Last Mail Over Kesar Pass

At half past four on Monday morning the post office at Sarekh was the only lit window in the town, and the lamp in it was Postmaster Kavan's, as it had been at half past four on the morning of the last mail for nineteen years.

Elias crossed the yard in the dark with frost creaking under his boots. Above the roofs the mountains were there and not there, a blacker black against the stars, and the air had the thin clean edge it only had at the end of the season, when the snow on the main range came a little lower every week and the river had gone quiet under its first ice.

Sarekh sat at the road-head, at two thousand nine hundred metres, where the lorries from the plains turned round in a churned square of mud and went back. Beyond it there was no road. There was the gorge, and the path, and the Hill Post, which had carried letters up the gorge and over Kesar Pass to Hemri on the far side every summer since 1893, and had never yet failed to carry the last mail.

Inside, the stove was lit and the room smelled of kerosene and sealing wax. Kavan stood at the long counter in his grey coat and his fingerless gloves, with the register open in front of him and the two canvas mailbags laid side by side like sleeping dogs.

"You're early," he said, without looking up.

"So are you."

"I am always early. That is what postmasters are for." He dipped his pen. "Four hundred and twelve letters. Thirty-one parcels. One packet of pension orders for the Hemri office, registered, which is to say if you lose it I will be forced to have you shot." He wrote, in his small exact hand, and blotted it. "And one parcel for the clinic at Hemri, medical, which is to say if you lose it the doctor will shoot you first and save me the trouble."

Elias watched him close the first bag. He drew the cord through the brass eyelets, snapped the padlock, and then held the stick of red wax in the lamp flame until it dripped. He pressed the Hill Post seal into it, the old seal with the pass and the two crossed staves, and held it there for the count of five, as he always did, as if he were taking its pulse.

Then the second bag. Then he turned the register round on the counter and held out the pen.

Elias signed for them. Received for carriage over Kesar Pass, 14 October 1974. Last mail. The signature looked small beside the column of names above it, the carriers of other years. Six of them were Elias's. Forty of them were Tashek's.

"Now," said Kavan, and took off his spectacles, and polished them on his scarf, which was how he announced anything he did not like. "The bulletin."

The radio-telephone sat on its own table in the corner under a cloth cover, like a parrot put to bed. Kavan had sat up with it at midnight for the plains bulletin, as he did every night in October, and had written it out on a form.

"Cyclone in the Bay," he read. "Third day. Moving north-west. Expected to weaken over land." He looked over his spectacles. "Snow possible on the main range, they say, perhaps from Thursday. Perhaps." He laid the form on the counter. "They say perhaps in the plains the way we say good morning. It costs them nothing."

"Thursday," said Elias.

"Thursday. Your exchange at the stones is Thursday at first light. Nawa will be coming up from Hemri the same morning with the north bags. If you keep to the days, you will be on the pass before their perhaps." He put his spectacles back on. "If you keep to the days."

Through the window the first grey was coming into the sky over the eastern ridge. In the yard someone was moving about with a lantern, slowly, the way a man moves whose knees have stopped arguing with him and simply refuse.

"He's been out there since four," said Kavan. "Go and talk to him, or come and look at my barometer, which has been falling since Saturday and does not say perhaps. Either way, you leave at six."