urgency:
Come back. Where are you going?
You force foot after foot. You slide downward even as you move up. The slope shifts. The rock that seemed firm slides and falls a soundless distance away into the black gorge. Your feet are wet and warm. With your own blood – though why should that be when you’ve left the leeches behind? You look down at your boots. Blood is spilling over their rims. You stop at last, and so does the man with you, who says, You were always a worrier, come on.
Look this way, to the left! Can’t you see me begging you to turn back? Why can’t you hear me?
Your feet start up the slope again and your heart booms like a drum keeping time. The air is cold and dry, scouring your nostrils. You are pausing every few steps, drooping with weariness. The other man prods the small of your back to urge you on. Around us, all is grey: grey rocks, dirty grey snow, low grey sky. The binocular strap around your neck is a resting noose.
I would scoop you up like a baby and carry you away to safety if I could. I would zip us into a single sleeping bag and wrap myself around you all night so that the warmth of my legs could thaw your legs. I would press your hands into the warmest part of me to unfreeze your fingers.
Just a little further, the other man says.
I strain to see his face. I think I have heard his voice before. Your blood-filled boots ooze into the grey snow. They drip slick red onto stones. Can you feel anything but the sticky wetness of your feet? Only exhaustion. What can you hear? The binoculars knocking against your chest. The wind like an ocean wave.
We come to the top. It is not the level top of a plateau or the crest of a hill. It is the rim of a cavernous grey-white bowl within which the wind is swirling, shifting snow dust, tiny pebbles. Far below, at the base of the bowl, we can see water reflecting sky, slabs of ice breaking the reflection into irregular geometries. Steep sides of grey scree slide away from us into the bowl.
The other man says, Have you seen anything like that? Look through your binoculars.
The voice is from far away, the sound of sand scraped with a spade. I have heard this voice before, in another place and time. He puts a hand on your shoulder and it is missing a finger.
You raise the binoculars to your eyes and see what I knew was waiting. The edges of the lake are populated. Human skeletons and bones. Clavicles, skulls. Tibia, fibula, femur. Mandibles and ribs, foot and hand phalanges with silver toe rings and gold finger rings on them still. Necklaces of gold beads intertwined with vertebrae. Some skeletons almost intact, frozen into the bed of the lake, others clinging to the slope, trying to claw a way out. A skull floats on the liquid part of the lake.
This is it, you say, hearing your own voice for the first time. Where we all end. A smile of sorts cracks your face, painful in the cold air.
You get no answer. You look to your left, there is no-one. Nobody to your right, or behind, or further away, or down towards the lake. You shout a name. I try to reach it, cannot snatch a syllable of it from the wind. Your boots are heavy with blood, you can barely lift them for the weight. A drop falls, and then another, of ice-melt from the low sky. You step back from the rim of the lake and your bloodied feet, now inexplicably bare, lose their grip.
You see the water in the lake and the skeletons in it, the ice and the cloud-heavy sky in the water, rushing towards you. You feel a vast weightlessness and vertigo as you fly down through the emptiness.
You cry out, but it is not your friend’s name. You are calling, “Maya, Maya.”
Maya, illusion, a woman’s name, mine.
I woke up with my own name in my ears. Through the uncurtained windows the eastern slopes of Nanda Devi and Trishul, suspended between night and day, were icy blue. It was going to be a clear morning, with beautiful views, but I wanted to run away: push aside the forest, escape the oaks and the darkness of deodars, clear a path to the plains, run down and away