The Abominable: A Novel

Saturday, May 2, 1925

It says something about the altitude and cold—and perhaps about the poor condition I’m in—that it takes a little under two hours for us to haul our loads three miles up the glacier bed to the site of Camp I.

The snow was letting up as we climbed, and I’m surprised to find only an inch or two on the moraine rocks beneath our boots, just enough to make footing treacherous. For this first stage of our “siege” of Everest—based more on South Polar expeditions’ cache-dump attempts than on our original plan for a quick alpine ascent, is my silent opinion—we don’t have to climb onto the glacier proper, but we do waste time winding our way through a bewildering series of 50- to 70-foot-high ice pinnacles that are called penitentes: they do look rather like giant religious pilgrims in white robes. In addition to the pinnacles that have turned the rocky moraine trough into an obstacle course, there are also innumerable ice-melt pools, frozen over but frequently so thinly frozen that we’d break through and soak our boots if we tried to cross the slippery surfaces.

This seems to make no sense, given the far-below-zero temperatures we’ve been suffering since we arrived at the mouth of the Rongbuk Glacier valley, but it is a part of the weirdness of Mount Everest and its environs; in places where the ridge walls and even ice walls shield the valley from the coldest winds, the early May sunlight can heat up sheltered places fifty degrees and more above the temperatures at Base Camp. The worst will be on the glacier itself, but on this first day we stay off the glacier, trudging along the rocky moraine bottom that previous expeditions have called the Trough.

My rucksack is heavier than any load I’ve carried for some time, and as we trudge uphill, I stay 50 feet behind the Deacon and Reggie so they won’t hear my labored breathing and occasional retching. But through my discomfort, I realize now why Mallory and Bullock missed this approach to the North Col for so many weeks and months during the late summer and early autumn of 1921. They found that the main avenue of the primary Rongbuk Glacier headed up to Lho La below the West Ridge of Everest and was impassable in its higher reaches. The broad Kharra Glacier comes down from the North East and North faces of the mountain, but careers off almost due east to the Lhakpa La Pass, where the Deacon had finally dragged Mallory and where the team had finally seen the true way to the North Col—this East Rongbuk Glacier.

But the East Rongbuk Glacier is a tricky, sneaky thing, converging with the main Rongbuk Glacier valley way down at Base Camp but snaking to the east, then northeast, and then sharply northwest—parallel to the Kharra Glacier—from Camp I to the North Col. The 1921 expedition had tried following ridges to the North Face, but the most promising ridge, one that led along the eastern side of the main Rongbuk Glacier, had led them to a dead end at what they called the North Peak—the mountain we now call Changtse.

In the monsoon mess of late summer 1921, Mallory and Bullock simply couldn’t believe that such a major glacier could give birth to such a miserable little trickle of a stream—the one that flows past our Base Camp now—and they kept circling back and forth along the northern approaches, swinging ever further west and east and then west again, looking for the kind of roaring stream or small river worthy of a glacier that ran all the way to the North Face or North Col.

It doesn’t exist. Our little trickle-stream at Base Camp, as the Deacon had guessed in 1921 (and for which correct guess—plus the recon to Lhakpa La, where they’d found the yeti footprints in the new snow as well as the glimpse of the proper route—I believe Mallory never fully forgave him), is all that the East Rongbuk Glacier is giving up.

We’d have been wasting more time today, since so many of the corridors through the five-story-tall penitentes lead to glacier walls or moraine-ridge dead ends, but the Deacon had brought bamboo wands with him during his recon on our first night at Base Camp, and the irregular line of these in the patches of snow keeps us on the right path. Since we’re not yet on the glacier or any real slope with crevasses, we’re not roped up, of course, but we settle into a single file with the Deacon leading, Reggie behind him, J.C. walking easily behind Reggie, and me bringing up a very distant rear. There are times when I lose them amongst the ice pinnacles, and only the bamboo wands and faint footsteps in the thin scrim of ice and snow show me which way to turn.

Finally we reach the site of Camp I, and the four of us dump our loads and sit panting with our backs against boulders. It is the same site that expeditions have used going back to 1921, and it shows the same tawdry signs of use as Base Camp, but it is also situated in the sunlight right where a wide rivulet of fresh water runs out of a moraine ridge of rock. The previous expeditions have built no sangas here—those low rock walls for extra wind protection within which you pitch a tent or tarp—but the multiple tent sites, places where rocks have been moved and the ground made as smooth as possible, are obvious.

“We’ll set up the Whymper tent and one smaller one, eat lunch, and head back,” says the Deacon.

“What was all this about, Mr. Deacon?” asks Reggie.

I’m still gasping for breath hard enough that I couldn’t join in this dialogue if I wanted to. I don’t want to. Jean-Claude seems to be breathing easily, his elbows on his knees as he uses his knife to cut up an apple he’s eating, but he also shows no interest in jumping into this discussion.

“All what, Lady Bromley-Montfort?” says the Deacon, eyes wide with feigned innocence.

“Our doing this useless hauling of these heavy loads to Camp One,” snaps Reggie. “Norton and Geoffrey Bruce last year had the porters do all the hauling to Camps One, Two, and Three, while the British climbers remained at Base Camp and saved their energy for the North Col and above.”

“Didn’t you and Pasang haul your own gear to this point last August?” asks the Deacon.

“Yes, but we had half a dozen Sherpas to help. And Pasang and I were carrying only light tents which we brought along with us to each camp…that and a minimum of food.”

The Deacon drinks from his canteen and says nothing.

“Was this some sort of test?” presses Reggie. “A cheap test of Jake and Jean-Claude and me, as if we hadn’t just trekked in more than three hundred fifty miles over passes up to nineteen thousand feet? Testing whether we can haul forty-plus-pound loads up the valley?”

The Deacon shrugs.

Reggie calmly takes a heavy can of peaches out of her overloaded rucksack and throws it at the Deacon’s head. He ducks, but just in time. The can of peaches bounces off a boulder but does not explode.

Jean-Claude laughs heartily.

The Deacon just points over Reggie’s and J.C.’s heads and says, “Look.”

Not only has the snow stopped, but the clouds have parted to the south. The high reaches of Everest may still be nine dangerous miles away up the glacier and Col and almost two vertical miles above us, but the Himalayan air is so clean and clear that it looks as if we could reach out and touch the visible First and Second Steps, run our finger down Norton’s Couloir, and press our palm down on the snowy spike of summit.

No one says anything. Then Reggie dumps the contents of her overstuffed rucksack out on the ground, stands, says, “You can set up the tents and stack your food tins here, Mister Deacon. I’m going back to Base Camp to get the loads apportioned for the Sherpas for tomorrow’s double carry.”

Then J.C. dumps his pack out, tent fabric flapping in what’s left of the wind—little more than a breeze now. “I’m going back to Base Camp to finish instructing the Sherpas on crampon and jumar technique.” He disappears downhill behind penitentes some minutes behind Reggie, although he seems to be making no obvious effort to catch up to her.

I continue to sit, my pack propped next to me.

“Go ahead and dump it and go, Jake,” the Deacon says. He lights his pipe. “Reggie was absolutely right. It was a sort of test, and it was wrong of me to have put the three of you through it.”

It’s one of the few times I’ve heard him call her “Reggie.”

“I don’t have anything pressing to do at Base Camp,” I say. I admit that I’m irritated not only at his testing us during our first days at this altitude, but also for smoking that goddamned pipe when I can’t get a full breath of air in my lungs. “I’ll help you set up the two tents,” I hear myself say.

The Deacon shrugs again but slowly gets to his feet, his gaze still fixed on the ever more visible massif that is Mount Everest.

Trying not to wheeze too loudly, I dig through the heaps of stuff for the Whymper tent’s larger ground cloth.