Editor’s Note
The pages that follow are reproduced from the private journals of Allan Quatermain.
The account has been prepared for publication with only minor modernisation of spelling and punctuation where clarity required it. The events, observations and conclusions remain as they were originally recorded.
Whether the reader accepts this journal as history, legend, or the recollections of one extraordinary explorer is a matter entirely for their own judgement.
My task has been simply to place these pages before you.
David Hardware
A Letter Home
The original occupies two folded sheets of cream writing paper. It was posted before the events recorded in Entry I and reached England after the writer did.
My dearest Eleanor,
By the time this letter reaches your desk, I trust I shall already be somewhere over the Mediterranean, wondering whether England has remembered how to produce a respectable cup of tea. I confess I have thought of little else these past few days.
Our present undertaking has proved rather more demanding than any of us anticipated. The mountains, as ever, have shown not the slightest regard for the careful plans of men. We have endured bitter winds, narrow passes and enough rain to satisfy Noah himself, yet Providence has seen fit to carry us through.
You will be pleased to know that my old boots have survived the journey rather better than my knees, both of which now complain with an enthusiasm usually reserved for politicians and tax collectors. I fear they are becoming wiser with age than their owner.
Please do not concern yourself on my account. I remain in perfectly reasonable health, although somewhat thinner than when I departed, a circumstance I suspect you will remedy within a day of my return.
Our companions have acquitted themselves admirably. Harrington has not once lost his sense of humour, despite having misplaced nearly everything else at least twice. Carter continues to insist that every unfamiliar plant possesses remarkable medicinal qualities. I remain unconvinced, particularly after witnessing the unfortunate effects of one of his recent experiments.
There were moments, I admit, when I wondered whether we should all see home again. Such thoughts visit every explorer eventually, and I have long since learnt that courage is not the absence of fear but the decision to keep placing one foot before the other despite it. You once told me that a calm mind weighs more than a full pack. I have carried those words with me ever since.
I often found myself thinking of home in the quiet hours after sunset, when the campfire had settled into glowing embers and conversation gave way to silence. Those moments reminded me how fortunate I am that someone waits for me, not because she must, but because she chooses to.
You have always insisted upon calling yourself my Quartermaster. I smile whenever I hear the word, for no army in history has possessed one half so capable. While I concern myself with deserts, mountains and the occasional impossible mystery, you quietly perform the miracles that make such journeys possible. Without your careful planning, my adventures would extend little farther than the station platform.
I daresay there will be paperwork awaiting me upon my return, and I have no doubt you have arranged my diary with military precision. I shall grumble about it faithfully, as expected, before thanking you for rescuing me from my own dreadful organisation.
Give my warm regards to Professor Ashcroft, should he enquire after me, and do remind young Thomas that cataloguing artefacts alphabetically is not merely a suggestion but a civilised necessity. Heaven help the poor soul who searches for an Assyrian tablet amongst Roman pottery.
With a little fortune and fair weather, I shall see you before many more sunsets have passed. Until then, know that no matter how distant the horizon may appear, my thoughts find their way home with remarkable ease.
Yours always,
Allan
Entry I
The Last Crossing
17 March
The bridge went at six minutes past four in the morning.
I know the time because Harrington’s watch stopped when the first cable struck him. It did not cut him, though the force of it spun him into the rock and left a red groove across his coat. When I pulled him upright, the cracked face of the watch showed 4:06. Behind us, half the bridge hung against the gorge wall. The other half had gone into the river with our food, the medical case and Professor Vale’s specimen box.
The bridge had been a poor affair before the storm. Two ropes, slats of wet cedar and a hand-line polished by generations of frightened palms. We had crossed it three days earlier because the northern path was under snow. Now the river had risen perhaps twelve feet and was carrying whole trees between its banks.
Carter stood on the far side.
He had crossed first with the lightest pack. Harrington and I had followed as far as the central span when the upstream anchor tore free. Carter reached for us. He was ten yards away and might as well have been in England.
“Go back!” I shouted.
He either did not hear or chose not to. Carter has always treated a sensible instruction as a topic for debate. He looped his rope around the remaining post and began lowering himself towards the broken span.
The second anchor moved.
There are moments when command is merely another word for choosing which friend may die. No handbook puts it so plainly. It will speak of priorities, acceptable risk and the good of the party. Those phrases are clean because the men who write them are seated at desks. On a mountain, a choice has a face.
“Cut it!” I called.
Carter stared at me.
“Cut your rope, man. The post is going.”
He understood then. He took out his knife, sawed once and dropped back upon the ledge as the post tore loose. The remains of the bridge fell between us. Harrington and I were thrown against the southern wall but our safety line held.
For some seconds the only sound was the river.
Carter rose. He lifted one hand. Then he turned towards the track by which we had come.
That was the last I saw of him for two days.
Our trouble had begun much earlier. We had entered the eastern range in search of a ruined observatory described by a surveyor in 1891. Vale believed its stone table preserved a local record of a comet. I had accepted the work because it seemed modest, because Eleanor had said I required a simple journey, and because I had committed the common error of believing an expedition simple merely because its purpose could be stated in one sentence.
We found the observatory. It was a shepherd’s shelter built upon older foundations, and the stone table was a quern. Vale was disappointed for nearly twenty minutes, after which he noticed tool marks below the newer masonry and became delighted again. Scholars are resilient creatures when supplied with ambiguity.
Then the weather closed.
Our guide, Temur, warned us that the southern crossing would flood. We turned north, lost a mule on the ice and spent a night beneath an overhang while snow sealed the higher path. The only route left was back across the gorge. By then the rain had begun.
After the bridge failed, Harrington and I had one rope, two revolvers, a canvas sheet, a tin of tea and three of Eleanor’s emergency oat biscuits. She had packed twelve. Harrington had eaten nine while awaiting what he called a more serious emergency.
“I feel this qualifies,” he said.
“You may feel it in silence.”
The southern track had slipped away in two places. We climbed above it, using roots where we could and cracks where we could not. Harrington’s left shoulder had stiffened, but he denied pain with such vigour that I knew it was considerable.
At noon we reached a shelf protected by juniper. I made tea in a cartridge tin and divided the first biscuit.
“Do you think Carter will find the eastern camp?” Harrington asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that?”
“At present, belief is less useful than saying it.”
He accepted this. It is one reason I travel with him.
We moved until dark. At the second landslip I went first and found no purchase beyond a narrow seam. The rain had turned the exposed clay to grease. Below us the river filled the gorge from wall to wall.
Harrington said, “We might wait.”
“For what?”
“A better idea.”
It was not cowardice. I have seen Harrington enter places that caused armed men to reconsider their professions. He was asking whether motion had become a substitute for thought.
I sat with my back against the rock.
The expedition leader is often the last man permitted to confess uncertainty. That is a foolish custom. Certainty may comfort a party, but false certainty kills it. I told Harrington I did not know how to cross. Saying it aloud removed a weight I had not realised I was carrying.
We waited.
After ten minutes the rain eased, and in the quieter air I heard bells. Not church bells; small animal bells, irregular and near. Temur appeared above us with two mountain ponies and an expression of profound disapproval.
He had crossed before the storm by a timber path known to every shepherd in the valley and to none of the survey maps.
“You went wrong,” he said.
“That had occurred to me.”
He lowered a rope.
We reached the eastern camp after midnight. Carter was there, asleep beside the stove with both boots still on. He had walked eighteen miles. Vale’s specimen box was gone, as were his notes, but the professor himself had survived with a broken finger and a vocabulary much enlarged by pain.
I slept for three hours.
When I woke, Carter handed me a mug and asked whether I regretted ordering him to cut the rope.
The honest answer was that I had regretted it from the moment I spoke. I had seen the accusation in his face and imagined explaining to his mother why I had left him. Yet had he remained tied to the post, the bridge would have carried him into the river.
“I regret that it was necessary,” I said.
He nodded. “That is not the same thing.”
“No.”
I have thought of that distinction ever since. There are choices one must make and choices one must afterwards endure. A man may be correct and still be wounded by what correctness required of him.
We left the mountains the following morning.
At the railhead, I posted my letter to Eleanor. It was gentle because I wished to spare her the gorge, the rope and the sight of Carter upon the far side. There was no falsehood in it. I had merely selected which truths belonged in her hands before I could place my own around them.
That evening a cable awaited me.
ASHCROFT FAILING. RETURN DIRECTLY. CAMBRIDGE REQUESTS DISCRETION. — ELEANOR
I read it twice.
The journey I had believed finished had not yet begun.