Servants of the Map Read Online Free Page B

relationships to each other and the glaciers.
    I will entrust this to the herdsman I met, who is on his way to Skardu; may it find its way to you. One of our porters speaks a language somewhat familiar to this herdsman. The pair had a discussion involving much pointing at Masherbrum, an insistent tone on the part of the porter, violent head-shakings from the herdsman. Later I asked the porter what they’d been talking about. The herdsman had asked where we’d been; the porter had shown him the shoulder from which we saw K2. “You have never been there,” the herdsman apparently said. “No one can go there. It is not for men.”
    He does not write to Clara about his glacial misadventures. Walking along on a hazy day with his party strung out behind him, he had seen what resembled a small round rock perched on the ice in the distance. Fresh snow had fallen the night before and the glare was terrible; over his eyes he’d drawn a piece of white muslin, like a beekeeper’s veil, which cut the worst of the blinding light but dimmed the outlines of everything. One of his companions had bound a sheet of slit paper over his eyes, while others had woven shades from the hair of yaks’ tails or had unbound their own hair and combed it forward until it screened their eyes. Max was nearly upon the round rock before he recognized it as a head.
    A narrow crevasse, its opening covered by drifted snow; a wedge-shaped crack the width of a man at the top, tapering swiftly to a crease: inspecting it, with his veil raised, Max could imagine what had happened. The testing step forward, the confident placement of the second foot; and then one last second of everyday life before the deceitful bridge crumbled and the man plunged down, leaving his head and neck above the surface. The slit would have fit as intimately as a shroud, trapping the man’s feet with his toes pointed down. No room to flex his knees or elbows and gain some purchase—but his head was free, he was breathing, he wasn’t that cold, and surely—surely?—he could pull himself out.
    The man had a name, although it would take a while to determine it: Bancroft, whom Max had met only once, a member of one of the triangulating parties, disappeared three days before Max arrived. The ice inside the crevasse, warmed by the heat it stole from Bancroft’s body, would have melted and pulled him inch by inch farther down, chilling him and slowing his blood, stealing his breath as fluid pooled in his feet and legs and his heart struggled to push it back up. By nightfall, with the cold pouring down from the stars, the cold wind pouring down from the peaks, the slit which had parted and shaped itself to Bancroft’s body would have frozen solid around him. After hours of fruitless work, Max and his companions had reluctantly left Bancroft in the ice.
    Max had not told Clara any of this: it would have frightened her. It frightened him. And yet despite that he went walking alone, ten days later. The sun was out, the sky was clear; the men had stopped in the middle of the afternoon, refused to go farther without a rest, and set up camp against his wishes. Irritated, he’d refused to waste the day. He’d mapped this section already, but wanted more detail for his sketches: how the ice curved and cracked as it ground past the embracing wall of the mountain. In Wales, when he was being trained, he and Laurence had seen erratic boulders and mountains with deeply scored flanks which were caused, said the bookish young man who led them, by a glacial period that covered all Europe with ice. Now it was as if he’d walked backward into that earlier time.
    He fell into a fissure, forty feet deep. A thick tongue of ice, like the recalcitrant piece of heartwood bridging two halves of a split log, stretched between the uphill and downhill walls of the crevasse and broke his fall. He landed face down, draped around a narrow slab, arms and legs dangling into empty space. Feebly he said his own name,