The Steady Running of the Hour: A Novel by Justin Go

or composition or provenance, or things even more unknowable. A climber snaps a huge icicle off a pinnacle and appropriates it for a walking stick, leaning on the glassy spire for uncertain support.
    I search each frame for Ashley, but none of the figures is shown close up, so I click a button to fast-forward the footage.
    Above the great mountain frowns upon us, angered that we should violate these pure sanctuaries that had never before suffered the foot of man.
    The porters heft incredible loads on their backs; they scramble up rope ladders and pace over icy slopes. Ascending steep faces of slabbed limestone, the British bend gasping over their ice axes, straining to breathe in the rarified air. I fast-forward again. The image of the peak returns, the streamer blowing past, the clouds closing in.
    Now could it be possible that something more than the physical had opposed us in this battle where human strength and western knowledge had broken and failed? Could it be possible we fought something beyond our knowledge?
    The screen fades to black. I rewind the film, scanning backward and then forward. Suddenly I see the climbers and I hit the play button.
    Eight men stand before the mess tent, sunburned faces with weathered half-beards, their mouths moving, their voices lost. The colonel stands at the center looking bemusedly at the camera. He is taller than the others but of equally lean build, his ice goggles perched over his hat brim. Beside him a handsome bareheaded man talks, hands stuffed in jacket pockets, leaning back to the colonel and laughing. This is HughPrice, the celebrated mountaineer. Behind Price a slim figure stands holding a pipe, someone’s arm draped over him. I recognize the face from the newspapers. It is Ashley.
    I set the machine to loop the ten seconds of footage. I lean up to the screen.
    Ashley wears a tweed jacket with voluminous pockets, a long scarf wound around his neck. He is clean-shaven and looks younger than the other men, still boyish though his skin seems weathered from the Tibetan sun. His hand cradles the briar pipe, but he does not smoke it. He smiles faintly and looks away. He coughs. When Price speaks, Ashley’s cough turns to laughter. For a half-second Ashley’s eyes look into the camera and meet my own. The film loops again.

    I eat dinner at an Indian restaurant on Drummond Street, thinking about Ashley the whole time. There was something in the film I didn’t expect, something that seemed slightly off. I pay the bill and start back for the hotel, stopping in Euston Station to buy sleeping pills from a drugstore. As I walk out of the station I realize what had bothered me. For days I’ve been reading grueling accounts of the expedition—the altitude sickness, the weeks of terrifying blizzards, the climbers practically broken by the time they set up the higher camps. But in the film Ashley didn’t look crazy or desperate. He looked happy. He stood in front of a camera with his friends and had no idea he’d be dead in a month.
    —Or maybe he did know, I whisper.
    The next morning I start with Imogen, running Web searches at an Internet café on Oxford Street. For hours I try her name in digital catalogs and genealogy websites. I find nothing. At the website of the Swedish National Archives I learn that most of their vital records haven’t been digitized yet. For hundreds of years these records were the responsibility of the local parish clergyman, who recorded not only births and deaths but christenings, communion attendance and migrations into and out of the parish. They even kept a kind of census recording the inhabitants of a household, their ages and occupations. The Leksand church archive isheld in Uppsala, an ecclesiastical and university town about fifty miles north of Stockholm. But even if I went to Sweden, there’s no guarantee I’d find anything.
    In the afternoon I visit the Tower of London, hoping that a break will help me think. The Tower is rainy and crowded