After a little more than two hours they reached the far side of the plateau and found themselves facing a steep path up a snow-covered mountainside. Ellis went first, pulling Maggie behind him. Jane followed at a safe distance in case the horse should slip backward. They went up the mountain in a zigzag.
The path was not clearly marked. They presumed it lay wherever the ground was lower than in neighboring areas. Jane longed for a more definite sign that this was the route: the remains of a fire, a clean-picked chicken carcass, even a discarded matchbox—anything that would indicate that other human beings had once passed this way. She began obsessively to imagine that they were completely lost, far from the path, wandering aimlessly through endless snows, and that they would continue to meander for days, until they ran out of food and energy and willpower, and lay down in the snow, all three of them, to freeze to death together.
Her back ached insupportably. With much reluctance she gave Chantal to Ellis and took the horse’s reins from him, to transfer the strain to a different set of muscles. The wretched horse stumbled constantly now. At one point it slipped on an icy boulder and went down. Jane had to haul mercilessly on the bridle to get the animal to its feet. When the horse stood up finally Jane saw a dark stain on the snow where it had fallen: blood. Looking more closely, she saw a cut on its left knee. The injury did not appear serious: she made Maggie walk on.
Now that she was in the lead, she had to decide where the path lay, and the nightmare of getting irretrievably lost haunted every hesitation. At times the way seemed to fork and she had to guess, left or right? Often the ground was more or less uniformly level, so she just followed her nose until some kind of pathway reappeared. Once she found herself floundering in a snowdrift, and had to be pulled out by Ellis and the horse.
Eventually the path led her onto a ledge which wound far up the side of the mountain. They were very high: looking back across the plateau so far below made her a little dizzy. Surely they could not be far from the pass?
The ledge was steep and icy and only a few feet wide, and beyond the edge was a precipitous drop. Jane trod extra carefully, but all the same she stumbled several times, and once fell to her knees, bruising them. She ached so much all over that she hardly noticed the new pains. Maggie slipped constantly, until Jane no longer bothered to turn around when she heard her hooves skid, but simply pulled harder on the reins. She would have liked to readjust the horse’s load so that the heavy bags were farther forward, which would have helped the animal’s stability on the uphill climb; but there was no room on the ledge, and she was afraid that if she stopped she would not be able to start again.
The ledge narrowed and wound around an outcrop of cliffs. Jane gingerly took steps across the most slender section, but despite her caution—or perhaps because she was so nervous—she slipped. For a heart-stopping moment she thought she was going to fall over the edge; but she landed on her knees and steadied herself with both hands. From the corner of her eye she could see the snowy slopes hundreds of feet below. She started to shake, and controlled herself with an effort.
She stood up slowly and turned around. She had let go of the reins, which now dangled over the precipice. The horse stood watching her, stiff-legged and trembling, evidently terrified. When she reached for the bridle the horse took a panicky step backward. “Stop!” Jane cried; then she made her voice calm and said quietly: “Don’t do that. Come to me. You’ll be all right.”
Ellis called to her from the other side of the outcrop, “What is it?”
“Hush,” she called softly. “Maggie’s frightened. Stay back.” She was dreadfully aware that Ellis was carrying Chantal. She continued to murmur reassuringly to the horse as she stepped slowly toward it. It stared at her, wide-eyed, breath like smoke coming from its flared nostrils. She got within arm’s length and reached for its bridle.
The horse jerked its head away, stepped backward, skidded and lost its balance.
As the horse’s head jerked back, Jane caught the reins; but its legs slipped from beneath it, it fell to the right, the reins flew from Jane’s hand, and to her unspeakable horror the horse slid slowly on its back to the lip of the ledge and fell over, neighing in terror.
Ellis appeared. “Stop!” he shouted at Jane, and she realized she was screaming. She closed her mouth with a snap. Ellis knelt down and peered over the edge, still clutching Chantal to his chest beneath his down coat. Jane controlled her hysteria and knelt beside him.
She expected to see the body of the horse embedded in the snow hundreds of feet below. In fact it had landed on a shelf just five or six feet down, and it was lying on its side with its feet sticking out into the void. “It’s still alive!” Jane cried. “Thank God!”
“And our supplies are intact,” said Ellis unsentimentally.
“But how can we get the animal back up here?”
Ellis looked at her and said nothing.
Jane realized they could not possibly get the horse back up onto the path. “But we can’t leave her behind to die in the cold!” Jane said.
“I’m sorry,” said Ellis.
“Oh, God, it’s unbearable.”
Ellis unzipped his down coat and unslung Chantal. Jane took her and put her inside her own coat. “I’ll get the food first,” said Ellis.
He lay flat on his belly along the lip of the ledge and then swung his feet over. Loose snow flurried over the prone horse. Ellis lowered himself slowly, feet searching for the shelf. He touched firm ground, slid his elbows off the ledge and carefully turned around.
Jane watched him, petrified. Between the horse’s rump and the face of the cliff there was not room enough for both of Ellis’s feet side by side: he had to stand, with his feet one behind the other, like a figure in an ancient Egyptian wall painting. He bent at the knees and slowly lowered himself into a crouch; then he reached for the complex web of leather straps holding the canvas bag of emergency rations.
At that moment the horse decided to get up.
It bent its front legs and somehow managed to get them under its fore-quarters; then, with the familiar snakelike wriggle of a horse getting to its feet, it lifted its front end and tried to swing its rear legs back onto the ledge.
It almost succeeded.
Then its back feet slid away, it lost its balance, and its rear end fell sideways. Ellis grabbed the food bag. Inch by inch the horse slipped away, kicking and struggling. Jane was terrified it would injure Ellis. Inexorably the animal slithered over the edge. Ellis jerked at the food bag, no longer trying to save the horse, but hoping to snap the leather straps and hold on to the food. So determined was he that Jane feared he would let the horse pull him over the edge. The animal slid faster, dragging Ellis to the brink. At the last second he let go of the bag with a cry of frustration, and the horse made a noise like a scream and dropped away, tumbling over and over as it fell into the void, taking with it all their food, their medical supplies, their sleeping bag and Chantal’s spare diaper.
Jane burst into tears.
A few moments later Ellis scrambled up onto the ledge beside her. He put his arms around her and knelt there with her for a minute while she cried for the horse and the supplies and her aching legs and her frozen feet. Then he stood, gently helped her up and said: “We mustn’t stop.”
“But how can we go on?” she cried. “We’ve nothing to eat, we can’t boil water, we’ve no sleeping bag, no medicines. . . .”
“We’ve got each other,” he said.
She hugged him tightly when she remembered how near to the edge he had slipped. If we live through this, she thought, and if we escape the Russians and get back to Europe together, I’ll never let him out of my sight, I swear.
“You go first,” he said, disentangling himself from her embrace. “I want to be able to see you.” He gave her a gentle shove, and automatically she began to walk on up the mountain. Slowly her despair crept back. She decided her aim would simply be to carry on walking until she dropped dead. After a while Chantal began to cry. Jane ignored her, and eventually she stopped.
Sometime later—it might have been minutes or hours, for she had lost track of time—as Jane was rounding a corner, Ellis caught up with her and stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Look,” he said, pointing ahead.
The track led down into a vast bowl of hills rimmed by white-peaked mountains. At first Jane did not understand why Ellis had said
