The Abominable: A Novel

Chapter 7

The ledge was about the width of that bread tray…

It is on another train, this one a narrow-gauge railway climbing 7,000 feet from miasmic Calcutta to the high hills of Darjeeling at the end of March 1925, that I finally take time to think back about the busy winter and spring months before our departure.

In early January of 1925, all three of us had traveled back to Zurich to visit George Ingle Finch, who, with the possible exception of Richard Davis Deacon, was the finest British alpinist still living.

And while Finch had been a fellow Everest expedition climber with Mallory and Deacon in 1922, he shared the Deacon’s bad fortune of falling out of favor with the Powers That Be—twice, in Finch’s case, not just running afoul of George Leigh Mallory’s sensibilities, but alienating the entire Mount Everest Committee, the Alpine Club, and two-thirds of the Royal Geographical Society.

Finch had studied medicine briefly at the École de Médecine in Paris and then switched to the physical sciences while studying at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich from 1906 to 1922, then served as a captain in the Royal Field Artillery in France, Egypt, and Macedonia during the Great War, and after the War had returned to mostly Swiss alpine climbing, in the process bagging more first ascents in the Alps than the rest of the chosen Everest expedition members combined. He was much more aware of German and other new European climbing techniques than any of the Everest Committee or other British climbers—but he’d been left off the 1921 roster, officially because of poor results on his physical. The real reason was that although he, Finch, was a British citizen and decorated Great War artillery officer, he’d spent so many years climbing and living in the German-Swiss-speaking part of Switzerland before and after the War that he was more comfortable speaking German than English. As Brigadier General Charles Bruce had described the selection committee’s choices, “If at all possible, they, we, wished to keep the Everest expeditions all an Old Boys’ Club, you see. ‘BAT’ we called it amongst ourselves—‘British All Through.’”

According to the Deacon, General Bruce, the same Everest Committee man and 1922 expedition leader who’d argued for a BAT climbing team, had once written to other potential committee and team members (including the Deacon) that George Finch was “a convincing raconteur of quite impossible qualifications. Cleans his teeth on February 1st and has a bath the same day if the water is very hot, otherwise puts it off until next year.”

But Finch’s primary sin in the various BAT-eyes of the committee, according to the Deacon, was, besides a frequently unkempt appearance and an odd German accent, the “impossible qualifications” part—that is, George Finch kept coming up with climbing innovations for conquering Mount Everest. Neither the Royal Geographical Society nor the Alpine Club (nor, for that matter, the Mount Everest Committee) liked “innovations.” The old ways were the good ways: hobnailed boots, nineteenth-century-style ice axes, and thin layers of wool between the climber and the almost-out-of-the-earth’s-atmosphere sub-zero-degrees-Fahrenheit temperatures at 28,000 feet and above.

One such absurd Finch innovation, said the Deacon, was an overcoat the successful alpinist had designed and had made—just for Mount Everest conditions—consisting of a goose-down-layered (rather than regular wool or cotton or silk) overcoat. Finch had experimented with many materials, finally settling on a thin but very strong balloon fabric, to create a long overcoat with many sewn compartments of goose down to trap air pockets of a person’s warmth much as the down had done for the goose in the Arctic.

The result, explained the Deacon, was that at altitudes of 20,000 feet and above on the 1922 expedition, Finch was the only man not freezing in the high-altitude winds and cold.

But the death knell for George Finch’s inclusion in the 1924 expedition, despite his excellent climbing record in the previous Everest attempt (he and young Geoffrey Bruce briefly set a high-altitude climbing record on their bold but unsuccessful May 27, 1922, summit bid), was that it had been Finch who proposed and adapted the Royal Flying Service oxygen equipment that members of the team had used—to very good effect—in 1922 and ’24. (Mallory and Irvine were wearing Finch’s oxygen apparatus, although much redesigned by the tinker-genius Sandy Irvine, when the two heroes disappeared in their summit attempt on that final 1924 expedition.)

Arthur Hinks, the Everest Committee man most in charge of spending (and hoarding) the expeditions’ funds, had written of Finch’s oxygen apparatus—long after it had been proven in altitude-chamber experiments, on the Eiger, and upon Mount Everest itself—with this much-repeated official comment: “I should be especially sorry if the oxygen outfit prevents them going as high as possible without it. If some of the party do not go to 25,000 ft to 26,000 ft without oxygen they will be rotters.”

Rotters?

“Easy enough for a man who never leaves London’s sea level to say,” commented the Deacon as we traveled by rail to Zurich in January of 1925.

“I’d like to transport Mr. Hinks to twenty-six thousand feet on Everest and watch him gasp, retch, and flop around like a fish out of water,” continued the Deacon, “and then ask him if he considers himself a ‘rotter.’ I certainly consider him such, even when he stays at sea level.”

This was why we were tentatively planning to take twenty-five sets of the Irvine-improved Finch oxygen rigs and one hundred tanks of oxygen on our own expedition. (This was more than the ninety tanks that Mallory and his team had taken along for their 1924 expedition to serve dozens of the climbers and high-altitude porters. And there would be only the three of us.) “What about ‘Cousin Reggie’?” Jean-Claude had asked, reminding the Deacon of Lady Bromley’s condition that we take Bromley’s tea plantation cousin with us.

“‘Cousin Reggie’ can bloody well stay at Base Camp and breathe the thick yak-scented air at sixteen thousand five hundred feet,” said the Deacon.

And now, in the cold first month of the year in which we’d try or die on Mount Everest, the Deacon wanted us to meet and speak with George Finch in his adopted hometown of Zurich. (The Deacon had invited him to London, offering to pay his expenses, which made sense since there were three of us and only one Finch, but the irascible climber had cabled back, “There’s not enough money in all of England to induce me to return to London now.”)

We met George Ingle Finch at the Restaurant Kronenhalle, an upscale place even by Zurich’s high standards for fancy restaurants, and one well known throughout Europe. The Deacon had informed us that, despite its once proud history, Kronenhalle had become pretty run-down in recent years and during Germany’s era of hyperinflation, the old restaurant floating by on its nineteenth-century reputation for excellence. But then a certain Hilda and Gottlieb Zumsteg had recently purchased and renovated the place, bringing the whole large establishment, including a new chef, a menu that was a combination of the best Bavarian, classic, and Swiss cuisine, and superlative service, up to the true standards of Swiss and Zurich excellence. So while Germans were starving a few miles across the border, the Swiss bankers, merchants, and other upper-class citizens could dine in luxury.

Restaurant Kronenhalle was situated at Rämistrasse 4, less than a mile southwest of the University of Zurich (where two of Jean-Claude’s three older brothers attended classes before returning to France to die in the Great War) and precisely where the Limmat River flows into Lake Zurich. The late January wind blowing off that lake, blocked only intermittently on the broad Rämistrasse by softly rumbling streetcars, froze me to the bone despite my heaviest wool formal overcoat.

It’s at this moment that I found myself wondering, If I’m freezing with chattering teeth just crossing the Rämistrasse in Zurich in a slight breeze from a Swiss lake for a few moments exposed to the wind, how in God’s name am I going to survive and conquer the space-blown sub-arctic winds of Mount Everest above 26,000 feet?

I thought I’d dined well in Boston, New York, London, and Paris—all on my aunt’s bequest money or through the largesse of Lady Bromley with the Deacon picking up the actual tab—but the Kronenhalle certainly had to be the largest and most formal-feeling restaurant I’d ever set foot in. The day we met Finch was the only day of the week when they served lunch, and still the waiters, maître d’, and other personnel were dressed in tuxedos. Even the tall potted plants configured here and there, in this corner and next to that pillar and over near that window, looked too formal to be mere vegetable matter; they seemed to wish they were also wearing tuxedos.

I was wearing the dark suit that the Deacon had purchased for me in London, but crossing the vast open spaces of Zurich’s Restaurant Kronenhalle, its luncheon tables filled mostly with formally dressed men but also a few elegant women, made me realize how insecure I still felt in European high society. Even though I was wearing my best (and only) pair of highly polished black dress shoes, I suddenly thought how clodhopperish and scuffed they must look to everyone in the huge restaurant.

Sitting alone at the white-linen- and silver-service-covered table to which we were led was a short, thin, sharp-faced man. He was ignoring the glasses of wine and water already poured and seemed to be lost in a book he was reading. Finch was the only man in the room wearing a regular daytime-wear tweed suit and waistcoat—neither looking all that clean at the moment (there were cigarette ashes on his waistcoat)—and his posture was the comfortable, oblivious, cross-legged sprawl that I associate with the very, very rich or simply the very, very self-confident. The Deacon cleared his throat, and the gaunt-faced man looked up, folded the book, and set it on the table. The title was a long one in large-word German that I couldn’t translate.

Finch removed his reading glasses and looked up at us as if he had no idea who we were or why we were standing by his table. I couldn’t be sure if the smudge under his nose was the rough sketch of a brownish mustache on his tanned face or simply more of the brownish stubble that already stippled his jaw and cheeks.

The Deacon reintroduced himself, although the two men had spent the entire 1922 Mount Everest expedition in each other’s company, and then introduced each of us. Finch didn’t bother to get to his feet but raised what looked like a limp hand dangling—almost as if he expected it to be kissed rather than shaken. Still, his handshake was surprisingly firm—almost shockingly firm, given the long, thin fingers. Then I noticed the damage to those hands and fingers and nails; if nothing else this man was an alpinist who’d spent years jamming his bare hands into cracks and holds in granite, limestone, and sharp ice.

“Jake, Jean-Claude,” continued the Deacon, “I’d like to present Mr. George Ingle Finch. You both know that two and a half years ago, Mr. Finch and I were on the expedition that climbed to just above twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet on the East Ridge and North Face of Everest…without oxygen. It was an altitude record at the time. But even though we climbed without the tanks that day, George helped design the oxygen apparatus that Mallory and Irvine were using when they disappeared last June, and he’s been kind enough to offer to take us to his workshop here in Zurich after lunch to show us how it works…and to give us some advice on various aspects of our…recovery expedition.”

The Deacon seemed embarrassed to have used so many words and—most rare for the Deacon—not sure of what to say next. Finch rescued the moment by lazily waving us to the three empty chairs.

“Sit down, please,” said Finch. “I took the liberty of ordering a wine but we can certainly get a different bottle for the table…especially if you’re paying, Richard.” Finch’s brief flash of smile showed small, slightly nicotine-stained but strong teeth. Despite the Alpine Club’s discriminatory insults about Finch, it was obvious that he brushed those teeth more than once a year. “This joint has good food and I can rarely afford to dine here, even for lunch,” he continued in his slightly German-accented British English, “which is why I suggested we meet here when you said you would be picking up the tab.” He casually waved over the headwaiter and—surprising, considering how Finch was dressed—the tuxedoed gentleman responded with alacrity and obvious respect. Perhaps people in Zurich were well aware of Finch’s alpine successes. Or perhaps the waiters simply assumed that anyone who could afford to dine at Restaurant Kronenhalle was wealthy enough to deserve such respectful treatment.

I admit that I was bridling a bit as we all ordered our lunches (I simply said that I’d have whatever the Deacon had just ordered) and while Jean-Claude and Finch conversed animatedly about which kind of wine to order for the table. I was irritated because I wondered if Finch used that “this joint has good food” vernacular because I was so obviously an American and a not-very-successful-looking one at that. (I soon learned that this was not the case; George Ingle Finch spoke many languages and mixed their vernacular into his sentences, even Americanisms, with casual enjoyment. By the end of that day in Zurich, I would see that Finch, though a man of great personal dignity, probably took the fewest pains to impress others with his knowledge, prowess, and personal achievements than any climber I’d ever met.)

The food was good. The wine, whatever it was (and to the limited extent I could judge wine when I was 22), was excellent. And the waiters whom I’d expected to be ostentatious, even Deutsch-Schweizer imperious toward our little group of foreigners, treated us with great courtesy and were all but invisible during their silent delivery and whisking away of courses and dishes. (This idea of capable-waiter invisibility equaling quality service was an opinion I’d picked up from my father: one of the few unsolicited opinions I ever heard him venture other than on the day he and Mother dropped me at Harvard and he took me aside and said sternly, “All right, Jake. You’re a man responsible for yourself from this point on. Try to keep your whiskey bottle out of the bedroom, your pecker in your pants as much as possible, and your head in your books until you get a degree. Any degree.”)

I set down my wineglass and realized that Finch, Jean-Claude, and the Deacon were discussing our plans, such as they were at that point, for our upcoming “recovery expedition” to bring back Bromley’s personal possessions to his mother, or, since we all knew that the odds of that were close to nil, at least return with some clear report about how young Percival had died. The Deacon had assured us that Finch understood that news of our private expedition was not to be shared with anyone else. “And,” the Deacon had added, “there’s currently so little love lost between Finch and the Alpine Club, the Committee, and the entire Royal Geographical Society that he certainly won’t be eager to tell them anything…much less our secret.”

“So you knew Percival…Lord Percival Bromley?” Jean-Claude was asking.

“The first time I met him was when he hired me as a guide some years ago,” said Finch in that rather pleasant educated-British tone with its slight German accent. “Bromley wanted to traverse the Douves Blanches…” He paused and looked at me for the first time. “The Douves Blanches is a spur, Mr. Perry—a sharp, spiky one all the way—off the main chain of the Grandes Dents on the east side of the Arolla Valley.”

“Yes, I’ve been there,” I said, my voice a shade impatient. I was no longer a novice at alpine climbing, after all. I’d done the Douves Blanches traverse the previous autumn with Jean-Claude and the Deacon.

Finch didn’t seem to have picked up on my tone. Or perhaps he had and didn’t care one way or the other. He nodded once and continued, “Young Percy was capable even then of doing the traverse, but he’d come to attempt what he called a ‘delectable’ series of rather impressive chimneys that split the two-thousand-foot rock wall above the upper Ferpècle Glacier, and he wanted someone on the rope with him.”

All three of us waited, but Finch seemed to have lost interest in Bromley and the conversation and returned his attention to his steak and wine.

“How did you find him?” asked the Deacon.

Finch looked up as if the Deacon had spoken in Swahili. (Which is a bad comparison, I realize, because it turned out that George Ingle Finch could speak some Swahili and understood more of it than he spoke.)

“I mean,” said the Deacon, “how did he handle himself?”

Finch shrugged noncommittally, and that might have been the frustrating end of the discussion, but perhaps he realized that we’d come a long way, and there was a real chance that we would soon be climbing very high on the shoulder of Mount Everest to find Percy Bromley’s corpse, and that we were, after all (or Lady Bromley was), paying for Finch’s meal in one of the most expensive restaurants in Switzerland. Perhaps in all of Europe.

“Bromley was all right,” said Finch. “Climbed very well, for an amateur. Never complained, even when we had to spend a long, cold night on a very narrow ledge, without food or proper equipment, on that steep south ridge just a short but difficult pitch below the summit. Not a good overcoat or bag between the two of us, nor a bump in the rock face to tie ourselves on to. The ledge was about the width of that bread tray…” Finch nodded toward the narrow silver tray. “We had no candles to hold lighted under our chins in case we dozed, so we took turns through the long night sitting watch, as it were, making sure the other didn’t fall asleep and pitch forward three thousand feet to the glacier.”

Perhaps to make sure that we got the point, Finch added, “I trusted the boy with my life.”

“So Lord Percival was a better climber than some others are saying now?” The Deacon was finishing his Tafelspitz—an excellent meal consisting of tips of choice beef simmered along with root vegetables and various spices in a rich broth and served with roasted slices of potato and a mix of minced apples and sour cream combined with horseradish. I always marveled at how the Brits could lift a fork with something like morsels of meat and sauce on the back of the utensil, and make it look not only easy but proper. Eating in England and Europe, I thought, must be like going to China and getting used to chopsticks.

“Depends on which ‘others’ you have in mind,” responded Finch after another significant pause. He was looking carefully at our team leader. “Anyone in particular?”

“Bruno Sigl?”

Finch laughed—a harsh bark of a sound. “That bully-boy Nazi fanatic friend of Herr Hitler?” he said. “Sigl’s an accomplished climber—I’ve never climbed with him but I’ve run into him on almost a dozen alpine ascents over the years. He’s a smooth, careful, competent man on rock or ice—but he’s also a lying Scheisskerl, one who tends to get his younger climbing partners killed.”

“What is this…Scheisskerl?” asked Jean-Claude.

“Brainless, untrustworthy fellow,” said the Deacon quickly, glancing over his shoulder at the hovering waiters. To Finch he said, “So if Herr Sigl told you that Percival Bromley ventured out onto a risky Everest North Face, walking onto an obviously avalanche-prone slab of snow with an Austrian fellow in tow, you wouldn’t believe him?”

“I wouldn’t believe Bruno Sigl if the bastard told me that the sun would be coming up tomorrow,” said Finch, pouring himself the last of our wine.

“Richard, weren’t you one of the first to see the monster’s tracks on Lhakpa La when you led Mallory up to that pass in ’twenty-one?” asked George Ingle Finch between large bites of his crème-covered Apfelstrudel. Jean-Claude and the Deacon were having only thick, rich coffee for dessert. I’d tried a chocolate pudding.

“Monster?” said Jean-Claude, perking up. I’d watched as the heavy Bavarian meal, so unusual for the athletic French mountain guide, made him sleepy. “Monster?” he said again as if unsure of the English word.

“Ja,” replied Finch, “the tracks of some huge biped our friend Richard here and the late, overly lamented George Mallory found above twenty-two thousand feet on Lhakpa La, the high pass from where Richard had suggested to Mallory—correctly suggested, as it turned out—that they might be able to see a possible approach route to Everest. But on the way up—this is in late September nineteen twenty-one, I believe—they found the tracks of the monster instead of a view. True?” He turned toward the Deacon.

“Twenty September,” said the Deacon, setting down his coffee cup with great precision. “Deep into the monsoon season. The snow was pure powder and hip-deep.”

“But you made it to the summit of this little mountain—more a peak of its own than a pass, ja?—despite the snow,” said Finch. It was not a question.

The Deacon scratched his cheek. I could tell that he wanted to light up his pipe but was refraining from doing so while Finch was still enjoying his dessert. “Mallory and I cleared the icefall all right, but the deep snow slowed us down and made the porters with our tents turn back eight hundred feet below the summit. We all—Mallory, me, Wheeler, and Bullock, with Wollaston, Morshead, and Howard-Bury in reserve—made it to the top and set up camp on the twenty-second.”

“What about the tracks of a monster?” insisted Jean-Claude.

“Yeah, what about the monster?” I asked. It was one of the first times I’d spoken, except to ask for something to be passed to me, during the entire meal.

“Above the icefall, on both the twentieth and twenty-second, where none of our climbers or porters had gone before, there were deep marks both in the loose snow and in the firmer, frozen-over parts of the ascent, where we could climb without fully breaking through the crust,” said the Deacon, his voice very soft. “They appeared to be from a two-legged creature.”

“Why say ‘appeared’?” demanded Finch. A slight smile was forming under his fuzz of a mustache. “Mallory, Wollaston, Howard-Bury, and all the others who made it up to the saddle summit of Lhakpa La swore that they were the giant clawed footprints of some mammal-like, two-legged living thing.”

The Deacon sipped the last of his coffee. The waiter bustled over, and we all accepted more coffee so we could keep the table longer.

“How large were the prints in the snow?” I asked.

“A paw print of a human-like foot fourteen to sixteen inches long?” said Finch, turning it into a question as he turned toward the Deacon.

Our friend only nodded. Finally, setting the coffee cup down again, he said, “By the time Wollaston and the others got up to the saddle of Lhakpa La, our porters—Mallory’s and mine, since we were leading that second attempt—had stomped all over the original tracks we saw. There was no way for any of the British climbers to be sure of what was what or the precise length of any track in the snow.”

“But George Mallory took photographs,” said Finch.

“Yes,” said the Deacon.

“And those photos were almost identical to tracks reported and photographed on a high pass in Sikkim way back in eighteen eighty-nine,” said Finch.

“So they tell me,” said the Deacon.

Finch chuckled and turned toward Jean-Claude and me. I am sure I looked as goggle-eyed as Jean-Claude did.

“The porters knew exactly what the tracks were and who or what had made them,” said Finch in his soft German accent. “They were made by Metohkangmi…a yeti.”

“By whom?” I said, my cup of coffee still frozen in space as if I could neither drink from it nor set it back on its saucer. “By what?” said Jean-Claude almost in unison.

“Yeti,” repeated Finch. “Not one of the many demons who the locals believe live in or on the mountain, but a real, living, breathing, blood-eating man-thing…a creature-monster, eight feet tall or larger. Huge feet. A gorilla-like or manlike monster that can survive at altitudes of twenty-two thousand feet and above near Everest.”

Jean-Claude and I looked at each other.

Finch ate strudel and smiled again. “I saw tracks myself the next year, in nineteen twenty-two, when Geoffrey Bruce and I climbed all the way to the North East Ridge for the first time. They were in an icy snowfield at about twenty-five thousand feet—a snowfield that none of our people had yet climbed to—clearly tracks of a biped like us, but with almost twice the stride of even the tallest man, and in the shallower parts of the snowfield where the tracks were embedded mostly in soft ice, we could see the actual outline of the foot—almost sixteen inches long, with what looked to be claws on the toes.” He looked at the Deacon. “You were there at the Rongbuk Monastery when we talked about the yetis in nineteen twenty-two, yes?”

The Deacon nodded.

Finch looked at Jean-Claude and me again. “Rongbuk Monastery is a very sacred place since it’s near the village of Chobuk, right across from the entrance to the valley that leads eventually to Chomolungma…”

“Chomolungma?” interrupted Jean-Claude.

Finch had turned back toward the Deacon and for some reason continued to look at him as he answered J.C. “The locals’ name for Mount Everest. It means something like ‘Goddess Mother of the World.’”

“Ah, oui,” said Jean-Claude. “I had forgotten. Colonel Norton had mentioned that name when we spoke to the climbers at the Royal Geographical Society.”

“So the monks at the Rongbuk Monastery knew about this…yeti creature?” I asked. I didn’t want to let the subject of the “monster” drop.

Finch nodded and said to the Deacon, “You were there with me right at the end of April in nineteen twenty-two and you heard what the Rongbuk lama and his priests said about yetis on Everest. Was it four of the creatures that the lama said lived there?”

“Five,” said the Deacon. “Bruce kept pressing them on the tracks and the creatures, and the head lama—Dzatrul Rinpoche—told us calmly that he and the monks had seen five yeti. He said that they lived in the upper reaches of the valley, up to the North Col and even above that. The Rinpoche said that the yeti were more feared than the mere mountain demons, which might or might not exist. He said that the yeti were manlike, but taller, larger, with huge chests and powerful long arms. He said that the yeti were covered with long hair and had yellowish eyes. The lama told Bruce and us—you were there, Finch, I know you remember—that sometimes the yeti raided the village of Chobuk, but never the Rongbuk Monastery itself, drinking the blood of yaks, killing men with one swipe of their clawed paw-hands, and—I believe Geoffrey Bruce found this most interesting—carrying off the Chobuk women.”

“What would the monsters want with human women?” asked Jean-Claude in a small, almost childlike voice.

The other three of us had to chuckle, and J.C. blushed a bright crimson.

“The lama went on to say that when the village sent men up the glacier valley with weapons,” said Finch, his voice low so that none of the hovering waiters would hear, “they never found the yeti or the women, alive at least—always just the women’s gnawed skeletons and skulls. The women’s bones, said the lama, had always been sucked free of all their marrow. The eye sockets in the skulls looked, he said, as if they had been licked clean.”

I finally had to set my coffee cup down into its saucer. They both rattled. The sound made me imagine Mount Everest winds blowing through gnawed ribcages and the hollowed-out eye sockets of a skull.

The last of his coffee drunk, glancing to make sure that our silent trio had finished, George Ingle Finch gracefully waved over the waiter, his rock-ravaged fingers writing in air to signal for the bill. When the bill came, he gestured, with equal grace, for it to be presented to the Deacon.

We came out the front door of Restaurant Kronenhalle and turned left onto Rämistrasse and into the full force of the freezing wind blowing in off the lake. A teeth-chattering block and a half later we reached the Quaibrücke bridge but turned left onto an empty avenue named Utoquai and trudged southeast along a frozen lakeside walkway. A low concrete railing to our right was guarded by fangs of icicles. A constant rumbling below reminded us that the ice—the lake was frozen solid near the shore, icy but liquid water starting a hundred yards or so out—was grinding up against the cement breakwater below that railing. The wind was roaring hard enough to raise whitecaps far out along the white-iced and white-watered expanse, and the same wind would have thrown me down had not the ever efficient Swiss cleared all the ice and snow along the Utoquai Boulevard sidewalk and sprinkled it liberally with salt. Finch had informed us that his storage warehouse was less than half a mile away, but as Jean-Claude and I plodded along behind the Deacon and Finch, trying to overhear their conversation through the freezing wind, half a mile seemed too far to walk.

Jean-Claude and I walked faster to close the distance to the two men in front of us.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” George Finch was saying, “and it’s just not possible, Richard.”

“What am I trying to do, George?”

“Climb Mount Everest alpine style,” said the shorter man. “Instead of the Mallory-Bruce-Norton military-siege style of attack—one slow camp at a time, attack, retreat, attack again—you and your young friends want to take it in one swift alpine assault. But it won’t work, Richard. You’ll all die up there.”

“We’ve been paid by Lady Bromley to carry out only a search and recovery operation—at least to find and bury her son’s body,” said the Deacon. “With luck, we’ll find some trace of him far lower than Bruno Sigl was talking about, way up high between Camps Four and Five—that made no sense. But I’ve mentioned nothing about the three of us trying to climb the mountain.”

George Finch nodded. “But you will try, Richard. I know you. So I tremble for the fates of you and your two fine friends.”

The Deacon did not reply to this. We passed the Opera House and turned left on a street called Falkenstrasse. At least the wind was at our backs now.

“You must remember in ’twenty-two,” continued Finch, “the day we reached Pang La Pass—at seventeen thousand two hundred feet—and caught our first glimpse of Everest.”

“I remember,” grunted the Deacon.

“The wind was so strong at Pang La that we had to lie down, gasping for air and clinging to rocks to keep from being blown away,” continued Finch. “But suddenly there was that view of a hundred miles of the Himalayan range. Mount Everest was still forty bloody miles to the south, but that monstrous hill dominated everything. You remember the cloud trailing from it, Richard? You remember the snow plume stretching out for miles to the west? That bloody mountain creates its own weather.”

“I was there with you, George,” the Deacon said. We turned right onto a narrower street of closed-front warehouses and bleak old apartment buildings—Seefeldstrasse, read the ice-encrusted street sign.

“Then you know that an alpine-style assault is impossible,” said the alpinist, removing a fat, heavy key ring from his overcoat pocket and finding the right key for a warehouse door. “Climbers sick, porters sick, terrible winds, sudden heavy snows, the monsoon season arriving early, injuries, avalanches, rockfalls, tents torn, oxygen apparatuses not working properly, dysentery, altitude sickness, frostbite, stoves malfunctioning…any single setback, and there will be many, Richard, you know that as well as I do…any setback will destroy the entire alpine-style effort. And cost some or all of you your lives. Here we are.”

Finch entered the black maw and fumbled for a light switch.

The first floor—first floor by my American way of thinking—of this warehouse wasn’t the huge storage space I’d expected. Or, rather, it was, but it had been partitioned. Nine-foot walls without ceilings had created dozens of such storage areas, each entrance with a metal-grill door and heavy padlock. We followed Finch halfway down the echoing space, he produced yet another long key from his key ring, and then he held the iron-grill door open as we entered his storage space, which was perhaps 25 feet by 20 feet.

Inside, a long workbench along the far wall was stacked with oxygen tanks.

To our left was a wall with more than a dozen different-sized ice axes hanging. Shelves held a myriad of hobnailed and felt-lined boots, and a long rack showed varieties of wool climbing jackets, arctic anoraks, and a whole line of distinctive long padded jackets or overcoats. I counted ten there on the rack, and I was surprised that Finch needed so many.

Finch had closed the door when I walked over, lifted the eiderdown-filled fabric of the closest long coat on the rack, and said, “Is this your famous balloon jacket?”

Finch glowered at me. It was obvious that he’d endured too much teasing about that particular article of clothing. “It’s the goose-down-filled outer jacket I devised for Everest,” he snapped. “Yes, it’s balloon fabric—the only material I could find that wouldn’t tear or rip and which could be easily sewn for the compartments of eiderdown. It kept me warm at almost twenty-four thousand feet below the North East Ridge.”

The Deacon chuckled. “I can vouch for that. The three of us—George, Geoffrey Bruce, and I, and Bruce was a neophyte climber then—used ‘English air,’ George’s oxygen apparatus, to press through the Yellow Band to a point just below the North East Ridge. We would have made the ridge had Bruce’s oxygen outfit not quit working. There was a broken glass tube in Bruce’s set. Luckily, George carried a spare glass piece, but he had to stop and tinker with his own oxygen rig to allow it to feed oxygen to both Geoffrey and himself while he repaired Bruce’s rig. All that at twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet…at the time, the highest point humans had ever reached on foot.”

“And then we had to turn back,” growled Finch. “Surrendering our summit attempt because of Bruce’s temporary trauma at not getting oxygen. And he’d been one of the adamant ones about reaching the summit without ‘artificial air.’ Had he been an experienced climber…” The growl trailed off, but the sadness and anger etched on George Ingle Finch’s face remained.

The Deacon nodded acknowledgment of Finch’s frustration. I realized then, fully for the first time, what an insult and disappointment it had been for these two men, each having climbed higher than Mallory or anyone else on the 1922 expedition, not to have been given another chance in 1924. What fury they must have felt when they were informed that they had not been chosen for the 1924 Everest attempt. While holding Finch’s balloon coat in one hand, I suddenly imagined the bile that must have brought a constant taste of rejection to these two proud men.

The Deacon said, “My point was only that when we returned to Camp Four that evening, Geoffrey Bruce and I were frozen to the bone, but George had stayed warm climbing in his eiderdown jacket. This is why I asked each of you to bring two empty Gladstone bags. I’ve paid George to make up nine of these coats for us.”

“Nine?” said Jean-Claude. He looked at the coat rack with its line of bulging down jackets. “Why so many? Are they that fragile that they wear out so soon?”

“No,” said the Deacon. “I figure that we’ll each have two high-climbing porters with us to get to the high camp for our summit attempt. I’ve ordered the extra oxygen sets and eiderdown coats for them as well. Nine in all. They compress nicely. We’ll pack them in our Gladstones today and take them back ourselves so that nothing gets lost in shipping.”

Finch grunted. “Mallory listed a copy of my eiderdown coat as possible outerwear for the climbers in last year’s expedition,” he said. “But no one ordered one. They chose to climb—and die—in silk, wool, cotton, wool, wool, and more wool.”

“Wool is warm in layers,” Jean-Claude said tentatively. “It has kept me alive through high bivouacs many nights.”

Instead of arguing, Finch only nodded and touched two of his worn wool outer jackets and then one of the Shackleton windproof gabardine anoraks hanging there. “Wool is wonderful, until it gets wet. Wet from our sweat as well as from snow or rain. And then you’re carrying another forty pounds of sodden wool with you when you climb, in addition to the forty or fifty pounds in your rucksack and thirty-some pounds of your oxygen apparatus. And then, when you pause in the high winds, your sweat freezes on the lower layers…” He shook his head.

“Doesn’t your eiderdown jacket absorb sweat and lose its loft when wet?” I asked.

Finch shook his head again. “I wear the usual wool underlayers, but the sweat buildup is less because of the breathing capabilities of the eiderdown. The eiderdown would lose its insulating qualities when soaked—it’s the pockets of air it creates that kept the goose, and now me in the jacket of the goose’s down, warm—but the balloon fabric I chose resists water short of a full immersion in a lake.” He managed a small smile. “There aren’t many lakes above twenty thousand feet on Everest…unless one slips.”

“I wasn’t aware that there were lakes or standing water on the upper reaches of the Rongbuk Glacier,” said Jean-Claude, still looking hard at Finch. “Just melt pools down at the entrance to the glacial valley.”

George Finch sighed at my French friend’s apparent literalism and shrugged ever so slightly. “If you fall two vertical miles from the North East Ridge or Everest summit ridge, your impact velocity might be enough to melt some ice and create a serious puddle.”

Finch knew better than we did—but all alpinists know from experience—that a falling climber almost never falls the full distance off any mountain. The body hits many rocks, boulders, ice slags, ridges, and other protuberances on the way down…enough that whatever remains make it to the glacier below are in many small, naked pieces and barely recognizable as having once been human.

“Or not,” he added and gestured to the cluttered worktable. “Richard, the coats are indeed ready for you to take today. I also thought we might look over the oxygen apparatus that we used in ’twenty-two, then the rigs that Sandy Irvine changed for his and Mallory’s final attempt, and now the final version you and I decided on. I need your approval before I ship them to Liverpool for loading on whichever ship you sail on next month.”

February departure was just a month away. Jean-Claude and I had known since November, of course, that the Deacon had been ordering oxygen tanks and breathing equipment for our small-scale expedition. And we knew that he’d decided not to use Siebe Gorman in England for the equipment, even though—or actually, because—Siebe Gorman had done all the oxygen rigs for the ’21, ’22, and ’24 official expeditions. The Deacon had explained that the risk was too great that Siebe Gorman might leak out word of another expedition outfitting itself with oxygen for the Himalayas—and of that word getting back to the directors of the Royal Geographical Society, the Alpine Club, and the Mount Everest Committee. He said that he knew of no oxygen-supply company in England that could be entrusted with our secret. Instead he’d gone to a “source in Switzerland.”

Now J.C. and I knew that the source was named George Ingle Finch.

But when I said this aloud, Finch only chuckled and shook his head. “No, Mr. Perry, our friend Richard Davis Deacon has been sending Lady Bromley’s money to me, but I have been sending it on to Zürcher Werke für wissenschaftliche Präzisionsinstrumente und Geräte—a scientific instrument manufacturing firm I know here in Zurich.”

I must have looked doubtful. Finch said, “I am a scientist by trade, Mr. Perry. A chemist. I do business with such firms for scientific instruments all the time. They are Swiss—which means that discretion is bred into their genes.”

The long worktable was piled high with oxygen cylinders, frames for the tanks, valves, tubes, regulators, and a variety of face masks, while the wall above the worktable was pegged with tools both common and exotic.

Finch dragged the one oxygen rig across the table toward us. To the Deacon he said, “Look familiar, Richard?”

The Deacon only nodded.

“We each hauled one of these to twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet, didn’t we, Richard?” said Finch. “And we would have gone higher if the glass tube in Bruce’s mask hadn’t shattered from the cold.”

“Not so much higher,” the Deacon said. “We wouldn’t have made the summit that day, George. Just not possible.”

Finch showed his strange, clenched smile. “You and I might have made the summit with these tanks if we’d left Bruce to get back to Camp Five on his own and we’d pressed on to the ridge and higher…and if we’d been willing to die up there. I think we would have reached the summit around sunset.”

The Deacon shook his head again. I realized that he wasn’t denying that they might have done it—the two of them making the summit of Everest by sunset or just after sunset on that day in late May of 1922—only that he, the Deacon, hadn’t been willing to die doing so.

I decided to ask the obvious question (but possibly insulting to Finch, who had championed the use of oxygen on Everest). “Does this oxygen stuff really help? Most of the English climbers I know are against using it on Everest.”

Surprisingly, it was the Deacon who answered. “Most English climbers have never climbed as high as even the lower North Col of Everest. If they had, they would know the benefits of bringing oxygen along…it can be as necessary as bringing food along, or a stove to melt snow for hot water.”

Perhaps Jean-Claude and I looked skeptical—I know that I did—because Finch then began talking specifics. He paused almost at once. “Are you gentlemen more comfortable in metric measurement or English feet?”

“Either will work,” Jean-Claude said.

I admitted that metric wouldn’t work as well for me. Despite the constant use of meters and kilometers in my French, Italian, and Swiss climbing, I still had trouble translating the figures into feet or miles.

“I shall use both, then,” said Finch. “Just one illustration, perhaps. In the nineteen twenty-two expedition, there were two serious summit attempts from Advanced Base Camp, which that year was at five thousand one hundred and eighty meters—that’s seventeen thousand feet, Mr. Perry. George Mallory and Howard Somervell, in their attempt, climbed to eight thousand three hundred and twenty meters, approximately twenty-seven thousand feet, in fourteen and a half hours. This is without oxygen, remember. So Mallory and Somervell’s ascent rate was one hundred twenty meters—approximately three hundred and ninety-three feet—per hour. Is this clear so far?”

J.C. and I both nodded, but I was lying with my nod. I’d lost the mathematical thread somewhere around the first altitude high point.

“Then Richard here, Geoffrey Bruce, and I, also starting our summit attempt from Advanced Base Camp, climbed to eight thousand three hundred and twenty meters…the twenty-seven-thousand-three-hundred-foot level that I’ve mentioned before and will refer to again since it was the human high point on Everest until Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance last year. It took us twelve and a quarter hours with oxygen to reach that altitude. That gave the three of us, with the crude oxygen apparatus, an ascent rate of one hundred fifty-five meters…some five hundred seventeen feet…per hour. This is clearly a superior climbing rate to that of Mallory or Somervell, and Richard and I have agreed that the rate and final altitude would have been even higher had we not moved out on a slow traverse of the North Face because of the terribly high winds on the ridge.”

Jean-Claude held up one finger as if he were a student begging to ask a question of his instructor. “But you had to turn back because of a valve failure in Bruce’s equipment. So in the end, the oxygen tanks ruined your chance of reaching the summit.”

Finch smiled. “I’ll discuss the valve problem in detail when we get to it. But please remember, Monsieur Clairoux, that there was another advantage to carrying the oxygen tanks so high.” He looked at the Deacon. “It saved all three of our lives.”

“How so?” I asked.

“On twenty-four May, Richard, Bruce, and I had sent our porters down and set up our tent on an exposed area at twenty-five thousand six hundred feet of altitude—seventy-eight hundred meters. We ended up being trapped there for more than thirty-six hours by high winds that literally lifted our tent off the ground. The tent had become a sail on the edge of a three-thousand-foot drop. Sleep was impossible as we spent day and night trying to hold the groundsheet down, now and then one of us venturing out into the hurricane gale to add another rope tie-down to a boulder. When the storm did begin to die down, we should have retreated to a lower altitude immediately, but none of us wanted to, even though we were short of food and our bodies were becoming numb from the cold. That night we were so weakened that all three of us were showing early signs of frostbite that would have been fatal by morning. None of us could have made the descent to a lower camp after another sleepless night of that insidious cold. Then I remembered the oxygen tanks we’d brought up.”

We looked at the Deacon. His nod was almost imperceptible. “The oxygen saved our lives that night,” he said. “All through the night, when we felt the coldest, we passed the oxygen cylinder around, and even a few breaths of the richer air got us warmer…the effects were immediate. It allowed us to sleep and kept us warm and alive through the worst night I’ve ever spent on any mountain.”

“The next morning was when we made our summit bid,” said Finch. “The three of us left the tent at six thirty a.m. and started climbing strongly. The oxygen sets had not only saved us from freezing to death in the night but restored our resolve to try to reach the summit—or at least the North East Ridge—the next day. And remember that this was after a record-setting forty-eight hours at an unprecedented altitude, and with almost no food or adequate water. The wind had blown so hard that for most of the time we could not even scoop a pan of snow from outside or light the stove. But the oxygen allowed us to climb toward the ridge that day anyway. At the ascent rate I mentioned earlier, we had climbed to twenty-five thousand five hundred feet, using bottled oxygen for many hours at a climbing rate of six hundred and sixty-six feet per hour, as compared to Mallory and Somervell’s three hundred sixty-three feet per hour. Almost twice their rate of ascent, gentlemen.”

“All right,” I said to both the Deacon and Finch. “That makes sense even to me. We climb with oxygen packs. How do they work, Mr. Finch?”

Finch started to explain the equipment to Jean-Claude and me, speaking mostly to me, but then he paused. “Mr. Perry, you are the tinkerer-mechanic for this expedition, are you not?”

“Not me!” I said, almost alarmed. “I can barely change sparkplugs. Jean-Claude’s our technical person.”

Finch blinked. “That was stupid of me. Perhaps, Mr. Perry, I assumed you were the technical boffin because you so closely resemble Sandy Irvine, who did all the technical work for Mallory’s expedition last year, even rebuilding this oxygen apparatus. You are the same age, I believe. Twenty-two? Same height. Same weight. Same confident look. Same athletic college rower’s build. Same blond hair. Same smile.” He turned to J.C. “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. J’aurais bien vu que vous êtes l’ingénieur du groupe.”

“Merci,” said Jean-Claude with a nod. “But I fear that I am a mere tinkerer, Mr. Finch. Not a brilliant young engineer as Monsieur Irvine showed himself to be. My father was a blacksmith much of his life and then opened a small steel fabrication company before the War. During the War, the company grew quickly and mon père began working on much more complicated metal fabrication for the army. I used to watch…and help sometimes…but I am no engineer.”

“I imagine you will be for this group,” Finch said and propped up the heavy oxygen rig.

He paused before beginning what I assumed would be a lecture on the equipment.

“I know that Richard understands this,” Finch said. “But do both of you know the difference in the actual amount of oxygen and air between sea level and, say, twenty-eight thousand feet?”

Again I felt like a schoolboy caught unawares by a surprise quiz. Desperately, I tried to remember the amount of O₂ at sea level—no number came to mind—and even more desperately tried to find an equation that would give me the smaller number at 28,000 feet. Divide by 28, perhaps? But divide what? “There’s almost exactly the same amount of air and oxygen at twenty-eight thousand feet as there is at sea level,” Jean-Claude said confidently.

What? My French friend obviously had lost his mind.

“Very good,” said Finch. He managed to avoid the pedant’s annoying whining sing-song and spoke normally. “But if the oxygen is roughly the same at both altitudes, then why,” he paused dramatically, “do you run easily along the beach for a mile at sea level but have to stop to pant and gasp like a fish after two steps at twenty-eight thousand feet?”

“Air pressure,” said Jean-Claude.

Finch nodded. “Scientifically, we know almost nothing about high-altitude physiology, and most of what we do know has come from a few studies by the British Air Ministry in the last few years—aeroplanes have been able to climb above ten thousand feet for only a very short time, obviously—and from tests in the nineteen twenty-one through ’twenty-four Everest expeditions. But we know that it’s the lack of pressure at altitudes above twenty thousand feet that kills us—literally kills our brain cells, literally kills our organs and metabolism, literally kills our ability to think rationally—and, as Monsieur Clairoux says, it is because that lack of pressure makes it harder to breathe, to pull the oxygen into our lungs, and harder for oxygen to be pushed into the lungs’ little capillaries and vessels to restore the red blood cells.”

He held the heavy oxygen pack higher. “The oxygen in these bottles—what the Sherpas quaintly called ‘English air’ during our ’twenty-two expedition—is pressurized to an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. No breathing problems there for a fit alpinist.”

I remembered that the summit of the Matterhorn we’d climbed the previous June was around 14,690 feet. Indeed, I hadn’t felt any problems breathing there. The air had felt a bit thinner and much colder in my lungs, but also rich enough to fuel any physical exertion the climb required.

Finch moved the heavy-looking pack of oxygen tanks in front of him. “This was pretty much the design that the Air Ministry gave us along the lines of the designs that a Professor Dreyer gave them. Notice that the frame is a strong steel Bergen pack frame, and it holds four steel bottles of oxygen, each bottle of air at that fifteen-thousand-foot pressure I mentioned. Then there was this mass of tubes, some regulator valves—all that gabble went over the shoulder and down to the climber’s chest, where he could fiddle with it at the risk of losing all O-two feed—and, to top it off, no fewer than three different types of face masks, counting my own modification.”

Finch shrugged into the straps of the four-tank rig. Tubes and valves and…things…hung in front of him like an uncut umbilical cord. “Each full bottle of oxygen weighs five and three-quarters pounds,” he said. “Would you prefer the data in English pounds, Monsieur Clairoux, or should I speak in kilograms?”

“Pounds would be completely understandable,” Jean-Claude assured him. “And please call me by my Christian name.”

“Oui, très bien,” said Finch. “Well, I’ve come to think in metric, so just for the record, each tank weighs a little more than two point six kilograms. The whole rig then weighs just a bit more than fourteen and a half kilograms…thirty-two pounds to you, Mr. Perry.”

“Jake,” I said.

“Oui, très bien,” he said again. “Here, Jake…Richard knows the weight of this version of the oxygen apparatus all too well. Why don’t you try it on and then give it to Jean-Claude.”

I took the Bergen frame and oxygen tanks from Finch, slipped into the thick straps, and shrugged it on. I didn’t know what to do with the regulator stuff, tubes, and mask, so I let all that dangle in front of me.

“Not too heavy,” I said. “I’ve carried almost twice this weight up serious mountains.”

“Yes,” said Finch, smiling, “but remember, you still have to carry a rucksack or some sort of canvas carrying bag as well as the oxygen bottles and Bergen frame. Food, your clothing, extra climbing gear, tents for the high camps…how much does your regular three-man tent weigh, Jake?”

“Sixty pounds.”

Finch’s smile was starting to look smug to me. “Pretty soon, with these ’twenty-two-style tanks, you’re off balance backwards, and just imagine climbing a rock face with all of those valves, regulators, and tubes hanging in front of your chest! With this rig, you’re exhausted in ten paces above nineteen thousand feet.”

Jean-Claude was running his hands over the oxygen canisters, flow tubes, and regulator doohickeys, as if he’d fathom more of the rig’s purpose just through feel. I stepped back to give him more room.

“Try it on, both of you,” said the Deacon. “Please.”

J.C. propped the apparatus up on the bench and easily slid into the straps. He hoisted it higher and secured a cross-strap over his chest. “Not too bad,” he said. “I often climb with more weight in a rucksack. But I think you may be right about the balance issue…” Then Jean-Claude surprised me by setting a foot on the bench’s stool and using just his arms to lift himself and the apparatus up to a kneeling position on the sturdy workbench. He set his hands on the wall to help himself get to his feet.

Looming above us, J.C. said, “Yes, climbing sheer rock or ice would be trickier with this.” Then he jumped four feet to the floor as if he weren’t carrying thirty-two pounds of steel and pressurized oxygen on his back.

When it was my turn, I loosened the straps for my greater size and girth, tugged them tight again, took a few steps around the workshop and grunted noncommittally. With J.C.’s help, I shrugged out of the pack and lowered it gently to the bench. I wasn’t sure whether such weight would hinder my climbing or not, but although I’d never say it out loud, I relied on my greater strength and fewer years to allow me to perform physical feats that might be beyond the 37-year-old Deacon and the much smaller and lighter Jean-Claude.

“Then there are the sad tales of the multiple face masks,” said George Ingle Finch. He’d pulled three across the bench toward him. “This first thing was called the Economizer. It was designed to deal with the fact that at Mount Everest altitude, with the lower pressure, most of the oxygen you breathe in while struggling uphill is just breathed out again—without your body or red blood cells getting any benefit from it. So the Economizer here had two valves…”

Finch turned the mask around and tapped the complicated interior. “They were there to allow carbon dioxide to pass through the mask but to store the unused oxygen for reuse. But the damned valves froze up more often than not, making the whole mask useless.”

He held up a second, even heavier-looking face mask. “We tried to solve that problem with this backup mask—the Standard—made of pliable copper with chamois leather over it. The idea was that it could be bent easily to fit each climber’s face. And there were no valves, you see…” He tapped the empty interior. “You controlled breathing and re-breathing by biting on the end of the supply tube. Simplicity itself.”

“Mallory hated that mask,” said the Deacon.

Finch smiled. “Indeed he did. As much as he hated the emergency backup plan I taught everyone, which was simply ripping off the mask and sucking on the oxygen hose directly, as Royal Air Force pilots often do during their brief flights above ten thousand feet. And he hated both the mask and the bare tube for the same reason—the climber drools like a baby. Then the drool freezes. Or runs down your throat and collar and then freezes.”

“So what’s the third mask?” I ask, pointing.

“This was my answer to the Standard’s drooling problem,” said Finch. “T-shaped glass tubes, like small mouth bits, instead of rubber hoses. They minimized drool and worked far better for re-breathing the oxygen your body has just exhaled without using. There was one problem, though, as Geoffrey Bruce discovered during his, Richard’s, and my high-altitude-record ascent toward the North East Ridge in nineteen twenty-two…”

“They break,” said Jean-Claude.

“Indeed.” Finch sighed. “The glass becomes brittle in the extreme cold and can break…or clog…either way shutting off all oxygen to the climber. Before the ’twenty-one and ’twenty-two expeditions, a lot of atmospheric scientists thought that with a climber using bottled air pressurized to fifteen thousand feet, if that O-two flow suddenly stopped at altitude—say, at twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet, where Bruce, Richard, and I were when Bruce’s valve broke—the climber would die immediately.”

“But no one died from such a failure,” said Jean-Claude, obviously aware of the oxygen rigs’ history in the Himalayas.

“Not at all. At least two of our climbers and three porters climbed all the way to our Camp Five at twenty-five thousand feet on the East Ridge with oxygen rigs that weren’t working at all. But Bruce’s valve failure that day, as Richard and I discussed earlier, did cause all three of us to turn back before we reached the North East Ridge.”

“So this version of the pack with the glass valves in the mask is what we’ll be using on Everest?” I asked, looking first at the Deacon and then at Finch.

“No,” said both men at once.

Finch dragged a third Bergen pack frame from the pile of rigs propped against the back of the bench. This one looked different somehow.

“This is Sandy Irvine’s so-called Mark Five version,” said Finch, tapping the steel canisters. “You can see the difference.”

It looked different to me but I was damned if I could see exactly how…wait, there were three oxygen tanks in the frame rather than four, I realized. I smiled at how perceptive I was.

“Almost everything is different,” said Jean-Claude, again running his hands across frame and tanks and dials and tubes. “To start with, I can see that Irvine inverted the tanks so that their valves are at the bottom rather than on top…”

Well, I’ll be damned, I thought. So he had.

“Irvine got rid of almost all the pipe work,” continued Jean-Claude, “and radically simplified this flow meter, setting it right at the lower center of the pack so the rig’s balance would be better.”

Without asking permission, J.C. tugged the Sandy Irvine version of the oxygen rig onto his back. “The hose goes over the shoulder now, rather than under the arm and through all those valves and tubes that used to be hanging in the front. Those are gone. The air feed should be better and the climbing should be easier. And it feels lighter.”

“Yes,” said Finch, nodding. “The late Mr. Irvine’s Mark Five version is almost five full pounds lighter than its predecessors, while working much better and being infinitely less awkward.”

Well, I’ll be damned, I thought again.

“Mr. Irvine did most of this redesign while he was still at Oxford,” continued Finch. “He sent all the modification plans to the company manufacturing them—our proud Siebe Gorman—and in almost a year, they made none of the changes he had requested.”

“None?” I repeated.

“None,” said Finch. “They ignored his and the Everest Committee’s orders to make such modifications and shipped precisely the same clumsy, leaking, bulky kits that Richard, Mallory, Bruce, and I had used in nineteen twenty-two. My good friend Noel Odell, who was the last person to see Mallory and Irvine climbing high, told me that when the expedition’s ninety cylinders arrived in Calcutta, fifteen were empty and twenty-four had already leaked so badly that they were useless on the climb. Mr. Irvine told Odell that he, Sandy, had broken one kit just by carefully removing it from its packing case. It was the same thing I found when we reached Base Camp at Mount Everest in ’twenty-two—not one of the ten apparatuses shipped was usable. The soldered joints all leaked, washers had become so dry during the high-desert trip in to the mountain that joints could no longer be made gas-tight, and the majority of the gauges didn’t work. Some of it was fixable—and I fixed what I could—but essentially, the judgment on the Siebe Gorman apparatus is that they were all…junk.”

Jean-Claude removed the Irvine Mark V version and set it on the workbench with a resounding thump. “Then how did Sandy Irvine get this improved version?”

Finch showed his small smile. “He fiddled with it all during the three-hundred-and-fifty-mile march in, then at Base Camp, then at the higher camps, and didn’t quit fiddling and improving it—with the few tools and parts he had—until the morning he and Mallory left Camp Six and disappeared.”

“So I assume we shall be receiving the Irvine Mark Five versions?” Jean-Claude said.

“One further modified to my specifications, yes. And you will be getting them not from Siebe Gorman but, as I said, from Zürcher Werke für wissenschaftliche Präzisionsinstrumente und Geräte.” The smile widened almost imperceptibly. “And I guarantee, gentlemen, that they will be engineered properly and up to and exceeding the late Sandy Irvine’s standards.”

The Deacon stepped forward and touched the Mark V tanks. “George, you said that you had a couple of final modifications of your own that you asked for.”

Finch nodded again. “I asked the Zurich engineers to make the Bergen pack frame, the flow meters, and several other elements of the apparatus out of aluminum”—he pronounced it British style, “aluminium”—“a strong metal derived from bauxite ore. I wish I could have made the oxygen canisters out of this aluminum as well, but facilities did not exist for attaching the proper valves or pressuring aluminum tanks, so the oxygen is still carried in steel canisters. But with three tanks maximum, not four, and the new aluminum components, the overall weight will be significantly lower.”

Finch pulled out yet another oxygen rig. This looked much like Sandy Irvine’s Mark V design but was somehow…different…at the same time.

“How much lower is the weight?” asked the Deacon, running his hand over the aluminum frame.

Finch shrugged, but his pride was obvious. “Down from Siebe Gorman’s thirty-two pounds to just over twenty pounds.”

“And you also did something with the face mask valves,” said the Deacon.

Finch lifted the mask of his Mark VI pack. The mask seemed simpler in design than all the others and more pliable in Finch’s scarred hand. “Instead of glass, I redesigned the breathing/re-breathing mouthpiece valves to be made out of a very high grade of rubber,” he said. “We’ve tested that rubber at altitudes up to and above thirty thousand feet—and in ultra-dry air—and the rubber does not become brittle or leak. I took the liberty of replacing all of the leaking Siebe Gorman gaskets and valves with this higher-quality rubber as well.” Finch looked down, and his voice sounded almost embarrassed or ashamed. “I had no time to test all the new components on a mountain, Richard. I wanted to…I had planned to…I had thought the ridges along the North Face of the Eiger might make for a good test…it is not right that you will find if everything works only once you’re high on Everest…but the fabrication of the new design took so long.…”

The Deacon patted Finch on the back. “Thank you, my friend. I’m sure your tests here in Zurich have ensured that the tanks we ordered will work and not leak as the earlier ones did. Thank you for all your work and advice, George.”

Finch showed his small smile, nodded, and put his hands in his pockets.

The Deacon looked at his watch. “We’d better be off if we’re going to meet our train.”

“I’ll walk with you to the Eisenbahn station,” said George Ingle Finch.

The train was on time, which, of course, is redundant. It was a Swiss train.

The Deacon and I were going back through France to Cherbourg and then to England to continue our preparations. Jean-Claude was returning to Chamonix briefly—mostly to say good-bye to the girl he was planning to marry, was my hunch—and would be joining us in London just before it was time to go to Liverpool and depart for India. On the train from Zurich, we each would be carrying our two leather Gladstone bags filled with the nine compressed eiderdown coats.

As we were preparing to board, Finch—who had been silent during the cold walk to the station—suddenly said, “There is one other thing I should tell you about the reason you are going to Everest…about Lord Percival Bromley, that is.”

We hesitated. The Deacon had one foot up on the lower step of the train car. There was no one behind us. We stood there holding our light valises and listened as steam from the train wrapped us in shifting folds of warm vapor.

“I did see Bromley one other time after I climbed with him years ago,” continued Finch. “He visited me here in Zurich—came to my home—in the spring of nineteen twenty-three. April. He said that he needed to ask me about one aspect of our ’twenty-two expedition…”

Finch seemed to be hunting for words. We waited in silence. Down the platform, the final passengers were boarding the train.

Letting out a breath in a small cloud that mixed with the steam, Finch went on, “It’s rather absurd, actually. Young Bromley wanted me to tell him everything I knew, everything we’d seen or heard, about…well…the Metohkangmi.”

“The yeti critter?” I said, surprised.

Finch managed a final smile. “Yes, Mr. Perry. Jake, I mean. The yeti critter. I told him about the tracks I’d seen high on the Rongbuk Glacier near the North Col, showed him photographs Mallory had taken the year before of the tracks he’d found on nearby Lhakpa La, and related what the lama at Rongbuk Monastery had said about the five yetis they were sure inhabited the upper reaches of the valley. That was all I had to show or tell young Bromley—hardly worth a trip to Zurich from Paris, where he was staying at the time—but he did not seem disappointed. Merely thanked me for my time and the information, finished his tea, and returned to Paris that same afternoon.” The conductor was waving his hands at us, pointing emphatically at his watch.

The Deacon said quickly, “Did Bromley tell you why he was interested in this yeti story?”

Finch merely shook his head. Then he stepped forward, bowed slightly, clicked his heels together in a formal manner that was almost Prussian, shook each of us by the hand, and said, “Good-bye, gentlemen. I somehow feel that I will never see any of you again, but I wish you all good fortune in your travels, in your adventure on Everest, and in your…search.”