LITMIR.BIZ

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was visible, snaking at an improbable angle upwards into the murk.

      ‘It will, darling.’

      Karen was angry. ‘Listen, what is this? I know it doesn’t interest you much but this is the oldest gompa in Ladakh. It dates from before the tenth century. There are frescos, thangkas, like nowhere else. We’ve got to see it.’

      ‘Not this time.’

      Silence fell, and Mair could feel the silent battle of wills. The wipers smeared away a ruff of sleet that was instantly replaced by another. Lotus quietly sang to her doll.

      ‘It’s just a sprinkling of snow, Bruno. Why are you so cautious all of a sudden?’

      The driver broke in: ‘We go straight to Fotu La. Get down to Kargil.’

      That seemed to settle it. Karen’s jaw set, but she said no more.

      The going got harder but the driver pushed on. Snow was falling now, piling on the heaps of stones at the edge of the road. Fewer vehicles were coming the other way. Mair focused her attention on keeping Lotus occupied, and tried to ignore the precipices that must be only a foot away. It was much more alarming, she discovered, not to be able to see the worst and to be left imagining it.

      She glimpsed another quirky Border Roads sign: ‘Are you married? Divorce your speed.’

      They seemed to have been climbing for a long time. The wheels skidded once, took purchase, and skidded again. Karen’s annoyance at missing the monastery had subsided. Bruno and the driver conferred in low voices. They went more slowly, in the lowest gear, following the tyre marks of the vehicle ahead, which quickly faded to nothing more than faint grey ridges in a grey expanse.

      ‘Snow very bad,’ the driver said abruptly.

      A moment later, on a steep incline, the Toyota’s wheels spun and the car began to slither backwards. For a panicky moment Karen and Mair’s eyes locked over Lotus’s head. Disorientated, Mair tried to work out on which side of them the drop currently yawned.

      Bruno was already out of the car. He kicked a rock under one of the rear wheels as the driver leapt out to join him. Karen and Mair sat tensely waiting.

      ‘Get out,’ Lotus chirped.

      ‘Not now, honey. Look how hard it’s snowing.’

      The men shovelled roadside dirt under the tyres but the Toyota edged forward only a few yards before it began to slide backwards again.

      ‘No good,’ Bruno shouted through the snow.

      ‘No good,’ the driver agreed.

      The doors slammed.

      ‘We’re not going to make it. We’ll have to go back down.’

      ‘Go back?’ Karen cried. ‘After all this?’

      ‘It’s five miles or so back to Lamayuru. We’ll stay the night there.’

      ‘Really?’

      ‘Yes, really. It’s either that or spend the night up here in the car. So you’ll get to see your frescos after all.’

      Karen scooped up a double handful of red-gold hair and fastened it back from her cheeks. She flashed a grin at Mair, perhaps realising that she had been intransigent. ‘Sorry about this. But that’s travel, isn’t it?’

      ‘It is,’ Mair agreed.

      The driver made a complicated reverse manoeuvre, slithering in the limited space between rock wall and vanishing road. They began the crawl downhill.

      Mair could see nothing except falling snow. She felt a queasy pressure beneath her diaphragm, like a weight of foreboding.

      The darkness seemed impenetrable. Mair groped her way along the clammy stone wall, trying to remember which way she had come and wishing she hadn’t left her head-torch in the car. She reached a corner, tripped at a shallow step and almost fell, noticing that the air was even icier here. The way to the courtyard must be close at hand.

      When her outstretched fingers finally met the door she felt for the iron ring handle and twisted it. The door banged inwards, letting in a blast of wind and snow.

      She stumbled outside. The woman who had led her to her room had pointed out the guesthouse kitchen, but with the thick snow now masking all the low doors that enclosed the courtyard she had lost her sense of direction. She didn’t glance upwards, aware that the monastery walls loomed so threateningly overhead that they seemed ready to topple and crush the house on its precarious ledge. They would hardly have been visible now, in any case. Gusts of wind drove the snowflakes horizontally and even upwards, half blinding her as she ploughed through the drifts. She ducked under a ledge of snow that blanketed a rough porch, and saw a light.

      Another door crashed open and she fell inside, shaking off snow like a dog emerging from water. She put her shoulder to the door and managed to latch it behind her.

      ‘Hello, My,’ Lotus called out.

      The room was dimly lit by a single kerosene lantern. There were mattresses on the floor against three walls, and in the centre a small stove with a chimney pipe that oozed smoke into the chill, grease-scented air. The woman Mair had seen earlier was stooped in front of the stove, tossing pancakes of dried dung into its cold heart. Several men, probably truck drivers also stranded by the storm, sat hunched on two of the mattresses. They had been smoking and talking in low voices but now they broke off and stared at her. The third mattress was occupied by Bruno and Lotus. The little girl was zipped up in a padded sleep-suit and swathed in a blanket so that only her rosy face was showing. The whole cocoon of her was snugly held inside her father’s coat, her head tucked under his chin.

      Mair felt distinctly envious.

      Any warmth would be welcome in these circumstances, she told herself hastily.

      ‘Do a jump,’ Lotus begged. ‘S’il vous plaît?’

      ‘Lotus, it doesn’t really work indoors. You have to be outside.’

      ‘Go out,’ the child said, and pointed, as if this was so obvious it was hardly worth saying.

      ‘I’ll do one for you tomorrow,’ Mair promised.

      ‘It’s snowing, Lo, remember?’ Bruno told her. ‘We’re all staying right here, inside, where it’s warmer.’

      He moved aside and indicated a space on the mattress to Mair. She picked her way between a tower of blackened saucepans and a wicker coop containing a dispirited hen to sit down beside him. The men resumed their conversation and the woman slammed the stove door.

      Bruno said, ‘Karen’s got a migraine. She took one look at the bathroom and went straight to bed.’

      The bathroom was a couple of yards away, located just to the left of the door. It consisted of a metal drum with a tap, a drain-hole in the floor and a pink plastic soap-dish with a cake of grey soap. The lavatory, Mair had already discovered, was in a lean-to on the edge of the courtyard. It was a long-drop, with several hundred feet of air yawning between the foot-rests. At present, snow was bracingly blowing up through the hole.

      The guesthouse attached to the monastery was packed with a large group of German tourists whose bus had failed to get over the pass. The accommodation further down in Lamayuru village also was full of earlier fugitives from the weather, and the Beckers’ driver had done well to find this place for them. When they had first arrived, battling the ankle-deep iced mud of the paths, it had looked less like a dwelling than some roughly rectangular deposits of rocks and planks. But there were two slits of rooms in the warren that led off the courtyard, chipped into the rock like hermits’ cells. The driver had ushered them into this shelter and gone off to stay with his cousin, who apparently lived nearby. Any further victims of the storm would have to bed down on the mattresses in the kitchen.

      Mair asked, ‘Can I do anything for her?’

      He shook his head. ‘But thanks.’

      Mair

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