Escape from Kathmandu Read Free Page A

wanted to continue some studies she had started of the goraks, and so I hiked on up to Honey Cliff on my own a few times.
    It was on one of those days by myself that it happened. The warbler didn’t show up, and I continued upstream to see if I could find the source. Clouds were rolling up from the valley below and it looked like it would rain later, but it was still sunny up where I was. I reached the source of the stream—a spring-fed pool at the bottom of a talus slope—and stood watching it pour down into the world. One of those quiet Himalayan moments, where the world seems like an immense chapel.
    Then a movement across the pool caught my eye, there in the shadow of two gnarled oak trees. I froze, but I was right out in the open for anyone to see. There under one of the oaks, in shadow darker for the sunlight, a pair of eyes watched me. They were about my height off the ground. I thought it might be a bear, and was mentally reviewing the trees behind me for climbability, when it moved again—it blinked. And then I saw that the eyes had whites visible around the iris. A villager, out hunting? I didn’t think so. My heart began to hammer away inside me, and I couldn’t help swallowing. Surely that was some sort of
face
there in the shadows? A bearded face?
    Of course I had an idea what I might be trading glances with. The yeti, the mountain man, the elusive creature of the snows. The
Abominable Snowman
, for God’s sake! My heart’s never pounded faster. What to do? The whites of its eyes… baboons have white eyelids that they use to make threats, and if you look at them directly they see the white of your eyes, and believe you are threatening them; on the off-chance that this creature had a similar code, I tilted my head down and looked at him indirectly. I swear it appeared to nod back at me.
    Then another blink, only the eyes didn’t return. The bearded face and the shape below it were gone. I started breathing again, listened as hard as I could, but never heard anything except for the chuckle of the stream.
    After a minute or two I crossed the stream and took a look at the ground under the oak. It was mossy, and there were areas of moss that had been stepped on by something at least as heavy as me; but no clear tracks, of course. And nothing more than that, in any direction.
    I hiked back down to camp in a daze; I hardly saw a thing, and jumped at every little sound. You can imagine how I felt—a sighting like that… !
    And that very night, while I was trying to quietly eat my stew and not reveal that anything had happened, the group’s conversation veered onto the topic of the yeti. I almost dropped my fork. It was Adrakian again—he was frustrated at the fact that despite all of the spoor visible in the area, he had only actually seen some squirrels and a distant monkey or two. Of course it would have helped if he’d spent the night in the night blinds more often. Anyway, he wanted to bring up something, to be the center of attention and take the stage as The Expert. “You know these high valleys are exactly the zone the yeti live in,” he announced matter-of-factly.
    That’s when the fork almost left me. “It’s almost certain they exist, of course,” Adrakian went on, with a funny smile.
    “Oh, Philip,” Sarah said. She said that a lot to him these days, which didn’t bother me at all.
    “It’s true.” Then he went into the whole bit, which of course all of us knew: the tracks in the snow that Eric Shipton photographed, George Schaller’s support for the idea, the prints Cronin’s party found, the many other sightings… “There are thousands of square miles of impenetrable mountain wilderness here, as we now know firsthand.”
    Of course I didn’t need any convincing. And the others were perfectly willing to concede the notion. “Wouldn’t that be something if we found one!” Valerie said. “Got some good photos—”
    “Or found a body,” John said. Botanists think in terms of