how it was done.

After that we settled down and just walked. It was a steep hike, but not as steep as yesterday's near-vertical climb from Thorung Phedi to Thorung Death Camp. And after almost two weeks of trekking my uphill muscles were things of iron. I'd had a headache last night, but now I felt terrific, vibrantly alive. Many of the Death Camp inhabitants had seemed suicidally miserable last night. I was glad to have had the benefit of an extra two days' acclimatization around Manang. Even so, I had felt the hypoxia. I had tried to play cards, but I couldn't add or remember the scores; had tried to read, but couldn't focus for more than a sentence at a time. In the end like everyone else I simply waited to grow tired enough to fall asleep while drinking loads of garlic soup and lemon tea. The HRA doctors had told us that hydration was key to minimizing altitude sickness. According to Nepalis, garlic and lots of it was the cure.

One of them seemed to have worked. I was breathing quickly, but not panting, and moving at a steady pace. Gavin, who was awesomely fit and seemed to thrive as the oxygen grew more depleted, walked faster and took fewer breaks than I, and soon disappeared into the distance. Suited me. We got along well but we were both ready to sever our week-long travel partnership. Both of us were loners at heart.

My dream had not dissipated, which was unusual. Usually I forget my dreams completely within moments of waking. This one had resonance. They had warned us at the HRA cabbage patch lecture that we might have strange and vivid dreams up here, and I guessed discovering a dead body and maybe being pursued by a killer was bound to contribute to that.

I still hadn't decided whether the masked man was a killer or not. It didn't make any sense that Joe Random Trekker would go for a walk with no pack and a ski mask, then abruptly double back just as I happened to turn a bend and see that the trail was no longer empty. But it didn't make any sense that he would return from Letdar to track me down either. So I'd found out his victim's name, so what? How did that threaten him? Why wouldn't he just keep going up the trail? He had committed the perfect crime. He didn't need to track me down, it only put him in more danger. Unless he thought I had found out something else, something that would identify him. But I couldn't imagine what that would be.

For that matter — I stopped all of a sudden, not to take a break, but because my thoughts were racing in this thin air, and a question had occurred to me for the first time. Why had we found the body at all? The killer had presumably thrown Stanley Goebel's pack, and the rock he had used to kill him, over the cliff near where the murder had taken place. Why wouldn't he have disposed of the body in the same way? What possible reason did he have to leave it there to be discovered?

Maybe somebody had come along, who would have seen him, after discarding the pack and rock, before discarding the body. Possible. It seemed unlikely, but possible. But why wouldn't he have gotten rid of the body first?

Did he want it to be discovered? Was there some sick psychological thing with the knives where he wanted the world to see what he had done? Did he want the world to see Stanley Goebel defaced? But Abigail had said he was traveling on his own. The killer was presumably either a complete stranger or a very recent acquaintance. So why this hateful mutilation?

Another trekker passed me and I resumed my slow trudge upwards, thinking. Laura's body could have been disposed of too. Or at least hidden out of sight, in the rocks and weeds. Instead it was left draped on the black sand of Mile Six Beach like a bloody flag. Why call attention to it?

What was the connection? There had to be a connection, I decided. Two murders so similarly perverse, of travelers in Third World countries; two perfect unsolvable crimes; they had to be connected by something other than my presence. But I could not even begin to think of what the connection might be. And I felt like I shouldn't even try. I shouldn't think about Laura any more. I had been thinking about her for two years. It was past time to let her go.

About an hour after leaving Death Camp we got to a teahouse which was reportedly midway to the top. I ate a frozen Snickers bar with some difficulty and paid a full U.S. dollar to wash it down with lemon tea served in a small metal cup. My hands were cold, even inside the two layers of gloves I had rented in Pokhara, and I removed my gloves and warmed my fingers on the cup, thinking uncomfortably of my dream. Water had a much lower boiling temperature at this altitude, so the metal did not feel uncomfortably hot.

I climbed onwards, past a gaggle of French package-tourists wielding ski poles who were necessarily moving at the speed of their slowest member, past six-inch iron bars engraved with apparently random numbers that protruded from the thin snow cover to mark the path. The sun had risen behind us and the snow-capped peaks all around us glittered like diamonds. The only colours of the landscape were dark gray earth and white snow. It was astonishingly beautiful, like walking through a Group Of Seven painting. I tromped slowly but steadily in the thick dark gravel, moving at a constant comfortable pace. An old seabed, I remembered. Aquatic fossils are found at the summit of Mount Everest. Long ago, before India plunged into the Asian continent and forced the folds of the Himalaya high into the sky, this very earth I walked on had been deep beneath the sea.

I passed a cairn on the left side of the trail; an American tourist, according to the headstone, who had died here not so long ago. It didn't say whether it was a blizzard or altitude sickness that got him. Or a killer.

And then I looked up and saw a blaze of colour up ahead. Strands of triangular Buddhist prayer flags by the hundred, red and yellow and green and blue and white, festooned the apex of our trek. Anticipated, feared, spoken of in hushed tones for two weeks now; the Thorung La.

There was a teahouse here — rebuilt every year, according to the guidebook, after being destroyed by the winter — and a crowd of triumphant trekkers milled about and took each other's picture. I wasn't really in the mood but I got a Dutch girl to take my picture against the sign that reported that I had reached the altitude of 5400 meters aka 17500 feet, the same height as Everest Base Camp. I ate another Snickers bar, and had another metal cupful of the most expensive lemon tea in Asia, and tried to work out why I felt so disappointed.

The rocks on the other side of the pass were brown and beige and if I squinted I could make out a green patch far below. Muktinath, I presumed. An oasis in the desert Tibetan Plateau, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook, politically Nepali, but in terms of culture and ethnicity and geography, it was part of fabled and mysterious Tibet. I took one last look around at the clean stark panorama and began the long trek down.

Downhill was hell. When I finally arrived in Muktinath I thought my knees were going to buckle and collapse. I staggered past the series of temples on the edge of town, walked up to the first lodge I saw, and asked for a bed. But they were full. I went to the next, and the next, and the next; it was the fourth which had a spare bed. I collapsed on it, surprised at the paucity of lodging, for I knew I had to be part of the leading wave. Most of those crossing today would have begun at Thorung Phedi, a good hour below Death Camp.

I made myself get up and washed myself with a bucket bath. There was no hot water, but I was beyond caring. I shaved with a broken fragment of a mirror. I wanted to wash my clothes, but the communal tap nearest my lodge was being used by a Nepali family to fill a series of large buckets, so instead I went to the police checkpoint to sign in. The bored policeman flipped through my passport, stamped my trekking permit, and gestured to the ledger. I wrote down my name, nationality, passport number, etc. Gavin had already checked in. I flipped through the last few pages of the ledger, thinking to myself that somewhere here was the killer's name.

And then I saw it. Eight pages and two days ago. Stanley Goebel, the entry read. Passport number and all.

I stared at it until a pair of trekkers came up behind me and the policeman motioned me to make way. I stared at the ledger as they went through the procedure. Had Stanley Goebel's killer taken his identity? Used his passport? Or was Stanley Goebel alive and well, was the dead man someone else? Had Abigail the Australian been wrong? Or had she lied?

I wanted a picture of that entry, and I had my camera on me, but I could easily imagine the policeman being sticky about letting me take one; so after the two trekkers had left, I took my camera out, set the flash to on, and asked the policeman if I could take his picture, idly flipping the ledger back to the appropriate page. He puffed his chest out proudly, and I snapped a shot of him — and, apparently accidentally, a shot of the ledger as I lowered the camera. I wasn't sure it would turn out but it would have to do.

I hobbled back to my lodge, my mind churning. I ordered fried noodles with cheese and vegetables and wrote in my journal until the food arrived. I didn't realize how hungry I was until the plate was before me. After it was empty I went back to my room to give my legs a rest, intending to later track down Gavin at whatever lodge he was at and tell him the news.

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