Desmond Bagley by High Citadel (V1.1)

Author:High Citadel (V1.1) [Txt] [Citadel, High]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

iv

Altogether it took them three hours to cross the glacier and by then Forester was exhausted, but Rohde would allow no rest. “We must get as high as we can while there is still light,” he said. “Tonight will weaken us very much — it is not good to spend a night in the open without a tent or the right kind of clothing.”

Forester managed a grin. Everything to Rohde was either good or not goad; black and white with no shades of grey. He kicked Peabody to his feet and said tiredly. “Okay; lead on, MacDuff.”

Rohde looked up at the pass. “We lost height in crossing the glacier; we still have to ascend between five and six hundred metres to get to the top.”

Sixteen hundred to two thousand feet, Forester translated silently. He followed Rohde’s gaze. To their left was the glacier, oozing imperceptibly down the mountain and scraping Itself by a rock wall. Above, the clean sweep of snow was broken by a line of cliffs half way up to the top of the pass. “Do we have to climb that?” he demanded.

Rohde scrutinised the terrain carefully, then shook his head. “I think we can go by the cliffs there — on the extreme right. That will bring us on top of the cliffs. We will bivouac there tonight.”

He put his hand in his pocket and produced the small leather bag of coca quids he had compounded back in the camp. “Hold out your hand,” he said. “You will need these now.”

He shook a dozen of the green squares into Forester’s palm and Forester put one into his mouth and chewed it. It had an acrid and pungent taste which pleasantly warmed the inside of his mouth. “Not too many,” warned Rohde. “Or your mouth will become inflamed.”

It was useless giving them to Peabody. He had relapsed into his state of automatism and followed Rohde like a dog on a lead, obedient to the tugs on the rope. As Rohde set out on the long climb up to the cliffs he followed, mechanically going through the proper climbing movements as though guided by something outside himself. Forester, watching him from behind, hoped there would be no crisis; as long as things went well Peabody would be all right, but in an emergency he would certainly break, as O’Hara had prophesied.

He did not remember much of that long and toilsome climb. Perhaps the coca contributed to that, for he found himself in much the same state as he imagined Peabody to be in. Rhythmically chewing the quid, he climbed automatically, following the trail broken by the indefatigable Rohde.

At first the snow was thick and crusted, and then, as they approached the extreme right of the line of cliffs, the slope steepened and the snow cover became thinner and they found that under it was a sheet of ice. Climbing in these conditions without crampons was difficult, and, as Rohde confessed a little time afterwards, would have been considered impossible by anyone who knew the mountains.

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