The Abominable: A Novel

Chapter 4

The ponies had been shot in the head.

O ur interview with 1924 Everest expedition members Colonel Edward F. Norton, medical officer R. W. G. Hingston, Dr. Theodore Howard Somervell, Captain John B. Noel, and Noel E. Odell—the last three men particular friends of the Deacon’s—takes place in October, after the official memorial service for Mallory and Irvine. These former team leaders and members are attending an Alpine Club function at the Royal Geographical Society at 1 Kensington Gore, and we are told to meet them in the Map Room on that Saturday afternoon.

“I hope that they left word at the entrance that we’re expected,” I say as we get out of our taxi across from Kensington Gardens, evening shadows lengthening, the huge dome of the Albert Hall looming over the brick building of the Society. It’s sunset, and the October-colored leaves on the countless trees in the park across the boulevard seem to be catching fire from the reflected light from the dome.

“I’m a member,” says the Deacon. “There should be no problem getting up to the Map Room.”

J.C. and I glance at one another.

Other than a bust of the explorer David Livingstone set into a niche on a wall outside the courtyard, there’s no clue that this sprawling brick building is, for geographers and explorers, the center of the universe.

Inside, someone takes our hats and coats, and an older, silver-haired man in tails and white tie says, “Mr. Deacon. Welcome back, sir. It has been too long since we’ve had the pleasure of your presence here.”

“Thank you, James,” says the Deacon. “Colonel Norton and some others are awaiting us in the Map Room if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yes, sir. Their meeting ended just a few minutes ago, and the five gentlemen are waiting for you in the Club Room annex to the Map Room. Shall I escort you, sir?”

“We’ll find our way, thank you, James.” The wide hallways with their highly varnished floors and glass-cased displays make me want to whisper as if I’m in a church, but the Deacon’s tone remains the same as it had been outside.

The Map Room is beautiful—mezzanines with leather-bound books, long tables with maps set on wooden display wedges, a globe large enough that an acrobat could have balanced on it while rolling it down Kensington Boulevard—but it is not as huge a space as my imagination has been drawing. To one side of the main room is one of the 1875 building’s many-windowed porch annexes, a lighted fireplace set into one wall. Hingston, Noel, Norton, Somervell, and Odell stand as we approach, the Deacon introduces J.C. and me, and the three of us take the last deep leather chairs in the arc of eight chairs facing the fireplace. Through the windows behind us, the sunset light has mellowed into a general golden glow.

During the Deacon’s introductions and our handshakes, I realize that while I’ve met none of these men in person before, I thought I knew what they looked like through published photos of their various expeditions. But almost all of them had been sporting beards—or at least rampant whiskers—in those photographs, and now most are clean-shaven except for a couple of well-trimmed mustaches, so I probably would have walked right past them on the street without recognizing them.

Colonel Edward Felix “Teddy” Norton is exceedingly tall—at least an inch or two taller than my 6 foot 2, I realize—and everything about him, from his quiet, competent demeanor to his cool stare, reflects a military man who has long been comfortable in positions of command. Dr. Richard Hingston, 37 years old, is a slim man—not a climber (he’d served as both physician and expedition naturalist on last spring’s ’24 expedition)—but I knew that he’d pushed himself as high as Camp IV on the North Col to take care of snow-blinded Norton and other ailing patients stuck there. He’d served as a doctor in France, Mesopotamia, and East Africa during the Great War, and had been awarded the Military Cross for his courage under fire. Hingston may not be a climber, but I look at him with great respect.

Theodore Howard Somervell—called Howard by his friends and introduced as such to us by the Deacon—is also a surgeon as well as a former missionary, but looks as rugged as a stevedore. The Deacon has told us that Somervell never really returned to England after the 1922 Everest expedition and has chosen to live and work at a medical mission in Neyyoor in southern India ever since. Somervell is in London now only for the Mallory-Irvine memorial tribute and this round of Alpine Club and RGS meetings and banquets.

Somervell’s a handsome man, even without the thick dark beard he’d sported in photographs from Tibet, and his curly hair, deeply tanned face, expressive dark brows, and sudden white flash of a grin make him appear almost rakish. But that’s not his nature. The Deacon almost never spoke about his own experiences during the War, but he had mentioned one night while we were bivouacking high on an alpine peak last year that Somervell—a particular friend of his—had been turned into a deeply religious pacifist while serving in a surgical tent as one of only four doctors trying to deal with the thousands of wounded soldiers, many mortally wounded and knowing it, on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme. The Deacon said that Somervell had spoken with many of the hundreds of men lying outside the tent on their bloody stretchers or rain ponchos, each man undoubtedly knowing that waiting even moments longer for medical treatment might well cost him his life, but not one injured man had asked to be treated before the others. Not one.

As I shake Somervell’s hand—calloused for a surgeon—and look into his clear eyes, I consider the probability that such an experience might turn any sensitive soul into a pacifist overnight. The Deacon also has told us that while Somervell was a devout Christian, he certainly wasn’t a dogmatic one. “The only problem with Christianity,” Somervell had told the Deacon as they shared a two-man tent high on a snowy pass during the ’22 expedition, “is that it’s never really been tried.”

Captain John Noel is a thin man with a lined face and deep-set eyes that seem filled with worry. There may be reason for that: Noel had paid £8,000, the full cost of the 1924 expedition, in exchange for all film and photo rights—had brought specially devised still and cine cameras as high as the North Col to get long shots of the summiteers, presumably Mallory and Irvine, reaching the top of Everest—and had even brought a full darkroom tent to Everest Base Camp with him the previous spring. He’d paid for a series of runners to carry his developed photographs from Everest to Darjeeling for mailing to the major London papers. Now he is putting out his motion picture The Epic of Everest—but because clouds had obscured any last views of Mallory and Irvine, at least from the North Col, it was being whispered that Captain Noel had no satisfactory ending to his film. He somehow had managed to bring to London with him a troupe of dancing lamas from a Tibetan monastery—not the Rongbuk Monastery near Mount Everest—to liven up his showings, but that, along with “objectionable scenes showing Tibetans eating head lice” in his proposed film, seems already to be causing diplomatic problems. Unless Noel’s motion picture turns out to be a huge hit here in England and in America, the poor man is looking at losing the majority of his £8,000 investment.

As I stare at Odell, I realize that he has good reason to look worried and distracted this autumn evening in 1924.

Captain John Noel had been the last man to receive a note from George Mallory, but it is the last man we greet this night, the geologist and climber and the Deacon’s particular friend Noel E. Odell, who always will be known as the last man to see Mallory and Irvine alive.

Odell had been alone at Camp V the night before Mallory and Irvine made their attempt from the precarious tent higher at Camp VI, and as he ascended alone to Camp VI that day—what should have been the auspicious summit day—it was Odell who’d clambered up a 100-foot crag at about 26,000 feet at 12:50 p.m. and, as he recorded in his journal that night, “saw M & I on ridge, nearing base of final pyramide.”

But had he?

Already, only days after the memorial service for Mallory and Irvine and the jam-packed Alpine Club meeting which had set all of England abuzz, climbers—even other members of the same expedition—were casting doubts on what Odell said he’d seen. Could Mallory and Irvine possibly have been surmounting the so-called Third Step and silhouetting themselves against the final snowy Summit Pyramid, as Odell claimed, as early as 12:50 p.m.? It was possible, but seemed doubtful. Their climbing rate, even with oxygen, would have been very impressive indeed. No, argue some, it must have been the Second Step which Odell had seen them climbing. No, no, argue other experts who weren’t within 5,000 miles of the mountain at the time, it could only have been the First Step that Mallory and Irvine were passing that early in the day. Odell must be wrong, even though he’d pointed out via photographs and terrain maps that the rise of ridges and the bulk of the mountain blocked his view of the First Step from his particular vantage point on that crag. But the clouds had parted for only a minute, granting him just a glimpse of the two climbing human figures—if human figures they were (“mere rocks in a snowfield,” argued many alpinists)—before closing in to obscure his view.

We were all seated and another servant in white tie and tails had taken our orders for whiskeys when Colonel Norton broke the silence.

“It’s good to see you, Richard. I’m sorry we have only twenty minutes or so before the formal Alpine Club dinner begins. Since you’re a fellow in the RGS and former expedition member, we could always find room for you…”

The Deacon waves that away. “I’m hardly dressed for it, Teddy, and it wouldn’t be appropriate at any rate. No, my friends and I only want to ask a few questions of you gentlemen, then we’ll be on our way.”

Our drinks arrive: whiskey, neat and amber-colored and aged eighteen years in sherry casks. It is warm going down. My hands aren’t shaking, but I realize that they want to. I also realize that I probably will never be in such an august company of world-class climbers again, which must be the cause of this tension. I’m not afraid of trying to climb Mount Everest, but I’m almost frightened to be in the presence of these men who’ve become world-famous by attempting and failing to do so.

“About Mallory and Irvine, I presume?” says Norton to the Deacon, his tone—I think—rather cooler. How many times has this group been asked questions about the disappeared “heroes” in the past four months?

“Not at all,” says the Deacon. “I had a visit with Lady Bromley this summer and promised that I would help her find out as much as I can about the disappearance of her son.”

“Young Percival Bromley?” says the filmmaker Noel. “How on earth can we help her? Bromley wasn’t with us, you know, Richard.”

“I was under the impression that he traveled from Darjeeling to Rongbuk with you.” The Deacon sips his whiskey, his aquiline profile lighted by the fire from where I sit.

“Not with us, Richard,” says Howard Somervell. “Behind us. By himself. Just himself on a Tibetan pony and his gear on a single mule. Always a day or two behind us. He caught up with us and visited our camp…what, John?” He is asking the filmmaker, Noel. “Three times?”

“Only twice, I believe,” says Noel. “The first time at Kampa Dzong, where we spent three nights. The last time at Shekar Dzong, before we turned south toward the Rongbuk Monastery and Glacier. We spent two nights at Shekar Dzong. Young Bromley never seemed to spend more than one night camped anywhere. He had a simple Whymper tent. One of the smaller, lighter kinds.”

“Should he not have passed you, then, on the trek in?” asks Jean-Claude. He is obviously enjoying his whiskey. “I mean, if you spent multiple nights in certain spots and Bromley would camp only one night…”

“Oh, I say,” says Dr. Hingston with a laugh. “I see your point. But no…Bromley seemed to be making little side trips. South along the Yaru Chu River, for instance, after we spent two nights at Tinki Dzong. Possibly to get a glimpse of Mount Everest from the low mountains there. At any rate, he was behind us again when we arrived at Shekar Dzong.”

“Strangest thing,” says Colonel Norton. “Whenever young Lord Percival did drop in for a visit—both times—he brought his own food and drink. Would accept no hospitality from us, though God knows we had enough food to spare and left a ton of tinned goods behind at the end.”

“So he was well provisioned?” asks the Deacon.

“For a weekend camping trip in Lincolnshire,” comments John Noel. “Not for a solo expedition into Tibet.”

“How could he have traveled alone without official permission from the Tibetan government?” I hear myself asking. I feel the blush rising to my cheeks, as warm as the whiskey in my belly. I’d not planned to speak tonight.

“Rather good question, Mr. Perry,” says Colonel Norton. “We wondered ourselves. Tibet is in a state of relative barbarism, but the local dzongpens—the tribal and village headmen—as well as the government, do post guards and soldiers here and there, especially on the high passes which one cannot bypass. Guards checked our papers there, so I have to assume that Lord Percival had some formal permission papers—perhaps received through the governor of Bengal. The Bromley plantation there near Darjeeling—Bromley-Montfort now—has long been a friend of the Tibetans and whoever is in charge of Bengal and Sikkim.”

“I rode over to Lord Percival’s camp once or twice,” Noel Odell says. “Early in the expedition, just after we’d crossed into Tibet after cresting Jelep La. Young Percival seemed very content to be alone—not overly welcoming, but certainly friendly enough once I sat by his fire. I was worried about his health, you see—so many of us had either dysentery or the beginnings of real mountain lassitude by that point—but Bromley appeared perfectly fine. Every time we saw him, he seemed healthy and in high spirits.”

“And did he follow you from Shekar Dzong to your Base Camp at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier?” asks the Deacon.

“Oh, heavens no,” says Colonel Norton. “Bromley continued on west the dozen or fifteen miles to Tingri after we turned south toward Everest. We never saw him again. I had the impression that he was set to explore farther west and north beyond Tingri. Much of that area is essentially unexplored, you know, Richard. Tingri itself is a rather frightfully crude former Tibetan military garrison on a high hill. You were there with us when everyone went out of their way to Tingri Dzong in ’twenty-two, as I recall.”

“Yes,” says the Deacon, but adds nothing else.

“I also had the impression from young Bromley,” says Dr. Hingston, “right from the time we met him at the family’s tea plantation, that he was going into Tibet to meet up with someone. It was as if he had just enough food and gear to get to a rendezvous somewhere beyond Shekar Dzong.”

“What about climbing gear?” asks the Deacon. “Bruno Sigl has told the German press that Lord Percival and another man died in an avalanche high on Everest. Did any of you see climbing gear with Lord Percival?”

“Some rope,” says Norton. “One always can use some good rope in Tibet. But not nearly enough rope for an attempt on Everest…nor enough food, nor tents, nor Primus stoves, nor any of the other things he would have required to get even as far as Camp Three, much less up onto the North Col…much, much less the huge mass of material he would have needed to get up to Camp Five or out onto the Face.”

“This Bruno Sigl…,” begins the Deacon.

“Is a liar,” interrupts Colonel Norton. “I’m sorry, Richard. I did not mean to be rude. It’s just that everything Sigl has told the press is sheer rot.”

“So you never saw Sigl or any other Germans, including this possible Austrian Meyer, who’s supposed to have died with Lord Percival?” asks the Deacon.

“Never heard the slightest whisper that any Germans were within a thousand miles while we were on the mountain or glacier,” says Colonel Norton. There are pink spots high on his sharp cheekbones. I have to think that the Scotch he is finishing is not his first of the evening. Either that, or the idea of Germans having been anywhere in the area during their attempts on Everest this year is somehow infuriating and intolerable to Norton.

“I confess to being confused,” says the Deacon. “The last of your party left Base Camp…when? On sixteen June, some eight days after Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance, no?”

“Yes,” says Odell. “We took time to let the most fatigued climbers rest, and to build the memorial cairn for George and Sandy—and for the porters lost in ’twenty-two—but the last of us were out of the Rongbuk Valley by the afternoon of the sixteenth. We were all in bad shape, except for me, strangely enough: heart conditions, the aftereffects of Colonel Norton’s snow blindness, frostbite, fatigue, constant altitude sickness, headaches for everyone. Everyone coughing constantly.”

“My cough almost killed me on the mountain,” says Howard Somervell.

“At any rate, we left in different groups—invalids, most of us—and the majority went with Colonel Norton to explore the never-before-visited Rongshar Valley under Gaurishankar—we had permission to do so—and to recuperate for ten days at lower altitudes before the hard march back.”

“I had to get my film back, so I came straight back to Darjeeling with the porters and mules,” says Captain Noel.

“John de Vere Hazard, our primary cartographer, wanted to finish up the survey your ’twenty-one expedition had begun, Richard,” says Colonel Norton. “We gave him permission to accompany Hari Sing Thapa of the Indian Survey to the West Rongbuk region for a few days. We waved good-bye to them as they and their few porters went west on sixteen June, the day most of us went north and east.”

“And I had my own detour,” says Odell. “I wanted to do a little more geological work.”

The other four famous men laughed. Odell’s geological ardor, even at altitudes above 27,000 feet on Everest, had evidently become a bit of a joke amongst these otherwise somber survivors.

“I told Odell he could have his little hundred-mile diversion during our trip back if he took our transport officer, E. O. Shebbeare, with him,” says Norton. “There are bandits in that Tibetan hill country. At least Shebbeare spoke some Tibetan.”

Odell looks at the colonel. “And Shebbeare admitted to me a week later that you warned him, Edward, that after our little trip was over, he would never want to set eyes on me again. I believe that was the precise quotation he gave me of your words—‘My dear Shebbeare, you may never want to set eyes on Odell again.’”

Colonel Norton looks down at his glass, and the two pink circles high on his cheekbones seem to glow a darker red.

“But Shebbeare and I enjoyed every day of the geology survey together,” continues Odell. “We became even faster friends than before. And thanks to the ten days of recuperation the main party had taken at Rongshar Valley in the shadow of Gaurishankar, we caught up to the main party just as it arrived in Darjeeling, and just before Hazard got back with Hari Sing Thapa and the porters they’d taken to the West Rongbuk on the mapping expedition.”

The Deacon takes his watch out of his waistcoat pocket, glances at it, and says, “We have only a few minutes before you all have to go to the dinner, my friends. And I confess that I’ve completely lost track of Lord Percival, much less the Germans—Meyer and Sigl. The report of Lord Percival’s death on the mountain—of him and this Meyer person—was in The Times the same week as the full report about Mallory and Irvine. I believe you telegraphed that report from Darjeeling. If you never saw Bromley after twenty-four April, when your expedition went south toward Everest and Bromley continued on toward Tingri, then how….”

“We apologize, Richard,” says Colonel Norton. “It is a rather tangled narrative, but it was a tangled narrative that brought us news of Bromley’s death. Let me explain. Just as John Hazard and Hari Sing Thapa were approaching the West Rongbuk region to do their survey, religious pilgrims met them and told them, translated through Hari Sing Thapa, that two English sahibs in Tingri—one named Bromley, the other a ‘non-English-speaking English sahib’ named Meyer—had rented six yaks to take with them as they headed south and then east along the river to Chobuk, then south to the Rongbuk Glacier and Chomolungma.”

“The Tibetans definitely said that Bromley and this Meyer were traveling together toward Mount Everest?” The Deacon has finished his whiskey, and now he carefully sets the empty glass on a wicker table next to his chair.

“They did,” says Colonel Norton. “Two more pilgrims—all headed toward the Rongbuk Monastery—told Hazard and Hari Sing Thapa the same news as our two men were headed back to the northeast, toward Pang La Pass and Shekar Dzong on their way home. But they added that there were seven other ‘non-English-speaking English sahibs’ who’d arrived in Tingri the day after Bromley and Meyer left, but who’d immediately left the village again, to the southeast, as if following Bromley.”

“How odd,” says the Deacon.

“But more than that,” continues Norton, “Hazard and Hari actually saw Bromley and Meyer. And the seven men following them.”

“Where’s John Hazard now?” asks Jean-Claude.

John Noel makes a vague gesture with his left hand. “Oh, back to doing government map work somewhere in India, I believe.”

“And Hari Sing Thapa?” asks the Deacon.

“Also doing map work in India,” says Colonel Norton. “But not with John.”

“Could you tell us what Hazard saw?” says the Deacon.

Dr. Hingston is the first to speak. I can feel a tension in my neck and back grow worse as our few minutes with these men are ticking away before we get any solid information.

“Hazard and Hari were headed northeast and had just begun to climb the old trade route trail toward the Pang La when Hari—who has the sharper vision of the two—said he saw two sets of riders headed south. Many miles away, but the day was perfectly clear—Hazard said that they could see Mount Everest smoking worse than ever, the spindrift spread thirty miles or more above the summits to the east of our mountain. Hazard and Hari actually diverted to a nearby hillside so that John could use military field glasses to confirm what they were seeing. Furthest south were two men—John said that he could definitely identify Bromley’s pony and the mule he’d brought from Darjeeling, but now Bromley and his new partner also had six yaks in train—and many miles behind them, perhaps five to seven hours’ ride, were seven men on larger ponies. Either real horses or—as Hari identified them—those big, shaggy Mongolian ponies.”

“Did it seem like a pursuit?” asks the Deacon.

“It seemed merely damned strange to Hazard,” says Norton. “He told us when they caught up to us in Darjeeling that he thought later that he and Hari Sing Thapa should have headed back south to Rongbuk to see what the devil was going on—if Bromley and these other men following might be poaching on our mountain, as it were. But Hazard was already several days behind us due to the mapping. He wanted to catch up before we got to Calcutta, and in the end he and Hari turned north over the Pang La.”

“What was the date of this sighting?” asks the Deacon.

“Nineteen June,” replies Norton. “Just three days after we’d divided the party while leaving the Rongbuk Glacier valley.”

“This is all fascinating,” says the Deacon. “But it hardly supports announcing that Lord Percival died in an avalanche on Mount Everest. I presume you received more information through some other reliable source?”

“We did,” Odell confirms. “As Shebbeare and I were finishing up our rather enjoyable geology excursion and heading north to the main route east, we ran into three of the Sherpas who’d accompanied us to Mount Everest and who’d been very important in the high-altitude carries. Perhaps you remember the one Tiger from ’twenty-two, the one who spoke the best English…Pemba Chiring, but everyone called him ‘Kami’ for some reason.”

“I remember Kami well,” says the Deacon. “He carried heavy loads to Camp Five…without supplementary oxygen.”

“Exactly,” says Odell. “And he was just as reliable during this year’s sad expedition. But Shebbeare and I were surprised to see Kami and his two non-English-speaking cousins, Dasno and Nema, as we were turning northeast again. They were literally whipping their little Tibetan ponies in their haste…and you know that the Sherpas rarely do that. They’d returned to the Rongbuk Glacier and were now fleeing as if for their lives.”

“What date was this?” asks the Deacon.

“Twenty-two June,” says Odell.

Colonel Norton clears his throat. “Kami and his cousins had started back with us but requested permission to detach from the main body. I granted it, thinking they would be heading home on their own. Evidently they had it in mind to return to our Base Camp…perhaps even to the higher camps.”

“For looting purposes?” asks Jean-Claude. “Or perhaps I should say…scavenging?”

Norton frowns. “It would appear that way. Although there’s precious little of value that we left behind, unless one were to count the caches of barley and tinned food we left at various camps.”

“Kami later insisted to me that they’d left a religious talisman behind by accident,” says Odell. “He thought he’d left it at Base Camp or perhaps tucked in one of the sanga rock walls at Camp Two. He said they couldn’t return to their family and village without it. I believed him.”

“What did they say they’d seen?” asks the Deacon.

I surreptitiously glance at my own watch. We have only three minutes or less before these esteemed climbers are expected at yet another Royal Geographical Society formal banquet here in the RGS’s Lowther Lodge. A glance over my shoulder shows me that the electric lamps along Exhibition Road where it runs into Kensington Road are burning. The October night has fallen.

“Kami said that he and his cousins reached our old Base Camp on twenty June,” says Odell. “They searched, but the talisman wasn’t there. What they did find there shocked them…seven hobbled Mongolian ponies down below the memorial cairn, down where there’s a bit of that tough grass a few hundred yards below the melt pond.”

“No one tending the ponies?” asks the Deacon.

“Not a soul,” says Odell. “And a bit further up the valley, before one gets too deep into the penitente ice pinnacles, they came across what Kami immediately identified as Lord Percival Bromley’s Whymper tent—the same one he’d slept in every night we’d seen him during the trip in—and two dead Tibetan ponies. The ponies had been shot in the head.”

“Shot!” cries out Jean-Claude.

Odell nods. “Kami told us that he and his younger cousins were alarmed. Nema would go no further, nor stay near the murdered ponies, so Desno took Nema back down the valley to Base Camp, while Kami kept climbing up the glacier toward Camp Two. He had to find the talisman, he said. He was also curious and somewhat alarmed for Bromley, who had been kind to him during his few visits to our camps during the trek in.”

“Did he see Bromley again?” I ask.

“No,” says Odell. “Kami found his talisman—set into the stones in the sanga they’d set up at Camp Two, right where he thought he might find it.”

“What exactly is a sanga again?” asks Jean-Claude.

The Deacon responds. “The rock walls we and the porters build at Camp One and above. They enclose the tents we use and keep things from flying away when the winds rise. The porters often sleep within sangas that have only a ground cloth and a pole-supported tarp for a roof.” The Deacon turns back to Odell. “What did Kami see?”

Odell rubs his cheek. “Kami admitted to us that he should have turned back to his cousins as soon as he found his talisman, but instead, out of curiosity, he continued climbing toward Camp Three.”

“That must have been dangerous with the monsoon snows covering the crevasses,” says Jean-Claude.

“That’s the odd thing,” comments Colonel Norton. “We’d expected the monsoon to hit full force by the first week in June…indeed, there were some serious flurries during the last days before Mallory and Irvine’s final effort. But the monsoon hadn’t arrived at Rongbuk when we finally left on sixteen June, nor had it arrived when Kami says he was back there on the twentieth of June. Some snow, very strong winds, but no actual monsoon. It didn’t really strike until we were all back in Darjeeling. Very odd.”

“Kami said that when he was at Camp Two, long before he got the last four miles up the glacier and through the last field of high penitentes, he heard what sounded like thunder from higher on the mountain, above the North Col,” says Odell.

“Thunder?” asks the Deacon.

“Kami found it very odd,” says Odell, “since it was a totally clear day—bright blue sky, snow plume off Everest’s summit clearly visible—but he said that it sounded like thunder.”

“Avalanche?” suggests J.C.

“Or pistol or rifle shots with echoes?” says the Deacon.

Norton looks shocked at that suggestion, but Odell nods. “Kami spent the night bivouacked on the glacier and in the morning light saw new tents at our site for Camp Three and, he said, more tents up on the ledge on the North Col where we’d set Camp Four. He also said that he’d seen three figures high up on the mountain, above where the Northeastern Ridge runs into the North Ridge. Far to the west, he said, between Steps One and Two…where a boulder was, he said. A boulder that looked like a mushroom. Three tiny black figures stood near that rock and then, suddenly, only one figure. Hours later he watched men coming down the sheer ice face from the North Col, using the rope ladder Sandy Irvine had cobbled together. He thought there were four or five descending.”

“It wouldn’t have been possible for even a sharp-visioned Sherpa to see figures so high on the ridgeline without field glasses,” muses the Deacon.

“Oh, yes,” says Colonel Norton with a smile. “Kami admitted that he’d ‘borrowed’ a good pair of Zeiss binoculars from one of the Germans’ empty tents at Camp Three.”

“And you left Irvine’s rope ladder behind?” the Deacon asks Norton. “Still in place on the ice cliff to the North Col?”

“We considered taking it down because it was dangerous, frayed and overly used,” says the colonel. “But in the end it was too much trouble to take it down, and some thought it might even last till our next expedition, so we left it where it was. Partially as a memorial to Sandy, truth be told.”

The Deacon nods. “I know you all must go in a moment, but what did Kami tell you that made you report the death of Lord Percival as told by a certain Bruno Sigl from Germany?”

Odell clears his throat. “Kami was frightened at the thunder, but stayed near Camp Three that second day just to see who the down-climbing figures turned out to be—hoping it was Bromley—but just as he was about to give up and leave the Camp Three area, he was shouted at in heavily accented English to stop. The man who shouted at him was holding a black pistol. A Luger, Kami thought. He stopped.”

“A pistol on Mount Everest,” whispers Jean-Claude. I could hear the revulsion at the idea in his voice. I felt it myself.

“At least it answers the question of who shot Bromley’s and Meyer’s little ponies,” I suggest.

The Deacon shakes his head. “They might have gone lame. Bromley or Meyer may have put them down themselves, planning to walk back to Tingri or Shekar Dzong with the yaks.”

“At any rate, poor Kami thought he was going to be shot for trespassing and for the theft of the Zeiss glasses,” continues Odell, “and he told us that he’d only hoped that his cousins would be brave enough to find his body and to bury it there in a crevasse with the proper ceremonies. But instead the German man with the Luger demanded in English—Kami had spent enough time in Calcutta that he could hear the German accent—to know who Kami was. Kami told him that he was a Sherpa with the Norton-Mallory Expedition and that he’d returned with others to retrieve a few forgotten items and that he was expected back.

“‘How many others?’ the German demanded.

“‘Nine,’ lied Kami, ‘including two sahibs waiting at the Rongbuk Monastery.’”

“Clever man,” the Deacon says.

“At any rate,” says Odell, “the German put his pistol away, identified himself as a European explorer, Bruno Sigl, and said that he was there simply reconnoitering the area with two friends—a number Kami did not believe because he’d seen the seven riding Mongolian ponies and four or five figures still on Irvine’s rope ladder—and that he, Sigl, had seen Bromley and an Austrian with Bromley, Kurt Meyer, carried to their deaths by an avalanche just twenty hours earlier.

“Kami had the presence of mind to ask where Sahib Bromley had died, and Sigl said that it had been on the mountain, above Camp Four on the North Col. Kami said that he was very saddened by the news—indeed, he wept in front of Sigl, partially, Kami admitted, because he knew the German had lied to him about where Bromley had died, and Kami still thought the chances were great that he himself would be shot dead by the German; but then Sigl merely waved him away and told him to stay away from Rongbuk.

“Kami complied,” concludes Odell, “literally glissading down dangerous stretches of the glacier until he picked up Nema and Dasno. The three cousins whipped their little ponies away from there and rode all through the night before coming across Shebbeare and me headed north toward the trade routes.”

“So we telegraphed tentative word of Bromley’s fatal accident to The Times from Darjeeling in our first full report,” says Colonel Norton. “Less than two days after we all took the train to Calcutta, Sigl himself showed up in Darjeeling and telegraphed his version of Bromley’s death to the Völkischer Beobachter in Germany.”

“That is one of the right-wing fascist newspapers, is it not?” asks Jean-Claude.

“Yes,” says Somervell. “A National Socialist Party paper. But Sigl was a respected German mountain climber, and the story was picked up almost immediately by the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, then the Berliner Tageblatt, and then the Frankfurter Zeitung. Sigl’s story was repeated almost verbatim by The Times less than a day after our own sketchy first report—and folded within our report in a way I did not much care for, to be honest.”

Norton and the others nod at this.

“But you do have Hazard’s, Hari Sing Thapa’s, the Tibetan pilgrims’, and Kami’s reports to back up Sigl’s claim that Bromley had gone to Everest and started climbing,” responds the Deacon. “I can give little hope or comfort to Lady Bromley about the reports of his disappearance on the mountain somehow being a mistake.”

“Perhaps not,” says Howard Somervell, “but it’s all deucedly strange. It leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth, no? And not just because young Percy was a nobleman.” Somervell slaps the leather arms of his deep chair. “Well, gentlemen, I believe it is time…”

We rise.

“One last thing,” asks the Deacon, after again thanking his former associates and climbing partners for their time. “We all know something about Bruno Sigl—he’s been a German alpine climber for years, but never an explorer to my knowledge. But what about Kurt Meyer? Why would Bromley have chosen to try to climb Everest, even a little way up, with this Austrian or German?”

Colonel Norton shrugs. “The Alpine Club has been in touch with the German and Austrian alpine and climbing clubs, but they say they have no record whatsoever of a Kurt Meyer as a registered climber. It’s strange.”

“It’s all very strange, if you ask me,” says Dr. Hingston as we all walk through the Map Room on the way to the banquet hall. “Damnably strange.”

And then there are all-around handshakes and farewells to us that are much warmer than the first greetings.

Outside, a north wind is blowing in from Kensington Gardens across the broad avenue. It’s scented with plants and flowers still blooming, but there’s also a stronger, sadder scent of leaves fallen and moldering. The not unpleasant smell of death in autumn. The clouds are low, and I can smell rain coming.

“We’d best find a cab,” says the Deacon.

None of us says a word during the entire ride back to the hotel.