by Helen Dewitt
When he got to the top he could hardly get over the edge. His arms had been stretched up for ten hours and the muscles had set. When he bent one wrist over the edge a terrible cramp seized the whole arm, so that for a second he hung by one hand and the tips of two boots; blackness covered his eyes and he might have fallen back through thousands of feet of empty air. Something saved him. He saw a root by his left hand and grasped it, and though he groaned with pain he pulled himself up over the edge, and he lay on the grass and looked at the sky.
After a while he heard a little sound & still looking up he found he was looking into the face of the child. It was the child he had spoken to the day before. Previously he had thought that the child had been carried away by accident. Now he thought: But perhaps he meant to do it. He saw the dragon shooting up into the air; perhaps the child had imagined being carried into the air away from its tormentors. Now its face was scratched and there was a cut on one arm. HC said something in Uzbek and then in Chinese, but the child did not seem to understand.
After a while he sat up, & the child flinched away. HC was in excruciating pain, but he said to himself Well it’s not for long, and he looked out over the edge.
The valley floor was now concealed again by the thick white mist which must have gathered while he climbed. Above the cloud the mountains rose like islands, and on the nearer ones he could see the different things that grew there. On one there was only bamboo—there is nothing like bamboo for spreading—and the grove was bent almost parallel to the ground from the strong steady wind. The fronds of it were ruffled like feathers, they streamed out in the wind. On another were tortured trees, their hard trunks must have fought harder against the wind before they bent, they consisted of the bare tormented trunks and a few leaves. The light was clear and golden—everything had the clarity and beauty of things seen underwater, so that he could see the individual leaves of the bamboo, the tiny birds, the diaphanous wings of an insect. On the far horizon was a big golden cloud, and a series of smaller clouds were being carried even as he watched steadily out of sight.
I said: So what had happened? Was he rescued? Did he climb back down again?
Of course he didn’t climb back down again, Sibylla said impatiently. It was bad enough going up alone; how could he possibly go back down with the child? It would have been ridiculous to go to all that trouble and go back WITHOUT the child.
Well he must have got down somehow, I said.
Of course he GOT down, said Sibylla.
Well he can’t have flown himself away on a kite, I said.
Of course he didn’t fly himself on a kite, said Sibylla. I wish you would think about this logically, Ludo.
He looked out to the west. The setting sun gleamed on yellow sand. The snowy peaks of a distant mountain range were as pale as the moon by day. The whole of Tibet lay between him and Xinjiang.
Now among the many O-levels HC had taken at 12 was one in physics. The result was that he knew something about aerodynamics. His first idea had been to make a parachute—but he had heard terrible stories from his father, who had been in the RAF, about parachutes failing to deploy. Then he had thought of taking dismantled kites to reassemble as a glider—but if he’d brought anything with him that could be used for stiff wings the wind would have blown him off the rock.
Then he had had an idea. Anything will have lift if its front edge is higher than its back, and it will have more if the top surface area is greater than the bottom. His idea was that if you made a pair of silk wings open at the front and cut the bottom shorter than the top the air rushing in would inflate them and the resultant taut surface would produce lift. He had had the woman sew in ribs like those on the wings of a plane, and attach ropes for a sort of harness, and this was what he had brought in his backpack.
He had thought only that he could bring the child down. Now he thought: If no one saw us leave no one would know we had not come down.
He thought: If they would not rescue the child why should they come for me?
He thought that if they flew over the mist it would be a long time before anyone knew they had gone.
Now he unpacked the wings and assembled the harness. The child stood watching him warily; it was backing toward a thicket of bamboo on top of the rock. He stepped into the harness and beckoned but the child refused to come. He was not entirely sure himself that the contraption would work, but he could not test it first—he knew he would not be able to climb up again.
Meanwhile the wind was pulling at the wings, and one gust almost pulled him off his feet; he had to grab a tree to keep from being blown away. Another gust of wind tore at him and nearly swept him off the rock. When it died down he made a sudden rush for the child; it turned and ran, and tripped, and he seized it by the foot. And now a third gust of wind snatched at him, sharper than the first two, and he had only one hand free. He was pulled loose from the tree; he could feel himself being pulled toward the cliff. Quickly he seized the child’s other foot; ignoring its howls he pulled it toward him and gripped it tightly in his arms—and no sooner had he done so than the wind filled the wings and they were carried off into the air.
At once they were carried high, high above even those pinnacles of rocks which he had seen flaming the day before. A fierce wind bore them along so impetuously he was afraid it would tear the wings; up it swooped and down it dropped, and it swept them at last out of that valley and miles and miles to the west until at last it did drop him in a bare rocky plain. There was no sand, but this was what had gleamed yellow on the horizon.
There was light in the upper air, but as soon as he reached the ground the light was gone. The sun was a bloody ball on the horizon. While he was still unfastening the harness it dropped out of sight.
HC was now in a much worse position than he had been at the top of the cliff. There was no water here; before the light had gone he had seen only the endless rocky plain stretching in all directions, with no sign of human habitation. It was bitterly cold, and there was nothing to burn. But now he had no way to a quick death—both might well die slowly of cold or thirst.
But even though he might now die a painful death he could not stop laughing. The silk wings lay crumpled at his feet, and the child was whimpering on his back, and he kept laughing and exclaiming: It worked! It bloody worked! Christ Almighty, it bloody worked!
He realised that he could not lie down to sleep or he would freeze to death. So he put the child on his back and he set out to walk through the night.
HC was 6′4″ and when he walked fast he covered ground. By morning he reckoned he must have walked a good 60 miles. And when the sun came up he saw a railroad track. Even though he was cold and hungry he was still laughing. When he turned to look back the way he had come he could not even see the valley, and he said again It bloody worked!
He walked by the track all day, and in late afternoon a train came. It did not stop when he waved, but it was going so slowly that he was able to jump on the last car, and it did not stop to throw him off.
The train did not stop at the next village, but he jumped off again to buy food. They ate, and then he put the child on his back again and followed the track. The next train was going too fast, but he jumped on the one after that. He kept expecting to be stopped but he thought that he would just keep going until he was stopped.
He rode trains for five days, and on the morning of the sixth day he saw the Flaming Mountains of Gaochang.
HC was now in the heart of Xinjiang, Mongolia to the east Kazakhstan & Kyrgyzstan to the west, but he did not know which way to go.
He left the train close to the end of the line and set off on foot. He walked north, keeping his options open, and now he had another piece of luck. He came to a village, and it seemed to him that the people there looked a little like the child he had rescued.
At first he thought he might find a home for the child, but people looked at the child and shook their heads, & though he could barely understand the local dialect he thought he was
being told that it came from the west.
There were no maps to be had. He did not have enough to buy a pack animal. So they set out on foot.
They crossed the border without being stopped, and together they went through increasingly harsh terrain.
They went very slowly for the child could not travel fast.
After many months they came out onto a plain where horses were grazing. In the distance some kind of encampment could be seen. On they went, both half-dead.
They came to the encampment but the men were gone. The women were preparing meals or repairing clothes. The man and the boy came to a halt in the centre of the tents and gradually all fell silent.
Then at the far end a woman looked up. Her black hair was as rough as a pony’s; she had the broad features of a true Mongolian. She gazed intently at the boy and at last came forward. The boy walked into her arms and began to cry and she too cried. Then she stood back and hit the boy on the side of the head and shouted and cried again. The boy lay in the dirt. HC made some gesture. The woman looked at him dumbly.
HC gestured at the boy’s torn feet and the woman looked at him dumbly. He gestured from himself to a pot of food and she spat at his feet.
At last one of the other women offered HC some food. None spoke while he ate and through the long afternoon there was complete silence in the encampment.
The men returned from hunting and still no one spoke, and HC at last slept in some straw by the horses and no one spoke either to protest or to offer him hospitality, and the boy slept with him.
He stayed for eight years. For five years no one spoke to him, and if they spoke to each other and he approached they fell silent, but in his fifth year he had a terrible disappointment.
HC had been thinking for some reason of RD, who had based his method of Greek pronunciation on the authoritative work on the subject, W. S. Allen’s Vox Graeca. RD, being largely self-taught, had always made a point of pronouncing Greek with the pitch accents, with the result that no one could ever understand a word he said. Thinking of RD, HC realised suddenly after five years with the tribe that their language was in fact Indo-European, but Indo-European filtered through a Chinese system of pitch accents to the point where it sounded like nothing he knew. He was now able to recognise a few words. It was a terrible anticlimax after all the languages he had learned, but he stayed another three years and was befriended at last and mastered it.
But then he was forced to leave.
The tribe moved around as nomads do, and it had moved to an area which was disputed between the Soviet Union and China. They were close to a village which had been punished severely by both sides for not implementing government policy and thus showing where its allegiance lay. One day a plane crashed in the desert near the encampment; the survivors were arrested as spies to forestall reprisals from above. The spies were thrown into jail and beaten to give a good impression.
HC knew he had to do something. He suspected the prisoners knew no Chinese, so he went to the jail to reason with the authorities. When he got into town he was told to come back the next day. When he got back to the encampment he found that the tribe had disappeared.
The jail was badly built and badly guarded. HC broke into it and freed the prisoners. He decided that the best plan was to march south and make their way into India. It had been ten years since he had heard a European language spoken, and he found it almost unbearable to articulate the old words with his tongue, but it had to be done.
Sibylla put her head on her hand. She seemed tired of the words in her own mouth. At last she went on.
The march south was very arduous, and three of the captives died en route. The survivors walked at last into the British consulate in Peshawar and demanded repatriation. HC was almost turned away: he had no passport, of course, and no proof of identification, and as he had been missing for more than seven years he was officially dead. Luckily for HC, however, it turned out that a man he had beaten in various prize examinations was now the British consul in Bombay. A trunk call was put through, and HC was able to recite from memory his translation into Greek verse of Wee sleekit cow’rin’ tim’rous beastie, and the man at the other end said there was only one man in the world who could do that. This was not strictly true, since RD could probably have done it, but HC was not about to argue.
He returned to a civilisation which in the interim had known John Travolta and the Bee Gees and he published a book in which he spoke of the silence of the lost tribe. Then people demonstrated that he could not have been where he said he had been and people who had travelled in China said that it was not like that at all and people who had climbed those strange mountains said they were in some completely different part of the country and anyway he could not have climbed one in ten hours the way he had said. Others argued that a tiny peasant village would not have had the quantities of silk he claimed to have requisitioned, and would not have had the battered old Singer sewing machine he had claimed was used, & would have had no use for hard currency even if it had. Others said kiteflying had been banned as a bourgeois practice by the Red Guard. Then HC laughed scornfully and said he certainly did not propose the lost tribe to be a subject of a documentary but if he should ever decide this was a suitable fate for it he would at once publish an accurate itinerary of his travels to facilitate location of that wandering people. Then of course there was a great hue and cry and people tried to investigate where he had really been for the public had a right to know, but no one was able to discover anything apart from the fact that he had walked into the consulate in Peshawar.
That book said Sibylla had come out in 1982 and HC had done this and that for a while. She said that she had met him at an Oxford party in the Fraenkel Room in Corpus Christi College. Skarp-Hedin had been talking to Robin Nisbet and so Sibylla had talked for a time to HC. I said Skarp-Hedin? and Sib said One of my boyfriends his real name did not do justice to his pale ill-starred look. She said that HC had spent years with the tribe though they had offered no encouragement to stay and even after his first breakthrough he could understand little or nothing.
Then one day everything had changed. They had he said a barbarous initiation ceremony which he would not describe. Afterwards many of the boys required prolonged nursing. One day as he lurked behind a tent he heard one of the initiates say something to his nurse, and then when she laughed correct himself. He had understood everything in a flash. It was the most wonderful thing he’d ever come across. There was an elaborate system of case-endings he said which was used only by women—the thing was quite extraordinary, as if you had at once for example a group of people speaking Arabic as it is written and another group speaking it as it is spoken. Amazing! And it was the same for moods and tenses. There was an indicative, past present and future, and an imperative, and these were used only by men—and then there were what he would call by analogy the subjunctive and the optative, and these were used only by women. It was very confusing, he said, for when presently they began to speak to him at last he would find that if he asked a question of a man, no matter how slim or even non-existent the knowledge might be on which an answer might be given, it would always be given as a statement of fact—whereas you might ask a woman whether it was raining outside and she would commit herself only to saying that it might be so. He said that when he worked it out he lay flat on his back in the grass and laughed till he cried.
Now the Fraenkel Room at this time said Sib had a long table covered with a mauve corded cloth like a cheap Sears bedspread, and a black and white photo of Fraenkel on the wall.
HC took one look at the picture and another at the people there and he said Oh my God and walked out.
That is, said Sib, he said Oh my God let’s get out of here, and though she knew Skarp-Hedin would complain that she did not love him she had said Yes let’s get out and they had both walked out.
HC had gone off again she said and now he was back. Sibylla said of HC that he could go for months without human contact, and if he made
contact the first thing he wanted to know was how his interlocutor handled sequence of tenses, and the second was whether he used a subjunctive.
I said: What happened to RD?
Sibylla said: Oh he got a job on one of the dictionaries. You can see him around the Bodleian.
I said: Was he at the seminar?
She said: Oh he goes to all the seminars.
I said: Did they say anything?
She said: Well, RD asked the speaker a question about Phrynichus.
I said: Did they say anything to each OTHER?
She said: Of course they didn’t say anything to each other. As soon as HC saw who was there he said Oh my God let’s get out of here.
I said: Did you play chess?
She said: No, we didn’t play chess.
I thought about this for a while and I said: What’s the youngest anyone has ever gone to Oxford? Sibylla said she didn’t know, in the Middle Ages it was more like a boarding school & she thought a lot of boys would be sent there at 12 or so. She thought a girl had gone to read mathematics at the age of 10 a few years ago.
I said: 10!
She said: I think she’d been taught by her father, who was a mathematician.
If I had had a mathematician for a father I could probably have beaten the record.
I said: Well what’s the youngest anyone ever did classics?
Sib said she didn’t know.
I said: Younger than 11?
It seems unlikely, said Sib, but we can only surmise.
I said: Do you think I could go?
Sib said: Well you probably could but how would you ever learn quantum mechanics?
I said: But if I got in at 11 people would say all my life that I got in at 11!
Sib said: They certainly would. She said: Or I could give you a piece of paper certifying that you read Sugata Sanshiro in the original Japanese at the age of 6 and all your life people would say you read Sugata Sanshiro in Japanese at the age of 6.