Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  After speaking to Peggy, she turned away. They needed more wood to keep the fire going. She would ask Peter . . . No, she would not. There was wood aplenty in the fallen offices. ‘Burn the tables,’ she said; and men hurried to obey her.

  The minutes, and then the hours, passed unheeded; some order appeared at the kutcherry; there were always tea and chupattis, and tired men, and bandages. Smythe arrived to say that the police cordon was in place round the Gujarabad sector; but it was too weak to be of the slightest use by day, as most of his men were on rescue work. Peter went off with him to make a personal inspection. Baber came with a hundred men, armed with picks and mattocks and crowbars from the Public Works Department store. Yar Khan, the P.W.D. overseer, was in tears because Baber had broken open the store and taken the articles without permission, and no one had signed a chit for them, or even counted what had been taken.

  A nightwatchman came and reported that the Maghra was rising at the same rate; Emily sent him off to find Peter. The members of the Meru expedition took Baber’s villagers, group by group, and disappeared into the smoking alleys of the city. The flames died here and rose there, but the smell of burning never left her nostrils--burning grain, old timber, prepared food, books, flesh. Sparks rose in towering pillars from afar; men and women walked past, hurrying, carrying beds on their heads ... ‘Where do we go, memsahib? Where do we go?’

  ‘Purana risala ki maidan,’ she repeated, over and over.

  Adam Khan had emerged, tight-lipped, from Gupta’s shop and told her that the Congress party was not going to run the camp; but he personally would--with volunteers, many of them Congress men.

  Smythe returned and told her Peter was having a look at the river. After an hour Smythe muttered: ‘He ought to be back by now. It’s not my bloody job to make these decisions. I’ve got my own work to do.’

  She said nothing; Peter ought to be back. Someone else made the decisions--either herself or Baber or Smythe or Harry, and, most of all, Peggy. Peggy was smooth and exultant. She took care of everything, thought of everything. She was tireless, heroic, competent and calm, and her every word and action gloated over Emily.

  Harry returned, and Emily gave him hot tea in a tin bowl. He was dyed with soot now, and his hands, when he showed them to her, had been badly scorched. He drank, looked at her, and said: ‘I came to climb Meru--sun, snow, ice, nothing changed, not just since I saw it last, but ever. This! I told you, it’s just like France.’ He drank again. ‘I’ve never seen a real city in rubble, though.’

  Emily glanced at him wearily. It must be near dawn, for there were pale green and dove-grey banners in the sky, and a pallor shone in the eyes of the townspeople shuffling by and in the faces of the villagers wearily slumped over their mattocks. Fifty yards down the street corpses were piling high in an empty lot, and soon the sun would be up. Something would have to be done about them before the day was far advanced. She thought there must be six hundred bodies there already. Peggy had disappeared.

  ‘That’s the same too,’ Harry said. ‘Corpses, piled on each other, and men walking across them. I don’t feel it any more, after France.’

  You don’t feel it, she thought. You’re ready to scream with the horror of it. It is I who feel nothing, because I am thinking and feeling for one individual only--my husband.

  Where was he? What was he doing, what was he feeling in this climactic moment when all his power should have been released in an explosion of will--the survivors of a city frantic to turn the will into action?

  Poor Harry. There was no escape, as there had been none in France. The stifling heat pressed smoke and the smell of death into the nostrils; the houses enclosed the horizon, bringing closer the empty lot where mangled women lay, their red clothes crushed into the flesh, and men lay hooked round each other in broken swastikas of white sharp bone and pasty skin, and children lay face up, naked in the warmth of the night, unknowing, wide-eyed.

  Baber and his men came, with Peggy. ‘Lady Margaret is a hero,’ Baber said. ‘She went with us into a burning house to help a woman who was trapped under a beam--she was having a baby. We saved the baby.’ Peggy had it in her arms, small, squalling--and Peggy’s face alight with a different warmth under the elegant filth. Baber called to a villager. ‘Ohé, take the child from the memsahib.’

  Emily gave Peggy a bowl of tea. ‘Baber’s a hero too,’ Peggy said. ‘He worked for half an hour with a burning beam just above his back--and then half a wall fell on him. Where’s Peter?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Emily said.

  Everyone was a hero, except Peter, that night. But the dawn was up, and, as at the end of the war, she could see for the first time the extent of the destruction.

  A villager ran up and spoke rapidly to Baber. Baber swung round. The villager pointed to a three-storey house only twenty yards down the street, on the opposite side.

  Baber turned. ‘That house settled forward just now, he says. It’s creaking inside. He doesn’t know whether there’s anyone in it.’ He shouted to the villagers. Half a dozen of them sprang forward. He cried: ‘Bring them along, Mr Walsh--quickly!’ But Harry was already moving, the villagers hurrying after him. The sun was up now, and a tongue of flame licked out of the lower storey of the house. ‘The fools!’ Baber cried. ‘They were cooking . . .’ He ran after Harry, a crowbar in his hand. Emily realized that the street was full of people. They had been there all night, tucked into corners, waiting. Some were under the creaking house, some where the house would fall. She ran forward, screaming: ‘Get out of the way! Hurry!’

  Yar Khan panted up beside her as she stopped at the edge of the danger zone. ‘The river is still rising, memsahib,’ he said. ‘I can’t find the Deputy Commissioner Sahib anywhere. The Police Sahib says he can do nothing. There is nothing to do--but my go-down, with the accounts, is in danger. What shall we do?’

  ‘Be quiet!’ she screamed.

  ‘Look at Harry!’ Peggy cried, her voice exultant. ‘Look at him!’ The men had run into the front door of the building and, a few seconds later, came tumbling out again as though they had met a tiger. A gout of fire and a torrent of black smoke followed them out, and no further explanation was needed. It was an old house, heavily ornamented in the Hindu style, and already Harry was going up the facade, his feet bare and a rope trailing from his waist.

  ‘Look at Harry,’ Peggy said. ‘Look at him, Emily.’

  Up he went, easily and quickly, and into a second-storey window. A moment later she saw him again as he helped an old man to get a grip on the rope. The old man slid down, Baber caught him at the bottom, and the old man danced about shrieking and holding his burned hands. A wailing woman followed. Finally Harry scrambled out and began to slide down, using one hand and his legs on the rope and holding a large shapeless bundle over his shoulder with his free hand. The building swayed slowly forward.

  Peggy screamed: ‘Oh, quick, quick, Harry, quick!’ But no one could hear down there for the roar of the building and the rumble of the flames now pouring out of the lower windows and the door. All the men and the spectators crowded back. Harry reached the ground.

  ‘Run!’ Baber shrieked.

  In the cleared place Harry ran with the bundle. Beyond, silhouetted against a sudden brilliance of the sun, the crowd stood frozen, and one of them was kneeling with a black box camera held in front of his face.

  The bundle slipped from Harry’s shoulder and fell heavily. For a fraction of a second he hesitated, half turning to stoop and pick it up. Then he ran on, alone. The high, many- windowed wall, embellished with gods and demons, leaned out over him, breaking like a wave of ocean, like the crest of the Matterhorn above him. The bundle rolled, stood, and was revealed as a young girl, her face split by a cry of terror. She took one limping step and then stood frozen, while Harry ran. The house fell and engulfed the girl, and a great cloud of reddish dust, lit by flames and smoke, licked at Harry’s heels and hid the crowd beyond, and the man with the camera.

  Emily tu
rned away, feeling sick. ‘I’ve got to find Peter,’ she mumbled. She began to run. The groom was beside her in a moment. Yes, yes, the horse! She scrambled into the saddle. Peter had gone away to hide from all the decisions. Where? She’d try the bungalow first.

  She could go no faster than a trot through the ruined streets, and it took her nearly twenty minutes, and a dozen detours, to reach the bungalow. The groom took the bridle as she dismounted. She climbed slowly up the veranda steps, stepped over a score of sleeping bodies, and walked into the drawingroom.

  He was there, on the sofa, staring out at his city and the sunshine and shadow that swept slowly across it. It was strange that no one had thought to come here to find him--but the place was deserted except for the refugees and ayah and the children, and even ayah probably did not know he was here.

  She went to him and said: ‘Peter, you’ve got to come down to the kutcherry--at once.’

  He stood up, and she prayed that she would feel a wave of anger, terror, even hate, come out against her. But there was nothing, only the limpid reasonableness of the past four years.

  She said: ‘It’s Harry.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Is he hurt?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘He was rescuing a girl from a building. It fell down, and he left her so that he could run away faster to save himself. Purshottam Dass took a photograph of it.’

  Purshottam Dass was the local correspondent of the Patriot, a nationalist newspaper published in virulent English in Lahore. He was also Harnarayan’s right-hand man in the extremist wing of the local Congress group.

  ‘Harry--ran away to save himself,’ Peter said slowly. ‘I don’t believe it.’ He did not speak in a puzzled tone at all.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said, her voice rising. ‘Just as true as that you’re sitting here, doing nothing, when Rudwal needs you more than it ever did or ever will.’

  ‘Did Peggy see?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Everything. She had just been telling me to watch because he was so brave--and asking where you were, in the same breath.’

  Yar Khan stumbled in. ‘M-memsahib,’ he stammered, ‘the watchman at the river says it is beginning to rise fast, much faster. It will be over the bund in four hours if it goes on at this speed.’

  She said: ‘The Harab dam, whatever it was! It must have broken.’

  Peter said: ‘That will flood the whole of the Gujarabad sector to about three feet.’

  She said: ‘The last time I saw Smythe he thought there were about a thousand injured people, living, trapped in the debris down there. We couldn’t get a quarter of them out in time. Oh, Peter, what can we do?’

  ‘Harry,’ he muttered. ‘Oh, my God! I’ll come down. Harry can help. That’s it. Harry can do it. Quick--get that horse. We’ll go down on it together. Yar Khan, run to the kutcherry!’

  Chapter 35

  Peter held the pony to a smart trot all the way to the kutcherry. Clinging round his waist, she wanted to yell in his ear: ‘Faster, faster, the river’s rising!’ Tragedy spread around them, but she was in a comedy, bouncing up and down on the rump of a small horse.

  Peter guided the pony rapidly over the piled wreckage in the streets. ‘Harry!’ he cried once, as though he had seen Harry in a dangerous place and wanted to warn him. She knew he was not thinking of the rising river, or the fires, or the shattered city, or the people dead by thousands and set out by hundreds for death, or the pale corpses, or the plagues which must be gathering even now, like the river, ready to flow in and overwhelm all that remained of Rudwal. He was thinking of the sorrow and final defeat, in his own fields of courage and self-control and self-sacrifice, of one man.

  The fallen house now blocked the street beyond the kutcherry, towards the Gujarabad sector. She marvelled that so many storeys of height, containing so many rooms and so much living, now stood only a foot or two above the earth, with beams pointing up and flames running like lazy rats in and under the rubbled bricks and a thin diseased smoke writhing up to dull the farther view down the canyon of the street.

  Baber had gone somewhere with most of his men. Most of those that remained were standing in a group under the kutcherry wall. The tent where they had made tea all night stood alone and, alone in it, Harry and Peggy. Even the khansamah had left. Emily could not believe that he would desert them at this time. Then she saw him sprawled asleep under the wall a few yards off; but the effect was the same, whether it was fatigue or duty or disgust that had sent the rest away. Harry and Peggy were alone.

  Peter reined in, and Emily slid down, and he in his turn. Peter walked up to Harry. ‘Harry, do you know anything about explosives?’

  Harry said: ‘A little.’ Peggy had shrunk, like the fallen house, like the corpses, the material envelope fallen in about the emptied spaces of the spirit. If Emily had not recognized the grey dress, stained and torn but still showing the perfection of its style, she would hardly have recognized her. Age had come on Peggy. The hate that had smoothed her skin and the courage that had put a new bloom on her cheeks had gone. She had become, in an hour, a woman old before her time, and even the eyes were lacking in life of any kind.

  Harry was different. Emily had expected to find him trembling, or possessed by some tautly silent neighbour to insanity, like the young men back from France, whom she had occasionally seen walking the sands below Harlech while they convalesced from the mysterious new malady of shell shock. But Harry was calm and the eyes, which had wandered like birds before, to fasten and suck and dart away, were still and steady on Peter, and, as Peter’s used to be, without depth.

  Baber and Smythe appeared together. They were utterly weary, and silent with the realization that they had done all they could and it wasn’t enough.

  Peter said: ‘I’m going to send Yar Khan to Shamoli, Harry. It’s a mile upstream, on the other bank. There is an old bed of the Maghra there. Shamoli stands in it. I want the bank blown in, so that the Maghra flows down its old course. Yar Khan will be in charge of the demolition, and Baber’s men will do the spade-work. Baber, how many men can you get within five minutes?’

  Baber croaked, cleared his throat, and tried again. ‘Thirty.’

  ‘Good. Get across the river at once. Go yourself and get everyone out of Shamoli on to the high ground to the north, at once, by force if necessary. Yar Khan, take all the explosives you’ve got out of the stores, and all your men, and get to Shamoli. Harry, you’re in charge of the whole thing. See that it’s done.’

  Harry said: ‘I can’t do that.’

  Peter said: ‘Why?’

  Baber had already gone, his cracked voice raised in urgent shouting. A moment later the villagers began the high-pitched chanting with which they called their sons from distant fields.

  Harry said: ‘I lost my nerve just now. I killed a girl. No one will listen to me.’

  ‘Has anyone said anything to you about it?’ Peter asked, lighting a cheroot.

  Oh, hurry, hurry, Emily whispered. Hurry--for the fires crackled, and the city lay at the door of death, and the silent river climbed out of its bed. How can you waste time arguing with him? Go yourself! Go, go, go!

  Harry said: ‘No, they’re all pretending it didn’t happen. They feel sorry for me. But I know what they’re really thinking, because I’m thinking it myself.’

  Peter said: ‘That’s done, Harry. There are a thousand lives to save now. Go on.’

  Yar Khan was there, panting a hundred questions... ‘Where can I get a cart to transport the explosives to Shamoli? ... How long before the last bridge over the Maghra goes?’

  Peter said: ‘Go to the tonga stand outside the station. Take my horse. Smythe, find me four constables to go with Mr Walsh.’ Smythe snapped: ‘All the police are busy.’

  ‘Take four off the cordon. Quickly, please.’

  Smythe turned angrily and spoke to the policeman at his heels. The man ran off, stumbling and heavy-footed. Smythe said: ‘The Gurkhas are on their way--two companies. They should be here by three this aftern
oon.’

  Peter nodded. Harry still waited, his mouth a little open. Peggy said: ‘He can’t go, Peter, can’t you see? He can’t! Can’t you see, he’s afraid it’ll happen again!’

  Peter said: ‘He must, and it won’t. Go on, Harry.’

  Now it was there in his voice and eye, force from the past. He did not speak loudly, but he never had; his eyes were the colour of icebergs, as they had always been, but not cold now; and all the power came together to focus on his friend. As though electrical wires had been connected inside him, Harry began to walk after Baber and his men. They were running, and Harry began to run, and so running faster and stumbling harder they all clambered over the burning rubble which covered the dead girl, and disappeared.

  Abruptly Peggy turned and walked away. Emily watched her go and turned to Peter. ‘Don’t you think you ought to go to Shamoli, Peter? Yar Khan always needs a lot of speeding up, and if they don’t hurry they---‘

  Peter said: ‘It will help Harry to do it himself.’ He turned away and began pouring himself a bowl of tea. A nurse from the hospital was struggling down the street at an awkward run, her sari hampering her movements. Emily repeated to herself: ‘It will help Harry.’ It meant nothing to Peter that a thousand people might die if Harry failed. She could not believe he had made a good decision--but he had made one, for the sake of someone who he thought was in a more miserable state than his own. Perhaps that was what had been needed all these years--that he should meet, as he walked numbly through the world, a being who felt worse, lower, more useless than he did.