The Last Samurai

For ten hours he moved up the face of the rock centimetre by centimetre. He looked neither up nor down. But in the tenth hour he put a boot up a centimetre and as his head rose a centimetre the green leaf of a vine dangled by his nose. He looked up and the fringe of the top was a few feet above him. Still obstinately, though his hands were bloody and his face was bloody he climbed centimetre by centimetre.

When he got to the top he could hardly get over the edge. His arms had been stretched up for ten hours and the muscles had set. When he bent one wrist over the edge a terrible cramp seized the whole arm, so that for a second he hung by one hand and the tips of two boots; blackness covered his eyes and he might have fallen back through thousands of feet of empty air. Something saved him. He saw a root by his left hand and grasped it, and though he groaned with pain he pulled himself up over the edge, and he lay on the grass and looked at the sky.

After a while he heard a little sound & still looking up he found he was looking into the face of the child. It was the child he had spoken to the day before. Previously he had thought that the child had been carried away by accident. Now he thought: But perhaps he meant to do it. He saw the dragon shooting up into the air; perhaps the child had imagined being carried into the air away from its tormentors. Now its face was scratched and there was a cut on one arm. HC said something in Uzbek and then in Chinese, but the child did not seem to understand.

After a while he sat up, & the child flinched away. HC was in excruciating pain, but he said to himself Well it’s not for long, and he looked out over the edge.

The valley floor was now concealed again by the thick white mist which must have gathered while he climbed. Above the cloud the mountains rose like islands, and on the nearer ones he could see the different things that grew there. On one there was only bamboo—there is nothing like bamboo for spreading—and the grove was bent almost parallel to the ground from the strong steady wind. The fronds of it were ruffled like feathers, they streamed out in the wind. On another were tortured trees, their hard trunks must have fought harder against the wind before they bent, they consisted of the bare tormented trunks and a few leaves. The light was clear and golden—everything had the clarity and beauty of things seen underwater, so that he could see the individual leaves of the bamboo, the tiny birds, the diaphanous wings of an insect. On the far horizon was a big golden cloud, and a series of smaller clouds were being carried even as he watched steadily out of sight.

I said: So what had happened? Was he rescued? Did he climb back down again?

Of course he didn’t climb back down again, Sibylla said impatiently. It was bad enough going up alone; how could he possibly go back down with the child? It would have been ridiculous to go to all that trouble and go back WITHOUT the child.

Well he must have got down somehow, I said.

Of course he GOT down, said Sibylla.

Well he can’t have flown himself away on a kite, I said.

Of course he didn’t fly himself on a kite, said Sibylla. I wish you would think about this logically, Ludo.

He looked out to the west. The setting sun gleamed on yellow sand. The snowy peaks of a distant mountain range were as pale as the moon by day. The whole of Tibet lay between him and Xinjiang.

Now among the many O-levels HC had taken at 12 was one in physics. The result was that he knew something about aerodynamics. His first idea had been to make a parachute—but he had heard terrible stories from his father, who had been in the RAF, about parachutes failing to deploy. Then he had thought of taking dismantled kites to reassemble as a glider—but if he’d brought anything with him that could be used for stiff wings the wind would have blown him off the rock.

Then he had had an idea. Anything will have lift if its front edge is higher than its back, and it will have more if the top surface area is greater than the bottom. His idea was that if you made a pair of silk wings open at the front and cut the bottom shorter than the top the air rushing in would inflate them and the resultant taut surface would produce lift. He had had the woman sew in ribs like those on the wings of a plane, and attach ropes for a sort of harness, and this was what he had brought in his backpack.

He had thought only that he could bring the child down. Now he thought: If no one saw us leave no one would know we had not come down.

He thought: If they would not rescue the child why should they come for me?

He thought that if they flew over the mist it would be a long time before anyone knew they had gone.