Downtime - Marc Platt [17]
Tundu pointed out to her the wild goats and flowers. There were fields of meconopsis, Charles’s blue poppies, their petals like fallen fragments of the azure Himalayan sky.
Among the plants by the road they saw evidence of the opening up of the region to the outside world. Clusters of drinks cans discarded among the flowers. It was Charles’s
‘thin end of the greasy slope...’
By late on the second day, Victoria was starting to wonder if they would ever reach Namche Bazar. They had crossed and recrossed the river by means of precarious wooden bridges and were scaling yet another interminable slope. The air was thin and she was starting to feel light-headed. She topped a ridge with what might have been her last breath and gasped. In the distance, maybe twenty miles away, rising beyond the closer peaks, was the majestic colossus of Everest, rose-coloured by the sunset on a throne of blue-grey clouds.
Victoria felt suddenly insignificant, dwarfed by the enormity of what she had set out to do.
‘It is a god,’ said Tundu. He took Victoria’s arm. ‘But we travel the opposite way. Come, the town is not far now. Then you can sleep well tonight.’
On the third day out, beyond Namche Bazar on the road to Thame, they encountered a traffic jam of yaks. Two groups travelling in opposite directions had met with room for only single-file progress. There was already a tailback in both directions, compounded by the bored yaks, which sat down and refused to move despite the shouting of their drivers. It took an hour and a half to clear and reminded Victoria of the rush hour at home.
To Victoria’s surprise she had not dreamed since they left Lukla. Perhaps it was the crystal mountain air that made her feel easier, although the lure of her destination, ripe with memories and threats, was still darkly compelling.
When they reached Thame, the old monk insisted on visiting the local gompa. The walls in the little lamasery were covered with gaudily coloured paintings of holy figures.
‘The whole world is full of them,’ said Tundu’s sister, Sonam. She was turning one of the painted prayer wheels that were set in the wall. Her English was even better than her brother’s. ‘All of us are on the wheel of life, tormented by gods and demons and hungry ghosts.’
The prayer wheel turned, its coloured letters dancing on its drum, and Victoria began to feel drowsy.
There was a mountain flying towards her. It surged through the air, filling half the sky, as if the mountain giants, weary of their chess games, had plucked Everest from its throne to see what monsters might be trapped underneath.
Distant thunder rumbled as the huge displaced peak continued its remorseless approach, blotting out the sun.
Lightning flickered across its upper slopes. She could see a rain of rocks and dust falling from its dark underside. She was in its path. A tiny ant about to be crushed. Then its snowy crags billowed and seemed to shift form. The rocky cumulus slowly altered in shape, its lines softening and rippling like a colossal amoeba. Its progress did not falter as it engulfed the sky, but its shape was uncertain, the massive bulk suddenly as insubstantial as a fluttering prayer flag.
The formless phenomenon shuddered and was webbed with a skein of electric blue. As the wind began to tear at its edges, shredding its dark pall, there came the distant roar of some lost denizen from an outer existence. A demon or a hungry ghost.
Victoria knew that cry. That voice was in her, too. It embodied the despair and loneliness of a being cast out from its old and native haunts.
She opened her eyes and saw the old monk standing over her.
His staff slowly raised itself and levelled at her. It moved of its own accord, the hand jerking to follow. His wizened