The Abominable: A Novel

Chapter 5

This is one hell of a stupid place to leave a pipe.

A fter the October memorial services and Alpine Club reports and our interview with Norton, Somervell, Noel, Odell, and Hingston, but before our November trip to Munich to meet Sigl, Jean-Claude and I want to start packing for Everest. The Deacon overrules us. He says that there are two things we have to do before we start planning the matériel and logistics for such an expedition.

First, says the Deacon, we have to learn about George Mallory—something that will show us something important about the challenge of climbing Everest that’s ahead of us—and for that we have to drive to Wales. (I know nothing about Wales except that I seem to remember that they use no vowels in their spellings there. Or was it all vowels? I’ll soon find out.)

We have a few weeks until the Deacon and I leave for Germany. He’s arranged a meeting with Bruno Sigl in Munich in November. In the meantime, the Deacon has reminded me that Jean-Claude lost not only all three of his older brothers in the Great War but also two uncles and a half dozen other close male relatives.

With that background, I find it surprising that Jean-Claude accepts German clients in his Chamonix Guide work and, the Deacon says, is as careful, protective, and polite to them as to any of his French, Italian, British, American, or other clients. But down deep, J.C. does, the Deacon says, deeply hate les boches.

But the Munich trip lies ahead in November.

“First,” says the Deacon after we’ve filled most of the backseat and all of the boot of a borrowed automobile with full rucksacks and climbing gear, including a lot of expensive new rope of the Deacon’s own design—the Deacon’s Miracle Rope, J.C. and I call it, since its blend of rope materials gives it a much greater tensile strength than the easily snapped climbing rope we are used to in the Alps—all of which I assume will go with us to Mount Everest, “we go to Pen-y-Pass.”

“Penny Pass?” I say, even though he hadn’t pronounced it that way. “That sounds like some place in a Tom Mix western.”

Rather than answering, the Deacon ignores me as he starts the engine and drives us out of town and west toward Wales.

It turns out that Pen-y-Pass is an area of tall crags and vertical rocky slabs in the region near Mount Snowdon in north Wales. We pass a hotel situated at the summit of the pass that—according to the Deacon—used to host many climbing parties in the early days of British rock climbing, many of them brought there by the preeminent rock climber of the time, Mallory’s older friend Geoffrey Winthrop Young, whom Mallory met way back in 1909.

I wouldn’t mind a big lunch and a pint at the hotel, but we keep driving. We’ve packed sandwiches and water in our rucksacks, but I secretly hoped for something better.

There have been plenty of climbable, fun-scrambling crags right along the dirt road we’ve been driving on for an hour now, but the Deacon keeps driving past them until, in an absurdly remote area, he finally parks the coupe and says, “Get your rucksacks and all that gear out of the boot, chaps. And tie it on well. It’s going to be a long hike in.” It is. More than two hours of covering rough country to get to his chosen crag. (I can’t remember now whether it was named Lliwedd or Llechog, but it is a big crag, at least 400 vertical feet to the summit, with a daunting overhang running the width of it about 50 feet below the summit.) All we’re given to understand is that the Deacon climbed here before the War with Mallory and his wife, Claude Elliott, David Pye, the better climber Harold Porter—who did a lot of first ascents and new routes on these crags in 1911—and the best climber of the time and perhaps Mallory’s closest climbing friend, Siegfried Herford.

Jean-Claude and I are ready to sit, study the face of the crag—which is daunting—and eat our pathetic lunches, but the Deacon insists we wait and walk just a while longer.

Surprisingly, he leads us around the massive crag to a backside where getting to the summit would be child’s play, just scrambling up tumbled boulders and easy ledges to the top. This is precisely what we do, which irritates me. I hate taking the easy way to a summit, even though that’s often the best way to do reconnaissance on a vertical rock face. Many great rock climbers do it, even rappelling down to check things out before starting their climb—although the Deacon tells us that after George Mallory did just that on this crag, after his rappelling recon, he let his climbing partner at the time, Harold Porter, take the lead.

The Deacon doesn’t allow us to eat even after we’ve hauled our loads to the top of the crag. The narrow summit, it turns out, is all but useless for climbing reconnaissance because of that view-obscuring overhang just 40 or 50 feet below the summit.

“Belay me,” says the Deacon and hands me one of the longer coils of rope we’ve dutifully hauled to the summit. It makes sense that I belay him—I’m by far the heaviest, tallest, and probably the strongest of the three of us, and there’s really nothing good to tie on to for a belay from up here—but it’s still irritating. It will waste energy I’ll need for any scrambling on the face of this crag that the Deacon might be planning for us.

Luckily there’s a ridge of rock along the summit line where I can wedge both feet solidly, adding some non-skid insurance to my one-man belay. I feel Jean-Claude behind me pick up the rope, although if both the Deacon and I get pulled off, the odds are almost zero that the smaller, lighter Jean-Claude could arrest our fall. He would simply join us in the 300-foot tumble.

The Deacon is nonchalantly smoking his pipe as he rappels backward and out of my sight over the edge of the summit. He rappels quickly, bouncing down eight and ten feet at a hop, and the load on the rope is significant. I brace myself in the classic belay pose, the rope over my shoulder as well, and am glad for the crack in the crag-wall summit in which I can dig my booted heels.

Still holding the moving end of the rope, Jean-Claude steps up to the edge of the drop, leans over, looks, and says, “He’s out of sight under the overhang now.”

Then, shockingly, the rope goes slack. He’s still moving—I have to feed some more rope out—but he’s moving horizontally, along some ledge, requiring no full belay. Then the rope stops moving and I hold my position and Jean-Claude leans further over the drop and says, “I can see smoke coming up over the overhang. The Deacon’s sitting on some damned ledge and smoking his pipe.”

“While I’m starving,” I say.

“I want the wine I brought,” says Jean-Claude. “This is no fun at all. What does any of this rock climbing have to do with our climbing Everest—no matter what Mallory and the Deacon may have achieved on these stupid rocks before the War? Mount Everest is not a rock-climbing challenge—it is snow and ice and glacier and crevasse and ice walls and high ridges and steep snowfields. This trip to Wales is a waste of our time.”

As if he’s heard us, there’s a warning tug on the rope, and then I’m on full belay again, leaning back to take the Deacon’s full weight—which is not great, thank heavens, since he has a Sherlock Holmesian thinnesss to him—as he climbs back up over the overhang and the 50 or so feet of rock, leaning back almost horizontally as he ascends.

Then he’s up over the summit ledge, standing with us, untying the knots of his belay rope, no longer puffing on that damned pipe, which must be in his shirt pocket now, and saying, “Let’s eat before we go back down to do what we came for.”

“I want the two of you to climb it,” says the Deacon as J.C. and I stare up at the forbidding face of the crag.

“To the summit?” asks Jean-Claude, looking down at the heap of ropes, carabiners, pitons, and other gear we’ve hauled in to this distant site. It will take pitons driven in—German style—for some sense of safety, stirrups, and some sort of suspended cord ladder to hang under that formidable overpass, then Prusik-climbing it loop by loop, and trying to find a handhold or place to spread-eagle yourself on the broad edge to climb over it.

The Deacon shakes his head. “Just to where I forgot my pipe,” he says and points to a grassy ledge about three-fourths of the way up the face, just under the overhang. “I want it back.”

As tempted as J.C. and I are to say “Then go get it yourself,” we both stay quiet. This has to have something to do with Mallory and our attempt on Everest.

“And no iron,” adds the Deacon. “Just the two of you, ropes, and your ice axes if you wish.”

Ice axes? Jean-Claude and I exchange worried glances again and look up at the slope.

The grassy ledge where the Deacon left his damned pipe is about 250 feet above us, sheltered nicely by the overhang but wide enough that one could dangle one’s legs, smoke a pipe, and stare out at the view from 25 stories high. Which is exactly what the Deacon had done.

It took him a couple of minutes to rappel down from the summit to that ledge, including the mildly tricky rappel move over and then under the overhang. But climbing it from here…???

The crag is the kind of just-beyond-the-possible challenge that causes even temperate climbers to use harsh descriptive language.

“I know,” says the Deacon as if reading our minds. “It’s a daunting bugger.”

Everything under the grassy ridge, for a width of 50 to 75 feet and more, is a huge, smooth, steep stone bulge—like the underbelly of some giant stone sow or an ex-prizefighter gone completely to seed. I’m good on rock—I started with countless rock climbs in Massachusetts and elsewhere and have taken those skills to rock-climbing challenges in Colorado and Alaska. I fancy that I can climb almost any climbable rock face.

But the part of this accursed face under the grassy ridge just isn’t climbable. Not by 1924 standards, equipment, and ability. (Perhaps the Germans could do it with all their pig iron—carabiners, pitons, and the like, which we’ve hauled this long way in—but the Deacon has ruled out using such Teutonic hardware on this climb.) I see no ridges, no cracks, no fingerholds or creases in the rock where booted feet can find a hold, and the smooth sow’s belly curls far out and then back in toward the bottom where we stand. The only thing that will hold a climber onto a vertical rock face (above the underbelly curve) like that in the first place is speed and friction—sometimes spread-eagled friction with every part of your body, including your palms and cheek and torso, trying to force itself into the rock, to become part of the rock, so you don’t keep sliding 200 feet to your death. But this curled-in sow’s belly won’t allow a friction scramble on a third of its lower face—one would be hanging out almost horizontally without any holds, sans pitons. A fall would be inevitable. Even with pitons allowed, I see no cracks or crevasses or soft areas of the nasty, solid-faced granite where any could be driven in.

So good-bye to the direttissima route—direct to the grassy ledge where the Deacon’s pipe sits. That’s out.

Which leaves the crack that runs up the majority of the face about 50 feet to the right of the grassy ledge up there above 250 feet.

Jean-Claude and I move to the base and look up. We have to lean back to see how it runs all the way to an ever-narrowing mini-crack as it peters out not far beneath the great overhang.

The first 30 feet or so of this climb will be easy enough—erosion has exposed boulders and rubble and ridges for this first short section—but beyond that it’s all this narrow crack and prayers for finger- and footholds that we can’t see from here.

“I hate cunt-crack climbing,” Jean-Claude mutters.

I’m shocked. To date I haven’t heard either of my new climbing friends use real obscenity or such a vulgar comment as this. I put it down to Jean-Claude not fully understanding what an unacceptable word this is in English.

But I look up again and understand Jean-Claude’s intense dislike of such a climb. For more than 200 feet our ascent will depend upon jamming our wedged hands, raw forearms, bloodied fingers, and the tips of our boots or shoes into an ever-narrowing and zigzagging crack. I doubt if there will be half a dozen decent belay points anywhere up this miserable little crack—and I still can’t see any decent handholds or footholds on either side of the fissure.

“You will lead, Jake,” says Jean-Claude without making it a question. Superb on snow and ice, brilliant on high mountain ridges and faces, the gifted young mountain guide simply doesn’t enjoy this sort of rock climbing.

He says, “Shall we even bother roping up?”

I look again at the face and crack—the 50-foot separation from the grassy “pipe ledge” to the highest points we must traverse from the crack, if it’s even possible to do so—and ponder the question. In truth, we’d probably be safer—especially I would—if we each climbed solo. With so few belay points, there’s little to no chance that if one of us falls, the other can hold him.

But some chance is better than no chance.

“Yes,” I say. “Ten meters of rope between us should do it.”

Jean-Claude groans. Such a short tether slightly increases the chance of holding a fallen fellow climber—since if the lead climber, me, falls, it’ll be 60 feet of falling inertia that the man on belay (Jean-Claude) will have to hold against, as well as far less weight-energy against the lead climber (should I have a solid hold) if the second man, Jean-Claude, falls. But the short rope will mean a slow ascent, with many stops for each man going on belay for the other. A sloppy, slow, dangerous climb, the antithesis of quality speed work on rock.

“But we should haul up a hell of a lot of rope,” I add. “For the rappel down from the pipe ledge. I don’t want to down-climb the damned crack.”

Jean-Claude stares angrily at the almost invisible “pipe ledge” nearly 250 feet above us, glares at the Deacon, and says, “That’s a lot of rope for a full rappel.”

“We’ll do it in two stages, J.C.,” I say with far more enthusiasm and confidence than I feel. “There has to be at least one decent belay point in that crack about halfway down or more, and we’ll swing the lead man on rappel to it and he’ll set up the second rappel from there. Easy as pie.”

Jean-Claude only grunts.

I turn to the Deacon and find that my voice is as angry in tone as was J.C.’s gaze at our “leader.” I say, “I presume that you’re going to explain to us why this miserable and dangerous save-the-pipe climb has something to do with Mallory or our attempt on Everest.”

“I shall explain after you deliver my pipe to me, old man,” says the Deacon in that smug British tone that makes Americans want to punch Brits.

Jean-Claude and I sit down, our backs against the crag, and start coiling the extra rope—we’re going to have to carry a lot of it looped over our backs and bellies—and emptying out our rucksacks to carry even more rope. I’m using the rucksack mostly as a way to hold my ice axe, which I can imagine a use for even though Jean-Claude thinks I’m crazy to haul it up this iceless, snowless mass of rock.

And he stares in shock—now truly convinced of my insanity—as I take off my mountain boots and put on an old pair of sneakers that I’d hauled in with me in my rucksack, holes worn in them from my years of tennis at prep school and college and on summer clay courts. I understand my French friend’s incredulity. Crack climbing demands the heaviest and most rigid climbing boots you can find; wedge a toe of that mountain boot in on the slightest spur or foothold, and the stiff sole of the boot gives you a stable platform on which to stand as you go for your next hold. My tennis shoes all but guarantee that my feet are going to be as bruised and bloody as my bare hands after this climb.

But all I can think about is that 50-foot traverse to the pipe ledge across that smooth and seemingly hold-free sow’s-belly curve of rock 250 feet up. On that sort of rock, I’ve always used the softest shoes I can find—my American equivalent to the grippy-soled soft shoes that the new generation of German rock climbers call Kletterschuhe. So today it’s my old tennis shoes with the holes in them.

Jean-Claude and I rope up and begin the climb. We’re soon using the crack, and it’s even nastier than I’d thought. My hands—already toughened and well calloused for such rock work—are bleeding profusely before the end of the first pitch. My tennis shoes soon have more holes in them, and I feel as if my bruised and torn feet do as well.

But we’ve found our rhythm, and very soon we’re climbing as quickly as the frequent stops for belays in the crack allow. Jean-Claude watches for the improbable places where I jam my hands or set my toes for a hold, follows my lead well, and our climbing soon flows smoothly upward. Only our occasional curses—in American English and more expressive French—echo down to where the Deacon lounges against a tree, only occasionally watching us.

When we’re three pitches and about 100 feet up the crag, something that had been in the back of my mind comes to the forefront of my thoughts: most rock climbers prefer crags and rock challenges close to a road. Falls from vertical rock faces can be terrible for the victim, and if the man survives the fall but is immobilized with broken bones and an injured back, it’s important to get him to medical help quickly—if he can be moved at all—or to get medical help to him quickly if he can’t be moved without killing him or snapping his back or neck. The two-hour rough hike in to this crag, no way to get a car or even a horse-drawn buckboard in here across the boulders, showed me that Mallory, the Deacon, Harold Porter, Siegfried Herford, and the others had been displaying impressive confidence and courage climbing here before the War. Or perhaps a certain arrogant stupidity.

I should talk about other people’s arrogant stupidity, I think as I clench my aching and bloody left hand, turn it into a wedge blade again, and jam it into the crack as far as I can reach above my head. Then, feet secure on nothing, I begin pulling myself up yet again.

When I find spurs in the crack where I can get at least one of my torn tennis shoes set, and find a real hold for at least one hand, something better than a mere friction wedge, I call “On belay!” and wait while Jean-Claude closes the ten meters or so until his head is just below my free, dangling sneaker.

At about 200 feet up the crag, we pause to catch our breath—hanging too long in such temporary holds will just tire us out more, but we have to stop for a few seconds—and Jean-Claude says, “Mon ami, this climb is merde.”

“Oui,” I say, using up half of my collection of conversational French. It’s possible that the little finger on my left hand is now broken—it feels broken—and this does not bode well for a Mount Everest attempt, even though such an attempt would have to be at least eight months away.

“Jean-Claude,” I call down, “we’re going to have to go all the way to the top of this damned crack to have any chance of a traverse. All the way to the overhang.”

“I know, Jake. You’ll have to half-free-climb swing, half-down-slide your way to the pipe ledge. But it has to be almost twenty meters across that bad patch of smooth, almost vertical rock. We’ll tie on an extra rope between us—if we can find a belay point for me up there—but if you want my opinion, I do not believe it can be done. When you slide off the dome, you’ll pluck me out of my belay point in the crack like a cork out of a wine bottle.”

“Thanks for the image and the encouragement.” Then, in a louder tone, “Climbing!” I wedge my possibly broken left hand as deep as I can in a three-inch crack far above my head and let that support all my weight as I scramble for another fingerhold, or a crack spur for my tennis shoe.

Pressing our bodies against the rock here just under the six-foot-wide overhang feels oppressive, as if that ceiling might force us out of our tenuous holds in the last skinny remnants, now almost horizontal, of this damned crack. The view from twenty-five stories up is fine, but neither of us can take the time or attention away from our tenuous and painful holds to appreciate it. Since we’re only 40 feet or so higher than the grassy ledge—which seems about half a mile away across the smooth curve of near-vertical rock—the friction-sliding I have in mind is going to be trickier than I’d hoped.

Gingerly, only one hand free, I remove my until-now-useless ice axe from its rucksack loop and set the long, curved pick side of it as deep into the horizontal crack as I can. Luckily there’s a downward V to the crack. Then I release my handhold and put my full weight on it. There’s a downward-sloping camber in the slot that nicely matches the curve of the ice axe’s pick.

It holds, but I wouldn’t bet the farm—well, I guess I already am, in truth—on its holding too long.

“Here’s your belay point,” I say to Jean-Claude, who’s moved to my right along the dying crack, actually ahead of me, and eye to eye with me for the first time in the climb.

“Hanging. From your ice axe,” says Jean-Claude in a flat tone.

“Yes. And with your left boot in this part of the vertical crack that just tore up the front of my tennis shoe.”

“My legs aren’t long enough to reach the crack while hanging from your axe,” J.C. says without unneeded emphasis. This climb has taken a lot out of us already. I know in my heart that Jean-Claude would prefer to try to free-climb this impossible overhang to reach the summit than try to help get me lower to that accursed pipe ledge.

“Make one of your legs longer,” I say and hand him the end of the second 50-foot coil of rope I’ve hauled up the crag. J.C. is better at tying knots than I am.

We get ready, and tied in to the new rope, I have 80 feet of tether between Jean-Claude and me. It’s necessary for the amount of naked rock I have to traverse, 60 feet to the ledge and some slack for up-and-down work, but it would mean that J.C. would have to arrest me after an 80-foot fall. I look at his belay stance. He’s made his left leg longer but only by hanging almost horizontally, one boot on a ridge higher in the crack than I’d been, his body hanging from his left hand gripping the ice axe and his right forearm holding much of his weight along a three-inch-wide ridge he’s found below the crack.

I think of the image that Jean-Claude’s provided: if I fall, he’ll be plucked out of his tenuous hold like a cork out of a wine bottle—or in this case more violently, more like a champagne cork.

But if I’m going to belay him over once I get to the pipe ridge, we need the connection. I think that if I were J.C., in my free right hand I’d have my knife unfolded and ready to cut the belay rope before it goes taut when I fall. Perhaps he does; I can’t see that hand well because of the rock and position of his body.

“Okay,” I say. “Here goes nothing.”

The Deacon and Jean-Claude usually enjoy my more American Americanisms, but this time it’s wasted: the Deacon looks like he’s dozing 250 feet below us, his back to a warm rock and his tweed hat pulled down over his eyes, and Jean-Claude is in no mood for my chirpy vernacular.

I step out of the crack and onto the near-vertical smooth rock face.

I slide only a foot or two before friction stops me, spread-eagled on the rock, shirt and face and belly and balls and thighs and very tensed lower legs begging for friction, most of which is being provided by the toes of my tennis sneakers, which are bent almost at right angles to the rest of my shoe and foot. This is a bit uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as falling 250 feet.

I can’t stay there. I begin slipping and sliding to my left, toward the damned pipe ridge, which is about 25 feet lower than I am and perhaps 60 feet away.

My fingers seek holds, even the slightest wrinkle in the rock, but this is an obscenely wrinkle-free rock face. I keep moving to the left, held against the near-vertical cliff just by friction and speed. If you’re fast enough, sometimes gravity doesn’t immediately notice you. My tennis shoes are doing 80 percent of the job of holding me onto the sow’s belly of curved rock.

It’s tricky playing out the rope to Jean-Claude as I crab-shuffle to the left. Most of it is in my rucksack, which keeps trying to pull me back and off the face with just the weight of the extra rope and a few other small things in it, but some I’ve had to loop over my right shoulder to keep playing out to J.C. The coil of rope itself pushes me away from the arresting friction of the cliff, and every time I play out more to Jean-Claude, I slide down a little bit until I’m free to slap my palms and fingers and forearms against the rock again.

I’ve made it a little more than halfway to the pipe ledge when I slip. My body just comes away from a glazed section of the great rock face.

I try to self-arrest madly, my fingers clawing toward any grip, any ridge, any irregularity in the rock, but I keep sliding, slowly at first, and then picking up speed. I’m already below the level of the pipe ledge still far to my left and sliding toward a part of the face that curves in enough below to be called a drop-off. I go off that, I go all the way down to where the Deacon is napping. Dragging J.C. with me if he’s not smart enough to cut the rope with the knife. I think I should scream at him to do just that—he’s only about 40 feet away and shifting in his impossible position to put more weight on his right arm along the thin ridge—but I’m too busy to scream. If he cuts it, he cuts. If he doesn’t, he dies with me. It’ll be decided in seconds.

The slide is cartwheeling to my left and within seconds I’m head down, still spread-eagled, upside down, my face and upper body being scraped bloody across suddenly rougher rock.

Rougher rock.

My bloody fingers become claws, trying to find a ridge big enough to grab and stop this quickening fall and swing me around. My claws lose a fingernail or two but don’t stop or slow me—the upside-down position doesn’t help matters.

I’m already about 20 meters below the face I’d been traversing and I’m picking up speed—the rope hasn’t gone taut yet, the remnant is flying off my shoulder still slack for Jean-Claude, and when it gets to the extra 40 feet or so of tied-on rope in my rucksack, I’ll be over the edge only a few meters ahead of me and in freefall.

Suddenly the toe of my right sneaker finds a deep part of one of these rough wrinkles in the stone just above the drop-off and I slam to a stop. “Ummphh!”

The rucksack tries to keep going over my head but doesn’t pull me off.

For long seconds—hours, maybe—I hang there upside down, still spread-eagled, blood from my hands and torn cheek rivuleting down the rock just below me, and then I begin the slow process of figuring out how to get right side up from that one tennis shoe toehold above me and then what to do next.

The first part offers one real option, and I don’t like it much. Somehow keeping the one toehold, I have to bend the rest of my body into as tight a U as I can, arms and bloody fingers fully extended vertically, and before that ridiculous posture pulls my sneaker out of the fault line and J.C. and me off the face, I have to get a hand jammed in there. It will be a curved-body flailing lunge as my foot comes out and I start sliding again.

Not good alpine form, by anyone’s standards. I’m suddenly happy that the Deacon, still 200 feet below, isn’t watching what very well might be my last seconds.

The upside-down position is just going to sap my energy, blur my thinking with blood rushing to my head, and make me weaker every second I think about this. The toe of the right sneaker may not continue its jammed hold for many more seconds.

I twist myself as hard right across the rock as I can, using the roughness for fingerholds as I bend myself into the tight U. The toe of my sneaker comes out before I want it to and my legs slide free again, nothing to stop me now before the drop-off, but I’ve gained inertia in the U-turn and I scrabble and lunge upward toward the ridge my foot has found.

Thanks be to God it’s not just one narrow ridge but an actual fissure, deep enough to accommodate both hands jammed into it, and as I hang head-up vertical again, my hands deep in the fissure, even my sneakers finding some toeholds on the rough rock below where my head had been a few seconds earlier, I see that this fissure—about six inches from top to bottom and eighteen inches or more deep—keeps running to the left all the way to a spot about 25 feet beneath the pipe ledge. The horizontal crack even accommodatingly climbs a bit toward the end, getting me closer to the pipe ledge.

I hear Jean-Claude shouting down—the curve of the face is hiding me from him: “Jake! Jake?”

“I’m fine!” I shout back as loudly as I can. An echo returns from surrounding crags.

Am I fine? I can shinny my way left using my hands in this crack, but there’s a better alpine way.

I carefully study the rock and find the ridges above the crack that could be sufficient for fingerholds. Keeping one hand in the crack for emergency arrest, I lunge at one of the wrinkles with my right hand. It’s more than arm’s length, so I have to push up toward it with knees and sneakers scrambling like a character in one of those new short Disney features from America where a live-action “Alice in Wonderland” interacts with clumsily drawn cartoon characters. In this instanceI am the clumsy cartoon character, all rubbery legs and wildly pedaling feet.

I find the handhold wrinkle, it’s adequate, I lunge up to my left—this one is less secure but it holds me as I pull and scramble my weight up above the fissure, using speed and friction again to temporarily defy gravity.

It works. My feet are now in the fissure below, and moving to my left is just a matter of shuffling slowly. Even when there’s no fully secure cleft or ridge for either of my hands, upper-body contact with the curved stone works. I’m on a shuffle-fast highway now, and within a few minutes I’m at the high point of the crack, still about 15 bare-rock feet beneath the beginning of that goddamned pipe ridge.

I look up at it. I don’t want to take my feet out of this life-saving fissure. I don’t want to go back to spread-eagle friction and a prayer. To my right, the long rope to Jean-Claude curves up and out of sight. There’s just enough bulge to the rock to hide my climbing partner from sight.

Slowly confidence flows back into me. I learned to climb on rock scrambles—in Massachusetts and other climbing spots in New England, and then twice in the Rocky Mountains, and once on a summer expedition to Alaska. After two years with my climbing friends from Harvard, I was the rock man of our group.

And this is a lousy 15 feet of smooth rock ascent. Come on, Jake, sheer vertical inertia, teeth, knees, sneaker toes, and then teeth again—if need be—can find enough three-second-type holds to get you up 15 feet.

I lunge up, arms wide, fingers clawing, pull my feet from the safety of the wonderful fissure, and crawl and clamber and climb.

I’m so tired when I reach the pipe ledge ridge that I have to pause, dangling a moment, before lifting myself up and over, onto grass.

God damn the Deacon. He risked both Jean-Claude’s and my life for—what?

His damned pipe is lying in the grass about ten feet to my right as I stand looking out at the truly impressive view that the Deacon enjoyed just by rappelling down here at my expense. There’s also a thin boulder curving up and back that will make a wonderful rappel anchor. I loop some of the rope around that, step back to my left, and wave at Jean-Claude, who has moved back to the vertical crack, my ice axe jammed in beneath his feet now. His new belay position, one arm deep in the crack, teetering atop the curved steel of the ice axe, might have stopped me if I’d gone over the edge.

Maybe.

Probably not.

I catch my breath for another moment and shout, “Ready! On belay!” The echoes return.

Jean-Claude waves his positive response. I’ve tightened the 60 or so feet of rope connecting us.

J.C. has a very complicated moment getting off the skinny shelf of my ice axe, using the vertical crack to climb below it, retrieving the axe, and sliding it into the loop on his own rucksack.

Then he waves again from that strangely great distance, shouts “Climbing!” and moves out onto the face.

He falls after this third traverse pitch. He just begins sliding as I had, but at least the rope between us keeps Jean-Claude head up as he hurtles down toward the overhang and freefall.

He’s not going to get there. There’s less than 40 feet of rope between us now, and I plant one foot on a boulder for extra leverage and easily hold him on the belay I’d worked around the short spire rock behind me. That will fray the rope as we pull Jean-Claude higher, but there’s nothing to be done about that. We’ll inspect it and use shorter rope on the rappels if we must.

Jean-Claude gives up on trying to self-arrest—saving his fingers and nails and knees from much damage—and just swings beneath me in a wide arc, easily held by my belay, until he swings back directly beneath me.

Then I do brace myself, even with the spire rock for backup, as J.C. pulls himself upright while holding the rope until his boot soles are on the rock face. He begins climbing that way—the tense and fraying rope his only hold—and I belay him up as quickly as I can, not wanting that rope to fray against the rock longer than it has to. It’s good Manila rope, the most expensive the Deacon could find, but it’s only a half-inch-thick lifeline.

Then he’s up, pulling himself over the final ledge, and collapsing onto the grass.

I coil the rope, inspecting it carefully.

“Fuck the Deacon,” J.C. says in French, gasping out the words.

I nod. That phrase is the second half of my tiny French vocabulary. And I agree with the sentiment.

Jean-Claude disentangles himself from the last coil of rope and walks over and picks up the Deacon’s pipe. “This is one hell of a stupid place to leave a pipe,” he says in English. He puts the damned thing in his large buttoned shirt pocket, where it won’t fall out.

“Shall we set up and start the rappel?” I ask.

“Jake, give me about three minutes to enjoy the view,” he says. I see that his ascent has sapped all of his energy.

“Good idea,” I say, and for five or ten minutes we just sit with our legs dangling over the drop, our butts on soft grass, and our backs against the sun-warmed curved spire stone that we plan to use as a rappel anchor.

The view from almost 250 feet up this rock slab—like looking out a big window on the 25th floor of some skyscraper in New York—is beautiful. I see other crags that are taller, thinner, and more of a climber’s challenge, and idly wonder if George Mallory, Harold Porter, Siegfried Herford, and Richard Davis Deacon had climbed them as well in those years between the time Mallory and the Deacon graduated from Cambridge in 1909 and went to war in 1914.

As for me, I’ve just done the only Welsh crag I’m going to climb this summer—perhaps this lifetime. Great fun, but just once, thank you.

It feels good to be alive.

After enjoying the view for a while and letting Jean-Claude get his wind back, we secure the ropes for the rappel. The section I’d used to pull J.C. using the rock as belay anchor looked okay, but we set it apart in my rucksack, to be used only if absolutely necessary.

The rappels down are fun. At the end of our first 80-foot descent, we swing our bodies right across the smooth rock—actually in a standing, boot-sole-running pendulum move—until Jean-Claude finally grips the edge of the vertical crack we’d climbed and stops his motion. A second later he is in the crack, with the really decent footholds and craggy bits we remember from the climb up—the one dependable platform in the whole vertical crack—and a few seconds later I swing up and join him.

J.C. has tied a good knot for our two-rope rappel—a stuck and irretrievable rope can be a nightmare on such a long rappel, and we need that extra twice-80-feet-each 160 feet of rope for the final single-rope descent from the crack here.

“Left rope to be pulled!” Jean-Claude and I shout out in unison. Pull the wrong rope, and J.C.’s beautiful knot will jam in the rappel sling we’d rigged, and we’re in trouble.

I check the ends of the ropes and remove a couple of small twists and the safety knots we’d tied at the end of the strands. Then—taking the left rope we’d both just shouted about as a reminder—I give it a steady pull. As it starts to travel freely and fall, I shout “Rope!”—an old habit and a necessary one. Eighty feet of falling rope can knock a climber off even the best narrow platform.

We pull the first strand and coil it as I shout “Rope!” once more and bring down the second length.

There’s no jam. There’s no debris falling with it. We retrieve the second rope, coil it, and J.C. begins knotting the two together in that flawless Chamonix Guide knot he does when he unites ropes.

Five minutes later we’re on the ground, retrieving the long rope and getting out of its way as the mass of it hits the ground, tossing up dust and pinecones.

Instead of inspecting and coiling it immediately, as would be proper, we both walk over to the boulder where the Deacon still appears to be sleeping.

I don’t believe it. I think he has been watching us during the hard parts of the climb and traverse.

But I use my jagged, torn sneaker to kick him on the knee to get his attention.

The Deacon shoves his cap up and opens his eyes.

I hear my voice coming out as an actual growl. “Are you going to tell us what the fu—…what the hell…this has to do with Everest?”

“Yes,” says the Deacon. “If you’ve brought my pipe back.”

Not smiling, Jean-Claude retrieves the pipe from his pocket. I’m sort of sorry to see that it hasn’t been snapped in two during the rappels.

The Deacon puts it in the chest pocket of his jacket, stands, and looks up at the face. All three of us are staring up at it.

“I climbed this with George Mallory in nineteen nineteen,” he says. “Five years, for me at least, of no climbing—four during the War and one when I was trying to get a job after the War.”

Jean-Claude and I wait, not happy. We don’t want old tales of heroism, whether about climbing or war. Our hearts and minds are aimed at Mount Everest now, a climb of snow, glaciers, crevasses, then ice walls, glazed rock slabs, windblown ridges, and a huge North Face that we won’t want to get very far out on.

“Mallory had done the rappel recon down from the top and had stopped to smoke his pipe on the grassy ridge,” says the Deacon. “It was only Mallory, me, and Ruth—his wife—on this climb, and Ruth didn’t want to do the full ascent. To the left of the grassy ridge, Mallory found the only indentation in the overhang that we might be able to climb without pitons, rope ladders, and all the modern overhang equipment.

“I went. But the move from the crack to the grassy ledge and then up again to and over the overhang took everything I had and more. We were roped together, but the belay points were as impossible as you just discovered them to be. Mallory and I had to do the same traverse across the same rock.”

“What does this have to do with Everest other than telling us that George Mallory is…was…a good rock climber?” There’s a bit of a growl still in my voice.

“When we came down the backside and around here to get our gear and hike out,” says the Deacon, looking back at the crag, “Mallory told his wife and me that he’d forgotten his pipe up on that grassy ledge, and before I had time to tell him that he had other pipes, that I’d buy him a new damned pipe, George is scrambling up the crack again, all the way to where you belayed, Jean-Claude, and then did that smooth rock traverse alone…by himself.”

I tried to imagine it. All I could see was a big black spider scuttling across the rock. Alone? No hope of belay or help? Even in 1919, such solo climbs, without protection of some sort, were considered bad form, showing off, and anathema to the protocols of the Royal Geographical Society’s Alpine Club, to which Mallory belonged.

“Then he took the sixty-foot coil of rope he’d climbed and traversed with, and rappelled down,” the Deacon continues. “With his pipe. And with Ruth furious at him for essentially doing the entire climb, except the overhang bit again, solo.”

J.C. and I wait in silence. There’s something here that might yet make sense of the day.

“On their last day, Mallory and Irvine left Camp Six at twenty-six thousand eight hundred feet about nine in the morning. They were slow to get started,” says the Deacon. “You’ve both seen the photos and maps of Everest, but you have to be on that ridge, in the high winds and bone-shattering cold, to understand it.”

Jean-Claude and I keep listening.

“Once you get on the North East Ridge,” the Deacon says, “and if the winds allow you to stay on it, it’s like climbing steep, ice-covered, downward-tilted slabs to the summit. Except for the Three Steps.”

J.C. and I exchange glances. We’ve seen the Three Steps on the ridge maps of Everest, but on the map or in the photos taken from a great distance, they were just that—steps. Not a real barrier.

“The First Step you can work around along the North Face, just below it, then scramble back up to the ridge again if you’re good,” says the Deacon. “The Third Step no one alive knows about. But the Second Step—I’ve reached it. The Second Step…”

The Deacon’s expression is strange, almost pain-filled, as if he is telling some terrible tale from the Great War.

“The Second Step you can’t work around. The Second Step comes at you out of the whirling clouds and blowing snow like the gray bow of a dreadnought. The Second Step Mallory and Irvine—and the three of us—would have to free-climb. And this at twenty-eight thousand three hundred feet or so, where to take one step makes you stop to gasp and wheeze for two minutes.

“The Second Step, my friends, this bow-front gray hull of a battleship in our way on the North East Ridge route to the summit, is about a hundred feet high—much less than your scramble for the pipe today—but it is composed of steep, brittle, treacherous rock the whole way. The only possible route I could see before the wind and my climbing partner, Norton, growing ill, forced us down—the only possible climbing route I could see on the Second Step is a fifteen- or sixteen-foot perpendicular slab on the upper part of the free climb, which in turn is split vertically with three wide cracks running up towards the top of Step Two.

“This climb you just did, if you’d also done the overhang to the summit, is rated ‘Very Severe.’ The technical free climb of the Second Step—above twenty-eight thousand feet, please recall, where even when one is hauling heavy oxygen equipment, your body and mind are dying every second you stay at that altitude or increase it—the rating of the Second Step is beyond the Alpine Club’s ‘Very Severe’ rating system. It may be impossible to climb such a rock face at such an altitude. And then there is the Third Step waiting for us higher on the ridge, the last real obstacle, I believe, except for a pyramid snow slope that one has to climb just below the last summit ridge—that Third Step may be even more impossible.”

Jean-Claude just stares at the Deacon for a long silent moment.

Then J.C. says, “So you had to see if we—or actually if Jake—could do such a comparable free climb. And then haul me up like a bag of laundry. And he did…so…I don’t understand. Does this mean you believe we can do the same sort of climbing above twenty-eight thousand feet?”

The Deacon smiles in earnest now. “I believe we can try without it amounting to suicide,” he says. “I believe I can do the crux of the Second Step, and now I think that Jake can as well, and that you will be an able third partner, Jean-Claude. This doesn’t give us the summit of Everest—we simply don’t know what’s beyond the Second Step, save for perhaps Mallory’s and Irvine’s frozen corpses, which might also be at the base of the Second Step—but it means we have a fighting chance.”

I coil the last of the rope, secure it over my shoulder and rucksack, and think about this. In my angry heart I forgive the Deacon somewhat for putting us through this go-get-my-pipe charade. Mallory had free-climbed that solo, after climbing it following the Deacon—the sporting thing to do, Mallory had said, according to the Deacon, since he, Mallory, had the advantage of the rappel recon.

We head out toward the distant car, almost two hours of rough hiking after our climbing day, and I feel like my insides are flying. My heart—or soul, or whatever’s in there at the core of who each of us is—has taken happy flight and is soaring above us.

The three of us are going to climb Mount Everest.

Whatever the outcome is of finding the remains of Lord Percival Bromley—and I assign that a very low probability—the three of us are going to make our attempt, alpine style, at the summit of the tallest mountain in the world. And the Deacon now thinks that we can climb that dreadnought bow of the vertical face of the Second Step. Or at least that I can.

From this moment on, a new fierce fire burns in me, and it continues to burn in the weeks and months ahead.

We are going to climb that goddamned mountain. There is now no other choice or alternative.

The three of us are going to stand on the summit of the world.