Chapter XVI: The Bamboo Bridge

Biff and the three boys with him started forward on the run to meet Charles Keene and his companions. They soon saw that one of the pair was Li, and since the other was about his size, it only took one guess for Biff to name him: “Chuba!” But by the time the two groups met, Biff had another name in mind as well. The first words he put were:

“Where’s Muscles? Wasn’t he along with you?”

“Muscles is all right,” Charles Keene assured him. “We are, too, but we had to speed up our pace the last few miles, otherwise we wouldn’t have made it. When I get a cup of hot coffee, I’ll tell you all about it.”

Li and Chuba were just too winded to talk at all. When they reached the caravan, Barma Shah decided to delay the start until they had rested. That gave Charles Keene time to tell their story. He related how clouds had enveloped their plane high in the Himalayas.

“Rather than hit a mountain,” he said, “we chanced a landing in a valley. Fortunately it was a deep one, and the fog hadn’t fully settled. All of a sudden, green fields smacked right up at us. We banged up the plane some, but not too badly. What happened next was the odd part.”

Charles Keene paused to drink half his cup of coffee in one long, grateful swallow. Meanwhile, Li and Chuba couldn’t wait to pick the story up from there.

“A lot of natives wearing goat skins came rushing up to the plane,” declared Li. “We thought they were going to mob us.”

“They were shouting ‘_Yeti! Yeti!_’ over and over,” put in Chuba, “but before we could find out what they meant, Muscles went after them. You should have seen them run.”

Charles Keene laid aside his empty cup.

“Later, they came creeping back,” he said, “and we made friends with them. So we didn’t ask what they meant by shouting—”

He stopped suddenly, as Barma Shah made frantic gestures for silence. A Ladakhi porter was standing by, staring with dark, narrowed eyes. Barma Shah told the man to bring some more hot coffee. Then, when he was gone, Barma Shah confided:

“Don’t mention the word Yeti to these people. You have heard of the giant ape-man of the Himalayas, haven’t you? The creature they call the Abominable Snowman? That’s their name for it: Yeti—”

“I remember now!” exclaimed Charles Keene. “I was sure I’d heard the word before. But I thought that yarn was spiked long ago.”

“Not in these mountains,” rejoined Barma Shah. “Here in Ladakh, as well as Kashmir, Sikkim, Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet, and even as far away as Yarkand, the Yeti is very real. The natives will run away if they even think such a creature is around.”

“And we thought they meant the plane!” exclaimed Li.

“Yes, because we came down from the sky like a big bird,” added Chuba. “Bigger than they ever saw before.”

“They may have blamed the Yeti for bringing such a monster,” commented Barma Shah. “But here comes the porter with the coffee. So let us avoid the word from now on.”

“But where is Muscles?” queried Biff.

“Back in the valley, looking after the plane,” explained his uncle. “Some of the tribesmen—_Sherpas_ they call themselves—guided us over to the mountain pass and then returned to their valley. We miscalculated slightly or we would have been here sooner.”

Despite the delay, the caravan completed its next stage ahead of the impending snowstorm. The patient yaks, creatures that resemble both the ox and the American buffalo, with long hair like the fleece of a sheep, responded to continued prodding as though they recognized the need for hurry. Tikse, the chief porter and head yak driver, had a comment on that score.

“Listen and you hear yak grunt,” he told the boys. “That means two things.”

“And what are those?” asked Biff.

“One thing, yak like what happen, yes. Other thing, yak do not like what happen, no.”

“And how,” queried Mike, “do you tell the grunts apart?”

“No way to tell,” replied Tikse. “Yak grunt the same exactly, whichever way he feel. But it is important just the same.”

“And what makes it so important,” demanded Li, “if you don’t know the difference?”

“You do know the difference,” returned Tikse. “When yak give grunt, he feel one way or other, maybe both. When yak do not give grunt, yak do not care.”

“But why,” asked Chuba, “should yaks feel both good and bad?”

“These yaks feel good,” explained Tikse, “because they know they get to shelter ahead of snow. They feel bad because we make them hurry. So they say both things with one grunt. Simple.”

It looked simple indeed when they reached the day’s goal, a small patch of grazing ground where dried grass spread to the foot of rocky slopes. There were stone huts for the members of the party and similar shelters for the yaks. The reason stones had been used in the construction was because there were plenty of them lying around; and nothing else. The roofs of the buildings were made of rough boards, covered with thatched leaves. They weren’t nailed down because they didn’t have to be. The builders had simply placed big stones on the roofs.

The boys turned in early and slept late, snug in their sleeping bags and shoulder to shoulder in their huts. In the morning it took three of them to ram the door open, the snow was so deep. But the yaks were up, ready and grunting—some because they liked snow; others because they hated it.

The yaks pulled the party through. They bulldozed their way through the snow, chest deep, clearing it like living snowplows, so that the people had no difficulty following them. Oddly, as the trail climbed higher, it led to barren ground, totally free from snow. Apparently, the storm clouds hadn’t managed to gain that altitude.

Early that afternoon, the party halted at a roaring mountain stream and stared at the remnants of a crude wooden bridge that had been washed away by the flood. Sadly, Tikse petted one yak after another, while the porters relieved the stolid beasts of their burdens. The boys watched Tikse turn the yaks over to two other Ladakhis, who promptly drove them off along the trail. Barma Shah explained the situation.

“We’ll have to make a footbridge,” he stated, “before the water rises too high. So Tikse is sending the yaks on to another shelter. From now on, the porters will carry our packs.”

All the while, Biff could hear a chopping sound from a short way up the narrow, turbulent stream. There was a sudden crash, and a tree came toppling down to bridge the raging torrent. Chandra appeared from the brush, carrying a heavy hand-axe.

“Bridge already set,” reported Chandra. “It just needs one thing more—”

“It needs much more.” The interruption came from a squatty, broadly built porter named Hurdu, as he tested the tree with a clumsy foot. “We need ten more trees like this.”

“We need a rail for the bridge,” declared Chandra calmly. “Can somebody bring me a rope?”

Biff supplied a rope, and Chandra hitched one end around a tree. Like a monkey, he scrambled across the fallen tree, carrying the free end of the rope with him. A single slip and Chandra would have gone into the flood, which probably would have pleased Hurdu, who was watching intently. But Chandra was across in no time and promptly hitched the rope to a tree on the opposite bank, drawing it taut as he did.

“Now, walk across log bridge,” called Chandra, “and hold on to rope rail.”

Biff shouldered a pack and followed instructions, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead, not on the furious current, which would have distracted him. With one hand on the rope, it was simple to steady himself while he advanced one foot, then the other. A dozen steps and he was over. Now the other boys were following his example. That was all the porters needed. They hoisted their full burdens, eighty pounds to a man, and stalked across Chandra’s simple bridge in regular procession.

Charles Keene and Barma Shah followed, as did Tikse and Hurdu, though the last two exchanged glares before they started and after they had crossed. Now that the yaks had gone their way, a dispute appeared to be in the making as to who was the chief guide of the party. Both Tikse and Hurdu wanted that honor.

The narrow path made a steep ascent up the side of a high cliff, and before the porters were out of sight of Chandra’s crude bridge, they saw the surging stream carry it away. Time had been the all-important factor, where that crossing was concerned. But an hour later, the party came to something much more formidable.

The trail swung along the fringe of a tremendous, steep-walled gorge a thousand feet in depth and a hundred or more across. Down below, a river thundered like a hungry dragon, ready to devour any human prey. Chandra was pleased to see that this chasm was already bridged, for he could have done nothing with his hand-axe.

The bridge was of a suspension type, so crude and flimsy of construction that it seemed to hover in midair. Yet it evidently was strong enough, for Barma Shah, who was up in front, started across without hesitation. Tikse and Hurdu were close behind him, followed by the long procession of porters with their heavy packs. As Biff paused to look for the other boys, he found Chuba close beside him. As usual, Chuba had a saying to fit the situation.

“Tikse and Hurdu agree on something at last,” declared Chuba. “Wise man never argue when it prove another man right.”

“You’ve got something there,” laughed Biff, as he watched Tikse and Hurdu practically crowd each other across the bridge. “Neither could afford to hesitate, or he’d be admitting that the other was boss.”

“From the look of that bridge,” observed Li, “both were lucky to get across. The same goes for us—if we make it.”

Considering that the bridge’s cables were composed of twisted strands of bamboo and rattan, with hanging vines dangling like ropes to support the roadway, Li had a point. But the other boys didn’t agree. They had seen and crossed many such primitive bridges: Chuba in Burma, Chandra in India, Kamuka in Brazil, and Mike in Mexico. Though the porters crossed at a safe distance apart, they didn’t begin to tax the bridge to its capacity.

That was proven when the boys reached the bridge and saw that its runway, fashioned from strips of bamboo laid crosswise, was wide enough to drive a yak across. As the boys crossed the bridge two abreast, Biff spoke to Chandra, who was beside him.

“Now I see why Hurdu wanted to chop down more trees back at the little stream. We could have brought the yaks along. Why wasn’t Tikse in favor of that?”

“I saw Tikse pet the yaks and say good-by,” returned Chandra. “He made grunts, like yak, saying he was both glad and sorry. Sorry because yaks had to go. Glad because it gave jobs to porters instead.”

“You’re right!” exclaimed Biff. “Colonel Gorak said the bearers were not to receive full pay until they actually took over.”

The tremendous roar of water echoed up from the steep-walled gorge, drowning further conversation until the boys were across. It might have been imagination, but Biff felt that the bridge quivered as he left it, so he turned to look back while Chandra, still beside him, was laying his pack on solid ground. They had come between a pair of upright posts that served as tower for the bridge; now they were close by the big stakes to which the rope cables were moored. There, porters were stacking their packs by dozens and sitting down to rest.

There were still several porters on the bridge, all well spaced. Behind them came Li and Chuba, for those two boys had stayed back to wait for Charles Keene, who was bringing up the rear. Biff’s uncle had taken on that duty to “keep the parade moving” as he styled it, which meant that he had been encouraging straggling porters in his own cheery, breezy way.

Li and Chuba were past the halfway mark and Uncle Charlie was almost there when Biff saw the swaying bridge give a sudden shudder. Biff thought for an instant that it was an earth tremor. Then he noticed that the porters near him were chatting, quite unconcerned. Biff gave a warning shout, too late.

With a snap like a rifle report, the rope parted from the stake at Biff’s right. With it, the entire cable slipped on that side of the bridge, tilting the runway downward. In a single second, Charles Keene, Li, Chuba, and a pair of porters were sprawling on the slippery bamboo slats, which had suddenly become a chute to certain doom in the abyss below!