Chapter One

      The leopard coughed somewhere on the steep slope behind the camp; and Eve Marquis awoke at once. Despite the number of trips she and Jack had made into the wildernesses of the world, she had never been able to take for granted the beasts that might prowl the outskirts of their camps. Each night she went to sleep with one ear still wide awake for any hint of danger; other people’s nightmares were supposed to be soundless, but hers were full of lions roaring, elephants trumpeting and gorillas grunting. Lately they had been echoing with the coughing of leopards. English and therefore a supposed animal-lover, a worshipper of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals as much as of the Church of England, she had all her life been guilty of what she felt was treason: she hated animals, couldn’t bring herself to trust even a day-old puppy. Cruft’s dog show was something left over from Dante’s Inferno; and people who kept more esoteric pets, baby alligators and Siamese fighting fish, were devils she did her best to avoid. Yet year after year she left the comparative safety of Kensington, a region where the wilder poodles were at least kept on a leash, and ventured into these areas where the animals made the beasts of Kensington Gardens look like people-lovers.

      Why? she asked herself. And the answer pulled back the flap of the tent and came in, dropping some letters on her as she rolled over on the camp-bed.

      ‘Mail,’ Jack said, sitting down on his own bed. ‘Chungma just got back from Thimbu. The trucks will be there waiting for us three weeks from to-day. Sleep well?’

      She had indeed slept soundly, and that annoyed her. When one was afraid of being torn to pieces, one should not sleep like a new-born baby. But she had always been like that when they were camped at some height. Other people complained of headache, difficulty in getting their breath, even of heart flutters; but it was as if the higher she went, the more relaxed and at home she felt.

      She remembered how pleased Jack had been when he had first discovered this fact about her. That had been on her first trip with him, their honeymoon trip, to the slopes of Ruwenzori, the Mountains of the Moon, in Uganda.

      ‘I was worried,’ he had grinned. ‘Someone told me honeymoons should always be taken at sea-level. Shortness of breath in the groom or bride is no foundation for a happy marriage.’

      ‘Ours is going to be a happy one. I don’t think either of us is going to suffer from shortness of breath. Not for years, anyway.’

      That had been only eight years ago. Their lungs were still good, but she had begun to feel their marriage needed a check-up. She had decided it was suffering from a shortness of compatibility, from a congestion of selfishness; she had had plenty of time in these past seven months to diagnose the reasons. That, of course, was part of the trouble: on these trips she too often had too much time to think. And to feel sorry for herself, something of which she was secretly ashamed. Self-pity was as wasteful as lavishing love on a dog or a cat.

      Jack had begun to slit open the letters with the small curved knife he used for prising plants from rock crevices. ‘I’m going up to Bayswater Road this morning. There’s a patch of swertia over there. I want to get some seeds of it.’

      All the tracks, streams and ridges in their working area were given familiar names for easier identification; it was an invention that had become a habit with them as they had made these expeditions into regions that were often unmapped. It was better than referring to the ‘fourth ridge from the skyline’ or the ‘track that branches off at the Kharsu oak’; and at first she had taken it on herself to dream up the names. As it had with soldiers during the war, it evoked a certain nostalgia for home and took away some of the foreignness of an alien land: Piccadilly Circus as a jungle clearing was just as much home as the original. Or almost. But lately, abraded by the moods that had taken hold of her like a girdle that didn’t fit, she had begun to look upon the names as an irritating whimsy. But she could say nothing: after all, they had been her idea in the first place. The first Bayswater Road had been a track on Ruwenzori: it was a honeymoon memory.

      ‘Better take your rifle,’ she said. ‘I heard the leopard again.’

      ‘I’ll be loaded down enough, without taking a bloody rifle with me.’ He was the animal-lover; he would trust even a starving python. ‘I’ll be all right, love. Here.’

      He handed her the bulk of the letters. She took her arms from under the blankets, felt the chill of the morning air through her pyjama-sleeves, and quickly grabbed at the sweater he tossed her. On their first trip to Ruwenzori she had insisted on taking sheets with them, but it had not taken her long to appreciate that the comfort of them did not compensate for the extra weight and the difficulty of washing them. She had grown accustomed to the roughness of blankets or the constriction of a sleeping-bag, but that did not mean she liked them. Sheets had become