The Doomsday Testament

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Ernst Gruber squinted into the ice-flecked wind, gritted his teeth and kept his eyes firmly on the retreating figure ahead. The muscles in the backs of the German’s legs felt as if they were on fire and his chest like he was breathing hydrochloric acid, but the pain gave him a certain sense of masochistic satisfaction. If he was suffering, how much more so were the lesser men following the near vertical scar in the sterile, corpse-grey rocks that provided them with a path up the mountain?

Not the Drupka guide, Jigme. Like all his people, the nomads who scratched a living in one of the most inhospitable environments on earth, he was a wiry urchin of a man capable of incredible feats of endurance. His metronomic step didn’t falter — no matter how steep the incline or difficult the footing. It had been five days since the expedition set out from their base camp by the freshwater lake. Today they had already marched for four ankle-crushing hours across country devoid of either water or vegetation, but still he showed no sign of tiring. Gruber, a vastly experienced explorer who had climbed some of the highest mountains in the Himalayas and ten years earlier had led the first German expedition across the Gobi Desert, delighted in testing himself against such men, but he knew his companions would be destroyed if they maintained this pace.

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