The Abominable: A Novel

Chapter 9

I just wish this Lord Bromley-Whatsis, his serene buggering Highness, had bloody well buggered himself down to Calcutta from the hills and helped us bandobast these buggering great heavy crates to the bloody freight depot a full buggering day earlier, is what I damn well wish.

C alcutta is a terrifying city, with Kipling’s “sheeted dead” underfoot on an evening walk—not dead bodies, it turns out, but people wrapped in their sheets and sleeping on what passes for sidewalks—and everything smelling of incense, spices, human piss, cattle, the not unpleasant sweat-and-breath scent of multitudes, and fragrant smoke from burning cow dung. All the dark-skinned men’s stares are curious, dismissive, or outright angry, while the women’s stares—even the Mohammedan women’s eyes peering out from beneath and above the black cloth covering them from head to foot—are alluring, inviting, and, for me, filled with sexual promise.

It is only the twenty-second of March, 1925, far from the terrible summer pre-monsoon heat and the downpours of the later-summer monsoon rains, but the air of Calcutta already feels like a wad of wet blankets wrapped around me head to toe.

At least these have been my impressions so far during our two and a half days here.

Everything is strange to me. Even though I’d crossed the Atlantic in a liner from Boston to Europe last year, the five weeks of travel on the HMS Caledonia from Liverpool to Calcutta seemed a thousand times more exotic. The first days were rough going—the tugs barely got us out of Liverpool harbor against the wind and waves—and I was surprised to find out that I was the only one of the three of us who did not succumb to seasickness at some point on the voyage. The pitching and rolling seemed like a fine game, a simple challenge in getting from Point A to Point B and then onward and upward to the wooden deck, where I ran my twelve miles daily and nightly in a pitching, rolling oval, and I never had a hint of the nausea that all but ruined the early part of the voyage for Jean-Paul and the Deacon.

Except for the slow boredom of transiting the Suez Canal and the storm in the western Mediterranean that kept me belowdecks for a day, the voyage to Calcutta was a pleasant experience. At Colombo—a small white town seemingly being besieged by ferocious, impenetrable jungle on all sides—I bought some lace and mailed it to my mother and aunt in Boston. Everything was new and exciting. And I knew—but did not then fully appreciate—that everything was prelude.

The 1921, ’22, and ’24 Everest expeditions all came through Calcutta on the way to their official starting point—Darjeeling—but funded and backed as they were by the Mount Everest Committee of the Alpine Club and that club’s parent, the Royal Geographical Society, there were always agents in Calcutta ready to sort out the crates of supplies and matériel, so that when the climbers arrived, everything they needed was either already loaded onto the train for Darjeeling or ready to be loaded.

We, of course, being a secret and illicit expedition, have no agents waiting in Calcutta. The Deacon is in charge of spending Lady Bromley’s money—at least until “Cousin Reggie” takes over here in India—and the Deacon soon tells Jean-Claude and me the Hindi word bandobast, meaning “arrangements.” Evidently bandobast in Calcutta (where most of the people speak Bengali, not Hindi, but the word is still used here, it being, I assume, almost a universal concept in all of multilingual and multiethnic India) means the same as baksheesh in the Middle East—i.e., bribes necessary to get even the simplest thing done.

But since the Deacon was on the two earliest Alpine Club expeditions with Mallory and others and was interested in all aspects of them, including this administrative greasing of the wheels to get things done in Calcutta (and, Jean-Claude and I can only hope, later in both Darjeeling and Tibet), our twelve heavy crates—amongst other things we had to bring from Europe, we’re bringing a lot of the Deacon’s new high-quality rope on this expedition for reasons I’ll explain later—have been moved from the docks to the train station freight depot by early this third afternoon of our stay in Calcutta.

There is a night train from Sealdah Station just beyond Calcutta called the Darjeeling Mail that we’ll be taking in a few hours, but that train—a real train, as it were—only goes as far as Siliguri, a little trading station out in the middle of nowhere which we’re supposed to reach about 6:30 the next morning. There we’ll have to switch to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, by all accounts a narrow-gauge toy of a train that has to chug its way 7,000 feet up the mountain foothills of the southernmost Himalayas to Darjeeling, where the Bengali English government of the Raj spends its summers. The entire train voyage will be about 400 miles, and the Deacon informs us that it will probably be too hot and dusty to get any sleep during the Darjeeling Mail part of it.

No matter. I don’t plan to spend much of the time on the train sleeping at any rate.

We receive a telegram from “Cousin Reggie” on our first morning here:

MEET AT HOTEL MT EVEREST DARJEELING TUES. 24 MARCH. I WILL ASSUME COMMAND OF THE EXPEDITION AT THAT POINT.

L./ R. K. BROMLEY-MONTFORT

“‘Assume command of the expedition,’ my arse,” says the Deacon, crumpling the telegram flimsy in his long-fingered hand and throwing it on the ground.

“What does the ‘L.-slash’ in this thing stand for?” asks Jean-Claude, who is retrieving and flattening out the crumpled telegram.

“‘Lord,’ I presume,” says the Deacon, biting down so hard on the stem of his unlighted pipe that I expect it to snap. “Lord Reginald K.-something Bromley-Montfort.”

“Why does he keep the Bromley in his name?” I ask. The ways of British near-royalty are still a mystery to me.

“How the hell should I know?” snaps the Deacon. He is rarely this short-tempered. Both Jean-Claude and I take a step backward, shocked by his tone. “I just wish this Lord Bromley-Whatsis, his serene buggering Highness, had bloody well buggered himself down to Calcutta from the hills and helped us bandobast these buggering great heavy crates to the bloody freight depot a full buggering day earlier, is what I damn well wish. This is his lousy country, his culture where bloody damn venal bribery is necessary everywhere to get the least bloody thing done, and where no one can keep a simple bloody appointment on time. So where is this ‘commander of the expedition’ when we actually need his fat arse?”

Jean-Claude and I look at each other and I think we are thinking the same thing. When George Mallory came this way a year earlier, he had no administrative responsibilities until they reached Tibet and the team leader, Geoffrey Bruce, fell ill during the five-week trek in to Everest Base Camp. Because of Bruce’s heart problems and trouble adapting to altitude even on the Tibetan passes long before Everest came into sight, the expedition’s doctor ordered the 58-year-old Bruce back to Darjeeling, and Colonel Norton, who had been the climbing leader, assumed overall command of the expedition with Mallory becoming climbing leader.

But even with the responsibility of planning the climbing logistics, Mallory had been free of the heavier administrative responsibilities of overseeing the entire expedition, renting mules and porters, handling all the Tibetan governmental and other requirements, and—most tiring—dealing with the personalities and sudden illnesses and weaknesses of the entire British climbing team and its mélange of more than a hundred porters.

Jean-Claude and I stare at each other after the Deacon’s sudden outburst—as I say, in the more than year and a half I’ve known Richard Davis Deacon, I’ve never heard anything like this from him (his usual response to logistical or climbing setbacks is a shrug and an ironic smile, followed by the lighting of his pipe)—and I know we’re both thinking that while Jean-Claude and I had been free to enjoy the ocean voyage here (or, for J.C., “enjoy” it between brief bouts of debilitating seasickness in the choppy parts), the Deacon had been dealing with thousands of unsettled money, administrative, logistical, and climbing details.

During the trip on the HMS Caledonia, although the Deacon did some daily exercising to stay in shape, he never had the time to go jogging miles around the pitching deck as I did each day. Usually he could be found at his tiny first-class stateroom desk, poring over topographic maps of Everest and its vicinity, photographs, and the private and public accounts of the three previous British expeditions—including a score of notebooks that the Deacon himself had filled during the ’21 and ’22 expeditions before he’d fallen out of grace with Mallory.

We are only on the first step of the trip—preparing for the train ride from Calcutta to Sealdah to the little town of Siliguri and then uphill to Darjeeling, where the real trek to Everest always begins—but the Deacon is exhausted.

And it’s even more than that, I also realize. The Deacon has been infuriated by this Lord Bromley-Montfort’s arrogant telegram. This “Cousin Reggie” was supposed to finance our expedition from Darjeeling on to Everest, not “take command of it.” I don’t blame the Deacon for his reaction—I’m seriously worried about what will happen when the two men actually meet sometime in the next forty-eight hours—and I have the sickening sense that our entire Mount Everest expedition may be in imminent danger of collapsing. It certainly wouldn’t be the first major mountaineering expedition that failed early because of conflict between two would-be leaders. (Nor, as I will notice over the next sixty-nine years, would it be the last.)

But then we’re leaving Sealdah Station in the loud, infernally hot, and eternally dusty first-class section of the equally loud, infernally hot, and eternally dusty first leg to Siliguri, and I find myself staring out at some of the most boring landscape I’ve ever traversed: endless rice paddies, interrupted only by plantations of various kinds of palm trees. It is also a chaotic train, with second- and third-class and nonpaying passengers hanging from every door and window and many more on the rooftop of every car except the first-class ones. As darkness falls, the number of villages we’re passing on this great, flat plain becomes obvious by the thousands of campfires and lantern lights we glimpse. A million people appear to be preparing their dinners at the same time, most over simple open fires in or near their open-doored homes, and—from the not totally unpleasant scent that fills the air even with our windows closed, the air moving only because of small electric fans set high on the walls turning slowly—it becomes obvious, and is confirmed by the Deacon, that most of the cooking fires we pass in the encroaching dusk are fueled by dried cow dung.

The Deacon does not apologize for his earlier outburst of temper at the Calcutta staging area, but as our Siliguri-bound night train moves deeper into the countryside and real darkness punctuated by hundreds or even thousands more fires in villages and isolated homes, his manner suggests both apology and embarrassment. After we dine on a basket of hotel-roasted chicken and a decent white wine in our small compartment where all three of us will be sleeping on fold-down cots, the smell of the Deacon’s pipe tobacco mixes with the cow dung scent of India’s humid air.

This is strangely calming. We say little to each other, all of us more interested in the tableaus glimpsed briefly as the now hurtling little train passes villages and homes lighted by open fires and the occasional lantern. We are climbing a little, but we know that narrow-gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway train tomorrow morning will have to pull itself and us from near sea level to Darjeeling—the town and the Bromley-Montfort tea plantation are set in the Mahabharat Mountain Range, also known as the Lesser Himalayas—at an average altitude of around 7,000 feet.

The heat eventually forces us to open the windows to allow more dust, smoke, and flying cinders in, but that thick, humid air becomes a tiny bit cooler as we roll through more coconut and banana plantations and the cooking-dinner scent of cow dung campfires is slowly balanced, if not replaced, by the thickly sensuous tropical funk of irrigated palm trees.

We are three or four hours out of Calcutta when the Darjeeling Mail express roars and clatters its way across the famous Sara Bridge which spans the Padma. After that, all is darkness, broken only by the dim constellations of the hundreds upon hundreds of distant villages across the plain.

All three of us are in our thinly cushioned fold-down beds by eleven p.m., and from the sounds my climbing partners are making, they are soon sleeping deeply. I’m plagued by thoughts and doubts for a while—the meeting with Lord Bromley-Montfort at the Mount Everest Hotel tomorrow night or Tuesday morning may be as disastrous as I fear—but then I also fall asleep to the swaying of the train and the soothing sound of its iron wheels on the Darjeeling Mail rails.

Early the next morning in Siliguri—after tea, coffee, and a good Western breakfast in an area of the station reserved just for British and other white passengers—we transfer to the narrow-gauge railroad that always departs for Darjeeling precisely thirty-five minutes after the mail train arrives in Siliguri. Seven miles up this line—the train really is so tiny that it seems a slightly overgrown toy train of the kind boys dream of owning—we reach the Sukhna station and begin the absurdly steep (and absurdly slow) switchback climbing to Darjeeling. The humid scents of the crowded Bengali plain are soon replaced by refreshing breezes and the thick, green, rain-scented forest that punctuates rolling plantation rows of tea plants. We are scheduled to arrive by noon, but two rockfalls onto the tracks put us hours behind schedule.

The engineer and fireman of the little Coney Island toy train roust out dozens from the third- and even second-class cabins to move the rocks fallen from the rain-drenched cliffs, but Jean-Claude and I enthusiastically join in the work, prying with crowbars to lever small boulders off the tracks.

The Deacon stands to one side, arms crossed, and glowers. “If you hurt your back or legs or hands now,” he says tightly, “you’ve ruined your chance at climbing Everest for nothing. Let the other passengers do it, for God’s sake.”

J.C. and I smile our agreement but ignore him, helping clear the track while the engineer and fireman and useless conductors (who collected all our tickets before the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway toy train started, since one cannot walk from one of the tiny cars to the next, but who have done no work since) lazily watch with crossed arms and frowning faces. From time to time they shout instructions and criticism in Bengali and Hindi and some other dialect. Eventually we’re finished, the rails are clear, and J.C. and I stagger back to our coach.

Twelve miles further on, we stop for another rockfall, this one with even larger rocks and boulders heaped all over the tracks. “Heavy rain,” says the engineer, shrugging and looking above us at the vertical cliffs from which run a thousand miniature waterfalls. Jean-Claude and I again join the second- and third-class passengers in levering off a few tons of rocks. Pointedly, the Deacon stays in his bunk and takes a nap.

So we arrive hours late in Darjeeling, not at noon as the schedule promised, but toward dusk. And in a heavy rain which has prevented us from catching views of the summits of Kanchenjunga or any of the other high Himalayan peaks usually visible—according to the Deacon—during the approach to Darjeeling. Two of us are sore and bruised from moving tons of rock, our muscles aching despite being honed for climbing, our climbing-necessary fingers torn and bloody; the third member of our party is also bloody—bloody disgusted with us.

We walk back to the fifth and last car on our Coney Island Express—the so-called “freight car,” in reality just a flatbed with our many crates and boxes hastily lashed down and covered with tarps—and wonder how we are going to get the tons of stuff to the Hotel Mount Everest. (Expedition members, especially their leaders, are often invited to stay up the hill at Government House, but our expedition is so totally unofficial that we want to be invisible. So the hotel it is.)

Suddenly, miraculously, a tall man with an umbrella appears out of the pounding rain. He’s followed by more than a dozen porters pouring out of three Ford trucks with wooden beds behind their cabs. The station platform has no roof. The rain is cold up here at 7,000 feet, and steam rises from the Fords’ hoods still ticking with heat.

The tall man is wearing a finely made cream-colored cotton robe with long wool vests hanging down like brown scarves. On his head is perched an elaborate and carefully fitted cap unlike anything I’ve seen so far in India. He doesn’t look either Indian or Tibetan—not quite Asiatic enough for the latter nor brown and short and dark-haired enough for the former—and while he might be one of the mythical Sherpas I’ve heard so much about, I know that Sherpas also tend to be short, and this man’s brown-eyed gaze is exactly level with mine—and I’m 6 foot 2. Without saying a word or making a gesture, he somehow projects a powerful sense of dignity and self-respect. He obviously has what some call “a commanding presence.”

The Deacon walks forward through the rain, water cascading from his fedora, and the other man extends the umbrella so that the Deacon can stand close under the broad black circle.

“Are you sent by Lord Bromley-Montfort?” asks the Deacon.

The man stares at the Deacon. Long, silent seconds pass in the pouring rain.

The Deacon points at his own chest and says, “Me…Richard Davis Deacon.” He points at the tall man’s chest. “You?”

“Pasang.” The voice is so soft that I can barely hear it under the pounding of rain on the umbrella fabric.

“Pasang what?” asks the Deacon.

“Pasang…Sirdar.”

I step closer through the rain and extend my hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Pasang Sirdar.”

The tall man makes no move except to shift the umbrella a bit so that it offers me some protection.

“No, no, Jake,” says the Deacon, almost shouting over the downpour. “Sirdar means something like ‘head man.’ He’d be in charge of the porters. Evidently it’s just Pasang for now.” He turns back to the tall man. “Pasang…can…you…get these?” The Deacon gestures dramatically to the heaps of tarp-covered crates that J.C. and I had only begun to untie. “To…the…Hotel Mount Everest?” The Deacon gestures vaguely uphill toward the dark, multi-terraced hill city of Darjeeling, all but invisible in the rain, and says again, more loudly, “Hotel…Mount…Everest?”

“That shouldn’t be a problem, Mr. Deacon,” Pasang says in a perfect Oxbridge accent. The soft, deep voice sounds as upper-class British as the Deacon’s. Perhaps more so. “We shan’t take more than five minutes.”

Pasang hands the umbrella to me and steps out into the rain to shout in both Hindi and Bengali to the dozen or so porters waiting silently in the downpour. The men rush to untie the crates and quickly load them onto the backs of the Ford carryalls. Somehow—I’ll never know how, except that J.C. is half-perched on my left knee while I am pressed sideways against the passenger-side door—the three of us squeeze into the cab of the first truck along with Pasang, who is driving. The downpour increases, and since the only working windshield wiper is banging away to clear the tiniest possible arc in front of Pasang, I can’t see a damned thing out the front, side, or back as the truck bounces, bucks, and grinds gears around unseen turns and up a seemingly endless series of steep and invisible switchbacks. Whatever Darjeeling looks like, I’m not going to see it this night.

Not one of the four of us says a single word during the ride up.

I’d expected the Hotel Mount Everest to be an old stone building set amidst other old stone buildings—gray, gray, gray. Instead we stop at a well-lighted and splendid-looking three-story Victorian structure perched high on a hillside. The hotel might fit an American’s mental image of Olde London Towne for all of its gables, rafters, towers, more gables, the elaborate porte-cochère with its brick drive and Elizabethan-style pillars, a shingled turret rising to the right of the main entrance, a garden out front with a white-graveled walkway, small leafy trees (not the great multi-trunked banyans of the lower elevations we’d climbed through on the tiny train) along the front of the hotel and elegant tall pines behind.

As we reach the hotel entrance, it stops raining so suddenly it’s as if someone has switched off a spigot. A full moon emerges from behind quickly scurrying clouds and illuminates the snowy summits of tall peaks to the north and east and west behind the hotel.

“We’re not that close to the Himalayas here, are we?” I ask as the three of us step further back from the hotel and its overhangs to look at what surely must be more clouds, not mountain peaks. Not so near to Darjeeling.

“That is moonlight on snow and ice,” Jean-Claude says. “Peaks and ridges.”

Despite the late hour, four handsomely attired bellboys have hustled out from the lobby and are now carrying in our personal baggage—some suitcases, but mostly rucksacks and duffels. The Deacon insists we go around back with Pasang and the other porters in the Ford trucks to make sure our gear is stored somewhere safe. That turns out to be in the large building that had obviously once served as the Hotel Mount Everest’s extensive stables. Pasang oversees the porters’ careful delivery and re-tarping of our crates into what had been three large stalls with high swinging doors.

“I think one of us should stay out here and keep an eye on our…,” begins the Deacon.

But with our crates counted and inspected, all tarps tied down, Pasang closes the stall doors, locks a heavy padlocked chain on the front of each, and silently hands the keys to the Deacon. “Everything should be quite secure for the night, Mr. Deacon. And I’ve posted a trusted servant from the plantation to sleep here and keep watch, just in case. One never knows.”

We trudge back to the front of the hotel amidst a wild myriad of almost overpowering scents: wet leaves and grass, rich soil, the richness of the flower gardens on both sides of the drive, wet mosses along a stream trickling down under an arched bridge, moist bark that makes up the driveway where the bricks and paving stop, and—perhaps most powerfully—the mountain-breeze-borne scent of hundreds of thousands of ripened and dampened tea plants growing along tens of thousands of green terraces on the steep hillsides now illuminated in moonlight above, around, and below the hill town of Darjeeling. Lights are coming on all over, many of them electric.

The hotel night manager is Indian, formally dressed in a cutaway and a high nineteenth-century collar, and he seems very excited to have us arrive in his establishment. The wide lobby is strangely empty except for the hovering bellboys, Pasang, and the three of us.

“Yes, yes, yes,” says the manager in his thick Indian accent, opening and swiveling the huge register and proffering a fine pen. The mahogany counter glows almost gold with its patina of age and use. “The Bromley Expedition, yes, yes,” continues the smiling manager. “We offer a very warm welcome indeed to the esteemed Bromley-Montford Expedition.”

The Deacon’s glower is almost, not quite, enough to extinguish the manager’s huge smile. “We are not the…Bromley Expedition,” our head climber says softly. “Our group doesn’t have a name. But if it did…it would be the Deacon-Clairoux-Perry Expedition.”

“Yes, of course, yes, yes,” says the manager, looking nervously at Pasang, who doesn’t so much as blink. “Half of our topmost floor, the Mallory Wing we call it now, our finest suites, sir, yes, yes, has been set aside for the Bromley Expedition.”

The Deacon sighs. We’re all tired. He signs the register, hands the pen to J.C., who signs and hands it to me. The liveried bellboys—not the same dark men who’d acted as porters with our crates—leap forward to lift our suitcases, rucksacks, and duffel bags. The three of us and a bellboy crowd into a single cage elevator—ancient, wrought-iron, electrically powered by God-knows-what, an intricate but workable mass of chains and gears. An operator begins to slide the cage doors shut.

“Just a moment,” the Deacon says, walking back to the registration desk. The manager snaps to attention like a Prussian officer being inspected by the former Kaiser.

“Is Lord Bromley-Montfort here already?” demands the Deacon. His voice is thick with an oncoming cold or mere fatigue. “I need to meet with him tonight if he’s still awake.”

The manager’s broad grin freezes in place, becomes a rather terrible rictus, and while his head both bows and shakes at the same time—yes, no, yes, no—his eyes flick to where Pasang has been standing silent in the same place amidst all the commotion with baggage and bellboys.

“The meeting is set for tomorrow morning,” says Pasang.

“Yes, yes, yes,” breathes the relieved manager. “The breakfast room is set aside for…yes…in the morning.”

The Deacon shakes his head, runs his hands through his thinning hair, and walks back to where the rest of us wait in the lift. We may be preparing to climb the tallest mountain in the world, but this night we’re too tired to climb three flights of stairs to our waiting luxury suites.