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“Piton?” Remi suggested. “Cut it free and tie it off.”
Sam knelt down and gathered some of the cordage in one hand. “Some kind of animal sinew. It’s in amazing condition.”
“Crevasses are nature’s refrigerator,” Remi replied. “And if all this was covered by that glacier, the effect is even more dramatic.”
Sam collected some more of the rigging and gave the mess a tug. “It’s surprisingly light. It would take me hours to get through all this sinew, though.”
“We’ll pull it along, then.”
Using the avalanche probe, Sam measured first the width of the gondola, then
the width of the crevasse.
“The crevasse is four inches wider,” he announced. “My gut tells me it’ll get wedged, but if I’m wrong, we lose all our firewood.”
“Your gut has never steered us wrong.”
“What about that time in the Sudan? And in Australia? I was way off that time—”
“Shush. Help me.”
With one of them stationed at each end, they crouched together and grasped the bottom edge of the gondola. On Sam’s signal, they heaved, trying to straighten their legs. It was no good. They let go and stepped back.
“Let’s concentrate our power,” Sam said.
Standing an arm’s length from each other at the gondola’s center point, they tried again. This time, they got the gondola two feet off the ground.
“I’ll hold it,” Sam said through clenched teeth. “Try a leg press.”
Remi rolled onto her back, wriggled beneath the gondola, then pressed her feet against the edge. “Ready!”
“Heave!”
The gondola rolled up and over onto its side.
“One more time,” Sam said.
They repeated the drill, and soon the gondola was sitting upright. Remi peered inside. She gasped and backed away.
“What?” Sam asked.
“Stowaways.”
They walked up to the gondola.
Lying at the far end of the wicker bottom amid a jumble of rigging and bamboo tubes was a pair of partially mummified skeletons. The remainder of the gondola, they could now see, was divided into eighths by wicker cross struts wide enough to also serve as benches.
“What’s your guess?” Remi asked. “Captain and copilot?”
“It’s possible, but a gondola this size could hold fifteen people at least—it might take that many to handle all this rigging and the balloons as well.”
“Balloons . . . as in plural?”
“We’ll know more when I see the rest of the rigging, but I think this was a full-on dirigible.”
“And these were the sole survivors.”
“The rest may be . . .” Sam jerked his head toward the crevasse.
