the gateway to some sacred place.Rather amusingly, when asked where the ring of mountains was, he replied that it had been made invisibl
e by a great sorcerer. He claimed that one had to use the wisdom from a book called the Kalak Tantra to see inside it, but as with all these things, the Tibetan villagers’ penchant for the mystic is seemingly endless. It really is quite impossible to get things clear.We decided to stick to the matter in hand and concentrate on getting into our own river gorge ‘beyul’.
Luca looked up from the page, his mouth suddenly dry. These were his mountains. They had to be.
So what did Bailey mean that they had been ‘made invisible by a great sorcerer’?
One thing Luca knew about Tibetans was that they loved anything supernatural. To them, gods literally roamed the heights and demons lived in the valleys. Almost every occurrence, even simple things such as bad weather or failing crops, was explained as an act of magic and sorcery.
Luca looked up through one of the long windows at the moody English sky. White clouds shrouded the tops of the city’s spires. Cloud… that was it! Within this context, the chief’s assertions about a great sorcerer having cast a spell over the mountains made perfect sense. The clouds themselves had rendered the centre of the mountain ring invisible, just as they had on the satellite map.
Standing up, Luca shuffled the books into a neat stack and then made his way over to the photocopying machine.
He wasn’t exactly sure what it was he had discovered, but he was getting closer.
He could feel it.
Chapter 8
Two monks stood on the roof of Tashilhunpo Monastery, their heads bowed in sorrow.
Usually the rarified mountain light reflected off the golden rooftops, making it unbearably hot and bright. But today was different. Dark cloud had rolled in from the east, blanketing the sky and threatening rain.
The Cloud Maker Page 4
