The Highland Trail: Himalayan Escape

The biting gale batters the frozen canvas overhead with the percussion of rifle shot, shuddering the timber tent poles until fine rime sifts down across your neck. Arthur Sterling strains his chin upward against the coarse wool of his sheepskin coat, breath clouding white and rapid in the sub-zero stillness. Your wrists are cinched tight behind your back, lashed with stiff hemp cords to the iron corner-plate of a heavy packing chest. The numbness creeping into your extremities has passed through simple ache into a dead, wooden silence. Twenty minutes ago, Alistair MacIntyre stood over you with his handlebar mustache caked in frost, cinching the final knot while Evelyn Rowe watched from the storm flap, her tight braids tucked beneath her shearling hood and her face turned away from the lantern. They stripped the expedition ledger, the survey maps, and the primus stove before hauling their sledges into the squall toward the pass. But in their haste, MacIntyre's heavy boot kicked over a brass hurricane lamp. A thin, greasy pool of kerosene now seeps across the frozen floorboards, steadily soaking into the coarse burlap sacks holding the expedition's remaining parched grain and dried…