Soot

by Dan Vyleta

  Thinking: We wear our accents like spoken marks of caste.

  [ 2 ]

  And everywhere they go—on the roads with their English way signs; in the gestures of ablution the casteless perform when bursting into Smoke, marrying Hindu supplication with the sign of the cross; in abject villages that have not seen an English face in years but fly a bleached Company banner over the local revenue collector’s hut—Empire is there: squatting on the land like one of those long-limbed insects that spends its life walking the surface of a vast and murky pond, spread-legged, busy, ignorant of the rich life gathering beneath its feet. It carries guns and money, but above all it is armed with an idea: that of good and evil, high and low, as it finds it written on the skin, both in complexion and in Smoke. Smoke came to India only a few years after the British; Empire and Smoke are fused at the hip. What then is Empire? A mercantile scheme hiding behind a messianic whisper.

  The rule of starched shirts.

  As they pass through yet another village and are beseeched by beggars and petitioners, are greeted by landowners and sized up by sullen youths, Thomas formulates the thought out loud.

  Singh resists it.

  “Starched shirts? Starched kurtas, starched dhotis,” he intones grimly and somewhat didactically, as though quoting from a book. “We collaborated with the British: our Walīs and maharajas did, our priests and merchants, the rich and the educated. Smoke and Empire did for them what it did for your own rulers: confirm them in their specialness.” He pauses, places an accusatory finger on his own chest. “As it did for myself.”

  Thomas lets him savour his moment of self-denunciation. He is all too familiar with its pain, its secret pleasure.

  “Jagat,” he says at last, using for the first time this intimate form of address. “Please be careful with your anger. It will swallow you up.”

  Singh waggles his head in ironic agreement. “Yessir. Say—are you some kind of expert on the subject?”

  The smile they share is like a secret pact.

  [ 3 ]

  Two days later the fields and villages stop and they enter a heavily forested area, half jungle, half swamp. The paths grow smaller and smaller until they are forced to dismount and leave their bicycles behind. Singh keeps consulting one of the maps he has brought. On occasion he will stop and listen, raising his hand in warning.

  “What is it? Border guards?”

  “Tiger. These jungles are famous for them.”

  “You are having me on.” When Singh does not reply, Thomas adds: “How far to the border?”

  “We crossed some hours ago. Welcome to Nepal, Sahib.”

  “I thought Nepal meant mountains.”

  “Yes, mountains. First jungle, then hills, then at last…Do you know what a yak is, Thomas-ji? Or a thar?”

  “No.”

  “How about a yeti?”

  “No.”

  “Ah, what wonders you shall see, Sahib! Unless you get eaten by a tiger first, of course.”

  [ 4 ]

  The “hills” turn out to be steep, overgrown cliffs that rise, so Singh tells him, to close to six thousand feet. Despite this, foliage covers them all the way to the top. Here and there, the local peasants have contrived to hew terraced rice fields into the terrain. Singh charges up the slope as though he is walking in the plain. Thomas huffs and puffs behind.

  When they meet the first locals, Singh relates to them the agreed-upon story. He and the sahib are part of the expedition that passed through a few weeks previously. The men are traders and speak passable Hindi as well as their caste tongue. They have heard of the white men’s trek into the mountains and of the special permission they hold from the king. It does not occur to them to ask for paperwork—who can say whether they can read, and if so in what languages?—and rather than sending for the nearest military garrison, they instead confirm Singh’s map, taking comfort in the level of detail the strangers possess about the terrain and about the expedition they are chasing. They also agree to reprovision them, albeit at a price that Singh haggles over for a good hour.

  “You are their first white man,” he tells Thomas, amused. “And already they know it is their sacred duty to rip you off.”

  [ 5 ]

  A few days later they finally catch sight of the mountains. The weather has been overcast, the air thick and hazy. But that morning they wake to brilliant sunshine, and when, at midday, they claim the next hilltop, there they are, walling off the horizon.

  The sight stops Thomas in his tracks; silences him, his eyes on the rock face, the snowcapped peaks, yoking earth to sky. The wind is blowing ice off the tops, unfurling it in thin, long banners. Thomas turns his head east and west but finds no gap in the jagged wall. The whole world ends here. He tries to speak but finds his mouth is dry. Awe: the sensation of standing face-to-face with divinity. The Smoke that seeps out of him is a colour he has never seen before.

  When he can speak again, he asks, “Which one is ours?”

  “That one, over there.”

  Singh has to guide Thomas’s outstretched finger with his own, direct his line of sight.

  “Are you sure? It does not seem so very big. This one’s bigger.”

  “That’s because it’s closer to us,” Singh replies, a little scornful, and adds, as though the information will help Thomas assemble a sense of scale, “The snowline is at sixteen and a half thousand feet. That’s where the real climbing starts.”

  As they eat their lunch, sitting shoulder to shoulder, facing the mountains, Singh tells the last of his long story. He tells of Hounslow’s death and Percy’s betrayal, of his flight to the Punjabi village and his growing hatred for the Empire—but his face is full of laughter, his eyes wet not with hate but with joy.

  “What is it?” Thomas asks, unnerved.

  “Nothing. I’m happy. I’m home.”

  And, mechanically, he, the revolutionary Marxist, performs the gesture of ablution as a jet of blue Smoke squirts from his open collar, placing raw yearning in that “home.”

  [ 6 ]

  Soon it is as though Thomas is walking inside Singh’s tale. It is all just as he has described. There—bounding the horizon—are the mountains, swallowing the morning and afternoon sun. Here is that deep canyon cut by the glacial river below, the rope bridges that bind the two cliffsides at a preposterous height. They pass through a series of squalid villages; are beset by local children who will follow them for hours at a time. When they cross the gorge on one of the bridges, walking gingerly and holding on to the guide rope for dear life, the children run after them laughing, showering them with greetings and questions, with laughter and pine cones, setting the bridge swinging from side to side.

  It is only when Thomas and his guide veer onto the goat pass that is to take them to the hidden valley that the children finally melt away. They see their first thar, standing high on a wall that seems too sheer to offer footing, chewing some shrub and watching them from afar. As they near the high point of the pass—trudging through snow for the first time in their travels—Thomas becomes aware of a weakness inside him, a dizziness and disorientation. His breath is a whistle in his lungs. His legs are made of lead.

  “The altitude,” Singh explains. “It has slipped into your blood.”

  “Does one die from it?” Thomas asks, only half jesting.

  “Some grow accustomed. Some do not.” Singh shrugs as though the price asked by the mountains is not for him to haggle over. “Come now, carry on. This is not a good place to rest.”

  [ 7 ]

  They make it over the pass and into a lifeless gorge filled only with rock and dust. The mountains crowd around them now; the high valley they are seeking must be near. They rest for a day, making sure to remain in the shadow of rocks in case the expedition has posted sentries. By now, they have found their first traces of
the men who came before: food tins; the carcasses of two butchered thars; an empty cannister topped by a valve that provides no clue as to what it once contained. The words COOPER EXPEDITIONS are stencilled on its base.

  The two men pass the time dozing, sharing memories: of family life, of youth. The one thing they don’t address is what awaits them in the valley—what it is they came here to do. The landscape dwarfs them, leeches significance out of their plans and resolutions. It would be easy to acquiesce in obliteration. Lammergeier circle high above. The mountain Buddhists, Singh has told him, cut their dead to pieces and feed them to the birds. Thomas entertains the thought until he dozes off and sees himself with a knife bent over Charlie. Peeling back that freckled face. It jolts him to his feet.

  “Let’s go,” he wakes Singh. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “The moon’s out. We can see just fine. And won’t be visible ourselves.”

  It is only when they are back on the trail that Thomas notices his dizziness has passed.

  [ 8 ]

  The expedition camp is placed at the far end of the plateau, near the glacier’s base. They see it first by its own lights: petroleum lamps blinking on in tents, turning them into lanterns. The moon is gone, but dawn is slowly creeping into the valley. For now the mountains are a starless darkness reaching high into the sky. When the first light comes, it flows in weak and sickly around this wall of mountains. It is all just as Singh has described it: here, the wide, barren plain dotted by waterholes and rocks; there, the great cirque of mountains, impossible in their magnitude. Up close, their relative scale can at last be discerned. One towers above all others: Percy’s mountain; now theirs. The glacial tongue pours down its face like a frozen river. In the weak morning light, its white is dull, impenetrable; the colour of blindness. Down in the valley, churned earth marks the glacier’s end. Beyond it stands a field of tents. Thomas counts more than two dozen. He wonders how many men share each tent.

  “Did the villagers say how many porters the sahibs hired?”

  “ ‘Many, many.’ They hired mountain people, mostly; they sent for them from up in the north. They and the hill men don’t really talk.”

  “They must be paying them well if they are here despite the mountain’s ‘curse.’ What are those animals over there that look like woolly cows?”

  “I told you that you would see yaks. They must have used them for transport.”

  “This many people need a lot of food. They must have a team of hunters that head back into the gorge periodically.”

  “Then we aren’t safe where we are.” Singh studies the terrain. “Over there, between those rocks. We will be hard to see there.”

  They move towards the spot Singh has indicated. Its twin boulders hide them from two sides but also make it hard for them to observe the camp. Thomas is about to suggest they move closer when Singh produces a pair of binoculars. He helps Thomas clamber to the top of the larger of the two boulders, then shoots up effortlessly himself. There they lie flat on their stomachs, taking it in turns to study the expedition camp through the binoculars.

  “I count seven, no, eight Englishmen. And some thirty porters. And look, Singh, there are people on the mountain—they have built a smaller camp higher up. There’s a rope and pulley system connecting the two.”

  “It’s not a climbing party. It’s an army. Laying siege. Hewing a bloody staircase into the mountain.” Singh seems to think this is unsporting.

  “Can you see where they are climbing? Are they here for the summit?”

  “Hard to say. They have put in fixed ropes in the difficult places, and ladders. And I think that’s a third camp, over there. And look, beneath that sickle ridge—they have marked something with a flag. A crevasse, maybe.”

  Thomas lets his naked eye roam up the mountainside and finds the great sickle shape Singh is indicating. “How high is that?”

  “Hard to say from here. Twenty-one, twenty-two thousand feet? Maybe more.”

  The numbers seem impossible. “Has anyone ever climbed that high?”

  Singh waggles his head. “Climb, yes. But not work. I think they have some sort of tool up there. I can see the blink of something made of metal—something substantial. Imagine carrying that up! And there are men working there now—they must have slept on the mountain. Ah, they are heading down.”

  [ 9 ]

  In the course of the day it is becoming increasingly obvious that the men who slept beneath the sickle ridge are not only coming down but are carrying something, something important. Whatever it is, it is not particularly large—the size of an adult torso perhaps—and has been wrapped into some kind of sheeting, before being strapped with ropes to a climber’s back. Climbers from the lower camp struggle up to meet the man thus burdened and take the parcel off him. Two or three times they load it onto a sort of sled—something like a wheelbarrow without wheels—and lower it on a rope down a particularly steep passage. The climbers are struggling, taking frequent breaks; one man has lain down in the snow and is not getting up.

  And still their precious treasure is threading its way down the mountain. Soon, it is in reach of the first of the pulley systems set up between the various camps. Through the binoculars Thomas can see the man receiving the wrapped parcel quite clearly. Bundled into layers of scarfs and hats though he is, there can be no doubt that he is an Englishman. It’s in the quality of his movements; in his bulky boots and the many layers of chequered tweed; in the flash of blond beard that emerges when he pulls aside his scarf to shout something. When his companions squat to rest, he alone sits on his rump. One has to go halfway around the world to learn that something as natural as the act of sitting is not natural at all but bred into us from childhood. Thomas learned it aboard a long procession of third-class train carriages on his way up the subcontinent, pretending to be an English pauper: he sat in the filth while everyone else squatted on their haunches, ringing him, watching his cowled and painted face, tasting his Smoke.

  Midday—the binoculars still clutched to his face—Thomas drifts off into a kind of half sleep. It’s the altitude perhaps, or the memory of the long journey from Pondicherry across much of Hindustan; that half-pleasant, half-panicked feeling of being lost, adrift, unknown and unknowing. There are dreams that are like that, but dreams are not dusty; do not humiliate you with diarrhoea; nor speak at you in half a dozen different tongues. In dreams, old loved ones come to visit you, along with old enemies. In dreams you are never that alone.

  When Thomas comes to the sun is dipping in the west. His first sensation is one of brightness; the haze has lifted, and light has filled the valley from behind. The binoculars are still in his fist and a mighty wind is roaring down the mountains. Singh is standing next to him, high up on the rock.

  It’s this last fact that fully shocks Thomas awake. He looks up, sees Singh leaning hard into the wind. His scarf has unfurled and flies out behind him like a flag, or a leash against which he strains. Thomas shouts at him, cursing his incaution, worried that they will be spotted with him standing thus exposed. Then Thomas catches sight of what brought Singh to his feet. A moment later, he, too, stands up and leans his weight into the wind.

  Ahead, the mountain has transformed under the angle of the sun. Its soft outlines have been given lineament and focus, its ridges and cracks been chiselled in by light and shade; the sickle ridge high on its flank freshly scored and festooned in boils of ice. The ice itself has grown translucent and glows in shades of green and blue.

  Lower down, the bulk of the glacier, too, is soaking up the sun. Where before it was uniform and dull, a blank within the folds of rock, it now flows luminous and contoured, broken into waves and jagged shards at its peripheries and bulging into convex smoothness at the centre like a single drop of water of astounding depth.

  But within thi
s smoothness, suspended in the centre of this depth, the sun finds something else: a dark web of roots threading the whole glacier. It is a capillary system drawn by a fine-nibbed pen, forked and re-forked a thousand times near the glacier’s rounded base, but fusing and thickening on its journey upwards towards the narrow of the glacier’s neck, until its myriad branches resolve themselves into a single vein of black that—at the foot of that sickle ridge—pours itself past the smooth lip of a crevasse, down into the ice and rock.

  It is like an interior organ, Thomas thinks, a heart or a lung, threaded in veins, inked in by cancer, and at once vows never to eat offal again. He listens for it but cannot hear the mountain’s heartbeat, the taking in of its breath. The locals warned Singh, all those years ago. The mountain is sick: down in its womb.

  He had not considered that it might be giving birth.

  Thomas shakes off the thought and forces himself back into a crouch, then reaches up and tugs Singh down beside him. The binoculars are back on his eyes. It seems they have not been noticed. The whole camp is on their feet, facing the glacier; in dread, not in prayer. The nameless thing they hauled down the mountain must have reached them by now, but Thomas can see no sign of cheer or celebration. An eerie silence reigns: the wind would carry any voices but only carries its own rage.

  Then the sun slips behind the western peaks and dullness returns to the valley. The men in the camp return to their chores. Dinner is being cooked.

  “Where are you going?” Singh asks, when he sees Thomas slide down the rock and prepare to set off.

  “There—into the camp. It’ll be dark soon. A good time to snoop around.”

  “That’s madness. We must be patient. Observe from afar.”

  “Haven’t you heard, Mr. Singh? Patience is not my strong suit.” Thomas waits until Singh has slid down next to him before he resumes. “They brought something down that mountain, Jagat. I need to know what it is.”