Paluchowicz spoke. ‘I could not last another night like that.’ He was voicing the thought of us all.
It was barely light, but we broke out and started on our way, Paluchowicz leading and Zaro and I in the rear. Even now I could not convince myself we would make it. Once, around noon, we were marooned for fully an hour when the track of our descent ended abruptly on a foot-wide shelf over a terrible drop. We inched our way back, climbed upwards in our old tracks and tried again in another direction. This time we succeeded, but not without great danger and frequent use of the rope and axe.
In about ten hours of gruelling toil we must have come down about five thousand feet before nightfall. Breathing became easier, morale improved, hopes rose a little again. We dragged on through another depressing, wakeful night and continued the descent the next day until we were able to see the valley below quite clearly.
In the afternoon Zaro said to me, ‘Do you notice anything peculiar about this valley?’
I looked around. ‘No,’ I answered. ‘Why?’
Zaro pointed to a long ridge thrown out from the main body of the mountain away to the west. ‘It is a similar formation to the ridge in which we found the shepherd’s cave.’
I laughed. ‘You don’t think we shall meet another shepherd and his flock?’
‘No,’ said Zaro. ‘But we might find a cave in which we can get a night’s sleep.’
We called the others over and suggested swinging away down the ridge to look for a cave. They agreed readily.
The extraordinary feature of this venture was not that, after a couple of hours search, we found a cave. But the cave was indeed a herdsman’s winter retreat. Unlike the other, it was untenanted, but there was a stack of brushwood near the entrance and a cached pile of untreated fleeces against the wall at the back, about twelve feet in from the opening. If we had needed a sign that Providence was still on our side, this was it.
Hanging from a peg in the roof was something parcelled in soft lambskin. Someone lifted it down and unwrapped it. Inside was a leg of goatmeat, partly smoked and nearly black. We were too hungry to be fastidious. We decided to get the fire going and cook it.
What a fire that was. We stoked it up until the dancing flames lit up the far corners of the cave. Watching the meat cooking, we thawed out for the first time for weeks. Without the knife we had to do some crude carving with the axe, leaving half the joint to be eaten in the morning and tearing up the rest in strips. Toothless Paluchowicz, without the knife to help him, took longer than the rest of us to eat his portion, but we all managed to take the edge off our hunger.
In this cave, for the only time since we left Siberia, we helped ourselves to another man’s belongings. We broke out fleeces from the cache and made ourselves a sleeveless surcoat each. For this I hope we may be forgiven, but our need was great for something which would keep away the mountain cold from our hard-used bodies. We slept the night through in a great communal bed of warm, smelly sheepskins, and when we awoke the day was already a couple of hours old and the fire had long since died out. Hurriedly we replaced the skins which had made the bed, ate the rest of the goatmeat cold, and left.
It was profitless to speculate any further on how near we might be to our journey’s end. Not even now were we out of the mountains. The lesser peak we set ourselves to surmount two days after the cave episode was, had we known it, the last outpost of the Himalayas, beyond which the foothills led down into Northern India. I do not remember any of the details of this last climb, but I know we pulled ourselves up the northern face for two days without attaining the height that induced altitude sickness. When we started down the other side the sun was shining and the air was startlingly clear. Far off to the west I could see snow-covered giants which made a modest hill of the eminence on which I stood. Southward the country fell away dramatically. I knew I was looking at India.
In all our wanderings through the Himalayan region we had encountered no other creatures than man, dogs and sheep. It was with quickening interest, therefore, that in the early stages of our descent of this last mountain Kolemenos drew our attention to two moving black specks against the snow about a quarter of a mile below us. We thought of animals and immediately of food, but as we set off down to investigate we had no great hopes that they would await our arrival. The contours of the mountain temporarily hid them from view as we approached nearer, but when we halted on the edge of a bluff we found they were still there, twelve feet or so below us and about a hundred yards away.
Two points struck me immediately. They were enormous and they walked on their hind legs. The picture is clear in my mind, fixed there indelibly by a solid two hours of observation. We just could not believe what we saw at first, so we stayed to watch. Somebody talked about dropping down to their level to get a close-up view.
Zaro said, ‘They look strong enough to eat us.’ We stayed where we were. We weren’t too sure of unknown creatures which refused to run away at the approach of men.
I set myself to estimating their height on the basis of my military training for artillery observation. They could not have been much less than eight feet tall. One was a few inches taller than the other, in the relation of the average man to the average woman. They were shuffling quietly round on a flattish shelf which formed part of the obvious route for us to continue our descent. We thought that if we waited long enough they would go away and leave the way clear for us. It was obvious they had seen us, and it was equally apparent they had no fear of us.
The American said that eventually he was sure we should see them drop on all fours like bears. But they never did.
Their faces I could not see in detail, but the heads were squarish and the ears must lie close to the skull because there was no projection from the silhouette against the snow. The shoulders sloped sharply down to a powerful chest. The arms were long and the wrists reached the level of the knees. Seen in profile, the back of the head was a straight line from the crown into the shoulders — ‘like a damned Prussian’, as Paluchowicz put it.
We decided unanimously that we were examining a type of creature of which we had no previous experience in the wild, in zoos or in literature. It would have been easy to have seen them waddle off at a distance and dismissed them as either bear or big ape of the orang-outang species. At close range they defied facile description. There was something both of the bear and the ape about their general shape but they could not be mistaken for either. The colour was a rusty kind of brown. They appeared to be covered by two distinct kinds of hair — the reddish hair which gave them their characteristic colour forming a tight, close fur against the body, mingling with which were long, loose, straight hairs, hanging downwards, which had a slight greyish tinge as the light caught them.
Dangling our feet over the edge of the rock, we kept them closely under observation for about an hour. They were doing nothing but move around slowly together, occasionally stopping to look around them like people admiring a view. Their heads turned towards us now and again, but their interest in us seemed to be of the slightest.
Then Zaro stood up. ‘We can’t wait all day for them to make up their minds to move. I am going to shift them.’
He went off into a pantomime of arm waving, Red Indian war dancing, bawling and shrieking. The things did not even turn. Zaro scratched around and came up with half-a-dozen pieces of ice about a quarter-inch thick. One after another he pitched them down towards the pair, but they skimmed erratically and lost direction. One missile kicked up a little powder of snow about twenty yards from them, but if they saw it they gave no sign. Zaro sat down again, panting.