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 mat-erial 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.
Chapter 7
Behind the vast, grey-brick facade 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
