The Kashmir Shawl

SEVENTEEN


The tiny coronet of blue flame seemed too fragile to survive in this place of howling wind. One of the men grimly hung over it, steadying the rim of the pan on the burner as the rough scoops of snow refused to melt. His companion lay huddled in his bag, his eyes closed as the storm hammered and roared at the canvas walls. The tent swelled like a pair of lungs labouring to suck in a breath of thin air, and then, with a bang and a shriek, collapsed inwards again. Trying to shout above the din took more energy than either of them had to spare.

After an hour, just enough snow had melted to allow them to mix a cup of powdered soup apiece. One man held the two precious warm drinks because the other insisted on laboriously unzipping the tent opening before he drank. Snow drove in at them and the tent pegs only just kept the flimsy capsule anchored. It was absurd, the watcher belatedly realised, to have imagined that he might see anyone coming – or, indeed, that any living thing could move in the thick of this storm. Altitude and exhaustion were eroding his judgement. He struggled to close the flap again.

They hunched over their soup.

‘What time is it?’

‘Quarter after six.’

It was thirty-two hours since the man they referred to as Martin Brunner and his companion had set off from their tiny camp. At 20,000 feet, they were more than five thousand feet above the base camp established at the foot of the Rakhiot icefall. Since they had left their base the three mountaineers and Pasang Pemba, the strongest and most experienced of their sherpas, had been carrying loads and leapfrogging their slow and painful way up the mountain to this point. It was now mid-July and the weather had been atrocious. Snow had fallen every day and filled in their laboriously cut steps, and in places it had swept away their fixed ropes.

On the morning of the previous day, Martin and Pasang Pemba had left camp to reconnoitre the rock formation they called the Moor’s Head. This ugly and threatening rock wall blocked their access to the high saddle of the mountain and the summit beyond, although the summit itself had been almost constantly veiled in cloud.

At first light yesterday, however, they had woken to a clear sky and a view of the mountain rearing to its full height above them, cold and crystalline.

‘Let’s go,’ Martin had said to Pasang. They were the stronger pair. Taking minimal food and protection with them, they had planned to climb to the rock head and assess how serious an obstacle it really was, then return to camp to rest and prepare a load to carry for the assault. The next camp would have to be established above the Moor’s Head.

They would be back that evening, Martin assured their American companions.

The two men set off up the slope, chipping their way upwards until they were no more than black specks moving amid the rock and snow. Finally they were swallowed up in the immense distance.

By mid-afternoon of the same day, an ominous nimbus encircled the sun. The wind began to blow and clouds whipped across the upper heights. The two men left behind watched and waited, but as darkness fell the snow and rising wind drove them into the inadequate shelter of their tent. They waited all that night, and through the following day, but the storm only gathered force. They couldn’t retreat, any more than they could go upwards, and the younger one was now suffering from chest pains and disturbing intervals of dizziness and confusion.

The elder lay as quietly as he could, assessing the situation.

Brunner and the sherpa had with them only basic supplies. They would have had to bivouac in the open overnight, and now the second night was upon them. It was inconceivable that they could survive two successive nights outside in conditions such as these.

Once the storm had blown itself out he himself would have to help his companion down to where their support team waited for them above the icefall at Camp I, and he thought they would be quite lucky to make it. There was no question of launching a rescue attempt.

Martin Brunner and Pasang Pemba would certainly be Nanga Parbat’s latest victims.

He remembered the advice of the American consul back in Calcutta, who had warned him to take no risks that might have potentially disastrous consequences. Of course the consul was thinking in political as well as human terms, because the bestowal of permits for future American expeditions depended to some extent on the absence of a tragic outcome to this one. And as expedition leader, at least in name, he didn’t think they had been reckless – just unlucky.

But, considered separately, Martin Brunner was a different matter. He climbed with implacable strength and determination, almost like a machine, and this brutal focus meant that he was careless of the weather and of himself.

‘If I have to go solo, I will do that,’ he had said once. ‘But I will get to the top.’

The leader understood his determination. He knew that Martin had been to the mountain before, and on that expedition his companion had been carried to his death in an avalanche.



Martin had returned to Nanga Parbat for a boy called Matthew Forbes and his family, as much as for himself – he had always been candid about that. And the current team all recognised that this would almost certainly be his last chance of reaching the summit. During the war he had several times been refused a climbing permit on his own behalf by the British authorities, but the name he had been using during those earlier negotiations had been different.

On the new permit, the very first to be issued following the end of the war in Europe, he was named as Martin Brunner and that was what the mountaineers called him. He had thanked them, laughing as he did so, for their indulgence. The possibility of such subterfuges wouldn’t endure for long. As the world slowly returned to normal, men, their names and their whereabouts would be more carefully monitored.

He said, ‘There will be no more cloak-and-dagger days, no more now-you-see-me-and-now-you-don’t times. We will all be ticketed and documented again, even more than before. So let us enjoy our conjuring tricks while we can.’

Shivering, the expedition leader lay down in his sleeping-bag and drew the frozen folds of it around him.

He must have dozed.

He was startled out of a dream by a heavy weight collapsing against the tent and the sound of a voice calling out. The wind had dropped and the canvas gently sucked and bellied in the remaining draught. He scrambled out of his sleeping-bag and tore open the tent zip. A man’s boot blocked the opening, a huddled shape lay in the snow. Overhead, tatters of cloud streamed across a sky pricked with stars.

‘Martin? Pasang, is that you?’

The body stirred and gave a groan. The leader saw that it was Pasang Pemba.

Between them the two Americans hauled him into their shelter. The man was more dead than alive, but they fed him sugared drinks and cradled his body between them until some warmth crept back into him. When they stripped off his gloves they found that his thumbs and fingertips were frozen solid. He would lose them, but he would survive.

‘Martin?’ the leader asked gently.

The sherpa shook his head. The frozen fingers drew a flat line in the air.



More than two thousand feet above them, in the tiny scoop at the foot of a rock face, a hummock of ice infinitesimally stirred and became a man again.

He was in no pain now, even though his leg had been smashed in the fall.

He was flushed with warmth and his dreams had been vivid and detailed. He had seen Srinagar again, in the full glow of summer, and the lovely reflections of the city and mountains were shimmering in the mirror waters. A little girl had been running towards a woman, shouting a childish version of her name.

Rainer floated closer to the surface. It was night again but at last there was no wind, and there were stars overhead.

He turned his head with the greatest difficulty and registered that he was alone.

Pasang had gone. That was good. The sherpa would reach camp if he was lucky. He was a strong man; he had made only one mistake.

His head fell forwards again and was enveloped in the frozen hood of his parka.

The sense of a job not done, of dispensations that should have been made, was like a faint tinnitus inside his skull. But he was too far gone to attend to his conscience. The languorous dreams were rising around him again and he gave himself up to them.

His lips moved to form a word.

‘Nerys,’ he said.