The Road to Samarcand

  “No, thank you,” said the Professor, rather stiffly. “I am not a particularly imaginative man, and I am convinced that there is something watching us from those rocks over there.”

  “An animal, maybe,” said Ross, frowning heavily.

  “No, I think not. It has been observed, and I have remarked it myself, that whereas animals are particularly sensible of a man looking at them, men, on the other hand, are not commonly aware of the gaze of animals.”

  Sullivan leaned over and said something to the Professor in what Derrick thought was French. The Professor started, and said, “Oh. Oh, quite. Yes, I quite understand. Foolish of me,” and began to drink his tea vigorously.

  Sullivan said, “I think I shall just have a stroll around before we go on.” He picked up his rifle and clicked a round into the breach. As he turned away there was a rushing noise in the air, the fire shot in all directions, and the rock that had scattered it bounced clean over Olaf’s head.

  They leapt up, gripping their weapons. Tensely they stood, waiting. Nothing appeared. There was no sound but the tossing and snorting of the yaks. Slowly they relaxed, and Ross went over to the rock: he picked it up with both hands: it was the size of a man’s head, and rounded.

  “Come on, Olaf,” cried Sullivan, “we’re going over to those rocks. Ross, you cover us.”

  Olaf swallowed painfully, he hesitated for a moment, then said, “Aye, aye, Cap’n,” in a hoarse, savage voice and ran after Sullivan. They went fast over the rising ground to a piled litter of ice-worn rocks. Sullivan paused, looking quickly from side to side. “This is where it came from,” he said, pointing to a heap of great smooth pebbles. They went on cautiously. Suddenly Olaf pointed. A huge print showed deep in the clean snow, a print like that of a hand with shortened thumb: the big Swede looked down at it without a word, and the cold sweat ran down his face.

  Sullivan looked up the slope: ten yards away there was another print, and ten yards beyond that a third. The line went straight to the sheer wall of the valley, and there, at the bare, unclimbable rock, it ceased. He looked from side to side—no sign of a living thing. He looked up; the cliff soared three thousand feet. He looked back to where the yaks stood a black group in the sun: they were two hundred yards from the heap of rounded stones.

  They turned back, and reaching the others, Sullivan said, “There’s a good deal of loose stuff up on the cliff. Falling from that height it can easily bounce as far as here.” He spoke in an artificially cheerful voice, but he deceived nobody.

  However, they were soon on the march again, a long, black train strung out along the floor of the silent valley, and they all found that it was far better when they were moving. Nobody referred to the subject of all their thoughts until Chingiz, who was marching behind Derrick, caught his eye as he looked round over his shoulder for the twentieth time, nervously scanning the rocks and the slopes of snow: Chingiz smiled, and said, “You are afraid, I think.”

  At any other time Derrick would have resented the remark promptly, but this time it was said without any offence, almost as if Chingiz had said, “It is going to snow, it seems.” Derrick nodded, and plodded on. He wondered at the imperturbability of Chingiz: the Mongol was superstitious enough for three; Derrick remembered the awful fuss and outcry that he and his brothers had made when Derrick, coming into their yurt for the first time, had stepped on the threshold: that was apparently the place where ghosts lived, and it was never to be touched, however awkward it might be to leap into the low tent in a crouching hop to avoid it when one was carrying two saddles and a heavy pack. And he remembered the extreme anxiety with which Chingiz had burnt the shoulder-blades of a ram, in order to foretell the kind of journey that they would have from the fire-cracked bones. But now he alone of the party was unmoved, either by the queer silence or by the haunting, oppressive threat that surrounded them, unseen, on all sides. Derrick looked up at the sky: the clouds were racing across the top of the lofty ridges, straight across them from left to right; up there it was blowing a full gale, but down in the valley-bed not a breath stirred.

  “I would be afraid if I were you,” said Chingiz, after a while. “But I have a charm and a spell against all devils of every kind. I wear it round my neck. A Buryat gave it to my grandfather: he had it from a Kalmuk, and the Kalmuk had it from a shaman of the north. It is the little finger of a crucified Russian, and there is something else there, something without a name. I will give you a piece tonight.”

  Derrick envied Chingiz the strength of his belief, but he remembered his father, and how for years and years he had tried to persuade his Chinese converts not to worship their ancestors, not to light crackers to prevent the sky-dragon from swallowing the sun during an eclipse, not to make secret sacrifices to the earth-dragon and not to carry charms, and he refused the gift. He knew that if he said it was against his religion Chingiz would not mind at all; but he refused against his own desire: it would have been a comfort to have had some armour, however heathenish.

  They reached the glacier, and although it was difficult to get on to it, once they had brought the yaks up through the boulders and broken ice, they found that it was easier than they had expected. It was not the glacier, at any rate, that had caused the old abbot to mark the valley as impassable. Two men went ahead to work out the route among the séracs and the crevasses, but there were few that offered any great difficulty, and they made surprisingly good speed until the sun went down. They pitched camp in the most open place they could find: it had no shelter, but it gave an uninterrupted view of the glacier for three or four hundred yards in each direction. There had been no incident all the day since noon, but as they were making the fire Ross stared fixedly at the far side of the valley through his glasses.

  “Do you see an animal?” asked the Professor.

  “No,” said Ross, “it was just a falling piece of ice.”

  “It is a curious thing,” observed the Professor, “but we have seen no animals all through this valley. I do not usually watch for them, but today I made a point of looking about me as we came along, and I did not see a single bird or beast anywhere. Surely that is most uncommon?”

  “Oh, no,” said Sullivan, “we are getting too high for them now.”

  “You must be mistaken,” said the Professor. “I remember thars much higher than this, and there was that group of wild yaks beyond the village where they so kindly gave us that horrible beer—I forget its name—and then there are always birds far above the snow-line.”

  Sullivan opened his mouth, but closed it again without making a reply and went on with his work.

  That night they slept much better, with no alarms; but in the morning they found the tracks again, rounder this time, and three-toed, in the light powdering of snow that had blown off the high ridges in the night. Some were almost in the camp, and some led off to the edge of a wide, uncrossable crevasse in the ice, a crevasse so deep that when Derrick kicked a lump of frozen snow into it he never heard it land.

  It had turned very much colder in the night: they woke up with their breath frozen on the fur of their hoods, and when Li Han incautiously seized the iron pot to melt the snow for tea it stuck to his hand. It took the skin clean off like a searing burn, and after a minute or two it began to hurt so much that Li Han howled aloud: the echoes came back strangely, one long after the others, and that last one sounded more like hellish laughter than the echo of his cry.

  It was bitterly cold, and the sky was dark. It looked like dirty weather coming, but for the moment the valley was still as silent as ever it had been: it was so silent that they could hear the deep, faint, remote grinding of the ice in its incredibly slow journey down the slope, a sound quite unlike the loud surface-cracks or the echoing fall of the ice-pinnacles on the farther side.

  “Today,” said Sullivan, consulting the map, “we shall turn that long projecting spur up there. The whole valley turns with it, but I think the main glacier comes from the high valley on the right up there, flowing into thi
s one from the north. Unless I am very much mistaken, we shall get across this glacier before the snow comes on, and with luck we shall find no ice up there on the left. We shall find wind though. That valley runs straight into it. Now here——” he said, holding out the map. There was a crash as a viciously jagged lump of ice slashed through the map and hit the fire. They were up in a second, standing in a ring, facing outwards. But it was the same as before: there was no movement anywhere, no sound but the stamping of the yaks and the sizzle of the ice as it put out the fire.

  “It does not matter,” said Sullivan at last, wiping the blood off his injured hand. “I have the whole thing clearly in my mind, and I can copy it exactly.”

  They did not waste time in following the single pair of tracks that they discovered later, but reloaded their beasts and set off across the ice. It was a long time before anyone spoke, and then it was only brief orders about getting the yaks round a bad moraine. Towards midday they came to a very broad and difficult crevasse. It had a few snow bridges over it, but although they held the men the yaks refused to go on to them.

  “They probably know best,” said Ross, and he set to work making a bridge at the narrowest place from the two long timbers that they had brought against such an emergency. This delayed them a long time, for even when the bridge was laid and paved with blocks of ice the yaks were very unwilling to approach it. They had to be dragged and pushed and pulled, one after another.

  “Thank Heaven we do not have to do this over fresh snow,” said Sullivan, looking anxiously up into the lead-coloured sky as the last yak crossed.

  There were more crevasses after this, and getting across the glacier was like tacking into the wind—ten miles run for one mile gained—for they had to work out a zig-zag course to find the crossing places. It was not before the late afternoon that they reached the huge left-hand turn of the valley, and there they met the wind. It was as bad as any that they had ever yet encountered: it had no snow in it yet, but it carried ice-crystals so sharp that they drew blood, and the cold was so intense that every breath was like a stabbing pain.

  “At least we have no ice,” shouted Sullivan, above the wind. He pointed up the left-hand valley—sheer black rock and hard white snow, but no glacier-ice—and then back to the right-hand branch of the valley they were leaving, where the glacier came down in an appalling ice-fall that they never could have passed.

  Their new valley came fully into view as they struggled round the spur: it was narrower by far, and its bed was littered with enormous rocks. When they could see at all for the driving ice-crystals they saw that there was another bend in it about five miles farther up: it looked difficult, but not at all impossible.

  “We will get to that clear space in about two hours,” shouted Sullivan. But he had reckoned without the yaks. Their thick coats were heavy and matted with the flying ice, they were growing obstinate and very tired. Soon it was evident that they could go no farther, and as the light was already failing, although the day was not yet done, Sullivan decided to pitch camp when they came to a fairly sheltered hollow among the rocks.

  It was not a good place at all, but once the yaks had stopped under the lee of a square-faced rock, nothing would make them budge, and although once he had thoroughly realised how difficult the hollow was to guard, Sullivan wanted to go on, he was forced to remain. The trouble was not so much lack of shelter—indeed, they were as well covered from the wind as they could be—but the fact that anything approaching them could keep out of sight to the very edge of the hollow.

  “We’ll have to make the best of it,” said Ross, as the first eddy of snow swirled round the boulders. “If you can stick it out on that rock over there, I will take this on the left, and Olaf can be in that cleft below us. That should give us a fair view, once the moon is up.”

  That was clearly the best idea, and they followed it. There was the saucer of the camp, then about fifteen yards above it the great square boulder from which the yaks would not move, and then, beyond the circle containing the camp and the yaks, there were the three guard-points, with Sullivan on the left, Ross on the right and Olaf down at the apex of the triangle, toward the glacier.

  They wedged themselves into positions as comfortable as they could manage, with as little of their bodies exposed to the wind as possible. The night darkened, the tearing wind increased and piled up drifts of snow on their leeward sides. But although the moon was not yet up, there was a faint glow from the whiteness all around them, and so far the snow was not driving too thickly: they could see a little way, and they were all men accustomed to keeping their watches in the night. It was the wind that hampered them most; in the howling, tearing, unceasing racket they could scarcely hear a hail from one to another, although each could let out a roar like a fog-horn if it were necessary.

  The cold hours crept by, and at last the moon rose behind the mountains: they could not see it from where they were, but it threw a faint radiance into the sky. The wind slackened, but the intense cold did not: Sullivan felt his hands, deep under their fur gloves, growing numb. The cold crept in and in from the hole that he had made for his trigger-finger, and which was protected only by two thin layers of silk. To ward off the dreaded frost-bite he got up, pushing the snow away, and stamped his frozen boots and swung his arms. A dim shape loomed up in the falling snow before him. He hailed, “Ahoy, Ross!” and at once the form vanished to the right, while from the left he heard the answering hail.

  Ross appeared, running. “Did you see anything?” he shouted.

  “Think so. Not sure,” answered Sullivan. They groped their way over the boulders down to Olaf, and found him squatting in the snow. He flung up his rifle as he saw them.

  “All right, Olaf,” roared Sullivan. “Have you seen anything?”

  At this moment the moon showed through a break in the driving cloud above the ridge, and they saw Olaf’s face, crusted with rime and snow: his pale eyes were glaring beyond them: he kept his rifle up, and they flung themselves down as the tongue of flame shot between their heads. Sullivan whipped round as he fell. He was on one knee in a flash, and he fired with the rifle half-way to his shoulder. Above the wind they heard an inhuman shriek. Olaf pushed between them and rushed towards the camp.

  “What was it?” shouted Ross, as they caught him up. Olaf was staring from side to side in the new and brilliant light as the cloud ripped clean off the moon.

  “Ay reckon I saw something,” he said. “It was just behind you.”

  Sullivan pointed forward. Dark in the moonlight there was a splash of blood. He knelt and put his hand to it, and getting up he slapped his hand against his thigh. “It’s something that can be stopped with a bullet or cold steel,” he said, with an expression of fierce joy on his face.

  Already the drifting snow had covered the blood, but they had seen it, and the sight sent a new tide of life and spirit into them. They made a tour of the far outside ring of the camp: they saw nothing, but still, when they came back, they felt twice as strong, warmer and encouraged. The wind was dropping fast, and the moon was higher now: yet there was a dark band in the sky behind it that promised more snow to come. The others were up, and with them was Chang. He was trembling, his tail was down; but he had caught the spirit that was in the men. He left them, instead of creeping at Derrick’s heel, and in a moment he had found the blood. He scratched down to it, threw up his head, and bayed.

  “That’s better,” cried Sullivan, and as Chang went out, away from the hollow, they followed him. “We can cope with these beasts,” said Sullivan, half to himself. They all felt that the peril could be faced and overcome now, and there were triumphant faces under the cold moon: but when they turned the yaks’ great rock it was as if a great hammer had struck them all. There were no yaks.

  There was one, ten yards from the shelter; but it was dead, dismembered and mangled horribly. Yet still, faintly in the drifting snow, there was the deep-ploughed track of the rest. It was a path that forked, one branch going up the val
ley and a fainter one leading down towards the old valley and the glacier.

  Olaf, from high up on a rock, shouted, “Ay seen one, Cap’n, way down on the glacier.”

  They leapt up after him, and there, far away and often obscured by the racing shadows of the clouds, they saw the black shape of a fleeing yak just turning the corner right-handed down the old valley on the glacier.

  “You and Li Han go down and catch it,” cried Sullivan. “Don’t go too far over the ice. Look lively. We’ll go up and find the rest.”

  He turned and ploughed up the valley through the new-fallen, loose and drifted snow along the fast disappearing trail. The others followed him.

  But they never saw their yaks again. They had scarcely got out of sight of the camp before the great dark bar in the sky reached the moon and put it out. They struggled on in the darkness, but five minutes later the first howling blast of the blizzard took them in the face. It was a wall of flying snow, so thick that they could hardly breath. Sullivan turned about at once, shouted an order to make a train, each holding the other and started back for the camp.

  The snow fell as they had never known it fall before. Their backs were loaded with it: they could not see their hands before their faces: the tracks that they had made so short a time before were already out of sight.

  Hours later they reached their camp, almost unrecognisable now. They had found it by feel alone, and they fell into it utterly exhausted. A few minutes later and it would have disappeared.

  The blizzard howled on all the rest of the night. Time and again they had to creep out of their coverings and clear the huge banks of snow that eddied into the shelter that they had hollowed out. When the next day broke it showed but a thin and feeble light through the never-ending clouds of drifting flakes that stopped their view a few feet from the camp. The day merged into the night and in the night the temperature rose: they were almost warm, huddled there in their furs and protected by the pall of fallen snow.