Thin Air

by Michelle Paver

  McLellan didn’t want to tell me the details of what he’d seen, but I forced him to.

  ‘It happened slowly,’ he said that first night at Base, as we worked our way through two bottles of Scotch. ‘The cornice just seemed to peel off, not jerky or fast, and he simply dropped. And God forgive me, I couldn’t look away. Halfway down, he – he struck a spur. He went wheeling out into the air, then down again hard, a fast jolting slide. I lost him … Then I saw something dark lower down, sliding slower and slower till it – he – finally stopped.’

  I asked what he meant by ‘something dark’, but he would never say.

  I also asked what he’d seen immediately before Kits fell. He didn’t mention seeing anyone else on the edge, so I’m quite certain that he saw only Kits. I don’t know about Garrard. All he’s ever told me is that he saw me on my knees, frozen with horror and staring at Kits, just before the ice broke.

  I don’t remember much about those first days at Base, apart from Cedric’s howls. He’d found his way back, and had been keeping McLellan company; but after the accident, the Scotsman tied him up to stop him bothering us. He howled for hours. Once, Cotterell brought him to see me, but he cringed and whimpered in terror, so Cotterell took him away. We never tried it again. I hated to see the poor beast so terrified. He’s better off with McLellan.

  I’m told that I was remarkably composed during that time, and that I kept saying, ‘We can’t leave Kits, we have to bring him back.’ So they did. McLellan had seen where he fell, and without telling me, he, Cotterell and Nima went to find him. They brought him back in his sleeping bag. Cotterell was grimly silent; I daresay he was used to such things from the trenches. Nima was shaking. McLellan’s freckled face was grey.

  They tried to keep the truth from me, but I found out. Kits wasn’t whole. How could he be, after striking that spur, then that ‘fast jolting slide’ over the granite and the rough Himalayan ice?

  The others had collected what they could find, but it wasn’t enough to fill a coffin. Only a small packing crate. Or maybe a rucksack.

  * * *

  When we were boys, Aunt Ruth’s mountaineering stories always ended at the mountain. She never mentioned the fact that you’ve got to get back.

  I’m told that I ‘kept myself together splendidly’ during the trek, but the truth is, I didn’t feel a thing. I was an automaton: looking after Garrard, helping Cotterell and McLellan prepare reports for the Himalayan Club in Darjeeling and the Alpine Club in London. Although I do remember coming off the glacier near Yates’ cairn, and realising in disbelief that we were back in the world and it was spring, a skylark trilling overhead, green grass and blue Himalayan poppies.

  The next morning, I climbed the moraine and said goodbye to the mountain. I thought: that lump of rock and ice will be there when the human race has broken and receded like a wave. It will never know what dreams and fears it has inspired, or what fierce desire. It will never know what haunts it.

  Then a cold grey curtain of rain came down and hid everything from view. That was the start of the Monsoon.

  I ‘kept myself together’ till Darjeeling, where I rather spectacularly fell apart. I remember sitting with Nima and Cotterell in a horse-tonga outside Tennant’s bungalow. Then I was leaning over the old man in his Bath chair, screaming: ‘Did you know? Did you know?’

  After that, I recall being dragged back to the tonga, and torrential rain and watery greyness, everything muffled – and crying in Nima’s arms as I’d never cried before.

  Two days later, Tennant died of a heart attack. Did he know? Were he and Lyell haunted during their last days on the mountain?

  Re-reading what they wrote, I’ve found the odd phrase which might suggest that they were. That bit at the beginning of Tennant’s memoir about the mountain killing five, but they’d only laid to rest four. And somewhere in Bloody But Unbowed, Lyell mentions something wrong about the air, and an uncanny silence … Although I may be inferring too much. And Tennant did say that Lyell never experienced a moment’s disquiet.

  Besides, even if they did know – even if Tennant had warned me that first night, before we set off – I wouldn’t have listened.

  * * *

  Cotterell was marvellous on the voyage home. He handled Garrard with touching gentleness, and read aloud to me when I didn’t dare sleep: The Vicar of Wakefield, and three of the Barchester novels.

  I missed Nima dreadfully. He’d come with us to Bombay, and stayed with me while they amputated my toes. To my shame, the only way I could show my gratitude was by giving him money; but he was delighted. He said that when he returned to his village, he would buy many yaks. When I asked him to write to me, he smiled and said gently that he’d never learnt how. So it really was goodbye.

  For a long time, I blamed myself for Kits’ death, because I didn’t shout a warning. I still wonder. Was I really incapable of crying out? Couldn’t I have tried harder? I’ll never know. What I cling to is the fact that I never told him I’d chucked the rucksack, or about Tennant’s memoir. So he died believing that Lyell and his companions were heroes. At least I got that right.

  Kits’ widow blamed me too, on the one occasion I visited her. She couldn’t understand why I didn’t warn him, and I couldn’t tell her. Garrard, who was with me, assured her that it wouldn’t have done any good, that Kits was already right on the edge; but she didn’t believe him. As we were leaving, she looked up into my face and said stonily, ‘You always wanted to beat him. Well, now you have.’

  She can’t truly believe that, not in her heart. And in what way have I won? Thank Christ I didn’t inherit a penny; it’s all gone to the boys.

  For weeks after Kits’ death, I hoped he would visit me in a dream and tell me he’s all right; but he never has. And surely that’s a good sign? It means that for him, death was the end? God, I hope so. Once, in Bombay, Nima tried to explain to me why he doesn’t fear dying: because it’s merely a transition to another existence. I couldn’t find the words to convey to him that after what happened on the mountain, another existence is what I dread above all else.

  I’ve spoken to several people who’ve survived falls while climbing, and they tell me that one feels no fear and no pain, there isn’t time. I hope – although hope is too weak a word for the intensity with which I want this to be true – that it was like that for Kits. And I hope that he never knew what was waiting for him on the edge: that all he saw was rushing whiteness and after that nothing, blackness, gone. No lingering consciousness in that wilderness of ice, with the thing that walks.

  * * *

  It’s been three years, and I still correspond with McLellan. He’s remained in India, even though he knows that it won’t be long before the whole bloody Raj goes to smash. I’ve told him that on his next home leave, he must come to me, but so far he hasn’t been over. I suspect that he doesn’t care to leave Cedric – although he’d never admit it.

  A publisher offered me a great deal of money to write an account of ‘the tragedy’, and when I refused, Garrard wrote one instead, as a memorial to Kits. He made no mention of what he’d seen on the mountain, or of the state I was in at Camp Three, and we’ve never spoken about it. His book has become a ‘best-seller’. Well it would, because somebody died. It has allowed Garrard to buy a house in Marrakesh, and I’ve heard nothing from him since.

  Publishers keep urging me to write ‘my side of the story’ – but who would believe that? And to write it would be to relive it, which is something I can’t do.

  Besides, I’ve been thinking about the chain of events that led me and Kits to Kangchenjunga. It began in the nursery with the Crystal Mountain; then Bloody But Unbowed when we were boys. That’s the real reason I shall never write anything. I couldn’t bear to think that any book of mine might inspire someone else to trek out there, and go through what I did.

  Of course, my dream of practising medicine in Sikkim never happened. I cling to London’s narrow, crowded streets. Clare’s father dropped his legal
action – he said I’d been punished enough – so I was able to buy a small general practice in South Kensington. I’m doing rather well. I think people come to me because they’re curious, or they feel sorry for me.

  Cotterell was quietly devastated by Kits’ death. He’s aged a good deal, and I often visit him at his little estate in Sussex. I can’t take Kits’ place in his affections and I don’t try, but we like each other. He enjoys talking about Kits, and as he lives quite close to where our family used to have their seat, we visit the parish churchyard, and Kits’ grave.

  Bringing him back was something else I did right. When we were still on the glacier, I kept his remains on ice. When we reached the moraine, I packed him in salt. Nima helped me; another astonishing act of kindness that I can never repay.

  Of course, I don’t really believe that any trace of who Kits was lingered on in that poor, mangled flesh, but I couldn’t leave him behind. I couldn’t bury him on the knoll, or with Yates by the moraine. So I brought him home. The ‘remains’, I mean. And I refuse, I absolutely refuse, to believe that any part of him is still on the mountain with that thing.

  Grief is a lumpy, uneven affair. Sometimes I’m angry with Kits: for being so bloody thoughtless and unimaginative and irritating. Fucking hell, Kits, you didn’t have to die. Enough! Pax.

  And how he would hoot with laughter if he knew about the salt. ‘Good Christ, Bodge, you’ve gone and pickled me!’

  That’s the worst of it, not being able to laugh together. Except it isn’t the worst, I keep discovering new ‘worsts’. It’s as if I’m trying to touch bottom, but I haven’t, not yet.

  Maybe it’s been even worse for Garrard. Once in Bombay when we were alone, he said, ‘He was my best friend. My best and only friend.’

  ‘I know,’ I replied.

  He glared at me with sudden hatred. ‘You didn’t even like him, did you?’

  I hesitated. ‘No. Not much. He didn’t like me, either. We were too different.’

  ‘So why pretend to grieve?’

  ‘I’m not pretending.’

  Garrard was puzzled, but I couldn’t explain. He’s an only child; how could he understand? Kits and I didn’t like each other, but we were brothers. We were caught in a messy tangle of love and hate, cruelty and guilt, illumined by the occasional flash of sympathy – like that time at Camp Three when we were digging the ice caves, and everything felt right. Now that messy tangle has been chopped in half, and I’m alone. There’s no one who remembers Aunt Ruth reading aloud from Scrambles in the Alps; or the stuffed owl on the landing. There’s no one to call me Bodge.

  That owl. When we were boys, Kits was a great one for practical ‘jokes’ of varying degrees of nastiness. But no matter how often I woke him after a nightmare and begged him to take me across the landing, past that wretched owl, he never made a joke of it. And he never once refused.

  * * *

  I felt cold for months after we returned to England, although it was a beautiful summer. Even today, on a sunny May afternoon, with sparrows chirping in the elm tree and people in their light summer clothes strolling along the pavement beneath my window, I’m huddled by the fire with a rug over my knees. The mountain is still with me. I carry it inside. I always will.

  Yesterday, I was in Hatchards, and I saw a photograph of it, the usual view from Darjeeling. Everything flooded back. The cold, the silence. The dread. It was so overwhelming that I staggered outside and vomited in the gutter. People thought I was drunk.

  I experienced the same thing last year, when I re-read Tennant’s memoir one final time before I gave it to the Alpine Club. In answer to my most recent enquiry, they told me they’ve not yet decided whether to make it public. I don’t care what they do. I’ve no illusions that exposing the truth will lay the ghost. Nothing will. It’s still there. I saw it this morning.

  The dream was the worst it’s ever been. It always comes before dawn, in the dim grey light. I wake, and I’m back there in the snow, just before Kits falls. Only this time, I do shout a warning, and he turns and starts trudging towards me, away from the edge. Then I become aware that that thing isn’t with him, it’s with me. The silence is shutting me in, and it’s coming closer, I can’t bear it, my heart is going to burst—

  That’s when I always wake up, clutching Nima’s ribbon. But this morning when I woke, I realised with a sickening plunge that everything that’s happened since Kits died – the trek back, the voyage home, London, everything – it’s all been a dream. I never left the mountain. I was the one who fell. I’m there now, trapped with that thing in the silence that will never end …

  Then I really woke up.

  The ice-cream vendor is cycling past my window, and the sparrows are squabbling over the crumbs I’ve put out for them on the sill. Those sparrows have helped me more than anything. The sparrows, and my little patch of garden, and watching the herons by the Serpentine. McLellan had the right idea when he kept Cedric. I’d like to think that one day, I too could have a dog. It would be company. Provided it wasn’t scared.

  Perhaps that’s why Charles Tennant kept those spaniels. I’ve been thinking a lot about him lately. Poor bitter, guilty old man. And I understand a little better now how it was for him, because it’s been much the same for me.

  Every night, do you understand, I see them: that thing standing on the edge, and Kits trudging doggedly towards it.

  Yes. I shall always see them.

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  Like Stephen, my first sight of Kangchenjunga came as a shock. I was staying in Darjeeling, and the previous day, I’d risen at 3.30 am and gone to the vantage point on Tiger Hill, hoping to glimpse the mountain at dawn – only to see nothing but cloud. The following morning, I drew back the curtains of my hotel room and there it was: vast, achingly clear, filling my window. Kangchenjunga had chosen its own time to reveal itself.

  That was in April 2014, when as part of my research for Thin Air, I trekked with a small group of doughty hikers and even doughtier porters and dzos (a cross between a yak and a cow) into the foothills around Kangchenjunga. We followed the same route that Frank Smythe and G. O. Dyhrenfurth had taken in April 1930, and which the Cotterell expedition would take in the story: driving from Darjeeling to the Sikkimese village of Yuksom, then climbing on foot through the jungle to the uplands of Dzongri. We camped at Dzongri for some days and explored the surrounding region, hiking to a nearby pass and a sacred lake, Lakshmi Pokari (official name Kabur Lam Lake); gaining startling views of Kangchenjunga; and experiencing, during one never-to-be-forgotten night, the most violent storm I’ve ever been in.

  I made up the Lyell and Cotterell expeditions and everyone who took part in them, but all the other mountaineers mentioned in the story, such as Bauer, Smythe, and of course Mallory and Irvine, were real people who climbed in the Himalayas and/or attempted the summit of Kangchenjunga – sometimes paying with their lives, like Alexis Pache, whose grave lies at the foot of the mountain.

  To evoke those times, I’ve retained many of the old-fashioned spellings. My characters’ attitudes are also of the period, and this includes their racism, which one finds in many, although not all, contemporary accounts. (On that note, the ‘Crowley’ mentioned in the story was the so-called ‘Aleister’ Crowley, an unpleasant, self-aggrandizing fantasist who treated his porters appallingly.)

  To create the Lyell and Cotterell expeditions, I’ve drawn on many of these early accounts, and I’ve been endlessly astonished by the toughness and bravery of the early climbers. Paul Bauer really did hack out large ice caves high on Kangchenjunga’s north-west face; and his dog Wastl climbed with him to about twenty-four thousand feet. Nor did I invent that lady mountaineer friend of Aunt Ruth’s. In the early 1900s an American named Fanny Bullock Workman unfurled a ‘Votes For Women’ banner high in the Karakorams, and left her visiting card in a glass jar on one of the peaks.

  The Cotterell expedition’s route up the south-west face largely follows that of the Br
itish team led by Charles Evans, who were the first to reach the summit in 1955. However, in the interests of clarity, I’ve simplified both the route and the mountain’s topography, omitting features not relevant to the story, such as the Hogsback and the Great Buttress, while keeping such major features as the Great Shelf, the Icefall and what I’ve called ‘the Buttress’ (which is actually the Western Buttress).

  In 1955 as in 1935, Kangchenjunga was a sacred mountain, and for many people it remains so today. It says a lot for its power that Charles Evans’ party had to promise the Sikkimese government not to desecrate the summit by standing on the very top. They kept their word. When George Band and Joe Brown reached the summit on May 25th 1955, they resisted the urge to climb the last five feet; as did Norman Hardie and Tony Streather the following day. So did Major Prem Ghand and Naik Nima Dorje Sherpa of the Indian expedition in 1977; and Doug Scott, Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker, who reached the summit without oxygen in 1979 (at the time, one of them remarked that they didn’t want to upset whatever lived up there). Kangchenjunga remained the ‘untrodden peak’ until 1980, when a Japanese expedition stood on the top.

  Concerning the history of climbing in the region, I’m particularly indebted to the following: Climbing and Exploration in the Karakoram-Himalayas (W.M. Conway, London 1894); Climbing on the Himalaya and Other Mountain Ranges (J.N. Collie, Edinburgh 1902); Round Kangchenjunga (D.W. Freshfield, London 1903); Mountain Craft (G.W. Young, 1920); The Kangchenjunga Adventure (F.S. Smythe, London 1930); Kamet Conquered (F.S. Smythe, London 1932); The Naked Mountain (E. Knowlton, New York 1933); Annapurna (M. Herzog, London 1952); Kangchenjunga Challenge (P. Bauer, London 1955); Kanchenjunga (J. Tucker, London 1955); Kangchenjunga the Untrodden Peak (C. Evans, London 1956); The Boardman Tasker Omnibus (P. Boardman & J. Tasker, London 1996); Nanda Devi Exploration and Ascent (E. Shipton & H.W. Tilman, compilation London 1999); Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (M. Isserman & S. Weaver, Yale 2008).