lifted the oil lamp and led the way up the wooden stairs, past curtained doorways to her cubicle. He lit the candle that had been left for her on a little shelf and stood back. ‘I bring cocoa, ma’am. Coming now.’
‘I won’t have cocoa tonight, Hari, thank you. I’ll go straight to bed.’ She wanted to close her eyes, and for daylight to come quickly. Lamayuru was an oppressive place.
After she had blown out the candle she lay listening to the darkness. There was a series of scraping sounds, probably made by rats in the ceiling. Wind gusted through the cracks between the wall and the tiny window frame. Then she heard another noise. It was no more than a woman’s voice giving a low cry, something between a moan and a sigh, followed by a series of rising gasps. And then, as a postscript, a conjoined bubble of laughter followed by a whispered ssssh.
Nerys twisted under her blankets and pulled the crackling pillow hard over her ears. She didn’t want to have to listen to Myrtle and Archie making love; there seemed too many things tonight that she didn’t want to hear or know or think about. Her own life seemed small, solitary and devoid of purpose.
The next day their route led onwards, over the high pass and through the town of Kargil. With Lamayuru a long way behind them, the travellers were in high spirits. More long but ultimately satisfying days passed, until only the jagged walls of the Greater Himalaya lay between them and the Vale of Kashmir. With the mountains in the distance it seemed impossible that their caravan could find a way to the summit via the Zoji Pass, but as they came closer they were able to pick out the crooked filament of a track zigzagging upwards. In one place there was a dart of brilliance as a mirror ornament or a fragment of polished metal on an ascending pony flashed the rays of the rising sun. Myrtle was reassuring when Nerys reined in her mount to assess the extent of the climb.
‘It looks harder than it actually is. Remember, you’ve already climbed higher than eleven thousand over the Fotu La, and on your way up to Leh last year.’
‘I’m not worried. I know we’ll do it. I’m just wondering what the view will be like from the top.’
Myrtle’s eyes shone between the folds of her veil. ‘Like nothing you could imagine. It will be like looking down into Paradise.’
This thought sustained Nerys through the long, baking ascent. Dust clogged her nose and throat and her water-bottle was soon empty. The sun rose higher, beating down on her head and shoulders. While she rode, her pony walked more and more slowly and she felt its shudders when the pony boy whipped its quarters. When she slid to the ground the stones dug up through the soles of her boots and the sun blazed fiercely. The jingle of the ponies’ harness set up a rhythm that was only broken by the occasional whistling of marmots from their burrows among the rocks. Black lammergeiers cruised the empty air spaces, lazily turning on their fretted wings.
The pass itself was obscured by intermediate outcrops, and Nerys thought grimly that they would be climbing for ever. Archie was far ahead but Myrtle matched her pace to Nerys’s. They exchanged occasional words of encouragement, but most of their energy was taken up with just placing one foot in front of the other.
As they mounted higher, Nerys began counting the number of bends still to be negotiated. There were seven, then five, then only one more.
‘Is this it?’ she begged Myrtle, dreading a false summit and a concealed cliff still to be negotiated.
Whenever she glanced backwards the wide brown desert of Ladakh had receded further, and she knew that they were crossing into a different country.
‘Nearly,’ Myrtle puffed. ‘Why must Archie dash ahead all the time?’
They came out on to a broad stretch of ground with chortens outlined ahead against the sky. Archie and the forward party were waiting for them. Down the slope Nerys glimpsed the picked-over bones and hide of a dead pony that must have fallen from the line of a caravan. It was a still day, but the air surged around her and she retied the strings of her straw hat.
They crossed the saddle of the pass, thankful for the almost horizontal ground, until they drew level with the chortens. The rough stone mounds were strung with hundreds of flags, faded or still bright, with ragged white streamers festooned between them.
Myrtle and Archie stood with their hands linked, silently looking west. Nerys came up beside them, and stopped short. Spread beneath her feet, unrolled like the most magical of carpets, was the Vale of Kashmir.
The folds of land swept up towards them, lower ridges cloaked with ranks of sombre fir trees and the higher ones bright with silver birches. Long seams of snow lay in the shaded gullies, and waterfalls laced silver threads down purple rock faces. A haze of warmth blurred the great hollow of the Vale, but she could see distant pasture lands, ripe fields, and the curves of a river. After the bare grey and brown landscape she had just crossed, the soft blend of a thousand shades of blue and silver and lavender mingled with pale green and gold seemed too sumptuous to be real. She stared at it for a long time, with the scent of rich earth and sweet water drifting up to her.
Myrtle had not been exaggerating.
It was the most beautiful place Nerys had ever seen.
FIVE
To get across the mountains from Leh to Srinagar, Mair’s options were to take the public bus, to find a group of people who were making the trip and needed another passenger to fill their vehicle, or to hire her own car and driver for the two-day journey. The buses ran every day, but they halted briefly overnight in Kargil and left again at one in the morning. Soldiers at the army checkpoints on either side of the Zoji La closed the road at five a.m. in order to leave the hairpin bends clear for army convoys, so official civilian traffic was supposed to be up and over the pass before then. She had seen notices pinned up in some of the Internet cafés offering spare seats for shared expenses in trucks or cars, but when she made her way to a phone office and called one of the numbers, she found herself talking (she was almost certain) to one of the Israeli boys who had been on the Changthang excursion. She made a hurried excuse and rang off. The option of her own car and driver had seemed by far the best until she went into the last travel agency that was still open for business and enquired about the price. She would just have to square up to the legendary discomforts and adrenalin shocks of the bus journey. She packed her bag, ready to leave Leh the next morning, and headed out for a last dinner at the best of the Lonely Planet Guide’s recommendations.
‘Hi there,’ a voice called, out of the frosty twilight, as she turned downhill towards the bazaar. ‘We were really hoping you were still in town.’
It was Karen Becker, zipped up against the cold in a duvet jacket, her hair bundled under a fleece cap.
‘How was the trek?’ Mair asked, as they fell into step.
Karen gurgled with dismay. ‘Full on, and then some. We went up high and there was snow up to my knees. Everything in the tent froze overnight. Bruno adored every second of it, naturally.’
‘And Lotus?’
‘She was good. But Lo’s always pretty good, and she likes the snow. Look, why don’t we meet tomorrow? I’d say come over tonight but Bruno’s got some work thing to sort out, endless phone calls to make, and that’s not easy around here, as you know.’
Mair did know. All foreign mobile phones were automatically blocked and the only way to make calls other than from a phone shop was by buying a Jammu and Kashmir mobile. She hadn’t done that, and she was feeling the lack of communication with home. The power supply
