The Last Samurai

As he sat there a great wind suddenly blew up, so that high above he could see the branches of the trees streaming in the ferocious air. From behind him in the distance he heard a great noise, as of many people shouting—and when he looked back & then up he saw a huge dragon shooting up into the darkening sky: the best kitemakers in the village had been working on it for weeks, & now it had escaped. The field where they launched the kites was far away, but in the slanting afternoon light all the figures stood out clearly: five or six were staring up at the kite which had escaped, and further back another group was struggling to haul a kite in. One person had caught the body of the kite, and another was reeling in the line.

Suddenly the wind snatched at the kite; the lineman tripped, tearing the kite from the other man’s hands; and as the kite began to lift a child ran forward and flung itself onto the frame. The kite dragged along the ground for a few feet, the tiny figure still clinging—and then the wind snatched it high into the air while the line went flying far out of reach.

Now the kiteflyers looked up in silence, while the brilliant red kite bore the child away. It sailed above HC, and when it reached the cliff a current of air tossed it high above.

The villagers stopped at the edge of the cliff. The kite began to descend. The wind snatched it this way and that, and at last hurled it at the top of one of the mountains HC had been looking at just before. The wind was blowing away from them, but in a sudden sharp twist it tossed at them a snatch of sound, the howling of a child, before wheeling away again.

The villagers looked at the mountain & HC, feeling they might now be more communicative, asked sympathetically: What is to be done?

But though he found the dialect very difficult what they seemed to be saying was that nothing could be done.

HC was sure he had not understood, but later someone explained that though of course they could request assistance it would not come and the request would count against them.

HC said: But couldn’t someone climb up and get it?

And everyone said at once that this was impossible because no one had ever climbed the mountain and anyone who tried it would die.

That settled it.

HC said at once:

I will rescue the child.

He looked up at the flaming trees and laughed, and he said:

I will eat the cattle of the Sun.

Night had fallen. The moon was the colour of a pumpkin, low on the horizon, sullen brother of the Sun. Under its baleful light the white mist glimmered, and the black of the mountains was more solid than rock.

He went back to town and he said that he needed a lot of silk. He was told that this could not be had but he kept insisting. He explained what he wanted to do and now the local people took an interest. In all the terrible times they had been through they had kept their interest in kites, and almost everyone in the town took an interest in aerodynamics and in what could be done with the silk. He gave hard currency to the right people and he was given 100 or so square metres of brilliant yellow silk, and a woman sat up all night sewing it for him on an old black Singer with a foot pedal.

In the morning the mist had cleared. The green fields ran straight to the base of each rock, unbroken by any path, and so he walked straight across a field to the wall of rock. The air was still & the occasional cries of the child could be heard.

HC had done some climbing as a boy. The fact that he had climbed before meant that he had some idea of what he was taking on; sometimes he thought he could do it, and sometimes he knew that he knew the form his death would take.

He found a handhold and a foothold, and he began to climb.

After an hour his hands were scraped and there was a shooting pain in his shoulder. His face was scraped on one side where it was against the rock, and a trickle of blood and sweat ran by the corner of one eye and could not be wiped away.

Perhaps no one would back down who’d started such a thing. HC would never back down. He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men. He had been through the Iliad and Odyssey and each time he had come to a word he did not know he had looked it up in Liddell & Scott and written it down, and if there were five words in a line he had looked up five words and written them down before going on to a line in which there were four words he did not know, and at the age of 14 he had worked through Tacitus in this way and at the age of 20 he had read the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun and at 22 the Dream of the Red Chamber. Now he moved one finger a centimetre and then another, and then he moved the toe of his boot a centimetre and the toe of his other boot a centimetre.