The Forbidden Temple (5 page)

It wasn’t imaginary – suddenly he couldn’t breathe. The air just wouldn’t pass into his lungs. He clawed at his shirt collar, desperately
trying to loosen his tie. Lurching forward on to his feet, he stumbled out through the living area, toppling a pot resting on the corner of the fire. He heard it crash to the ground just as he arrived outside and into the terrible heat.

They were all there, staring at him. They fixed him with their vacant, stupid gazes, as he pushed past them towards the jeeps. He leaned against one of the cars, finally dragging the dry air deep into his lungs. Pulling open the door, he frantically tried to find the cigarette pack he had seen earlier which belonged to the driver. It was jammed under his seat, by the door. Chen broke open the pack and put a cigarette to his lips then tried to inhale. It didn’t work. He tried again, sucking hard on the filter.

Why was it not working?

It was the sergeant who grabbed his shaking hands, holding them still for a moment as he brought a light to the cigarette. Chen inhaled deeply, once, twice, and then a third time in quick succession. Eventually he let out a long, ragged breath, sending a plume of smoke skywards.

‘Get the body. Beijing will want to see it,’ he managed. ‘And get those fucking people away from the house.’

The sergeant nodded curtly and then ran off towards the house, barking orders. Chen watched him go then silently moved around behind the two stationary jeeps, into the shade of one of the nearby houses. He inhaled on the cigarette again then leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and vomited.

‘
I DON’T HEAR
from you for three months. Then you turn up out of the blue with a rucksack full of dirty clothes and want me to dig up some old satellite maps . . . Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?’

Luca smiled, resting his hands on the arms of his leather chair. He still remembered the days when he used to be genuinely terrified of Jack Milton’s craggy face and withering gaze. As a boy he’d sat in this study, in this same sagging armchair, and felt the weight of the long silences that seemed to be part of every conversation he had with his uncle.

For the young Luca, Jack’s prematurely lined face and shaking hands had always been just another sign of his strange otherwordliness. He was a professor of geology at Cambridge University and somehow different from everyone else. Everything about him was unpredictable, often erratic and confused. It was only as an adult that Luca saw these idiosyncrasies for what they really were – the signs of an ex-alcoholic who had strayed too close to the edge before purging himself of his addiction. Now he drank endless cups of coffee, channelling his compulsive drive into the minutiae of the rocks he studied.

The study hadn’t changed in all those years and was still crammed with books. Wooden shelves honeycombed the walls right up to the ceiling, so that the uppermost volumes threatened to shower down
amidst a cloud of dust. At shoulder height, some of the books were pushed aside to make room for selections of rock samples, stacked in small piles and having long since lost their identifying labels.

‘You’re the only person I know who really gives a shit,’ Luca said, dunking a biscuit into his coffee.

‘Well it’s good to know I’m top of a long list,’ Jack laughed, creasing the deep-set lines at the corners of his eyes. ‘So go on, tell me everything. Makalu must have been quite something.’

There was a pause. As his nephew remained silent, Jack stopped smiling.

‘Is something up?’

‘Everything’s fine. Except Bill got altitude sickness and we missed the summit by a couple of hours. We sort of fell out on the way back down and I’m not sure we’re on speaking terms right now.’

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Jack softly. ‘I know how much time you two put into it. But I’m sure you’ll sort out things with Bill. You’ve been friends far too long to fall out for long.’

‘Yeah, I suppose so.’

‘Come on, Luca. Nothing can have been said that can’t be taken back.’

Luca shrugged. ‘Is it all right if we don’t talk about this?’

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to push,’ Jack said, his brow creasing further as he took another gulp of coffee. ‘So are you going to tell me some more about this pyramid mountain?’

Luca’s face slowly lit up, a smile forming at the edge of his lips.

‘I wish you had been there, Jack. It was incredible. And set in the middle of a stunning ring of mountains. Have you ever heard mention of it?’

‘No,’ Jack said, standing up and walking over to his desk. ‘After you called, I dug everything we have on the area east of Makalu from the departmental library. Took me a while to find these and blow the dust off them. Not exactly the world’s most sought-after documents.’

He carried the maps over to the low table and knelt down. Fishing
out his reading glasses from his breast pocket, he held the first map up to the light.

‘This one’s about six months old – the most recent.’

He pulled it a little closer and studied the grid references, drawing a finger over the contours of the Himalayas. He stopped suddenly and prodded. ‘There’s Makalu.’

Luca moved round the table so that they were shoulder to shoulder and peered more closely at the markings. The map showed a vast swathe of the Himalayas, with swirling currents of cloud bending round the massive peaks and valleys.

‘I’m guessing it would be forty kilometres or so east of that,’ said Luca. ‘Somewhere over here.’

Simultaneously their eyes swept over the map until they alighted on a small cluster of peaks, bent round in a perfect circle.

‘That’s them!’ Luca said, feeling a strange lift of excitement. Part of him hadn’t expected them to exist at all.

‘It’s strikingly symmetrical, I’ll admit,’ said Jack, adjusting his reading glasses and leaning forward to examine the formation more closely. ‘But you say the most interesting mountain was the one in the middle? All I can see is cloud.’

‘It was right in the centre, Jack. It sounds odd, I know, but it was like a kind of a pyramid, perfectly proportioned, as if someone had been up there with a chisel. I only caught a glimpse of it when I was high enough on Makalu.’

‘A pyramid-shaped mountain,’ repeated Jack, immersing himself in the twisted contours of the map. He had studied maps all his working life and was able to interpret the graphite markings as if staring down on each peak for real. ‘If it’s anywhere near the same height as the others in that range then that would make it nearly seven thousand metres high – which, as you know, would make the Matterhorn look like a molehill.’

Luca nodded. Between the ring of mountains, all he could see was a thick belt of cloud twisting in between the peaks. He leaned closer,
searching for the slightest sign of the pyramid mountain. There was nothing.

‘Any other maps of the region?’

‘Sure,’ said his uncle. ‘We have nine or ten of these satellite images, going back a few years. One every six months or so.’

Together, they lifted the first map off the table and laid it on the floor. Luca quickly bent over the next one, his face furrowed in concentration. Jack glanced over at his nephew, feeling a flicker of concern to see that light in his eyes. It was no accident that whenever Luca worried him the most, it was when he reminded Jack of himself. It was not something he would ever put into words, but he was pretty sure his nephew had inherited the same dark, addictive streak.

‘Shit!’ said Luca as he traced his finger across the region. ‘Still cloud.’

They went through each of the maps in turn. Discarded, the massive sheaves of paper covered most of the study floor, their edges curled up like giant scrolls.

‘Always the same: cloud covering the entire region. How is this possible?’ Luca said eventually, staring directly at Jack. ‘There’s not a single break in any of these images.’

Seeing his frustration, Jack sighed. Wincing slightly as his knees cracked, he began gathering the maps off the floor.

‘You have to understand that some mountains create their own weather systems. They reach so high into the atmosphere that they actually change the weather around them. In this particular case, they create a lot of cloud.’

Luca had heard the theory before. The great summits of the Himalayas could cause moisture in the atmosphere to condense around them and collect along their massive flanks. The invariable result: cloud.

‘But why can’t the satellite penetrate the cloud? Can’t you switch to infra-red or something and see through all that kind of stuff?’

Jack lifted an eyebrow.

‘Sure. If you change bandwidths, you can cut through any weather you like. The military do it all the time. But who the hell is going to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for something like that in the middle of the Himalayas? The Geology Department can barely afford to get me out of this damn office once a year, let alone source material like that.’

He paused before adding, ‘And even if we had the money, the Chinese and Indian Governments get very touchy about satellite imagery along their borders. We wouldn’t even get a response if we tried to go through official channels.’

‘What about other maps? Is there anything else we could try?’

‘That’s everything we’ve got. Look, you’ve got to understand that this is an area the size of Spain and vast sections of it remain almost completely unmapped. This is one of the last untouched regions on the entire planet. You, more than most, know what it’s like out there. There’s nothing as far as you can see: no people, no animals, just snow and rock. And it’s only us tired old geologists who get excited about that. Everyone else just sticks to the glamorous peaks, like Everest and K2 – and, of course, Makalu.’

Luca acknowledged the dig. Jack was right. Few but geologists cared about the smaller, less well-known mountains. He looked across the last map, at the vast tracts of peaks it depicted and marvelled at how much of the Himalayas remained totally unexplored. Like the human brain, the majority was uncharted territory.

Jack stood up and gingerly lowered himself back into his armchair.

‘So, Prodigal Son. Dare I ask if you’ve called your father since you’ve been back?’

Luca frowned. ‘I just got in a few hours ago, Jack, give me a break. I’ll go and see him some time in the next few days.’

His uncle started to say something but Luca broke in.

‘You are going to spare me the lecture, aren’t you, Jack?’ he said with a slight edge to his voice. ‘If I’d wanted that, I would have gone straight home.’

Jack shrugged and drank some more coffee.

‘Well, I’m hardly one to give advice on family matters. Especially with your father. I blew that a long time ago.’

‘Come on, Jack, I’m here to talk about this mountain,’ said Luca. ‘If the pyramid is as perfect as I remember it, it could be one of the most exciting things anyone’s discovered for years. Surely there’s some way of tracking down more information about the area?’

Jack nodded. Leaning forward in his chair, he scrawled a couple of names on the back of a used envelope.

‘There are a couple of ways I can think of, but both are long shots so I wouldn’t get your hopes up. There’s a Department of Asian Studies somewhere around the back of the Fitzwilliam Museum. There should be someone there who can point us in the right direction . . . and help us find someone who specialises in Tibetan geography or something similar. But your best bet will be the University Library. You should see if any of the early British explorers went near that region. Their accounts are usually pretty detailed.’

He paused, then after a moment’s thought, added, ‘Try around the eighteen hundreds, during the time of the “Great Game”. That’s when the British were paranoid about the Russians invading India and sent lots of spies up into the border regions. They mapped it all covertly, measuring distances by counting their own steps.’

He leaned over and took a swig from the dregs of his coffee, considering the idea of walking the breadth of the Himalayas while counting every single step.

When his gaze swung back up, it seemed to include Luca.

‘Crazy bastards,’ he said softly.

BEHIND THE VAST,
grey-brick façade of Cambridge’s University Library lies centuries’ worth of learning. Over seven million books, manuscripts and maps are contained in this giant edifice, the most precious being stored in the great tower which sticks up above the main structure like a factory chimney. Casting a long shadow over all who enter, it is a solemn reminder of the sheer weight of knowledge stacked inside.

Luca halted in front of the imposing entrance, fishing out Jack’s pass from the back pocket of his jeans. It was here, if anywhere, that he would find a reference to the pyramid mountain.

Following a group of students through the main lobby, he walked up echoing stone steps that smelled of floor wax into the index room. Row after row of worn, faded drawers lined the room, each containing ranks of neatly numbered and annotated cards.

Luca pulled out a few at random, not having a clue where to start. There were no signs or explanations as to how it all worked, just thousands of seemingly identical cards. What was it about highbrow institutions that made them still persist with such archaic systems? What was wrong with using a damn computer? Was it some sort of initiation test, to keep the unworthy philistines at bay? Here he was, in one of the greatest libraries in the world, and he couldn’t find a single book.

A couple of girls stood a few feet away from him, hugging books
to their chests. One of them had hazel eyes in a round, pretty face. He caught her eye.

‘I don’t suppose you could give me a hand?’ he asked. ‘I’m completely lost.’

‘Sure,’ she answered, moving round and looking down at the drawer he’d pulled out. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘Well, that’s the problem, really,’ he said, smiling apologetically. ‘It’s not exactly specific . . .’

Fifteen minutes later they had drawn a blank, and it was obvious from the strained smile on the girl’s face that she was regretting having agreed to help in the first place.

‘Look, I really think you’d better talk to a librarian,’ she said, flicking back her hair impatiently. ‘They take a while to pin down but, like I said, they really know their stuff. Sorry, but I have to run to a supervision . . .’