The Abominable: A Novel

Chapter 8

Seek out Messrs. Burberry, Haymarket

(“ask for Mr. Pink”).

T he Deacon had informed us the previous November that for the 1921 through 1924 expeditions, the Alpine Club and Everest Committee had allocated £50 per man for his full “kit.” He also told us that most of these upper-class gentlemen had spent additional money of their own for their outfitting, so he had taken it upon himself to allocate £100 of Lady Bromley’s budget for each of us in our outfitting and would add to that if necessary.

Even with the Deacon’s personal checklist from his ’21 and ’22 expeditions, as well as the updated 1924 gear list given to him to by his friend the filmmaker-climber Captain John B. L. Noel, finding and purchasing our clothing and specialized climbing gear for Mount Everest was almost the precise equivalent of preparing for a trip to the South Pole. But then, of course, the entire British effort to climb Everest to this date—up to and including the final disappearance of Irvine and Mallory the previous year—had used South Polar expeditions as their template: i.e., using porters to set a series of food and matériel caches in stages along the way to the Pole—or, in our case, at different altitudes on the mountain—and then shifting backward and forward through these camps until a smaller, select group, given a window of good weather, could make their dash for the summit, as Robert Falcon Scott had toward the South Pole thirteen years earlier, just him and his handpicked group of four good men planning to sledge their 1,600-mile round trip to the Pole and back. Since Scott and all four of his men had died during that ill-advised and bad-luck-plagued attempt, it was an analogy I tried not to dwell on.

Still, the clothing and materials we were buying now were very similar—with a few wonderful modern improvements—to what Scott and his men had worn to their cold deaths in the Antarctic.

The first item on the sacred List was windproof clothing, and for that, the List said, we should “Seek out Messrs. Burberry, Haymarket (‘ask for Mr. Pink’).” Jean-Claude and I were a little intimidated by what was reputed to be one of the ritziest of all London haberdashers—“outfitters to Ernest Shackleton” and all that. So J.C. and I went together on a day when the Deacon was busy with other expedition preparation business.

“Mr. Pink,” it turned out, was indisposed and not at the Messrs. Burberry establishment on Haymarket that particular day, but a formally dressed and impeccably polite “Mr. White” spent nearly three hours helping us choose clothing and sizes before we left with a receipt for our purchases and a promise that they would be delivered to our hotel that very afternoon. It turned out that the parcels beat us back to the hotel, and we’d only stopped for a single post-Burberry pint on the way.

The majority of what we purchased at Messrs. Burberry was in the Shackleton line of windproof knickerbockers, smocks, and gloves. We purchased fingerless woolen mitts that went inside larger mitts made of Shackleton gabardine. We added thick woolen mufflers to our Burberry-buying list.

We also needed protection for our heads and faces at Everest altitudes—or even at the 17,000-foot and higher altitudes of the many passes on the 350-mile hike through Tibet to the mountain—and, rather amazingly I thought, Messrs. Burberry sold leather flying, or perhaps motorcycle, helmets with rabbit or fox fur linings and earflaps that tied under one’s chin. Also available—and we each bought one—were face masks made of a thin, soft, breathable, leather-lined chamois. This awe-inspiring combination of leather flaps and straps and fur and brass toggles was topped off with massive goggles made of Crooke’s glass which could be sewn into the leather face mask and helmet if we so chose. The thick glass darkened our view and would shield our eyes from the terrible sunlight at high altitudes. Every climber knew the story of Edward Norton, who’d left his goggles off during his and Somervell’s daring 1922 traverse across the North Face and their failed attempt to climb up the snow-filled great gully that runs down the face of the mountain from the summit. The climbing was so technical that Norton removed his goggles for hours to make sure he could see where he was setting his hands and feet. He’d assumed that since he was climbing on bare rock more than on reflective snow or ice, the sunlight wouldn’t hurt his eyes.

They didn’t succeed in climbing the treacherous couloir, but that night upon descending to Camp IV, Norton was hit with blinding pain in both eyes. He’d given himself ophthalmia—snow blindness with an accompanying infection—and the pain and blindness afflicted him for sixty straight hours after that. They had to help the blinded man down to Advanced Base Camp and put him in a tent covered with sleeping bags to hold out the painful light. Norton’s suffering in that tent was said to have been terrible.

The Shackleton jackets—they were waxed-cotton anoraks, really—had helped keep the wool clothing from earlier expeditions from getting soaked through, but they did very little to hold in warmth, despite their theoretical resistance to wind. The Deacon had this wild idea that a climber—at least the three of us climbers—might be able to survive in the open after dark on Everest with the combination of Finch’s goose down jackets and our waterproof Shackleton jackets. Perhaps—not probably, but just perhaps—we would have clothing warm enough to keep us alive all night in an open bivouac above 25,000 feet.

The few layers that Irvine and Mallory had been wearing when they disappeared, said the Deacon, wouldn’t keep them alive for an hour of sitting still after sunset on the North East Ridge. “I can’t guarantee that Mr. Finch’s eiderdown coats will make the difference between life and death up there,” the Deacon had said when we’d been deciding on outerwear (actually, when he had been deciding), “but I know Finch was warmer than all the rest of us in ’twenty-two, plus the eiderdown is lighter than more layers of wool, and the Shackleton overjackets should keep the down loft dry, so it’s worth the wager.”

I never liked the word “wager” used when it applied to our lives on the highest mountain on earth.

The day after our visit to Messrs. Burberry, Jean-Claude and I joined the Deacon on a boot-purchasing trip to Fagg Bros. on Jermyn Street. There all three of us were fitted for a recently designed—for polar exploration, of course—leather-soled felt boot that was intentionally made oversized to accommodate at least three pairs of thick wool socks. Few of the 1924 climbers had chosen to wear the felt boots once they were above the lower glacier, which meant that no one knew for sure how the boots performed for rock and ice climbing at real altitude.

“Why can’t I use my own climbing boots?” asked Jean-Claude. “They have served me well for years. They only need re-soling from time to time.”

“All of us in the first two expeditions, even Finch, and all of the high-climbers on last year’s expedition, wore our own hobnailed boots,” said the Deacon. “And we all suffered from cold feet, several had frostbite, and some lost toes. Sandy Irvine told John Noel last year that the reason is that these specialized alpine climbing boots not only have the hobnails—in whatever pattern you choose, and Mallory and everyone chose different ones—but also have little metal plates driven between the inner and outer soles to give extra grip. And some of the ‘nails’ on the hobnails are serrated.”

“So?” I said, impatient at last with our team leader. “Did these expensive hobnailed boots give better grip? If so, the metal plates are a good idea, right? They can’t weigh that much.”

The Deacon shook his head in that way that always meant No, you don’t understand.

“Irvine did suggest we use fewer hobnails, for lightness’s sake,” he said. “In the army, we were told that every pound of weight on our feet was equal to ten on our back. Our leather boots during the War were substantial, but designed to be light—for maximum marching. But it’s not the weight that Sandy Irvine was warning Noel about, it was the transmission of cold.”

“Transmission of cold?” repeated Jean-Claude as if not sure of the English phrase.

“Leather soles and thick socks insulate against the terrible cold of the rock and ice high on the mountain to some extent,” said the Deacon. “But Irvine had a theory that the hobnailed boots everyone was wearing were conducting heat from the body through the feet via those metal plates and the hobnails themselves. Heat always flows to cold, of course, and that, according to Irvine’s theory, is why there were so many cases of near-frostbitten toes and some of the real thing. On our expedition, Henry Morshead had to have a toe and several fingertips amputated when we got back to India. He applied to the nineteen twenty-four expedition, but was turned down because of those injuries. So I agree with Sandy Irvine that the hobnailed boots lose body heat to the rock or ice.”

“Then why are we here?” I said. “I might as well wear my trusty old climbing boots if these more expensive hobnailed things are just going to get my feet colder sooner.” That sentence sounded childishly petulant even to my own ears.

The Deacon unfolded several papers from his jacket pocket. On each sheet were carefully diagramed pencil or ink drawings, with columns of handwritten text to either side. The spelling was terrible, but the instructions were clear—Sandy Irvine had made his own revision of the standard alpine climbing boot design, showing where layers of felt should be added between the welt and the nailed sole. Irvine’s summary (the Deacon confirmed that these were his actual notes, given to Captain Noel during the last days before Irvine disappeared with Mallory) concluded in precise handwriting but in terrible spelling, Boots shulde be spareingly naild for liteness—everry ouns counts!

“This spelling,” I said to the Deacon, holding up the folded note as if it were evidence. Everyone knew after the months of newspaper accounts and funeral oratory that Andrew “Sandy” Comyn Irvine had gone to Merton College, Oxford. “The result of high-altitude oxygen deprivation?”

The Deacon shook his head. “Noel said that Irvine was one of the cleverest young men he’d ever met…a near-genius at engineering and in-the-field tinkering…but there was some problem that never allowed the boy to learn to spell correctly. It didn’t seem to hold him back in any way. He rowed crew for the OUBC—Oxford University Boat Club—and was a member of the rather infamous Myrmidon dining club at Merton.”

“Infamous?” said Jean-Claude. He’d been carefully examining Irvine’s diagrams for the special boots and looked up in surprise. “Irvine was part of something…infamous?”

“A dining club of rich boys, most of them excellent athletes, who specialized in breaking university rules and windows,” said the Deacon. He took back the folded sheets of paper and handed them to the attentive Fagg Brother who had been discussing boots with us. “Now our decision is whether to go with Irvine’s design for the newer, possibly warmer alpine climbing boots, or stick to the new felt ones, or get the super-rigid types of boots that Jean-Claude has asked us to use with his newly designed crampons, or just bring our own.”

“Can we not do all four things?” asked Jean-Claude. “Soon I will show you why the very rigid boots I requested may be necessary on Everest. So the four types of boots—high felt for cold, extra-rigid for my new crampon design, Irvine’s felt and hobnail boots, and our own old boots, perhaps resoled, for backup. If Lady Bromley’s money allows?”

“It allows,” said the Deacon. He pointed to the diagrams and said to Mr. Fagg, “Two pairs of these specialized boots with the extra felt layer and metal-plates-not-touching-metal-nails for each of us. Two pairs of the extra-rigid boots—Jean-Claude has a page with the specifications. And two pairs each of the Laplander Antarctic felt boots. We have time to be measured now.”

But it was not Finch’s balloon coat or the Irvine-designed new boots that were the largest change made in outfitting our tiny new expedition in 1925.

As soon as J.C. had rejoined us after his last trip to France, he asked urgently for two days of our time before the end of January. The Deacon replied that it was impossible; he simply didn’t have two days to waste between January and late February, when we were destined to sail for India.

“It’s important, Ree-shard,” said Jean-Claude. At this point J.C. used the Deacon’s first name only on rare occasions, and I was always amused when he used the French pronunciation. “Très important.”

“Important enough that the success or failure of the entire expedition may depend upon it?” The Deacon’s tone was not friendly.

“Oui. Yes.” J.C. looked at both of us. “I think that, yes, these two days may be so important that the success or failure of our entire expedition may depend upon it.”

The Deacon sighed and pulled out a tiny notebook-diary with calendar that he kept in his jacket pocket. “The last weekend in the month,” he said at last. “The twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of January. I have several important things…I’ll move them. That’s a full-moon weekend…will that make any difference?”

“It might,” said Jean-Claude. He flashed his sudden, wide, boy-like grin. “The full moon may well make some difference. Yes. Merci, mon ami.”

We left at sunrise—or what passed for sunrise on that freezing, gray, foggy, snow-spitting late January day—on Saturday the twenty-fourth. None of us owned an automobile, so the Deacon had arranged to borrow one from a friend of his named Dick Summers. It was a Vauxhall, and in my memory the vehicle was about thirty feet long—it had three rows of seats with plenty of legroom and tires that came up almost to my chest. (The mild irony, explained the Deacon, was that Dick Summers had used this same Vauxhall less than two years before to make the first-ever automotive crossing of the rough gravel road—little more than a trail, said the Deacon—in both directions over the difficult Wrynose and Hardknot passes in the Lake District. When I commented that I didn’t see much irony in this, the Deacon lit his pipe and said, “True. I forgot to add that while Summers did the driving on that adventure, Sandy Irvine rode in the third-row seat with two attractive young ladies.”)

We learned within moments of leaving Summers’s storage garage that the huge Vauxhall was better suited to summer expeditions over high passes than it was to winter driving. It was a convertible—what the Brits called “a ragtop” or “topless”—and although it had taken the three of us only thirty minutes of swearing and smashed fingers to get the impossibly complex roof apparatus properly raised and locked, and then another half hour to get the soft side and rear windows buttoned and snapped in properly, as soon as we were on a London street heading northwest out of the city, we realized that the damned machine had more gaps in its superstructure than a cheap colander. Within ten minutes of getting the huge auto onto the streets, snow was blowing in our faces and piling up along the wooden floorboards, on our feet, and in our laps.

“How long a drive did you say this is?” the Deacon asked Jean-Claude, who was at the wheel. J.C. hadn’t yet revealed our destination, which irritated the Deacon all the more. (Not that he seemed to need many reasons those days for being irritated; the amount of logistical work he was doing for our limited little “recovery expedition” was leaving him no time for sleep or food, much less relaxation or exercise, and was visibly wearing him down.)

“Less than a six-hour drive, I am told, on a nice summer day,” replied J.C. happily, both wool-gloved hands firmly on the giant steering wheel, and spluttering a bit of snow off his lips. “Perhaps a little longer today.”

“Ten hours?” The Deacon’s voice was a growl as he tried to light his pipe. It was difficult for him since he was wearing our new fingerless gloves under our new wool and then Shackleton-cloth mittens. At least we had dressed for the South Pole for the drive to this outing.

“May be lucky if we get there in twelve hours,” chirped Jean-Claude. “Please sit back, as you say, and relax.”

No chance of that for two good reasons: first, the Vauxhall had a theoretical heater in the dash, and all three of us were huddled forward toward it, me from the second-row seat, even though the thing blew out only cold air; and second, Jean-Claude was not used to driving any automobile, but especially not in England, so the trip on snow and ice was terrifying even between his lapses as to which side of the road to drive on.

The snow fell harder. We continued on northwest—the only other vehicles foolhardy enough to be on the roads this day were lorries—through Hemel Hempsted, then Coventry, then the smoky-black city of Birmingham, then on toward Shrewsbury.

“We’re going to northern Wales,” said the Deacon with a sigh, long before we got to Shrewsbury. Somehow he managed to make “Wales” rhyme with “Hells.”

The wide third seat, and half of my second seat, were taken up with huge and heavy duffel bags which J.C. had needed our help to lift into the car. They were heavy. And the steel clank and heavy metal bangs coming from the bags as we slewed left and right in dizzying attempts to find a straight line down the road again over the snow and ice made me guess that there was a lot of serious equipment in those bags.

“Is this the oxygen apparatus you brought with us?” I asked from where I gripped the front seat ahead of me like the restraining bar on a roller coaster.

“Non,” said Jean-Claude absently, chewing his lower lip while he tried to thread the needle with a twelve-foot-wide Vauxhall between an oncoming lorry and an impenetrable hedge and deep ditch to the left of our steeply crowned and snow-covered road.

The Deacon removed his pipe for a second. I’d just decided that I should lean closer and hold my hands out to it—his pipe—as a source of warmth rather than toward the car’s so-called “heater.”

“Can’t be the oxygen sets,” said the Deacon glumly. “You remember that Finch will be sending those straight from Zurich to the ship for loading.”

It grew dark. Our dinner had consisted of freezing—literally freezing; there were ice crystals in them—sandwiches we’d packed in a now mostly snow-filled hamper and a thermos flask of hot soup that had lost all of its heat somewhere around when we did, ten hours earlier in the northwest suburbs of London.

The snow continued to fall. The Vauxhall’s flickering headlights put out almost as much light as two sputtering candles. No matter; there was no one else idiotic enough to be out on these roads this night anyway. Perhaps the full moon that Jean-Claude wanted had risen while we drove on. We’d never know. The world was a whirling white mass through which Jean-Claude drove firmly ever onward, blinking unmelting snowflakes out of his eyes as he squinted into the white-darkness ahead.

“We’re going to Mount Snowdon,” said the Deacon. His pipe would no longer stay lit in the gale blowing through the flapping sides and roof and window panels.

“Non,” said Jean-Claude grimly. The last time I’d seen his smile had been somewhere just after Birmingham.

We didn’t get to his destination that night. The first of two tire punctures that we were to enjoy during the trip made sure of that. Luckily, Dick Summers had had the foresight to have two workable spares lashed to the Vauxhall’s left-rear running board. (I could get in and out of my rear seat only on the right side.) Less luckily, the jack and other tools needed to change the spare in the roaring blizzard—we had broken down in mid-road, so if a lorry or other vehicle came barreling out of the snowy darkness, it was all over for all of us (we didn’t even have a flashlight—or “torch,” as the Deacon called it—to carry down the road to warn other cars, nor even a candle, much less a road flare)—we finally realized must be buried in the tiny boot of the huge Vauxhall. And the boot was locked. And the ignition key would not open it.

We wove a tapestry of obscenities so thick that night I’m certain that it’s still floating somewhere near the England-Wales border.

Finally one of us thought of merely banging the hinged boot cover, hard, thinking that perhaps it was merely frozen closed rather than locked, and the tiny flap of metal swung up as easily as you please, revealing a jack, tire iron, and so forth that looked to have been made for an automobile a fifth the size of the hulking Vauxhall.

No matter. We had the tire changed in under ninety minutes.

We spent the night in an overpriced and not very clean local hostelry in a place called Cerrigydrudion. We arrived too late for the warm food they’d served earlier, and the owner wouldn’t open the kitchen to allow us to forage. The public room did have a fireplace, and although the owner, on his way to bed, stepped forward as if to tell us not to put any more coal on the fire, one glance at the glares from all three of us froze him in his tracks.

We stayed by the tiny fire until midnight, trying to thaw out. Then we dragged ourselves to tiny, strange-smelling rooms that were almost as cold as the Vauxhall had been. We’d brought our best down sleeping bags—after J.C. had told us that we’d be camping out this Saturday night—but the cold and evil smell of the tiny cells was too much, and somewhere around three a.m. I pulled on more outer layers of clothing and trudged back out to see if I could get the fire relit.

There was no need. J.C. and the Deacon had got there before me, had the tiny coal fire burning brightly, and were both snoring as they lay in contorted positions sprawled in and across two wing chairs. There was a third ancient wing chair in the room. I dragged it over—the screech waking neither of my climbing partners—got it as close to the little fire as I could, pulled the down bag over me like a comforter, and slept soundly until the inn’s host rousted us out of our happy nests at six in the morning.

That Sunday, January 25, 1925, was one of the most beautiful days in my life, albeit at the tender age of 22, when so much of my life still lay ahead. But to be honest, none of my “most beautiful days” in the almost seven decades since have been shared with anyone quite the way I shared that day—and then more such days and moments during the following months—with my friends and brothers of the rope, Jean-Claude Clairoux and Richard Davis Deacon.

There was deep snow everywhere, but the day was blue-skied and sunny. Perhaps the sunniest day I remember during my time in England, with the possible exception of that perfect summer one when we visited Lady Bromley. It was still very cold—at least ten degrees below freezing—so the snow wasn’t melting, but the huge Vauxhall, with its powerful engine and gigantic, strangely knobbed tires, was in its element. Even on the provincial Welsh roads where no other vehicles had traveled that morning, we barreled along at a comfortable and safe thirty miles per hour.

After only a few miles, we all realized that we couldn’t stand being entombed in the top-up Vauxhall again, so we stopped the car in the middle of the empty, blindingly white road—our two tracks behind us disappearing over the last pass like black railroad tracks in a domed white world—and we deconstructed the ragtop’s rag top, storing pop-off windows, canvas sides, and the rest on the floor next to J.C.’s huge bags riding next to me.

We’d each pulled on our five layers of wool, then the personal-use eiderdown balloon-fabric parkas we’d brought back in our Gladstone bags from Mr. Finch’s Zurich, and finally the Shackleton-Burberry anoraks. J.C. and I also donned our leather flying or motorcycle helmets and face masks, complete with Crooke’s glass antiglare goggles.

I wish to this day that someone had been there to take a photo of us as we passed by all that Mount Snowdon–area emptiness. We must have looked like Mr. Wells’s Martian invaders.

But it turned out that our destination—Jean-Claude’s secret destination—was not the frequently-climbed-in-winter Mount Snowdon or George Mallory’s Pen-y-Pass slabs where we’d rock-climbed the previous autumn; our destination, reached mid-morning that January Sunday, was the lake Llyn Idwal and its surrounding moraines, roches moutonnées (Jean-Claude’s description but familiar to me from our many alpine climbs during the previous year), brilliant striations in the cliff sides, wild moraines and scree slopes, erratics (boulders brought there by long-gone glaciers and left sitting on the rocky flatlands like huge hurling stones forgotten by a race of giants), and exposed deep-rock strata on vertical faces and slabs and slopes everywhere around us. The Llyn—the lake, frozen then—was surrounded by hard-rock verticality. J.C. pointed out the high peaks of Y Glyder Fawr and Y Garn as we got out of the car and stretched our legs in the snow. Jean-Claude and I were wearing waxed-cotton gaiters to keep our high socks dry. The Deacon, also in knickerbockers, wore old-fashioned puttees—though of the finest cashmere—and looked like the rather fussy-looking British climbers in the photos of the ’21, ’22, and ’24 Everest expeditions. Also, with his khaki knickerbockers and khaki wool shirt visible through the opening of his unbuttoned balloon coat, the Deacon looked like the military man—Captain—he’d been during the Great War.

There was something almost disturbing in seeing the Deacon in brown and khaki and high puttees like that. If it brought back harsh memories of the War to him, he certainly didn’t show it as he got out of the big car, stretched, craned his head back to look at the surrounding peaks and icefalls, and then got his pipe out of his tatty old wool-jacket pocket and proceeded to light it up. I remember that the smell of his tobacco in the cold air was like a powerful drug.

I was worried that it would be another two-hour hike to our climbing spot—as with Mallory’s damned pipe-ledge rock—but Jean-Claude had parked the gigantic Vauxhall only a hundred yards or so from his true destination.

He’d been after vertical summer waterfalls that had turned to icefalls; he’d been after 200-foot walls of ice over rock that ended in daunting ice-over-rock-slab overhangs. He’d found them. Frozen waterfalls and spectacular icefalls filled the entire valley at this far end of the mostly frozen Llyn Idwal and under the cliffs of Cwm Idwal. We lugged the heavy bags to the base of one of the largest, steepest, and most overhanging-at-the-top vertical icefalls, where he dumped his load in the snow and waved for us to do the same. And then he began to explain something that would change alpine and Himalayan climbing forever.

“First you must change into the new boots Messrs. Fagg created for us,” said Jean-Claude. He pulled two pairs of the stiff boots from one of the heavy canvas bags. J.C. was already wearing his.

The Deacon and I grumbled but found separate boulders to sit on while we took off our comfortable and broken-in new alpine boots and tugged on the ridiculous stiff ones. We’d tried walking in these new things in London, and they were hideously uncomfortable. (The Laplander high-and-fuzzy felt-and-leather boots were best—like walking in knee-high, extra-warm Indian moccasins. Unfortunately, the rocks and boulders we’d be walking on in Tibet, usually while carrying heavy packs, on the 350-mile hike in to Everest would bruise the soles of our feet too much if we wore the fuzzy boots all the time. But they’d be perfect as in-camp boots.)

The Deacon and I took a few clumsy steps in the full-shank “stiff boots,” frowned at each other, and scowled at Jean-Claude. Those stupid boots had almost no flex at all. They’d never break in to become comfortable hiking or climbing shoes.

J.C. did not seem daunted by our glares. Also, he was too busy removing a host of metal and metal-and-wood items from his three heavy bags of tricks. “What are these?” J.C. asked us, holding up two old crampons I’d seen him use many times.

“Crampons?” I said, hating the schoolboy rise in my voice at the end. “Crampons,” I repeated more firmly.

“And what are they used for?” he continued in his schoolmarmish, only slightly French accent.

“Crossing glaciers,” I said even more firmly. “Sometimes going up snow slopes—if they’re not too steep.”

“How many points does each have?”

“Points?” I said stupidly.

“Spikes on the bottom,” said the Deacon. He was fumbling with his damned pipe again. I wanted to hit him with one of the four-foot-long icicles dangling from the lower part of the icefall ahead of us.

“Ten points,” I said. I’d had to envision my crampons at home and mentally count the spikes. Stupid. I’d used them since I was a teenager. “Ten.”

“Why don’t we use them more while climbing?” asked Jean-Claude. “Why won’t we use them high on Mount Everest?” His soft, innocent voice sounded treacherous to me. There was some trap here. I looked at the Deacon, but he was suddenly very busy getting his pipe relit.

“Because the damned things are no good on rock,” I said at last. I was losing patience with this dunce-schoolboy role.

“Is everything underfoot high on Everest rock?”

I actually sighed. “No, Jean-Claude, not everything underfoot high on Everest is rock, but enough is. We can use crampons for the occasional snowfield, if it’s not too steep. But hobnailed boots are better. More grip. More traction. The North Face of Everest, and most of the North East and East ridges, according to the Alpine Club’s reports and what the nineteen twenty-four expedition high-climbers say, consists mostly of downward-tilting rock slabs—like slate shingles on a steep roof. A very steep roof.”

“So crampons would be inadvisable there?”

I had a geometry teacher in prep school who used to lead class instruction and discussions in that tone. I hated him as well.

“Very inadvisable,” I said. “It’d be like walking on steel stilts.” That hadn’t been easy to say clearly.

Jean-Claude nodded slowly as if finally coming to a basic understanding of Himalayan and high-alpine climbing. “And what about Norton’s Couloir?”

“Norton’s Couloir” was what climbers were now calling the great slab-and-snow-filled gully that runs straight up the central North Face of Everest to the Summit Pyramid. A year earlier, Edward Norton and Howard Somervell—Norton in the unroped lead—had blazed a route off the East Ridge onto the North Face above the so-called Yellow Band of rock above 28,000 feet. Norton, with Somervell not feeling well and trailing far behind, had reached the great snowy gully and tried to fight his way almost vertically up the couloir. But the snow was almost waist deep. And where it wasn’t, the downward-tilting slabs were covered with ice. Norton finally began to realize how precarious his position was—one glance under his sliding feet showed a direct drop to the Rongbuk Glacier some 8,000 feet below—and he was forced to end his summit attempt, descending very slowly to Somervell and asking in a shaky voice if they could rope up. (This sudden loss of nerve after daring attempts, in climbs with terrible exposure, wasn’t uncommon, even in the Alps. It was as if the brain, suddenly clicking on a survival instinct, finally overrode the adrenaline and ambition of even the most courageous climber. Those who didn’t heed this “loss of nerve” in truly dangerous situations—such as George Mallory—often didn’t return from climbs.)

Norton’s couloir effort had been an astounding attempt. A new altitude record of 28,126 feet—surpassed, if it all, only by Mallory and Irvine on their fatal final attempt along the windy North East Ridge.

But most would-be Everest climbers had written off Norton’s Couloir as impossible. Too steep. Too much loose snow. Too much vertical climb. Too serious a penalty for a single slip after too many hours at too high and cold a place under the most extreme exertion possible.

“Why not use crampons to climb Norton’s Couloir?” asked Jean-Claude. “Or even along the steep snow ramps above twenty-seven thousand feet on the East Ridge or North East Ridge, where only Mallory and Irvine have gone?”

The end of that sentence chilled me. But then, I’d taken off the Finch balloon coat and a cold breeze was coming down Cwm Idwal and across Llyn Idwal.

“Crampons don’t work on a snowfield as steep as Norton’s Couloir,” I said irritably. “Or even on the high-ridge snowfields below where they established high camp at around twenty-seven thousand feet.”

“Why not?” asked Jean-Claude with that maddening Gallic smugness.

“Because human feet and ankles don’t bend that way, God damn it!” I said loudly. “And because crampons can’t keep a grip on steep snow slopes when the climber’s weight isn’t above them, bearing down on them. You know that, J.C.!”

“Yes, I know that, Jake,” he said, dropping his old crampons onto the snow.

“I think our friend has something to show us,” said the Deacon. His pipe was puffing along well now, and he spoke through gritted teeth.

Jean-Claude smiled, bent to his big bag, and pulled out a single, shiningly new metal crampon. It took me a few seconds to see the difference.

“It has front spikes…points,” I said at last. “Like horns.”

“Twelve-point crampons,” said Jean-Claude, his tone brisk and businesslike now. “The German ice climbers were talking about them. I had my father design and manufacture them.”

We all knew that Jean-Claude’s father had gone from being a blacksmith to running one of the biggest metal-pouring and forming companies in all of France, certainly in Chamonix. M. Clairoux Sr.’s business had grown by leaps and bounds thanks to French government (and some British and one American) contracts during the Great War. Now they produced everything from specialized steel pipelines to dental instruments.

“That looks dangerous,” I said.

“It is,” said Jean-Claude. “To the mountain that does not want to be climbed.”

“I think I understand,” said the Deacon, stepping forward to take the scary-looking 12-point crampon in his hand. “You kick these points in, put your weight on the solid, almost unbending shank of your new stiff boots, and use it as a platform. Even—theoretically—on near-vertical ice.”

“Oui,” said Jean-Claude. “But not just on ‘near-vertical,’ my friend. On sheer vertical. And worse than vertical. I have tested them in France. We shall test them here today.”

I confess that my heart started pounding rapidly. I’ve never enjoyed ice climbing. I hate surfaces where my boots can’t get a grip, however tenuous. J.C.’s “we shall test them here today” made my cold skin go clammy.

“There is more,” said Jean-Claude. “Show me your ice axes, my friends.”

We’d brought ours with us, of course. I pulled mine out of the snow and set it in front of me: long wood shaft and metal adze and pick on top. The Deacon retrieved his ice axe from the snow and leaned on it.

“How long is your ice axe, Jake?” asked J.C.

“Thirty-eight inches. I like that shorter length for cutting steps on a steep slope.”

“And yours, Richard?” Ree-shard.

“Forty-eight inches. It’s old-fashioned, I know. But so am I.”

Jean-Claude merely nodded. Then he reached into the bulging bag in the snow and brought out a series of “ice axes” that weren’t ice axes at all. The longest couldn’t have been much more than 20 inches or so in length. They were hammers, for God’s sake. Only with different adzes and picks atop each wooden or…dear Christ…steel shaft.

J.C.’s daddy had been busy at his steel-fitting plant.

“Your designs?” asked the Deacon, hefting one of these absurd hammer-things.

J.C. shrugged. “Based on what the Germans have been doing this year—you two told me so yourselves after you returned from Munich last November. So I climbed icy routes with them in Chamonix in December—with some young Germans, that is—saw their new techniques, used some of their new equipment. Then I made my own variations at l’usine de mon père to improve what they had.”

“Those aren’t ice axes!” I was almost spluttering.

“No?”

“No,” I said. “You couldn’t hike with any of those, couldn’t lean on them, couldn’t even cut ice steps on a steep slope.”

Jean-Claude held up one finger. “Au contraire,” he said softly, lifting one of the five short axe-hammer-things he’d left lying on the canvas bag. The one he was holding up looked most like a regular ice axe—wood shaft and all—but like a real ice axe that had been left out in the rain and shrunk by two-thirds. But instead of there being an adze on one side, as our ice axes had, the short end was as blunt as a hammer. It was a hammer.

“This ice hammer, my father and I call it ‘straight drooped,’” said J.C., “is superb for cutting steps on a steep ice or snow slope. And one does not have to lean out of balance as one would with either of our old longer ice axes.”

I just shook my head.

“The shortest one is there,” said the Deacon, pointing to a large hammer-sized thing made entirely of steel with a pointed and sort of threaded base and a long, flat pick on one side and very short adze on the other.

J.C. smiled and lifted it, then handed it to the Deacon, who took it in his free hand. “Light. Aluminum?”

“No, steel. But hollow in the shaft. This is what Father and I called the ‘technically curved’ short ice axe. For use on steep ice slopes, perfect for carving steps. This slightly longer one with the wooden handle, the one which looks more like a shortened version of a regular ice axe but with this long, curved, serrated pick, we called the ‘reverse curved’ axe. It is used”—he turned to the impossibly vertical ice wall behind him—“for that.”

The Deacon had handed the two short ice axes to me and was rubbing his stubbled cheeks and chin. He hadn’t bothered to shave that morning, though we’d finally procured some hot water at that execrable inn.

“I’m beginning to see,” he said.

I was making axe-weapon downward swings with both sharp-picked…things. I imagined the long, curved picks penetrating a French skull.

“How did you find this place…Cwm Idwal?” asked the Deacon. He was craning backward to look up at the vertical ice cliff, now glistening wickedly in the late-morning sun. Its terrifying slab of rock and ice hung directly above us like a giant weight that could drop 200 feet onto us at any time. The overhang was just too broad and thick to free-climb—the width of rock twice Jean-Claude’s entire height, at least, and the slabs of ice extending another five or six feet. There would be no sane way to get to the vertical rock and ice above the overhang for the last icy pitch of eight feet or so.

“I asked British ice climbers for the best place in England and Wales,” responded Jean-Claude.

“There are British ice climbers?” asked the Deacon. I didn’t know if he was faking his tone of wonder and surprise. I’d always assumed that the Deacon personally knew all British climbers. And most of the French and German ones as well.

“A very few,” said J.C. with a small smile.

“What next?” asked the Deacon, pointing to the still mostly full bag, sounding eager to see the next weird thing to pop out.

Jean-Claude Clairoux turned around, stepped back, shielded his eyes, and joined the Deacon in looking up at the sheer ice wall and terrifying overhang. “Next,” he said, his voice almost lost in the rising breeze, “…next, all three of us climb that wall today. All of it. Including the overhang. To the top.”

All right, I’ll be honest. I would have pissed my silken underwear and new woolen knickerbockers at that moment if I hadn’t been sure it would have frozen into a long and very uncomfortable icicle.

“You…can…not…be…fucking…serious,” I said to my diminutive French ex-friend. It was only the second time in my life that I’d ever used that word and certainly the first time in the presence of my two new climbing partners.

J.C. smiled.

From the largest bag, J.C. had pulled out three sturdy but light leather…“harnesses” is the word that comes to mind—although there were metal carabiners on the front of the belt, where straps met in the center of the chest, and more loops and carabiners around the wide belt—and while the Deacon and I were tugging our harnesses on, dubiously, Jean-Claude simply lifted his left leg as high as it would go, kicked his new forward crampons of the 12-point set into the wall of ice, hammered in the pick end of both of his short ice axes—connected to his wrists, I noticed now, by short leather straps and loops—and pulled himself up until he was supporting himself just on that rigid left foot. His harness jingled because he was carrying a variety of self-designed steel implements on it—an extra ice tool of some sort set in its holster, a mass of shiny carabiners, a large bag of ice screws, other bags of jangly things set around his belt. A huge coil of rope was slung over his shoulder and across his chest, and now he slowly let it out beneath him as he started to climb.

He pulled the short ice axe in his right hand down, jiggled it, pulled it out of the ice, and hammered the pick head in deep another four feet up. Still holding his weight on that left foot—easily, I thought—J.C. kicked his right foot into position several feet higher, wiggled the forward crampons of his left foot out of the ice, and pulled himself upward with the strength of both arms. He banged the left ice axe deep in the wall higher than the right axe, lifted his left foot, and kicked it into the ice.

Standing as casually and easily six feet up the ice wall as he might have on a city sidewalk, J.C. looked over his shoulder at the Deacon—who’d finally got the harness rigged right—and said, “If this were the ice wall below the North Col and we had to prepare it for other climbers and porters, how long do you think it would take to hack out the necessary steps?”

The Deacon squinted upward. “It’s too steep for steps. And the overhang…it’s impossible. Porters wouldn’t do it, even with fixed ropes.”

“All right, then,” said J.C., not even breathing hard as he stood on that vertical face, “we’ll bring something like the hundred-foot ladder that Sandy Irvine strung together for the porters last year. For the porters to use when they follow us.”

“That was after Mallory had free-climbed the chimney—a fissure in the ice wall,” said the Deacon. “They also rigged a pulley to pull up loads.”

“But assuming one could climb this wall just by cutting steps,” persisted Jean-Claude. “How long for the first ascent?”

The Deacon looked upward again. The sunlight on the vertical ice was blinding. He tugged his goggles on. “Three hours,” said the Deacon. “Maybe four. Maybe five.”

“Seven,” I said. “At least seven hours.”

J.C. smiled and began kicking and hammering his way up the ice wall again. Every 30 feet or so he would stop, create a tiny hole in the ice above or in front of him by tapping with the pointed end of his pick, remove a 12- to 18-centimeter ice screw from the bag on his belt, and screw it in by hand, the screw always angled uphill—that is, downward into the ice—with an angle of what I judged to be 45 to 60 degrees against the direction of his weight and pull. Sometimes, when the ice was so hard that the screw would not go in fully, J.C. used the sharp point of his ice axe pick or some sort of ice tool from his belt inserted into the eye of the screw to gain greater leverage for screwing it in.

Each time he finished fastening a deep ice screw, he would snap on a carabiner and test it with his weight, his boot crampons never leaving the ice.

Even with the pauses to put in the ice screw protection every ten yards or so, Jean-Claude was scrambling up the ice wall like a spider. Sometimes he would bang both ice hammers into the ice—connected only by a bifurcated tether running from the carabiner set into the chest piece on his harness to the wrist loops—and use both hands to secure a tough ice screw.

As he climbed higher and higher, it became harder and harder for me to watch these moves. Theoretically, his rope—which he’d run through a complicated series of knots on the chest and belly side of his harness—would break his fall if he came off the wall, but if he did come off at the high point of his next pitch, before he’d put in the next ice screw, it would be a 60-foot vertical fall before the rope would catch on the eye of the inset ice screw. Very few climbers, even given good footing and a possible belay point, could belay a man who’d fallen 60 vertical feet. Too much mass. Too much velocity after that long a fall.

Besides, climbing ropes in 1925 almost always snapped when put under that much pressure.

This was when I noticed that Jean-Claude’s huge coil of rope looked so large not only because he had more than 200 feet of it across his chest when he started, but also because the rope that now spiderwebbed down the ice wall was thicker than the kind we always used.

Jean-Claude continued scrambling vertically up the impossible ice wall, shifting a few feet or yards left and right when he had to avoid rotten ice or outcroppings, so that the fixed rope behind him did begin to look a little spiderwebby.

The Deacon had taken his gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and was looking at it. I knew the watch was also a chronometer. He was timing our friend.

When the now diminutive figure reached the 15-foot rock-and-ice overhang 180 or so feet up the vertical wall, he clipped his chest or waist harness carabiner (it was hard to tell which from this distance) to a thick strap attached to the last ice screw he’d just put in at the junction of wall and overhang, and shouted down (sounding only a little breathless), “How much time?”

“Twenty-one minutes,” the Deacon shouted back, putting his watch away.

I could see Jean-Claude shake his head. He was wearing a floppy red stocking cap, not quite a beret. “I could do it in half that time with more practice. And…,” he looked straight down through the V of his widened legs, “…fewer ice screws, I think.”

“You’ve shown us, Jean-Claude,” shouted the Deacon. “You’ve proven your new hardware! It’s brilliant. Now come on down!”

The figure leaning back in his harness straps almost 200 feet above us shook his head. He shouted something that neither the Deacon nor I could make out.

“I said—‘to the top,’” he shouted again, looking straight down at us between his legs again.

I was actually wringing my hands with anxiety, which made little sense since I was the sheer-face rock climber of the three of us. I was supposed to love this kind of vertical test—lots of exposure and fissured rock and even some modest overhangs for an extra challenge. But this…this was suicide.

I realized then that I really hated ice. And the idea of going up Mount Everest with these stupid harnesses and all this clanking metal—“bloody ironmongers” was what the British climbers derisively called the Germans and the few French who were using metal carabiners, pitons, and such on tough rock faces and slopes—seemed suddenly obscene. Obscene and absurd.

I also realized at that moment how nervous I was. I’d never felt this tense climbing on high alpine ledges, ridges, faces, summits, or slopes with these two men.

I looked up expecting J.C. to begin his descent. He had enough rope left that he could rappel a good part of the way. If he trusted those damned ice screws.

Instead of rappelling or scuttling down the way he’d gone up, Jean-Claude Clairoux then did something that to this day, more than sixty-five years later, I do not believe.

First, a strap still connecting his chest harness to the ice screw he’d just put in at the topmost section of the vertical part of the wall, J.C. leaned back until it was just the tension of that five-foot leash holding him almost horizontally on the ice. He then drove both hammers into the overhang ice as far out as he could reach. Then J.C. raised his feet—I had to look away it was so appalling, then looked back to watch him fall—and planted his crampons and toe crampons firmly in the corner where vertical wall and horizontal overhang came together.

Somehow he hung there horizontally with one arm supporting the weight of his entire body while he drove in a deep screw—he had to bang on it to get it in the last few centimeters, and I heard steel going into solid rock under the ice—then he clipped a carabiner and a sort of double tether leash to that and let himself down until he was hanging horizontally only from the ropes, perhaps seven feet beneath the overhang.

Then, using his steel crampon tips against the vertical wall on each inward oscillation, he began to pendulum-swing back and forth, completely dependent upon that one ice screw and the rope, no point of his body in contact with the wall or overhang except when he kicked harder each time to pendulum out further.

“Mother of God,” whispered the Deacon. Or perhaps I did. I really no longer remember.

But I do remember Jean-Claude’s outer pendulum motion under that 20-foot-wide overhang stopping when he banged both ice axes into the ice ceiling above him. Only one held, but he pulled himself higher so that there was slack in the rope tether, from which he was dangling horizontally. He kicked until both sets of points at the front of his rigid-shank boots were attached to the ceiling again. Then he pounded in the other ice axe.

All good climbers have to be strong. Look at our forearms and you will see bulk and muscles rare in any other athlete and missing from almost all “normal” people. But to hang there like that, suspending the full weight of his fully horizontal body—more than horizontal, since his head was lower than his boots cramponed into the ice—to hold on using only the strength of his hands on two short ice axes, the strength of those two forearms and upper arms. Impossible.

But he did.

Then he released one of the ice axes. His left hand fumbled on his harness belt for an ice screw from the dangling bag of hardware.

It slipped out of fingers that must have been close to nerveless by then, and fell 200 feet. The Deacon and I stepped aside as the long screw bounced off a low boulder between us, sending up sparks against the snow all around.

J.C. calmly reached for another screw, righting the carrying bag so no more hardware tumbled out. Shifting hands on the embedded ice axes so his weight was now supported by his left hand, Jean-Claude calmly screwed in that final ice anchor. He had to use the small steel ice tool from his belt to get it through the last of the ice, then pound it into the underlying rock. Why he didn’t come off the overhang when he did that work, I’ll never understand.

His next move—after letting out another seven or eight feet of harnessed leash—was to dangle, head and feet lower than his supported torso, and swing wildly back and forth. The far point of his outer swing took him out further than the edge of the overhang. Back and forth he went, and I waited for the sight and sound of both of the screws set into the ice ceiling popping out, sending him hurtling 30 or 60 feet down and back into the ice wall, almost certainly rendering him unconscious. One of us would have to ice-climb the fixed rope to retrieve our unconscious or dead friend. I didn’t want it to be me.

Instead of peeling off, Jean-Claude’s arc went beyond and above the edge of the overhang, and on the second swing at that distance, he banged in the curved picks of both ice hammers.

Freeing one at a time, he pulled himself higher, again just with the strength of arms and forearms that must be shaking with tension and toxins by now.

Seven feet up the 12-foot outside vertical wall of the ice overhang, he kicked the toes of his new-style ice-climbing crampons into the ice and calmly screwed in the last piece of steel protection he needed. The only sign of J.C.’s great fatigue—or perhaps the backwash of adrenaline that always gets a climber’s hands and fingers shaking after the fact in a truly terrifying situation—was that after he’d clipped in a carabiner and used Y tethers to tie into both his chest and belt harness, he leaned back from the short ice wall at about 40 degrees to rest a couple of minutes. His short ice axes dangled from his wrist straps. Even from more than 200 feet below, I could see him clenching and unclenching the fingers of both hands.

Then he grasped both ice axes, straightened up, and began hacking and climbing again.

The Deacon and I watched him lean over the top of the overhang, sink his right ice hammer point into something, and then he pulled himself up and out of sight over the edge.

A minute later he was standing near that edge, taking the remnants of the coil of rope from over his shoulder, and shouting down at us.

“I have about a hundred feet left,” came the echoing, triumphant shout. “I’ve tied both off—we’ll want two ropes for belay—so bring up around another hundred feet of rope, the thicker stuff, the Deacon’s Miracle Rope, that I brought, in the second bag, and you can tie it on halfway up. Who’s next?”

The Deacon and I looked at each other.

Again, I was the “big face” rock climber of the trio. I was the one who would be expected to free-climb rock on Everest, say, if we ever reached that battleship prow of the so-called Second Step near the summit along the North East Ridge above 28,000 feet.

But for the moment, I was terrified.

“I’m next,” said the Deacon and, shrugging on a 100-foot coil of J.C.’s “good rope,” walked up to the ice wall with both ice hammers raised.

None of us wanted to stay in that pathetic inn again in Cerrigydrudion or anyplace close to Wales, so the Deacon drove us all the way back to London through the dusk and long, dark night. The Vauxhall’s headlights were still little more than useless, but once on the real highways again after dark, he tucked the Vauxhall in behind various lorries and we followed them closely, using their tiny little red taillights as our guide. We’d taken time to wrestle and button and snap the roof, windows, and side flaps back into place. Somehow the heater seemed to be working at last (or perhaps it was just our overheated bodies), and Jean-Claude was sprawled across the cushions and gear bags in the backseat, snoring all the way home. When the Deacon and I talked, it was in low, almost reverent voices. I kept thinking about the incredible day and the incredible revelations Jean-Claude had given us.

My own climb, when my time came, wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. The ice hammers and 12-point crampons with the deep-digging front points gave one a feeling almost of invincibility. Also, the Deacon had brought up an extra 100 feet of what J.C. called “the Deacon’s Miracle Rope” and tied on to his second line, so—counting the first fixed rope—I was essentially under double belay the whole way up.

This came in handy when twice I was a little too eager to remove my crampons before securing my next hold with three solid points and came unglued from the wall, but while it might have been a thrill to drop the 50 feet or so to arrest (or non-arrest) by the last ice screw below me, the second belay rope, tied to a massive tree somewhere out of sight above the overhang and physically belayed by the Deacon, caught me in five feet or so.

The overhang itself, which had so unnerved me while watching from below, was sort of fun. I was worried about my extra weight on the two ice screws that had held for the two lighter climbers before me, but the Deacon had taken time—while hanging horizontally under the ice-rock overhang—to secure a third and even longer screw in place, banging the hell out of it to get it the last five or six centimeters into the rock itself.

So I actually enjoyed swinging out wide, nothing beneath me at the outer arc of my swing but 200 feet of empty air to the rock below, and I successfully smashed both ice hammer picks into the outer, vertical section of the overhang on my first try. Those years of serious rock climbing, it turned out, were not wasted on ice: I pulled myself the last ten feet to the top using only the strength of my arms fiercely gripping the ice hammers. Once I was on top—the view of Llyn Idwal and Cwm Idwal and the peaks and lakes beyond was fantastic—Jean-Claude reprimanded me for not using my crampons on that last bit, but all I could do was grin at him.

We’d rappelled down one after the other, leaving the second belay rope in place, and then practiced for the rest of the day on the lower slopes. Only the Deacon’s new rope—a thicker-diameter blend of hemp, regular climbing rope, and some secret ingredient he wouldn’t reveal to us (but which gave the rope greater elasticity and a much higher breaking point)—gave us the confidence to rappel that way. In 1924–25, few alpine climbers trusted their ropes—what the Deacon now called “our old clothesline ropes”—for such long rappels.

Trying to stay awake during the long drive back to London—just to keep the Deacon company as he drove, so he’d stay awake—my tired mind kept going over and over the French terms that J.C. had tried to drill into us about this new type of glacier and ice climbing.

Pied marche—just marching across flat ice or a shallow slope up to 15 degrees, as if across a glacier—we’d all done that together on regular 10-point crampons many times before.

Pied en canard—“duck walk”—a careful 12-point cramponing on slopes up to 30 degrees. It looked and felt as silly as it sounded, but we could use our old, longer ice axes for that.

Pied à plat—literally “flat-footed,” with the bottom 10 points on each crampon holding your body upright on slopes up to 65 degrees or so, with your ice axe dug in uphill. A good way to rest.

Then there were the regular ice axe moves themselves: piolet ramasse (cross-body) on slopes from 35 to 50 degrees (an elegant way to cut steps in a steep slope) and piolet ancre, the anchored way one could cut steps or do hand work (such as sinking ice screws with one’s free hand) on steep slopes, 45 to 60 degrees and steeper.

The ice hammers had their own vocabularies—angle of pick entrance, whether to hold the tools high or low while climbing, etc.—and the ones I remember from that first day were piolet panne (low dagger) for steep slopes 45 to 55 degrees; piolet poignard (high dagger), which we used on steeper slopes of 50 to 60 degrees; and the most common one we used that day, piolet traction (traction), on 60 degrees to vertical to overhanging.

Since these last techniques were all used with the “front-pointing” crampons, techniques which I was sure Jean-Claude had said he’d learned from the Germans and Austrians while ice climbing with them the previous December, I was a little confused as to why there weren’t any terms in German. The answer was simple: the Germans and Austrians had kept using the old French 10-point crampon and long ice axe terms and simply added more in French. Ahh, Europe.

What we began learning on shallower—but still deadly slick—ice slopes around Llyn Idwal that Sunday afternoon is what I think of (to this day, after using them thousands of times since) as the “dance steps”: pied à plat–piolet ramasse, for instance—flat-footing upslope while simultaneously using the short ice axe in a graceful cross-body position to find the next anchor. J.C. did this so beautifully on a steep but less-than-vertical slope that it was a delight to watch—left leg bent inward until he was slightly knock-kneed, short ice axe held in both hands and pressing down higher up the slope, then the right leg crossing over the left as if in a tricky dance step, and then, when the tip of the ice axe and 10 of the 12-point crampon steel teeth on the right boot were all pressing down into the ice again, swinging the left leg higher upslope until 10 crampons on the bottom of that foot got a solid bite.

And then starting the dance all over again.

Jean-Claude showed us various ways to rest on such an exhaustingly steep slope, but my favorite was the simple pied assis—leaning back on the slope until your butt almost (but not quite) touched the ice, left leg bent and left foot under you with all crampons pressing down, right leg further outward with ankle turned so the right boot and its crampons were at almost a 90-degree angle from the direction one’s right knee was pointing. You didn’t need your ice axe or ice hammers to hold this position, and the result was that, as long as the muscles in your legs and thighs didn’t start cramping, you could hold this position for an extended time, ice axe in both hands, giving yourself plenty of time to look out over the slope and up and out at the landscape below.

But the bulk of the afternoon into the lovely Welsh sunset was spent learning how to use the shortest ice axe and the ice hammers in basic low-dagger and high-dagger positions, front-pointing (using only the forward two crampons of the twelve) in anchor positions, front-pointing in traction positions, front-pointing in high-dagger position (the way we’d climbed the vertical ice wall), the three-o’clock position using both ice hammers ahead of you on a steep slope with the right leg curved and slammed down behind you, front-pointing on a terribly steep slope so that your weight was over the ice hammers with picks down in a low-dagger position (climbing with both at once, essentially under you), and so forth.

Traverse and descent techniques on the ice—especially the rapid descent (I’d always loved glissading down a steep snowfield, using only my regular ice axe as a rudder and then for self-arrest near the bottom, and J.C. showed us how we could flat-foot down on crampons, using the cross-body position with the short axe or trailing the axe behind us in anchor position, almost as quickly and on much more dramatic inclines)—took most of the rest of the afternoon.

Later that afternoon, on a steep snowy slope below a rock face, Jean-Claude showed us his last technological tour de force.

It was a small and relatively light metal wedge-shaped device that had steel springs—released by hand pressure, tightening automatically when you exerted no pressure—that could slide along a fixed rope. J.C. had laboriously climbed the slope in his new 12-point crampons, attached the Deacon’s Miracle Rope to a long ice axe driven deep into the ice under the boulders some 150 meters above us, reinforced that belay with several ice screws, and then removed his crampons and expertly glissaded down the steep slope to us. The rope lay like a long black fault line on the blindingly white snow.

Then J.C. showed that he had one of these hand clamps for the rope for each of us.

“It is simple, non?” he said. “Release the hand pressure completely, and it locks tight to the rope. One could dangle if one chose. Squeeze ever so slightly with one hand, and the mechanism glides along the rope as if the rope were a guide. Squeeze hard, and the mechanism—and you—no longer has…how do you pronounce it? Friction? Friction on the rope.”

“What do you suggest we use this gadget for?” I asked, but I saw that the Deacon had grasped the idea.

“It would be best if it were attached to some light climbing harness,” said the Deacon. “So that one could have both hands free while staying attached to the fixed rope.”

“Exactement!” cried Jean-Claude. “I am working on precisely such light leather and canvas harnesses. For today, though, we try the one hand, no?”

And with that J.C. clamped his little device onto the fixed rope and began sliding it up as he climbed steadily, even without crampons. The Deacon went next, getting the hang of when to apply pressure, when to release it, within a few paces. It took me longer, but soon I realized the added security of climbing with this silly little spring-driven device gripping the fixed rope harder than one’s heavily mittened hand ever could. It would give even more assurance if it were attached, say, by a line and carabiner, to the climbing harness that he and the Deacon had been talking about.

At the top of our 150-meter 50-degree slope, we huddled together as a cold wind rose. The sun was setting behind peaks to the west. The moon was rising in the east.

“Now we use it for a controlled descent,” said Jean-Claude. “You will see, I believe, that one could use this device even on vertical fixed ropes. It is, how do you say it? Proof for fools?”

“Foolproof,” said the Deacon. “Show us the fast descent.”

So J.C. unclamped his device from the double line of fixed rope—double so we could retrieve the rope after our rappel down the slope—retrieved the ice axe so that only the deep screws held the doubled line on belay, re-clamped onto the line below me, and began a rapid, no-crampon glissade that he controlled only by the spring pressure of the device in his hand.

“Incredible!” I gasped as the Deacon and I reached the bottom after one of the fastest glissades I’d ever experienced.

“We shall practice more later before we leave and during the trek in to Everest,” said Jean-Claude.

We were in twilight shadow now and it suddenly became very cold. J.C. was already pulling the rope free of its needle-eye ice screws and retrieving the long line.

“Do you have a name for this device?” asked the Deacon.

J.C. grinned as he expertly wrapped the long coil of Miracle Rope from his fist to his elbow, coil and coil again. “Jumar,” he said.

“What does that mean in French?” I asked. “What does it stand for?”

“Nothing,” says J.C. “It was the name of my dog when I was a boy. He could climb a tree after a squirrel if he chose. I have never seen a better dog-climber.”

“Jumar,” I repeated. Odd word. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever get used to it.

“I’ve been worrying about that last ice wall between the Rongbuk Glacier to the North Col on Everest for some months,” the Deacon said quietly as we approached London and the murky winter sunrise.

I nodded awake. “Why?” I whispered. “In ’twenty-two, you and Finch and the others found snow slopes up to the Col and cut steps for the porters. Last June there weren’t any snow slopes, but there was that fissure—the ice chimney—that Mallory free-climbed and dropped fixed ropes and then Sandy Irvine’s jury-rigged rope ladder down.”

The Deacon bobbed his head slightly. “But Rongbuk is a glacier, Jake. It rises, subsides, fissures, faults, moves, crumbles, creates its own crevasses. All we know for sure is that it won’t be as it was last year for Mallory—a chance to show off his climbing techniques—or for Finch and us the year before that. This spring that ice wall may have climbable fissures or new snow slopes—or it may be two hundred feet of vertical ice.”

“Well, if it is sheer vertical ice,” I said, tiredly but with a new sense of bravado, “J.C. and his front-point crampons and silly little ice axes and the whatchamacallems—jumars—have given us a way to climb it.”

The Deacon drove in silence for a moment. I could see the dome of Saint Paul’s coming over the horizon with the sun.

“Then, Jake,” he said, “I shall have to assume that we are ready to go climb Mount Everest.”