The Abominable: A Novel

Thursday, May 7, 1925

It’s time to pack and go down,” says Jean-Claude as it begins to get light after two miserable, endless, restricted-to-the-tent days and two even more endless, wet, cold, sleepless nights at Camp III.

I lift my hands to where strips of my face are coming off and think, Maybe it’s past time we left.

We’d brought no mirrors in our personal kits. “Give it to me straight, Jean-Claude…leprosy?”

“Sunburn,” says J.C. “But you are a mess, my friend. Your sunburned skin is coming off in red and white strips, but your lips and the flesh underneath the peeling skin are almost blue—cyanotic, I think—from lack of oxygen.”

“Red, white, and blue,” I say. “God bless America.”

“Or Vive la France,” says Jean-Claude, but he does not laugh. I notice that he and three of the four Sherpas, all but Babu, also have a blue tinge to their lips, faces, and hands.

For breakfast, lunch, and dinner yesterday I’d tried to suck on a tin-shaped frozen wedge of potatoes and peas. It tasted of kerosene, as did everything else the Sherpas had carried in their mixed loads. I’d crawled outside to vomit again and have not tried to eat anything since then. (We had been able to thaw the tin of peaches enough that all six of us got one tiny, icy sip of the peach juice. The tantalizing hint of liquid was almost worse than having nothing at all to drink.)

I’m freezing. J.C. and I had assumed the first night that Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay would be able to wriggle into a sleeping bag with one of the other Sherpas—the bags were made for European-sized male bodies, not the diminutive Sherpas—but they weren’t able to manage it. These bags are sewn like a cocoon, not buttoned or zippered, so there is no way to open them up to spread one above and one below like eiderdown duvets. So that first night, Ang Chiri tried to sleep wearing just the wool outer clothing they’d chosen to keep on rather than wear the “Michelin” Finch goose down suits that J.C. and I had climbed into (and had been forced to shed our first hot day in the Trough and on the glacier where I received my terrible sunburn). The result was that Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay both had frostbitten toes and feet. J.C.’s English-speaking Sherpa, Norbu Chedi, had been gasping for air so hard both nights that he chose to sleep with his face outside the folds of his sleeping bag; the result is white patches of frostbitten cheeks for Norbu.

So last night Jean-Claude and I gave our Finch down jackets and trousers to Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay, and I didn’t sleep a wink all night. Under the new down coat and trousers, I was wearing just a regular Mallory-style wool Norfolk jacket and sweater and wool knickers and socks, and now even the eiderdown sleeping bag couldn’t keep me warm. I would begin to doze off despite the physical misery, but then slam awake either from the intense chill or with a sense of someone strangling me. Or both.

It feels better to be moving now, dragging on my boots and packing the high felt Laplander “slippers” deep into my empty rucksack. But every move uses up my energy and makes me have to stop and gasp for breath. I see Jean-Claude taking the same pauses as he labors to tie his frozen bootlaces. The Sherpas are moving even more slowly and ponderously than J.C. and me.

But eventually we’re all packed, booted, cramponed, and layered—Jean-Claude and I have taken back our Finch outer clothing for the descent—and then J.C. makes me moan and the four Sherpas slump silently when he says, “We have to pack the tent and staves and ground cloths as well.”

“Why?” I ask plaintively. Reggie’s experimental Big Tent has survived the two days and nights of hurricane winds, but the damned thing is heavy. I’d carried only parts of it uphill and the weight had been oppressive. Now, I thought, everything depended upon our getting down to Camp II or lower quickly. Leave the damned tent where it is for the next Tiger Team, is what I think but do not say aloud.

“We may need it for shelter on the glacier,” Jean-Claude explains.

I stifle the urge to moan again. The idea of bivouacking anywhere on the open glacier seems like death to me. But if for some reason we do have to bivouac…

I realize that J.C. is right and I say to Babu Rita, “All right, you heard the man. You and Ang Chiri begin taking down the staves. Norbu, you and Lhakpa get outside and pull up all of the stakes and untie all the tie-downs. Don’t cut them unless you have to and then only right next to the tie-down knot—and leave all the ropes attached.”

If we have to pitch this tent on the glacier, I don’t think we’ll have the energy to attach new ropes. And there won’t be these friendly rocks and boulders around.

It’s strange to be standing outside and wearing a pack load again. The winds haven’t abated, and the blizzard is coming down as heavily as it has the past two days and nights, but Jean-Claude’s handy combination aneroid barometer and thermometer tells us that the low pressure is climbing along with the temperature, which is up to a balmy ten degrees Fahrenheit.

“Good for the crampons on the glacier snow,” J.C. says into my ear under the wind roar and buffet.

Nothing is good.

J.C. and I are both surprised that there’s only about two feet of new powder on the glacier rather than the four or five feet the intensity of the three-day storm made us fear, but the crust is not frozen solid enough to keep us from crashing through up to our knees or waist every dozen steps or so. And none of us ever seem to fall through at the same time. We descend the glacier like six blind men with palsy.

We’ve decided to rope up, all together, using the Deacon’s hideously expensive Miracle Rope that was his personal invention (at Lady Bromley’s expense) for this expedition. For things like casual guiding ropes on the glacier, on the way up we’d strung the alpine-standard three-eighths-inch cotton rope—what I think of as “the Mallory-Irvine rope,” since they were last seen using it on this very mountain—but for vertical fixed ropes and for roping up in dicey situations, the Deacon insisted on this new blend of cotton, manila, hemp, and other material for his rope. It made the rope thicker and heavier—five-eighths of an inch rather than the three-eighths that had been standard for so many years in alpine climbing—and thus heavier to haul and harder to knot quickly, but his Alpine Club contacts led the Deacon to a commercial rope-testing facility in Birmingham: the three-eighths-inch standard cotton rope, even when new and unfrayed in any way, would snap at 500 pounds of pressure. This sounds like a lot, but when a normal-sized male is free-falling, say, while leading on a 30-foot belay, his mass plus velocity after falling 60 feet will almost always snap the standard three-eighths-inch cotton rope. “I think we use the damned stuff more as sympathetic magic rather than as a real safety precaution,” the Deacon said.

That low tensile strength was also the reason, the Deacon had pointed out to us the previous winter when he’d had us testing his new rope in Wales, why so many climbers—in the Himalayas now as well as in the Alps—lost their lives while descending steep slopes again rather than rappelling down with any real assurance of safety. The Deacon’s new Mixed Fibre Rope, as he liked to call it, had tested out to more than 1,100 pounds’ strain before snapping. Not yet satisfactory to the Deacon—he envisioned what would later become the 5,000-test-pound average nylon-blend rope of the future, without knowing how it could be manufactured with the materials of 1924–25—but decidedly better than the three-eighths-inch cotton “clothesline rope” (as the Deacon called it) that Mallory and Irvine had tied onto on their last day.

But even with the new, improved rope, J.C. and I have had to sort out the order in which we should all descend the mountain. Obviously Jean-Claude should go first, but then who? Of the other five of us, Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay can barely stand and stagger along on their frostbitten and swollen feet—neither had been able to tie the laces to his own boots, and J.C. and I had attached their crampons—so neither can be expected to hold a belay if Jean-Claude were suddenly to disappear into a hidden crevasse. And neither I nor the Deacon’s new Miracle Rope could be expected to hold the weight of three free-falling men on belay, no matter how quickly I could get my long ice axe into the glacier snow.

So we’ve compromised, with J.C. going first, then Babu Rita—the healthiest of the Sherpas this awful day—and then me (in the slight hope I might belay two men), and then Ang and Lhakpa staggering along, holding each other up, and finally with Norbu Chedi, frostbitten cheeks and all, as our anchorman. Theoretically I could belay Ang and Lhakpa if one or both of them fell into a crevasse behind me.

It is understood, at least by Jean-Claude and me, that if it reaches the point where Norbu Chedi has to belay all or most of us, we are dead men anyway.

So we follow J.C. up and away from our quickly disappearing wreckage of Camp III, back onto the East Rongbuk Glacier, and then down the glacier’s surprisingly steep slopes. How, in this never-ending blizzard, Jean-Claude can find his way and avoid the hundreds of crevasses he’d pointed out during the climb up in sunlight two days ago I’ll never know. Most of our route-marking bamboo wands either have blown away or are covered with snow, but occasionally J.C. reaches down and tugs one up, reassuring all of us that we are on the right track.

And although I believe in nothing supernatural, I will always—after this day—ascribe a weird but real sixth sense to Jean-Claude Clairoux in his ability to sense the presence of crevasses that would have been invisible even on a sunny, shadow-assisted day, much less in this blinding blizzard. Several times he holds up his arm telling us to stop where we are, and then he turns around and retraces his quickly disappearing steps in the snow, leading us back up and then around and then down past crevasses that sometimes become slightly visible to the rest of us in the passing, but more often than not remain unseen and unsensed by anyone other than Jean-Claude.

So, after the agonizingly slow hours of dressing, tying our bootlaces, getting our crampons on, and packing up the tent in different loads (J.C. hauling most of it), we suffer four more hours descending the glacier in this stop-and-start way before we get to the ladder-crossed crevasse that had been less than an hour short of Camp III on our way up on Tuesday.

Jean-Claude holds up his snow-covered arm and we stop, then approach slowly.

The combined 15-foot span of the two roped-together ladders has slipped out of place.

“Merde,” says J.C.

“Yeah.”

It’s still snowing so hard that we have trouble seeing the far side of the slumped span of the ladder only 15 feet away, but after a few minutes the flurries clear just long enough for us to assess the problem.

There’s been a subsidence on the far, southern lip of the crevasse, as if a column of ice supporting the far side has shifted downward six feet or so. One of our Miracle Rope guy lines is missing, and the other one—the one to our left as we look south—is slumping under its weight of snow and ice in a way that suggests that the eyelet stake and ice screws holding it on that side have come loose. We’d left two climbing rigs for the heavily laden porters who were to follow us up on Wednesday to put on for security—clipping the carabiner on the harness into one of the guy lines—to use as they crossed the rickety ladder, but the harnesses are now lost, either buried under the new snow or fallen into the widened crevasse.

We untie from our common rope, and Babu Rita ties back in as lead man of the four connected Sherpas. I tie on to Jean-Claude, who sinks to his hands and knees to crawl closer to the ladder and the edge of the crevasse.

I borrow Ang Chiri’s and Norbu Chedi’s long ice axes, and J.C. and I drive them as deep into the snow and solid ice as we can, running about 30 feet of free Miracle Rope to Jean-Claude so that the axes will be the primary anchor system should he fall. I gesture for Ang and Norbu to come around to the crevasse side of the ice axe anchors and to lean their weight on them. Borrowing Lhakpa Yishay’s long ice axe, I lay it along the edge of the crevasse, anchoring its curved pick deep into the ice; if J.C. falls, I want both the anchor rope and my belay rope to be running over the smooth wood of the ice axe shaft rather than cutting into the lip of the crevasse. Babu Rita retains his ice axe to sink behind us and has run a loop of rope around it should a hole open up under Ang, Norbu, and Lhakpa. He’s their belay man now.

Then I sink the steel point of my own ice axe as deep into the snow and ice as I can—there’s too much powder snow to make it feel truly secure—and back away from the edge as I play out the 30 feet of rope I’ve left between J.C. and me.

He begins his crawl out onto the now steeply inclined ladder. I brace myself for the sudden belay shock of his fall.

Jean-Claude has only one free hand with which to grip the ladder in front of him, since he’s using the short ice hammer that has been lashed onto his rucksack to bang snow and ice off the rungs and ladder rims ahead of him as he crawls. He’s left on his full rucksack load; he and I hadn’t even needed to speak out loud before both deciding that—if the ladder holds—we want the Sherpas also to cross with their loads still on their backs. It would just take too damned long in this freezing world of continually falling temperatures and whirling spindrift to send the loads across by hand. So it will be all or nothing.

At one point, when J.C. is about halfway across, his feet and backside higher than his head as he crawls downhill, the ladder drops another six inches or so in its snowy niche across the crevasse, and I brace again for the full, spine-jarring shock of his drop.

It does not come. The new ledge of snow and ice on the far side stays solid long enough for Jean-Claude to finish his crawl. Amazingly, he stays out on the ladder while he bangs some ice screws into the blue-ice wall of the little debris chute he’s crawling toward. He takes two precut six-foot strands of the Deacon’s rope and ties the ends onto the stakes and then wraps the other ends around each side of the ladder until the lines are taut.

It’s not much protection, but it’s a start.

Now I can barely see Jean-Claude through the heavy snowfall, but I can hear him panting heavily as he pulls his own long ice axe off his rucksack and sinks it into the snow and ice about ten meters beyond the crevasse. He ties longer strands to this new ice anchor and—incredibly—crawls back out onto the ladder to lash these new support lines onto the middle section of the ladder. I toss him two more lines that we’ve tied around our own ice anchors, and he moves forward to tie them onto this end of the ladder. Then, rather than stand up on our side of the crevasse, he laboriously backs his way across the steeply inclined ladder again, crampons first.

Standing in the debris chute, he uses his ice hammer and mittened hands to sweep away some of the snow debris so that it will be easier for the porters to stand upright and walk the eight vertical feet up the rough ramp to the glacier proper.

Then he throws his own belay line and the last coil of Miracle Rope across the crevasse to me and backs away to loop his ends around his ice axe anchor before he takes up his belay stance. Just watching my friend exert himself like this above 20,000 feet has made me gasp for breath.

“All right,” I say with as much authority as I can muster. “Lhakpa first. Babu, you keep the other two on belay while I tie my belay rope and Sahib Clairoux’s onto Lhakpa. And please instruct Lhakpa and the others to approach the ladder on their hands and knees—with pack loads remaining on, if you please—and to move slowly. Tell them that there’s no danger. Even if the ladder were to give way, which it won’t with its new tie-downs, Sahib Clairoux and I both will have you on belay. All right…Lhakpa first…”

For a moment the terrified Sherpa won’t come forward, and I’m sure that we’ll have a mutiny on our hands.

But in the end, after much gesticulating from me and shouting in Nepalese from Babu Rita, Lhakpa crawls forward an inch at a time, out onto the ladder, trying to keep his knees on the ladders’ still icy rims, moving only one mittened hand at a time. It takes forever, but finally Lhakpa is across and being untied by Jean-Claude. The frostbitten Sherpa is laughing and giggling like a child over there.

Four more of us, I think wearily. But I smile and beckon the hobbling Ang Chiri to drop to all fours and come crawling forward to be tied in on both our ropes.

About a century later, when all of the Sherpas are across and tied in to their own climbing line again, I wrestle with all my might to dig up the three ice axes I’ve driven in and then hurl them across the crevasse. J.C. retrieves all three.

I’ll have only Jean-Claude on belay for me, but the second line he tosses me will run to where his own axe is still being used as an ice anchor. I tie a loose strand of the Miracle Rope around me, to make a Prusik sling for my feet should the ladder give way under me. It’s infinitely better for the climber fallen into a crevasse to Prusik-knot his way up and out under his own power—creating little climbing stirrups with the knotted loops—than to have the man or men on the other side try to use brute force to haul him up.

I make the mistake of staring down into the swirling blue-to-black depths of the crevasse as I shuffle across the ladder. The drop beneath the shaky, ice-rimmed, tilted ladder looks to be, quite literally, bottomless. The downward-forward incline seems steeper when one is on the ladder. I feel blood rushing to my head.

Then I’m across and eager arms are helping me to my feet. Tying on to the main rope again, I look back at the spiderwebbed, jury-rigged mess of a ladder-bridge we’ve all just crawled across and I laugh, just as Lhakpa Yishay had earlier, with a weary sense of sheer elation at the mere fact of being alive.

It’s getting late in the afternoon and we have far to go. Jean-Claude takes the lead, I tie in to the line in third place behind Babu Rita, where I’d been before, and we resume the slow descent of the glacier in the snowstorm. I can tell that Ang Chiri and Lhakpa are stumbling along with no sensation in their frostbitten feet at all; they might as well be walking on wooden stumps.

Somehow, I will never understand how, J.C. keeps us to our route. As we get a bit lower, moving between the towering and oppressive ice pinnacles again, there’s less new powder, and we see more of the bamboo wands appearing like quick, careless ink scratches on a perfectly white sheet of paper. There is no separation between snow and sky this gray afternoon, and the giant seracs appear suddenly before and beside us like white-shrouded ghost-giants.

Then we reach the last obstacle between us and Camp II and fresh water to drink and warmed soup and real food to eat—the final crevasse less than half a mile above the camp, the crevasse with the wide and thick snow bridge and our rope guy lines to clamp on to for a sense of security as we cross.

Both guy lines are in place, although slumping from the weight of ice on them. The snow bridge is completely gone, tumbled into the broad crevasse.

Jean-Claude and I huddle and compare watches. It’s after 4:30 p.m. The glacier will be in full shadow from Everest’s ridges, and it will be growing dark in forty-five minutes or less. The snow and temperature continue to fall. In coming up, we’d gone both right and left for more than half a mile in each direction before deciding that the snow bridge was the best way to get across. There will be no bamboo wands to guide us between snow-covered crevasses if we try that kind of traverse again. We’ll have to wait for morning and—if God be pleased with us—better weather.

We look each other in the eye and Jean-Claude says loudly to Babu and Norbu, “We dump our loads here, about thirty feet away from the crevasse. And we will set up the tent here.” He drives his ice axe into the snow about ten meters back from the lip of the crevasse.

The porters pause, stunned at the thought of spending another night on the glacier.

“Quickly! Vite! Before darkness falls and the higher winds return!” J.C. claps his mittened hands so hard that the echo returns to us as loud as a gunshot.

The noise brings the Sherpas out of their shock, and we all work as well as we can to unload both ground cloths, set up the tent, and drive in as many jury-rigged stakes and ice screws as we can. I realize that if the winds come as they did the last two nights, odds are poor that our tent—and we—will survive. I can imagine Reggie’s Big Tent with all six of us huddled in it tonight, fingers trying to self-arrest through the ground cloth, as the hurricane winds just slide us, tent and all, across the ice like a hockey puck, until we go hurtling into this no-bottom crevasse.

Within an hour we’re inside the tent and huddled together for warmth. We make no attempt to eat anything. Our thirst is terrible beyond any words I have to describe it. All six of us are coughing that high-altitude cough that sounds so terrible—“like a barking jackal,” J.C. has called it. The second time he uses the phrase, I ask my friend directly if he’s ever actually heard a jackal bark. “All last night, Jake,” is his reply.

Jean-Claude and I have given Ang and Lhakpa our eiderdown sleeping bags this night while we sleep in our Finch duvet coats and Reggie goose down trousers, thin blankets pulled over us. I use my boots in a weatherproof sack as a pillow.

Both J.C. and I are exhausted, but we’re too cold and anxious even to pretend to sleep. We try to huddle closer, but the other’s shaking and chattering teeth just seem to make it worse for each of us. Perhaps our bodies have just quit putting out any heat.

That would mean that you’re both dead, Jake. I don’t like the tone of my own voice in my head. It sounds like it’s given up.

“In the m-m-morning,” whispers Jean-Claude as full darkness falls and the winds grow stronger, “I’ll cross on one of the fixed ropes, ankles and hands, and g-g-get down to Camp Two and bring everyone back with me early with ladders and food and hot b-b-beverages.”

“Sounds…okay,” I manage between teeth chattering. Then, “Or I could try it tonight, Jean-Claude. Take the hand torch with me and…”

“No,” whispers my friend. “I d-d-don’t believe the rope will h-h-hold your wuh-weight. I’m lighter. Too t-t-tired to b-belay tonight. In the m-morning.”

We curl closer, close our eyes, and pretend to sleep. The wind has grown in ferocity so the machine-gun battle sounds of the canvas slapping have returned with a vengeance. I imagine that I can feel the entire tent sliding south toward the crevasse, but I’m too exhausted and dehydrated to do anything about it and just remain curled where I am, the other bodies pressing close.

Jean-Claude’s slow breathing has the bad habit of just stopping for what seems like minutes on end—no sound, no inhaling or exhaling—until I shake him back into a semblance of breathing again. This goes on deep into the black night. It gives me a good reason for staying awake in the cold darkness. Every time I shake him back into life, he whispers, “Merci, Jake,” and then passes into his irregular, semiconscious breathing again. It’s like a deathbed watch with a dying man.

Suddenly I sit straight up in the darkness. Something terrible must have happened. I can hear J.C.’s and the other men’s gasping breaths, including my own, in the near-absolute darkness, but there’s something essential missing.

The wind has stopped. The noise is gone for the first time in more than forty-eight hours.

Jean-Claude is sitting up next to me, and we shake each other’s shoulders in some sort of mute celebration or simple hysteria. I fumble around until I find the boxy flashlight, turn its light onto my watch. Three-twenty a.m.

“I should try the rope now,” rasps J.C. “I won’t have the strength to cross come sunrise.”

Before I can answer, there come a scrabbling and tearing at our tent door—which we’ve learned to leave partially unlashed since totally closing off the tent adds to our inability to breathe—and I begin hallucinating bright lights shining in on us. Norbu Chedi’s cheeks are frostbitten pure white and black in the sudden glare of brilliance. Something large and powerful is clawing to get in.

The Deacon’s and Lady Bromley-Montfort’s heads poke into the tent. I can see the flashlights in their mittened hands and more lights behind them—lanterns, several of them. The two are also wearing Reggie’s Welsh miner headgear, and those lights also illuminate the tawdry, ice-dusted interior of our tent and our staring faces.

“How?” I manage to say.

The Deacon grins. “We were ready to set out as soon as the blizzard died down. I have to admit that these miner’s lamps work passably well…”

“Better than passably,” interrupts Reggie.

“But how did you cross…,” begins Jean-Claude.

“The glacier’s been busy,” says the Deacon. “About six hundred meters—a quarter of a mile—to the west, both sides collapsed a debris field to the shallow bottom there. About a hundred and fifty feet down and then back up, but ramps, really. No terribly serious climbing involved. We left some fixed ropes. Make room, gentlemen, we’re coming in.”

Besides the Deacon and Reggie crowding in to fill our tent to overflowing, Pasang comes in on his knees. He removes a medical bag from his rucksack.

The Sherpas outside crouch by the doorway, their own headlamps burning, at least three lanterns casting a wide light on their grins as they pass in thermoses of warm Bovril, tea, and soup. A larger thermos holds only water, and each of us takes a turn drinking deeply.

Dr. Pasang is already inspecting Norbu’s face, Lhakpa’s and Ang’s frostbitten feet. “These two will require carrying on Tejbir’s and Nyima Tsering’s backs,” says Pasang. He begins rubbing smelly whale oil on the two men’s bare, blackened feet and on Norbu’s face.

“We’re going now?” I manage to say. I’m not sure I can stand, but already the water has revived something that had been close to being extinguished in me.

“Now’s as good a time as any,” says the Deacon. “There’s a Sherpa to help each of you. We also have headlamps for all of you. Even with the—what’s your American word, Jake?—even with the detour down to the new route across the crevasse, we’ll be back to Camp Two in forty-five minutes or less. We’ve marked the way with wands.”

“Come, Jake, I’ll help you to your feet,” says Reggie and puts my arm over her shoulder. She lifts my two-hundred-plus pounds as if I were a child and all but carries me out into the night.

The stars are very bright. There is no hint of snow or cloud, other than the spindrift I can see hurling itself from the summits and ridges of Everest, a mere three miles and 10,000 feet above us.

Jean-Claude also looks up at Everest and blazing star fields as he’s helped out of the tent. “Nous y reviendrons,” he says to the mountain.

I may be wrong, but I think I’ve picked up enough French to translate that as “We shall return.”