Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  That star dimmed. She was not a very good climber, and her two ascents of the Matterhorn via the Hornli ridge had stretched her nerve and her strength to a point where the attainment of the summit had brought only new and greater fears of the descent.

  ‘It’s clearing,’ her father said and paused to relight his pipe. He was a man of habit, and his pipe always needed attention at this point, where the footpath to Cader Brith left the main carriage road. A moment later they set off in single file across the moorland. Twenty paces farther on, Gerry, in the rear, stopped and cried: ‘Wait! Listen!’ She heard the crunch of wheels and the rapid clip-clop of hoofs on the main road, and then round a curve of rock came a trap, the two horses going at a hand canter. There were three men in it, two on the driver’s seat and one perched on a stack of luggage behind.

  ‘It’s Jones the station trap,’ Gerry cried. ‘And Peter! Peter’s got the ribbons. Hey! Stop, stop!’ He ran at breakneck speed across the broken ground, stumbling on heather roots and sliding over damp stones, until he reached the road. The rest followed him more slowly. The trap drew to a stand, and the occupants jumped down.

  ‘My, but you are the gentleman to drive the horseflesh,’ Jones muttered, standing at the horses’ heads. ‘Look, here is Mr Fenton himself, and the young ladies and all.’

  Adam Khan stood by, looking spruce and calm, while Gerry pumped Peter’s arm. Peter’s black hair was dishevelled, and beads of mist made his face shine as though he had just come out of the sea. ‘We caught an earlier train, sir,’ he said cheerfully.

  Her father said: ‘We weren’t expecting you till the evening, but Mrs Fenton’s down at the house and Jones knows the way. Go on down and get settled in.’

  ‘Indeed, yes, Mr Fenton, but I’ll drive, myself, down the hill, young gentleman.’

  ‘Why don’t you come along with us?’ Gerry cried eagerly. ‘Let Jones take the luggage down. Uncle G. and I are going to do the South Crack. We’ve got enough lunch for Peter and Adam, haven’t we?’

  ‘Oh, yes’ Peggy said. ‘Tom’s bringing it up on the pony, but Bertha always sends out enough for ten people.’

  ‘Well, what do you say?’ Gerry was like a big golden retriever begging to be taken for a walk.

  Adam Khan said: ‘Just as you wish, Peter.’

  Peter Savage was glancing down at his thin shoes. Finally, ‘All right,’ he said.

  Peggy said: ‘Good!’ Emily said nothing.

  So they left Jones the trap to take the luggage on down to Llyn Gared, and again set off across the moor. Peggy had cut in just ahead of Emily and behind Peter Savage, who walked behind Gerry. Adam Khan was behind Emily’s father, who was leading, and that left her at the back.

  Daddy was trying to talk to Adam Khan. He’d better be careful. What did he know of India? What did any of them know?--except Peter Savage, presumably. The less Gerry knew, or came to learn, the better she’d be pleased.

  Peggy was pointing things out to Peter’s back, naming for his benefit each of the mountain shapes that now climbed slowly out of the mist ahead, and the headlands and the sea behind. Peter answered briefly or not at all, for he was slipping and stumbling on the wet stones as he tried to keep up with the sharp pace set by Emily’s father in front. She thought, looking at the backs of Peter’s ears, that he would break his leg rather than ask for the pace to be slowed, that he was furious with himself because he could not keep his balance. Her father usually went at a slow, all-day pace. She wondered if he was going so fast on purpose, to vent some of his distaste for Mr Savage, or his jealousy of him. Or perhaps to show Gerry that Peter Savage wasn’t a natural-born genius at everything. She flushed lightly--that would have been her own idea; but it wasn’t Daddy’s or Gerry’s.

  ‘A little slower, Uncle G.,’ Peggy called. ‘Peter doesn’t have any nails in his shoes.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ Peter said shortly, and Emily saw him look briefly at Peggy; but her father apologized and they went on at a more reasonable pace until they reached the cirque below the east face of Cader Brith. It was twelve o’clock, and the mist had risen from the crest. The sun shone athwart the mountain, forcing the crags and promontories into sharp relief against the purple shadows in the gulfs and crevices.

  ‘The sun will be off it by three,’ Gerry said thoughtfully. ‘Do you think it’ll have dried out enough for us to start after lunch?’

  ‘I think so,’ her father said. ‘There’s Cader Brith for you, Savage. There are eleven ways up this face. According to these modern gradings, five are easy, two moderately difficult, three difficult, and one very difficult. Look, there’s the Spire route...’ He had sat down on a rock, the three young men round him, and was off on his favourite subject--after the Matterhorn--the beauties of Cader Brith.

  The arrival of Tom with the lunch went almost unnoticed, and Emily and Peggy unpacked it and spread it out. ‘Lunch, Daddy!’ Emily called at last, and then they gathered round and began to eat.

  She found that Adam Khan had placed himself next to her. Peggy, Gerry, and her father were taking turns in explaining more about the mountains to Peter Savage and snatching mouthfuls of food between sentences. Tom ate by himself a little distance off, listening to the mountain talk and occasionally throwing in a piece of local lore. She and the Indian might have been on Mars.

  After a long silence she said, smiling: ‘Can you see the Himalaya from Rudwal? I found it on the map.’

  Adam Khan said: ‘Wonderful! Yes, we can see the snows all the year round.’

  She said: ‘How beautiful! And when you come down from King’s next year you’ll go and live there all your life? Just like Gerry going to Wilcot?’

  ‘Not quite. As a matter of fact, my father is going to be quite angry with me. He is old-fashioned, but he did convince himself that the I.C.S. was the best thing for me, and for the family. He had me educated at the Prince’s School, and then sent me to Cambridge. I was to take the examination next year. My tutor thought I would stand a good chance.’

  ‘There’s a lot of competition, though, isn’t there? Daddy said so. He wondered how Mr Savage--Peter--could be quite so sure he was going to get in.’

  Adam said: ‘Oh, there is no doubt of that--but I have decided not to sit for the exam, at all. You see, I had hoped to get the Rudwal district, though it was very unlikely they would post me there, since it is my home. But Peter wants to go there and I realized that I could do more by helping him in Rudwal than by becoming a D.C. myself in some other place. Peter and I have talked it over a lot since May Week. But, as I said, I fear my father will not be pleased. He will not give me much responsibility for the estate, so I shall be hanging about.’ He shrugged with a suddenly very un-English gesture of the hands.

  They glanced over at the other group: her father was pointing, Gerry explaining rapidly, Peter Savage standing, silent, staring up at the jagged rocks.

  Adam said: ‘I think he was wrong to give up cricket. A Blue would do him more good in the I.C.S. than a First. That is the English custom--ours too. Our people remember the champions at kabaddi, and the great hunters and wrestlers, when they have forgotten the subadars and lieutenant-governors.’ Now they were both staring at Peter Savage’s back--as though hypnotized, she thought angrily. Adam said: ‘It is an exciting thing to be a friend of Peter’s. But a little frightening, too, sometimes, Miss Fenton. We have a proverb: “When the lightning plays about a man’s head, stay close--that the rain may also fall on you.” The proverb doesn’t say anything about being struck by the lightning.’

  For a time they ate in silence. Then Adam said in a low voice: ‘My father thinks I am a weakling because I talk with the cultivators on our land, and argue, instead of telling them what to do. But I think that I too have a destiny--no, that is a bad word--a fate, Miss Fenton, just as Peter knows he has. He knows what must be done, and he says: “Do it,” and the people do it. But if we Indians are to grow, to fit ourselves into this modern world, the people must know why they do it, and they mu
st agree that it is good, and understand. I am an Indian--I keep telling you, do I not? but it is very important. When Peter says: “Do this,” I can make the people understand, so Peter’s work will be done properly. Later, many years later, it can be the other way round, so that the people will say: “Do this,” and men like Peter will do it--but that will not be in my time, I think, or perhaps in my son’s.’

  ‘Your son!’ She gasped. ‘I mean, I didn’t know---‘

  He looked at her quizzically. ‘I am twenty-four, Miss Fenton. I was married at the age of eighteen. She was not a child bride--that is a Hindu custom--and our son was born three years later. He is called Baber, after the first Mogul emperor, who was also a poet. He is a very beautiful child--but it is a long time since I have seen him.’

  ‘Haven’t you finished eating yet, Emily?’ her father called. ‘Tom wants to get back.’ She got up with a start and hurriedly helped Peggy repack the hampers. Adam Khan, a father! No wonder he seemed more mature and spoke of large, important things in such a serious way.

  ‘Now,’ her father said, ‘Gerry and I may as well start up. Are you all going to stay here? Or watch from the side? Savage, what about you?’

  ‘I’ll go up,’ Peter Savage said at once.

  ‘The grass is pretty slippery.’

  ‘I’ll take my shoes off.’ He glanced at Adam Khan and asked: ‘Are you going to stay here with Miss Fenton?’

  ‘I’m coming up,’ Emily said shortly and waited, looking somewhere else, until they were all ready.

  For a time they followed Gerry and her father up the detritus slope at the foot of the cirque. Peter Savage’s feet must have hurt on the sharp rocks, but he didn’t give any sign of it and climbed up steadily and with increasing speed, until he was at Gerry’s heels.

  After half an hour’s strenuous but gradual ascent they reached the foot of the cliff. A slope of grass and occasional rock continued on up, though more steeply, to the summit seven hundred feet above. To the left stretched the black cliffs of Cader Brith, six hundred feet, almost vertical, not smooth, but split by fissures, crevices, and narrow chimneys.

  Gerry and her father roped up, Gerry leading. The rest of them, led by Peter, scrambled on up the grass until Peggy called breathlessly: ‘There, Peter! That’s the best place to watch from.’ They sank down in a group and looked across the face of the cliff. The pair of climbers was already a hundred feet up above the detritus, and going fast. ‘They’re on an easy pitch,’ Peggy said importantly. ‘Each separate part of a climb is called a pitch. The next one’s easy too. The one after that, level with us, is the bad one on that route.’

  ‘They all look difficult to me,’ Adam Khan said cheerfully.

  ‘Gerry and Uncle G. are good climbers,’ Peggy said.

  ‘I am sure. But why do they climb by a difficult route when there is an easy one?’ Adam Khan asked.

  ‘For practice,’ Peggy said a little impatiently.

  ‘Practice for what, Lady Margaret?’

  ‘The Alps.’

  ‘Ah,’ Adam Khan said, but Emily thought: There’s a snag in that answer somewhere. It’s plausible, but it’s not really true--and what were people in the Alps practising for?

  Peter Savage said: ‘It’s not for practice. It’s so they can be afraid.’ He was lying on his stomach where the grass verge hung over the cliff, chin on his cupped hands, intently watching the two men on the rope.

  Peggy said eagerly: ‘I see what you mean. . . . This is the difficult pitch now. See, where that ridge of knobby rock gives out they have to work up that tiny crack--the South Crack. Gerry and Uncle G. have done it half a dozen times, but it’s always exciting.’

  Emily’s breathing quickened as it always did when she saw any climbers reaching an obstacle that was going to test them near their limit. And these, to her, weren’t ‘any climbers.’ They were her father and Gerry.

  Gerry had edged his fingers into the crack and placed his feet against the wall on either side for the sake of what little friction they could find. He went up slowly, and she could see the painful grimness of his expression as he relied almost wholly on his fingers to get him up. Her father, twenty feet lower down, had belayed the rope round a buttress of rock and then over one shoulder and out under the other arm. Slowly he paid out the rope towards Gerry, so that there was always enough but never any slack.

  ‘Why doesn’t Mr Fenton give him more rope?’ Peter asked suddenly.

  ‘Because if Gerry should fall the extra slack would jerk tight and make it more likely that the rope would break,’ Emily said, trying to make it sound like an obvious answer to a foolish question.

  ‘What’s the breaking strain of that rope?’ he asked then, at once.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, about---‘

  ‘Three hundred pounds, I think,’ Peggy said.

  ‘It’ll break anyway, then, if Gerry falls. There’d be all the distance between him and Mr Fenton as slack. Twenty feet.’

  ‘The leading man mustn’t fall,’ Peggy said, repeating the lesson that had been drummed into them over and over again.

  Peter Savage said: ‘No.’

  Gerry was sweating, although the sun was almost off the rock and there was little heat in its rays. Now his face showed no sign of strain, though when he took one hand out of the crack to reach for a hand-hold Emily saw that he had to press down so hard that his fingernails went white. He wasn’t afraid, she realized suddenly, thinking of Peter Savage’s remark. This had been a difficult place to him once, but it was so no longer. Of course he had grown several inches since he first tried it, and his physical strength was much greater. Then, looking down, she saw in her father’s anxious concentration that with him time was moving the other way, past the crest and down towards the valley. He was afraid, and he was overcoming it.

  A pause, another long, slow reach up--like a caterpillar moving--and Gerry edged himself wholly into the top of the widened crack. Only the outward pressure of feet and back held him there. He raised one leg, pressed it firmly against the opposite side, and then raised the other to join it. Pressing down and back with his hands and gradually straightening his arched back, he crept upward.

  ‘Chimneying,’ Peter Savage said. ‘That’s what Walsh was doing. Gerry could climb King’s Chapel.’

  Gerry reached the top of the chimney and made a firm belay round a low, thick pinnacle of rock. Peggy cried: ‘Well done, Gerry,’ and Emily sighed with relief.

  Peter Savage rose quickly to his feet and said: ‘Now, can’t we do something?’

  Emily said: ‘Wait a minute. Daddy’s still climbing.’

  ‘He’s all right. I don’t think he could have led up there, though.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he could,’ she said. ‘He has, lots of times.’

  Peter Savage turned his head slightly and looked at her as he had in the ballroom at King’s, the sudden switching on of a powerful electric lamp that stripped away not the clothes from her body but the polite shawls from her thoughts, so that she knew she feared him as well as disliked him--and that he knew it. That look, without words, repeated her last phrase, with a deadly emphasis on the word ‘has.’ She had to admit that her father could not now lead up the South Crack of the East Face of Cader Brith. The sullen inner voice went on to repeat another prime maxim of mountaineering: ‘If you can’t lead up a climb, you have no business to be on it at all.’

  But Peter turned away without any word. Her father reached the top of the crack, and then he and Gerry began to work quickly towards them along a broad grass ledge that traversed the cliff a little above the head of the crack, and soon joined them on the grass. As soon as Gerry had sat down, and while he was drinking copiously from the flask of hot tea that Peggy carried slung round her shoulders Emily said: ‘Gerry, when you’ve rested let’s go up the Spire--you and Peggy and I.’ Gerry nodded as he handed back the flask. ‘Thanks, Peg. That’s a good idea. Uncle G., do you want to come?’ Her father shook his head, and Gerry turned to Peter. ‘The Spire’
s not so hard as the crack, and you can see more clearly what’s going on.’ He pointed to a gaunt ridge of rock and shale that rose up on the far side of the grass slope. The ridge towered into a pinnacle almost a hundred feet high that stood away from the side of Cader Brith like a chimney from a gable roof. ‘You and Adam can watch from here.’

  ‘I’d like to come with you,’ Peter Savage said.

  Exasperated, Emily turned to flare at him. He was looking exactly as he had just before the punt race. He was going to ‘win.’ But he was on the wrong track now, because there was no ‘winning’ in mountaineering. Her father came to her help. He said gravely: ‘That’s not an easy climb for a beginner, Savage. And you don’t have any boots.’

  ‘I’ll go in my socks,’ Peter said, ‘the way I am now.’