When the morning came she found the ship transformed, heaped with red-yellow dust, in the hatches, over the decks, drifting in every corner. The crew, ill-tempered, were shovelling this load into the sea. The dust was due to a storm blowing from the coast, Rina learned. Desiccated farmland, topsoil turned to dust by years of drought and just blown away. The dust had got everywhere, wherever a window or hatch hadn’t been sealed – into your clothes, your hair, in the fabric of the ships’ sails. It took a full day for the little fleet to be dug out.

The journey resumed. After two more days the fleet turned south away from the mainland of southern Ibera, with the crew nervously watching the horizon for pirates. Soon, the word ran around the ships, they would at last come into Carthage. Rina knew her troubles were far from over, but at least this journey with all its trials would end, and she would never have to make such a trek again. She felt an enormous relief, like a physical weight lifted from her shoulders. And she wondered how close her uncle was to his goal.

32

Day by day Pyxeas’ party climbed. The air grew clearer and colder, the sky more blue. The sun felt stronger than ever to Avatak, and he kept his exposed skin covered with Uzzia’s greasy unguents. The ground was bare and hard and rocky, and ice-bound mountains stood around, gleaming a brilliant white in the clear sunlight. In places they followed ridges from which they looked down upon ice-coated slopes, and they could see glaciers pouring into valleys below, every detail clear, the merging ice flows and meltwater streams like models made by some sculptor of plaster and paint.

There were no people up here, no more caravanserai. Yet there was life. Sometimes Avatak glimpsed wild sheep, their coats grey-white, clambering up impossible-looking slopes to get at the sparse tufts of bright green grass. Jamil said there were wolves up here too, feeding on the sheep. And there were rumours of humans, ragged hunters in skins who preyed on the flocks with small bows, but who were timid and secretive and rarely seen. Those locals who had come this way before had their own names for this place. Jamil called it ‘the roof of the world’.

And still they climbed, and climbed. Avatak found his lungs dragging at the thinning air, and the horses laboured. When they stopped, the fires they built seemed to burn only fitfully, and Jamil grumbled that when water boiled it was no more than lukewarm, and spoiled his evening tea. Some of the locals, especially the hard-working bearers, were afflicted with headaches, nausea, giddiness, episodes of passing out.