I could not be sure. If anything, it was a very indistinct cry. Perhaps someone hailing another over a distance. But it could just as easily have been my imagination.
Father Vernon had retraced his steps to the last turn in the path. There he was more able to look back and down the slope. I joined him. He was standing very still and alert.
Somewhere, far below us, a dog barked.
“Just a dog barking,” I said. “One should not see the sinister in every rustle and snap.”
“Dogs live in the valleys. They are in the village. There is no call for dogs to remain in the mountains at night.”
With that, I too became still and alert. We remained in that position for a few moments.
“There…” whispered the priest. “Did you hear that?”
“Dogs!”
“And Arthur…. look…”
I barely noticed that he had used my first name. I stood at his shoulder. Loomed over by the mountain above, and shrouded in tree shadow, the forest had fallen into dusk a good half an hour before it reached us. I peered at where he was pointing.
“There, and there… do you see?” His voice betrayed his disquiet.
“Yes.”
About a thousand yards away and directly below us on the lower slopes of our climb, I could make out little orange flickers. Three or four of them.
Lanterns.
They were moving, for they were, by turns, being hidden and revealed through the intervening trees. As if to confirm our fears, we heard another bark from a dog and then someone calling out. An answering call came from another direction. There was no doubt that the sounds had come from the vicinity of the little intermittent specks of amber.
“They are tracking us,” said Father Vernon.
NINETEEN
Clutching our accoutrements, I followed Father Vernon as he scuttled back up the track. Soon, as apprehension laid its cold grip on our hearts, we found ourselves jogging steadily up the slope. With every hail and halloo behind us, our pace increased. So did our pulses. I had never wondered how it felt to be a hunted stag among the glens; now, unfortunately, I knew only too well.
I tried to work out how they had managed to find our trail. It was not beyond the realms of possibility for someone to have gained access to my hotel room. They may have taken an item of clothing and they may have subsequently given it to some hunting dogs, in order that they might learn my scent and begin following it.
We blundered on along the track in the gathering gloom. The twilight would not last long at this latitude.
Father Vernon tugged at my sleeve and pulled me off into the trees which still lined the last of the lower reaches of the mountain.
“Up,” he urged, breathing heavily.
We began to stumble and clamber off the track and up the steeper slopes. There were roots here, fallen rocks, boughs and other impediments. They hammered at my toes, bruised my ankles, slashed at my shins and calves, and wrenched at my knees.
Still we clambered in the deepening darkness.
I understood fully Father Vernon’s intention: to get over the top of this ridge and scramble down into the neighbouring valley as quickly as possible. This would hopefully take us away from our pursuers. We had no idea whether we would succeed in throwing them off our scent. But it would have been only a matter of time before whoever was tracking us had caught up with us, should we have stayed on the path.
It took us about twenty minutes to scale the slope above the trail. We arrived at the top of the ridge, which was now clearing the main timberline. Here the landscape began to turn itself into tundra. Heaving and gasping for breath, battered and bruised, we gave ourselves the luxury of a temporary rest. I slumped onto the ground, dug out the water bottle from the satchel and drank deep. We by no means felt secure. But at least we had achieved our primary objective. One thing to be grateful for. Our self-approbation did not last long. It came like a blow to the midriff.
This time, I saw it first.
“Look…” I pointed down the slope that led into the neighbouring valley.
Tiny crocus flames of distant lanterns were weaving their way up the corresponding path through the darkness on that side of the ridge.
“Someone,” said Father Vernon through clenched teeth, “has been very clever. They have sent word to these other villagers that the game is afoot. They could only have started barely half an hour after our initial pursuers had set off. They have second-guessed the direction in which we have been travelling.”
I had begun a while ago to have my suspicions as to who that someone was.
“Come on.” The friar hauled me to my feet and we set off along the ridge as it rose towards the great mountains ahead of us. Below, behind and either side of us like some other-worldly wake straggled the light from a score of lanterns. They were becoming more evident now, as the evening deepened. And as they drew ever closer to their prey.
I couldn’t help thinking that we were being beaten towards waiting guns like grouse. I shook off that melancholy consideration and set my face to concentrate upon my continued ascent.
By the time evening had fully fallen, we found we had been pursued up into the height known as Kleine Scheidegg. The trees had all but disappeared. All we had as cover were folds in the stark uplands or the occasional rocky outcrop. The wind was keener here and the snowline barely a thousand feet further up. It was a spare, cold wilderness. The mountains were suddenly haughty, heartless and cruel. Mad, bad Byron had come this way in 1816. He had called the great Aletsch glacier, lying beyond the mountain ridge ahead of us, “a frozen hurricane”.
Father Vernon was anxious that we continue directly up the couloir and onto the snowfield. Here it would be thick enough to dig a snow hole in which we could spend the night. But we needed to gather what was left of our strength before that desperate assault. We flung ourselves gratefully behind a Neolithic-looking slab of rock. It would have done very well should it have been needed by the ancients intent upon some species of human sacrifice. We peered back the way we had just come. Everywhere in the shadows, beating across the ground we had only recently covered ourselves, could be seen those unrelenting lanterns. Anger crept into my heart and lay there in sullen reproach. Why had I come all this distance just to be caught anyway?
“We are surrounded,” Father Vernon noted. “We might just manage to hide away from them for a few hours. At the moment it is probably just villagers armed with pitchforks and axes. Maybe one or two shotguns,” he added, obligingly. “By morning the garrison at Interlaken will have been alerted, along with the canton police. They will come. In the morning, they will bring up the mountain guides and…”
“And…?”
“Hunters with rifles.”
“They can’t shoot me,” I protested, then added preposterously, “I’m a famous novelist.” Slightly more practically I continued, “They have no evidence.”
“That’s not what I heard,” the priest said, unhelpfully.
I grimaced. What I needed most at that point was reassurance, not gloom. “You do not now believe that deluded fellow Holloway’s rubbish, do you?” My voice had risen about an octave higher.
He did not get the chance to answer. Before he could open his mouth, a voice spoke out of the deep purple gloaming studded with torchlight below us.
“Doyle!” I recognized that supercilious slur to the voice. It carried perfectly clearly across the quarter of a mile of silent tundra that separated us. “You might as well give yourself up. We’ve just about done for you.”
I remained silent. I did not wish to give Holloway the satisfaction.
“You may have felt you were being clever coming this way, old chap. But it was easy to deduce in which direction you had gone. Your walking boots and ice axe were missing from your room. As was your knapsack. Wouldn’t have needed it if you were going to go down into the valley. Anyway, you might have been spotted going down. No, you were always going to go up. The least obvious escape route and consequently the most obvious.
Which is what I told the people here. You really are most predictable, old man. At my suggestion, they wired the villages on the other side of the ridge and set them off too.”
It was a fair piece of deduction, I had to admit. Up away from people. Despite the desperate situation, I wondered idly whether I would have reached the same conclusion had our roles been reversed.
“So, why don’t you just be a good fellow, save us all the trouble and come back with us? We won’t bite.”
I was not so sure of that. I was not sure of anything any more. I turned to Father Vernon to see how he was feeling. He laid a hand on my forearm. It was at once comforting and resolute. Interestingly, no mention had been made of my companion yet. Hopefully, he might still get away from all of this undetected. I owed him that at least.
“Should I go? Not that I want to.”
“No.”
“But if I went with them, they would leave and you could make your way back down later. No one would know of your involvement.”
“It is not over yet. We may still get you safely away from here. We just need a little time to think of a plan. They have not caught you yet. And why are they now calling out to you? Are they afraid that you are armed? Are they exhausted like us? We should wait a little while longer, at least.”
We took a turn each at the flagon of fine Swiss wine and lay back for a moment.
“What’s that?” The friar sat up. His breathing increased. I got onto my haunches to listen more attentively.
The once-distant barking was very much nearer now. I fancied I could hear the dogs’ paws rustling through the undergrowth as they bounded up the slope in our direction. Along with barking we could now hear yelping. The sound of excited dogs, hunting dogs, dogs closing in on their prey.
“It appears as though we have a little more climbing to do, doctor.”
“It appears so.”
Crouching there on a cold and blustery high alpine brae, listening to the approaching creatures, I had visions of a huge hellish hound. I imagined it pounding out of the darkness towards me. With a huge blood-curdling howl I could picture it clamping its great slavering jaws around my throat, then shaking me to and fro as if I were a cornered fox. I shivered and shook off the idea as best I might. Now was no time to quail.
“Come along, Doyle!”
Suddenly that languid voice again rolled up towards us like a mist.
“This really is getting rather tiresome. Let’s be having you, or we shall have to let the dogs off their leashes.” This comment was reinforced by a sudden and far more violent barking from the creatures. Someone had most likely stirred up the animals in order to emphasize the point, in order to send terror winging its way up towards us like some species of mystical black crow.
I could not help but think as I crouched there, a hunted creature, that Holloway’s voice had taken on a different timbre. A more curt, slightly cynical, world-weary intonation. Moreover, it sounded as if he were playing a part. A part, it began to concern me, I had written for him. It was as if he were playing the part of Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, as if he believed he were Sherlock Holmes.
I tried to chase such thoughts from my mind. But, even as I sought to do so, another thought seized hold of me, not without a grimace of pawky humour: these were dogs I earnestly wished had not barked in the night.
Then, finally, I thought that if I ever got out of this, I would definitely kill him… Holmes, that is…
“We cannot stay here,” I said, shaking myself out of my morbid reverie. “I do not intend being torn apart by a pack of hunting dogs. Let us get on. I will not be prevented from solving this mystery. Whomever it was, was concerned enough to drive me from the village in this way. It is why they want me caught and put away.”
“At least for a period of time. It could be weeks before you were brought to trial and found innocent, if you are…”
“If I am innocent? Not very encouraging!” Despite the circumstances, I found I was able to grin. “Then, if I am not allowed to go down, there is only one other way I can go.”
“Up?”
“Up.” I started to collect my things together. “One thing is for certain, we have no time left to discuss matters. I feel sure they will do what they said and let those hounds go at any moment. Holloway has no intention of waiting for reinforcements tomorrow. We shall have to climb like cats up a tree if we are to throw those hounds of his off our scent.”
“Up.” The priest repeated. He then said, with a wisp of irony in his voice, “You do know where we are, don’t you?”
“Where?”
“We are crouching at the foot of a little masterpiece of God’s called the Eiger.”
“I’ve heard of that…” I tried to remember in what context. Then it came to me. On the first day, Eva had referred to that great grey slab of a mountain as the widowmaker.
“However,” Father Vernon thought out loud, “there will be no watch at the north face immediately behind us. They would not have had time to send anyone round that far. And besides, no one has ever climbed it, so why should they need to cut us off from it?”
“Which is why we have been deliberately driven in this direction. Up against the wall. Clever – really very clever.” I marvelled at my nemesis’s ingenuity and foresight. We had been outmanoeuvred. He had pressed us back and back until we had found ourselves against this sheer wall. Calling it to mind as I had marvelled at it that first day, I recalled that it was a concave and hooded blade, like the inside of a vast pen nib. He didn’t have to follow us any further; he could afford to wait, I realized. All night, if necessary. As far as he was concerned, we were not going anywhere. I looked again at the task looming out of the bowels of the earth and rising into the vast blackness above me. “Why has no one ever climbed it?”
“It is sheer and bitter. If it rains, the rock face streams with a thousand pounding waterfalls. And when it has finished raining, the water forms verglas which glazes the rock and covers the surface with iron-hard ice. If it doesn’t rain, then you are at risk from falling rocks. If your fingers do not grow numb and lose their grip within the first hour, then the ice on the rock face will throw you from it; and, if that does not succeed, then the higher you get, the stronger the wind. You will be pulled and tugged at until you are hauled off it and hurled onto the scree a thousand feet below.”
I stared at him through the gloom.
“At night? How? By feel?”
I did not need to see his expression; the tone of the voice said everything. Was I entirely insane?
“Well…” Having stepped off over into the abyss of foolishness, I was loath to try to scramble back now, “… it is our only chance. If we cannot go under it, and we can’t go back, we have to go over it.”
“Arthur! This is madness. We cannot possibly do this.” The wind tore the words from his lips and scattered them across the cliff face like spindrift.
“I know, Father, I know. But I am desperate and bereft of ideas.”
“But…” he considered, “if we cannot go over, perhaps we might be able to go around…”
“Around? How do you mean?”
Holloway would have sneered had he witnessed those words. He would have sneered all the harder had he heard what the priest then said.
“I have attempted this other climb before, in my time.” His words were whirling, curling and fading in the mirk. “If memory serves, since we have not yet reached the true base of the crag, we might be able to work ourselves laterally and eventually over the Eiger’s shoulder. This would take us towards the trade route that wends its way over on the eastern flank…”
I tried to picture the peaks of the Berner Oberland in my mind’s eye. They rose and fell, like shark’s teeth. At the junction of one peak with the next, like the shoulder of a twin-headed giant, we might find better, and less sheer, purchase for our fingers and feet.
“I have managed it once before. In daylight. It is far more accessible for we duffers. We are not trying to break any records or place our names in the history books, after all, are we, my friend? Doctor…? Are you still undecided…?”
“No. I just wondered why we had not thought of this before.”
“Because if we had set off directly for that route, we would have been cut off by Holloway’s troops. By taking this route we have, by chance, drawn the net in tighter on us. Or rather it has drawn itself tighter upon us…”
“So now we have entered a new dimension? The vertical rather than the horizontal plane.”
“Precisely. Now we can reconsider our options…”
Now, up above and beyond the apex of our pursuit, we would be able to elude them by working our way around outside the perimeters of the net and traverse onto our new route. It could not have worked out more hopefully than if we had planned it.
“As it happens, in my rucksack I have an ice axe, rope and pitons and other climbing gear.” The friar produced the items as he spoke, and then revealed woollen socks and a burly pair of studded climbing boots. He started to pull them on in place of his sandals. He looked at me, and through the night, I could see his grin. “I thought we might have to go ‘up’ at some stage. I just did not imagine for one moment precisely which ‘up’ we would have to take.”
“Then, my dear fellow, lead on. Lead on.”
“As you say, my son. And let us commend our souls to God as we do so…”
Which was hardly encouraging.
Accompanied by the occasional yelp and wail of the dogs below us, we turned our backs on the lanterns, whose lights were becoming increasingly larger by the minute. We scrambled somewhat irresolutely across towards the starting point for our insane attempt.
We managed the early stages of the ascent clinging on to the rocks and cracks through the ice and snow fairly easily. It was a difficult climb, but we were ambitious. It was as if the great monster was keen to draw us in towards it in our folly and ambition. As we climbed higher, though, the problems presented to us became more pronounced, and our weariness began to tell. We approached a particularly difficult crevasse but, before we reached it, we were faced with an almost vertical wall. Of course, it was preposterous. We had managed only a short amount of puffing and panting and wheezing, scaling the widowmaker, before we realized exactly what it was that we had undertaken.