The valley of eyes unseen
I bore a hand in getting the tents down, but suddenly there caught my
eye something on the ground which held me stock-still, staring. It was
a trail of footsteps in the snow, a double trail, as of someone going
and coming; and it drew a straight line from the door of the bearers'
tent to the very spot where I had stood last night when I peeped round
the angle of rock. That vague form disappearing into the tent hadn't,
then, been a trick played on me by my fevered eyes. Philipson had had
another watcher.
We used our last sticks of fuel for a fire to cook breakfast, and when
we had finished the meal, one of the bearers cringed up to Philipson
and knelt down, beating his forehead on the ground. The man spoke,
still with that curiously fixed expression of despair and fear that
I had noticed on the faces of them all. Philipson heard him out, and
dismissed the fellow with a quick word, whereupon he sprang up with
alacrity and ran back to his fellows.
'You understand what the man said?' queried Philipson, turning to us.
'Not a word.'
'He voiced the unanimous desire of the gang to leave our service and go
home. I told him they would be allowed to do so.'
The pair of us looked at him in surprise. 'Great Scott!' exclaimed
Poyning. 'What on earth for?'
'Because,' replied Philipson, very positively, 'it was the one thing on
this earth to do. I know that breed. I can stand the six of them in a
row and shoot them here if I like, but neither I nor anybody else can
make them follow us farther.'
'Yet you thought we should have no more trouble with them?'
'I did. At that time they feared me more than anything else in the
world. Now a greater terror has arisen.'
'Why, what's up with them?'
'They believe the mountains are haunted hereabouts. One of them got up
in the night and saw a devil.'
I gave an involuntary start, and I am sure Philipson noticed it. I
felt his eyes were keenly on me. 'Superstitious cattle, are they not,
Mirlees?' he said. 'But one thing is absolutely certain: it is a waste
of time trying to remove their superstition by argument. I shall pay
them off and let them go.'
Poyning looked bewildered. 'How in Hades are we to get the gear along?'
he said.
'Hump it ourselves. There will still be five of us to share it.
Moreover, we can reduce the gear. _We have not much farther to go._'
'What's told you that?'
The words were out before I realised I had said them. Philipson looked
at me, and for one instant there seemed almost a shadow of suspicion,
of defiance, in his eyes. But only for an instant. When he answered me,
he might have been a city man mentioning the hour of a train.
'Plain common-sense,' said Saunders Philipson.
CHAPTER VIII
HOW WE CAME TO THE VALLEY OF GREAT BIRDS
'Put it to yourselves as rational men,' he said. 'The Tibetan Sbrang
Chikya, who died on this spot, had strayed from his caravan, and he
must have strayed a long way, since we are far west of any caravan
route that I know of. Why he came in this direction, which was the
least likely to lead to safety, I do not know, but it is probable that
the mountains remained wrapped in cloud and he lost his bearings, only
to pick them up again when he got down into the valley and saw the
sun. You will remember he describes the valley quite definitely as
west of this spot. But we must assume from the fact that he had left
the caravan presumably without preparation of any sort that he had
little food with him, and how far could a man travel like that in these
mountains? Certainly not much farther than we are from the nearest
caravan route at this moment. Therefore I say the valley of great birds
cannot be much beyond this point. Is not that sound logic?'
There was no denying it was.
'Then let us get on at once and find the valley.'
'Before the snow clears?'
'If we wait for that we may be merely waiting for a fresh fall. We must
make a dash for it. The sooner we are off these heights the better.
Never fear, I will find you a track!'
We paid off the bearers and parted company with them for ever. If I
wanted proof that Philipson really believed we were near the end of the
trail, the way he dismissed those hillmen would have convinced me: he
not only gave them more than the stipulated wage, but all the surplus
gear which, in his view, we should no longer require. They then filed
off down the pass, heading north-east. We ourselves divided the rest of
the baggage into five packs, and struck due west by Philipson's compass.
And now we came to a stretch of our journey beside which the worst
that had gone before was mere pastime. Strive as I may, I cannot get
clear in my mind the events of the next few days. I wouldn't even be
sure how many days we travelled, for it is all a blurry nightmare to
me, with nothing remaining distinct but a ghastly memory of constantly
increasing cold and misery and exhaustion. What few facts rise up
vaguely out of the confusion I have tried to re-assemble and set down
in order, but I will stake nothing on them. It may be we didn't travel
far as distance would be measured on the flat. There was no flat in
that country to measure the distance on. All was sheer cliff or
tremendous wall-sided ravine. The greater part of the time we seemed to
be crawling along a mere thread of projecting ledge and looking down
into awful abysses of rock and snow; and most perilous of all were the
rare places where our route looked to be easier. We halted before one
such, which I should have said was a moderately passable snow-paved
surface of rock, but after some hesitation Philipson shook his head
and turned aside. We climbed a rugged scarp to the left, from which we
could overlook the way we should have taken, and coming at length to a
ledge broad enough to stand the five of us, Philipson stopped, picked
up a fragment of rock, and heaved it over the cliff side. The stone
clattered hoarsely down, then disappeared in the fluid powdery snow,
which closed silently in over it so that you wouldn't have known the
surface had been disturbed.
'It is well that I did not let you go on,' muttered Philipson. 'That
means deep snow--an enormous drift in a ravine. Not one of us would
have come out of it alive.'
He led on, picking a way with extreme care and, as it seemed to me, a
perfectly uncanny instinct for safety, but at the best our advance was
no more than a laborious crawl. Though the snow had evaporated off the
more exposed faces of the mountain, the treacherous, swallowing drifts
were everywhere, and there was a fantastic suggestion about it all of
crossing a flooded country by shallows. Time and again we halted while
Philipson, mistrusting even his own intuition, hurled great stones
into the crevasses to estimate whether they were "fordable" or not.
Our last fire had been at the pass of the _obo_, and there, from the
temperature of our boiling water, we calculated the elevation to be a
little over eighteen thousand feet; and I am certain that from that
point, though there were some deceptive drops, we worked in the long
run considerably higher. Height-sickness and the consequent fever
were now a normal state for us all, and though we benefited by the
sedatives that Philipson dispensed, we remained in a sort of chronic
delirium. So rare was the atmosphere that even the exertion of our
creeping advance brought on a terrible breathlessness and distress;
blood trickled continually from our noses and ears, and we had to call
a halt at least once about every fifteen minutes. These rests we took
standing. Philipson would let nobody lie down till night fell; then two
men remained awake at a time, to rouse the others before they had slept
too long. We dared not allow any man to lie still for more than an hour
at a stretch, or thereabouts, for as I have said we had no watches,
for fear he shouldn't wake at all; and I am convinced Philipson would
have had us push on night and day but for the sheer impossibility of
negotiating those dizzy slants and ledges in the dark.
At last, weary beyond imagination, but with a tremendous thrill of
renewed hope, we came into a long gully in the mountains. It ran
between two vertical walls of rock, and though it descended sharply for
a considerable way ahead, we could see nothing beyond it but a blaze
of golden sky where the sun was setting. By common consent we halted
in silence, and stared, and stared. I have never been nearer tears in
my life. I seemed to lose my grip. Here, it looked, the mountains came
to an end. There was a valley ahead, or at least a depression; if we
had not found the object of our quest, we were to find relief from the
frightful cold and exhaustion and height-fever of the last few days.
'It appears,' said Philipson, in a queer, hollow voice, 'that we are
going to see our goal before long. Keep well in behind me.'
He advanced cautiously, sounding the gully with the butt of his rifle
as he went. Now in the far distance we could see peaks again, but they
were right across in the eye of the sun; it became increasingly plain
there was lower ground between us and them. Philipson would halt from
time to time, and stare before him fixedly. Then we saw him drop the
rifle and tear out his field glasses from their case. He swayed where
he stood. A moment later he had turned a dead-white face to me and
handed me the binoculars without a word. I took them mechanically and
raised them to my eyes. Now it was I who staggered. The sun was by
this time sunk half below the distant peaks, and its dazzle had faded.
There, moving across the gold-washed sky, were several black specks,
far away, but having through the glasses all the appearance of enormous
birds.
Poyning had snatched the binoculars out of my hands and was looking for
himself. It was the last thing he did that day. His strength, which he
had forced to uphold him by an effort of will for which I should never
have given him credit when he entered our lives at Nanking, now broke
down utterly; he fell in a heap, unconscious, and though we managed to
bring him to with the last drain of brandy we possessed, he was unable
to move hand or foot. He lay in the snow crying like a child. It wasn't
emotion--just his nerve-control completely gone.
Philipson looked at him and at me. 'It is a pity,' he said. 'We must
push on for the hour of dusk that is left--it may mean a couple of
thousand feet downwards. I cannot let him sleep here.'
Then without another word Saunders Philipson picked up Stephen Poyning
and carried him in his arms. Lo Eng and I shared his pack in addition
to our own loads. It was in vain for me to offer to take a turn with
Poyning. Philipson grunted angrily.
'Keep your breath for breathing, Mirlees,' he snapped. 'It is as much
as the three of you can do to move as it is. We must get on the fastest
we can.'
I picked up his rifle and took the lead myself, feeling the way as he
had done. At the end of the gully we had plainly come to the end of the
heights, and there, deep down before us, we could see a blur of light.
It was gloriously easier going now. The mountain side was steep, but
of a fairly good surface, and we made capital headway. The relief was
unspeakable, and came with startling quickness as we worked down off
that frightful roof of the world into the denser air below. We filled
our lungs with it again and again, and I felt it intoxicate me like
wine. Saunders Philipson carried his burden for fully an hour and a
half, and only stopped then, I am convinced, because dark had fallen.
We pitched camp and put Poyning to bed, then turned in ourselves. There
was no danger in sleep now. We lay down in our sheepskins and slept
till the sun was high in the heavens of a glorious day.