Swift could see that there was little point in arguing with the holy man. He would only have replied with yet another enigmatic answer. But her silence didn’t stop him.
‘And don’t be so hard on religion,’ he called to her. ‘God’s purpose in life is like a great carpet. Seen from one side of a loom it makes no sense. It has no shape, no logic. Just hundreds of strands of wool hanging loosely here and there. But seen from the other side everything can be understood. The pattern becomes clear. There are no loose bits of wool. Just order.’
‘Goodbye,’ she said.
The swami was still giggling when he turned back to the satellite and reached into the generator to remove the isotope with his thin, bare hands.
The yeti’s route took them up and through the sharp pinnacles that enclosed the hidden valley like two halves of a bear trap. As they climbed higher. Swift felt her ears pop and she began to worry that the yeti would leave her on some inaccessible mountainside where she would surely die.
Dwarfed by the mountains and by the size of the creature carrying her in its arms, she felt herself an insignificant horizontal figure in an immense vertical landscape: she and her personal King Kong, two creatures that were for all the world quite different, and yet almost identical in their proteins and molecules. She was Fay Wray carried through the snow turned blue by the deeper azure of the endless sky. Gradually she began to relax and to understand perhaps a little of what he had said. What was certain except the great blue roof above her head in all its marvellous infinity? Whatever happened on Earth, that would always be there. Perhaps she was still under the influence of the suggestions he made to her while she was in a trance. Certainly she still felt as warm, though the fact was that she had yet to switch on the power for her suit. She even started to believe that in this magical place where there was no end, no finish, only vast space, the swami might never grow old, might never die. For all she knew he really was an immortal, someone to whom the ordinary laws of nature did not apply. He would go on guarding the yetis in his quiet, passive way until the end of time.
She dozed.
When she awoke they were on their way down, on a difficult-looking descent and she soon started closing her eyes when the route became too alarming. But the yeti never once lost its massive footing. Until the moment came when it was clear that even yeti feet would be inadequate for the impossibly precipitate slope that faced them. Swift guessed them to be at around six thousand metres up the side of Machhapuchhare. Below them was the Sanctuary. In front of them rose Annapurna, rising to some eight thousand metres like an ancient Egyptian pyramid. There seemed no obvious way down, short of hammering a piton into the arete above them and rappelling down the one-and-a-half-kilometre-long slope.
To Swift’s surprise the yeti sat down in the deep snow. She thought it might be taking a well-earned rest while considering an alternative route.
‘So where to now?’ she asked. ‘Back the way we came, I suppose.’
Instead the yeti shifted its enormous backside forward on the ridge a little, sending a small powder avalanche down the virtually sheer gully ahead of them. Suddenly Swift guessed what the yeti was planning to do and gasped with horror.
‘Oh no,’ she shouted through the hot mike. ‘You’re not going to slide down this on your ass, are you? You crazy bloody baboon.’ She struck the yeti several times on the chest to make her point.
The yeti grunted before shifting forward again on the edge of the ridge.
‘Oh Jesus, no. Don’t do this. We’ll be killed.’
Inside her helmet, she felt the sweat start on her brow. Deeper in her self-contained environment, a queasier feeling overtook her stomach as, slowly, the yeti started to slide.
‘No, please.’
Swift screamed and closed her eyes as suddenly they picked up speed and began to hurtle down the steep gully in a white vacuum of snow, with the yeti roaring enthusiastically as if they had been on some fairground ride instead of the blackest-looking ski run. As good a skier as she was, Swift would never have dared a slope like this one. She kept on screaming as they hurtled through space, buffeted one way and then the other by the falling gully. Once or twice she felt them actually take off before the yeti’s great weight drew them back onto the slope. Pressing her head to the yeti’s shoulder, she prayed for their precipitate journey to be over, but they kept moving, faster and faster, until she was certain the animal holding her had lost control and they were no longer sliding, but falling inside an avalanche of their own creation that would bury them both alive.
The next second it seemed they were rising in the air and Swift braced herself for the life-extinguishing impact she felt would surely follow. But instead they kept on moving, and when Swift opened half an eye she realized that the yeti had hit the ground running. They were just above the glacier at the head of the valley. She sighed with relief.
The yeti ran around an ice cliff that curled across the glacier, leaping from one rock to another like the most surefooted of mountain goats, narrowly avoiding ice towers and crevasses. It was as at home, as agile in this high mountain landscape as a gibbon was in the tallest of trees.
Soon they reached the ice corridor and the wall with the ladder that led up to the crevasse where they had followed Rebecca and baby Esau. She would have liked to have seen them one more time, just to hear her say ‘Oh-keh’ again. She was almost sorry when they reached Camp One and, steaming like a workhorse on a cold day, the big silverback yeti stopped and put her down. How would she ever describe this journey in her book? And if she did, would anyone believe her? That was perhaps another thing the swami was right about. It really wasn’t necessary to ask so many questions.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
The yeti waited. He looked almost as if he was waiting for a tip until she realized that he was looking at the equipment and tents that constituted Camp One. Gently he touched the top of a tent before pulling out a sleeping bag and sniffing it curiously.
Swift smiled. It was hard to connect this yeti with the one that had killed Boyd. But she could hardly reproach him for that. Boyd would have killed her with much more enthusiasm. Watching the yeti, she felt science giving way to sentiment and realized that she wanted to give him something.
Raking through her belongings in the tent she shared with Jutta, she thought of giving him a glove, a notebook, a woolly hat, but there was nothing that seemed appropriate. Then she remembered the yetis’ predilection for shiny objects and recalled that she had carried a small makeup bag in her rucksack to Camp One. Quickly finding it, she took out a folding hand mirror and handed it to him.
The yeti looked at himself for a moment and then, grunting with pleasure, tugged at his lower lip with one enormous forefinger. She wondered if he had ever seen himself before and, if he had, whether or not he recognized himself.
Gradually the yeti’s mouth split into what looked to Swift to be an enormous grin. Immediately she took off her helmet and smiled back, for she knew that what was more important was that in this enormous hominoid she recognized something of herself. She felt a tear at the corner of her eye and blinked it away. A moment passed and then, still holding the mirror, he walked quickly away.
Swift watched him for a while, hoping he would turn and look back at her. But he never did.
It was only when he had disappeared from sight that she wondered how she was going to get back through the ice field. She had quite forgotten the serac that had collapsed across the route. If only she had remembered she might have been able to have the yeti carry her to the other side. She was about to call ABC on Boyd’s radio when she saw the helicopter.