Servants of the Map Read Online Free PDF Page A

calling himself back to life. Then Clara’s, and his daughters’, his sister’s, and his mother’s. Above him he found a ceiling of snow, with a narrow slit of blue sky where his body had broken through. He could move his feet, his hands, his shoulders; apparently nothing was broken. Slowly, hugging the ice with his thighs, he sat upright. Before him the uphill wall of the crevasse glimmered smooth in the blue shadows. Slim ribs of ice, bulges and swellings reminiscent of Clara’s back and belly. Behind him the downhill wall was jagged and white and torn. To his right the crevasse stretched without end, parallel faces disappearing into darkness. But to his left the walls appeared to taper together.
    He might make of himself a bridge, he thought. A bridge of flesh, like the bridge of ice. With his back pressed against the wet uphill wall, his legs extended and his hobnailed boots pressed into the crunching, jagged downhill wall, he suspended himself. He moved his right foot a few inches, then his left; sent all his strength into the soles of his feet andthen slid his back a few inches, ignoring the icy stream that chattered so far below. Again and again, right foot, left foot, heave. Time stopped, thinking stopped, everything stopped but these small painful motions. The walls drew closer together and he folded with them, his legs bending at the knees, then doubled, until finally he hung in a sideways crouch.
    He reached the corner without knowing what he’d do when he got there. The crevasse was shaped like a smile; where the two lips met, the bottom also curved up. He released his right leg and let it slide down, touching some rubble on which he might balance. He stood, he straightened partway. Soaked, scared, exhausted, and so cold. Above him was not the sky, but a roof of snow. Like a mole he scratched at the bottom surface. He tore his fingernails and ripped his hands. When he realized what was happening he stopped digging with his right hand and dug only with his left.
    He dug himself out. He hauled himself up. How many hours did this take? His left hand was bloody and blue, his right torn but still working; how lucky he had been. On the surface of the glacier, under the setting sun, he closed his eyes and fixed in his mind the dim, shadowed, silent grave he’d known for a few hours. Among the things he would not mention to Clara—he would never write a word of this—was how seductive he’d found the cold and quiet. How easy he would have found it to sleep on the leaf of ice, his head pillowed on his arm while snow drifted over the broken roof, sealing him in silent darkness. Nothing would have been left of him but his books and maps, and the trunk with Clara’s letters. So many still unopened, dated months in the future, a year in the future. It was the thought of not getting to read them that made him wake up.
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    July 21, 1863
    Dear heart—
    This week I received your Packet 15, from March; you cannot know what a relief it is to hear from you. But why do I say that when I know you suffer the same torments? It is very upsetting to hear that none of my letters have reached you, and that you have as yet no news of my travels across the country to Kashmir, never mind news of my journeys in the mountains. Although perhaps by now you do: it was still
March,
I remind myself, when you hadn’t heard from me. It may be September or December before you receive this, and you will be in possession of all my other letters by then, smiling to see me worry in this.
    We heard a ship leaving Calcutta was burnt down to the waterline just after it embarked; all the passengers were saved but everything else on board was lost and I wonder if some of my letters were on it, now bits of ash on the sea. When I think about the hands through which these must pass, to find their way to you: a passing herdsman to another party of the Survey, to another messenger, to some official in Srinagar; perhaps to Calcutta, perhaps to Bombay;