The Abominable: A Novel

Friday, May 15, 1925

Base Camp is almost deserted when we arrive there before noon.

Dr. Pasang is still there, of course, with both his frostbite patients resting in their tents. Pasang carried out the amputations when everyone returned from the monastery yesterday: all ten toes for Ang Chiri, four toes and three fingers on the right hand for Lhakpa Yishay. Normally, Pasang told J.C. and me, he would have waited much longer before operating, but the rot from Ang Chiri’s toes was spreading to his entire foot, and gangrene also threatened Lhakpa’s right hand and left foot.

Jean-Claude and I look in on both men; Ang Chiri is more cheerful than ever and, he says, is looking forward to trying the new wooden wedges in the toes of his hiking boots to see how well he can walk with no real toes. Of course, J.C. and I think but do not say aloud, a Sherpa spends most of his life at home in sandals, not wearing English-made hiking boots. But evidently Ang isn’t worried about that fine distinction.

Lhakpa, who’s lost less than Ang, is far gloomier. Both men have their feet bandaged with yellow-red iodine stains leaking through. He is cradling his now two-fingered right hand and all but weeping and repeating the mantra—according to Pasang’s interpreting—that he’ll never find work again.

Outside the tents, J.C. and I comment on Ang Chiri’s high morale and Pasang says softly, “Never discount the power of a little post-surgical opium to cheer one up.”

There are only about five other Sherpas in Base Camp, and Pasang tells us that yesterday Reggie and the Deacon assigned most of the men carrying tasks—hauling loads to the “upper camps,” Camp III at the base of the last ice slope and Camp IV on the North Col. Also according to Pasang, a messenger brought word today that high winds and heavy snow up there were keeping everyone except the Deacon, Reggie, and two Tiger Sherpas lower than the North Col, and Pasang guesses that even those four may have retreated to Camp III by now. At least Camps II and III now have plenty of tents, sleeping bags, and food for the mobs moving in and through.

Pasang tells us that he is eager to get to the higher camps himself, once his two patients are better. That freedom for him, of course, depends upon no more injuries so severe that he has to take the injured man or men all the way back down here to Base Camp. My own guess is that Pasang doesn’t like being separated from his employer—Lady Bromley-Montfort—for such long periods.

Jean-Claude and I decide that we’re going to do a carry to the highest camp we can reach today, despite the relatively late hour for departing from Base Camp. I think we both need some high, clean climbing and carrying to get rid of the terrible taste of that dawn’s “sky burial.” I know I do.

While many of the oxygen rigs have already been transported higher by Sherpas, J.C. and I test the tank integrity of two such backpack-frame rigs—almost no leakage in any of the six tanks—and we shrug into the harnesses to haul the O₂ sets up as high as we can get by nightfall.

With the Irvine-Finch-modified oxygen rigs on our backs—we won’t be breathing any of the English air today, so the masks and valves are tucked into the metal frame there—we’re hauling close to the Deacon’s guideline carry-load total of 25 pounds, but we also have to haul some personal stuff up with us if we’re going to be staying at any of the high camps—perhaps stay there until the summit bid itself. So we grab two off-the-shoulder, hang-in-front “carry bags”—actually gas mask containers (minus the masks) from the Great War which the Deacon had purchased both cheap and by the dozens. They’re perfect for cramming in our personal effects of some extra clothing, shaving kit—which I haven’t used for a week, since I hate shaving in cold water—camera gear, toilet paper, and all the rest. It’s probable that there are extra sleeping bags waiting at the high camps, but J.C. and I aren’t going to take any chances: we roll the bags tight, put on their protective waterproof covers, and tie them onto the outer metal bars of the oxygen rig frames.

We have our assortment of odd-sized ice axes (keeping only the long axes out and unlashed) as well as two of J.C.’s jumars, we’ve strapped on our 12-point crampons (despite the fact that most of the way to Camp II is on moraine rock), and it’s cold enough and snowy enough today that we’re wearing our Finch duvet jackets and Reggie eiderdown pants under our outer Shackleton anoraks and snow pants.

We shake hands with Pasang when we leave, and then we’re walking up the stony valley between walls of dirty moraine ice and the occasional ice pinnacle. The weather remains lousy, and visibility is down to about 15 feet. The wind is even stronger here than out in the Rongbuk Valley, and while the falling snow doesn’t seem to be accumulating much, hard pellets of the stuff sting our faces like buckshot.

Tied together by 40 feet of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope, more rope slung over our shoulders, with me in the lead, Jean-Claude and I head up the twelve-mile valley and glacier to the North Col.

J.C. and I exchange only a few necessary words during our long trek up the Trough, then the glacier above Camp II. We’re each lost in our own thoughts.

I’m thinking about death in the mountains. Beyond my real sense of guilt at Babu’s useless death during our clowning around, I’m remembering other mountain deaths and my reaction. I’m not totally new to sudden death on a mountain.

I’ve mentioned before that the Harvard Mountaineering Club didn’t formally come into existence until last year, 1924, but when I attended Harvard from 1919 to 1923, there were a few of us—the Harvard Four, as we were known in climbing circles—who spent every vacation and spare moment climbing in the nearby Quincy Quarries in the spring and autumn and in the New Hampshire mountains during the winter.

Instructor Henry S. Hall, who would found the formal club in ’24, was our informal leader, and our ad hoc climbing group met in his home. The other two members of our little group were Terris Carter (same year as me) and Ad Bates, a year behind us and a tough little mongrel of a climber, all knees and elbows and flying heels, but strangely skillful.

Professor Hall, with his older and more experienced mountaineering pals, specialized in climbing in the Canadian Rockies and, on rare occasions, in Alaska. During a school break in the early autumn of my junior year, the four of us were climbing on Mount Temple in Alberta, doing the East Ridge—which today would be classified IV 5.7 or so—when Ad slipped, snapped the 60-foot rope connecting him to Terris and me, and fell to his death. We hadn’t been set for belay, and Ad’s fall was so sudden and so vertical that if the rope hadn’t snapped, Terris and I would almost certainly have gone over the north face to fall with him.

We mourned Ad’s death, of course, in the way that only the young can mourn the death of someone their own age. I’d tried to talk to Ad’s parents when they came to Harvard to pick up his things, but all I could do was sob. I started missing classes when school resumed, just sitting in my room and brooding. I was sure I’d never climb again.

That’s when Professor Hall came to see me. He told me either to get back to my classes or drop out of school. He said I was just wasting my parents’ money the way it was. As to climbing, Hall told me that he’d be taking student climbers to Mount Washington as soon as the first snow fell and that I should make up my mind whether to continue climbing—he thought that I had some skill at it—or run away from it now. “But dying’s part of this sport,” Professor Hall told me. “That’s a hard fact—unfair—but it’s a fact. When a friend or partner on the rope dies, if you’re going to continue to be a climber, Jake, you have to learn how to say ‘Fuck it’ and move on.”

I’d never heard a teacher or professor use that word before and it hit me hard. So did the lesson he was imparting to me.

But over my last few years of climbing, I’ve learned—at least partially—how to say “Fuck it” and move on. During my months in the Alps with the Deacon and J.C., we’d been involved in no fewer than five attempted rescue missions, three of which ended in tragedy for someone. It’s true that I didn’t know any of the dead climbers well, but I did get to know the terrible damage an alpine fall will do to the human body: fractured, splayed limbs, clothes torn off by jagged rocks on the way down, blood everywhere, crushed skulls or heads missing altogether. Death by falling from a great height is never a dignified thing.

Babu Rita hadn’t fallen from any height; he’d just followed two idiots in glissading down a slope that one could find with a toboggan run in any snowy American city’s municipal park. Only toboggan runs don’t usually have boulders concealed under the snow.

“Fuck it,” I hear myself whisper. “Move on.”

The wind howls between the ice pinnacles of the Trough, and once up on the glacier, we have to dig out fixed ropes for security between crevasses, but the flagged bamboo poles show us the way.

We get to Camp III before daylight starts to fade, but Reggie and the Deacon aren’t there. There are now six tents at Camp III—two of them oversized Whympers—but we find eight Sherpas curled up and sleeping in the smaller Meade tents. Pemba moans that none of them feel well: all have been struck by “mountain lassitude”—our word for altitude sickness in 1925. Those not in sleeping bags are wrapped in heavy layers of blankets. Pemba says that Lady Memsahib and Deacon Sahib are up at Camp IV on the North Col with Tejbir Norgay and Tenzing Bothia. The winds up there, says Pemba, are very terrible.

Jean-Claude and I step back out of the odiferous Meade tent and confer. It’s late in the day, and it will be dark by the time we reach Camp IV. But we’ve brought our Welsh miner headlamps, I have an extra hand torch in my gas mask bag, and we both feel strong and impatient.

The hardest part of the climb, oddly enough, is the postholing from Camp III to the base of the slope and then trudging up the two hundred yards or so to the steep part where the first fixed ropes begin. The heavy snow and dimming day hide the boulder that killed Babu, but I can’t help imagining a layer of frozen blood under the new-fallen snow, like strawberry jam spread thin beneath white bread. When we reach the steeper fixed-rope part of the route, we have to use our ice axes to dig through the new snow until we can find the fixed rope and tug it up and out. Then we dig through our canvas bags and don our headlamp rigs and take out the ascender device that Jean-Claude named “jumar” after a dog he had as a kid. Or so he’s said.

As J.C. double-checks to make sure I’ve clipped the jumar onto the Deacon Miracle Rope properly, I say, “Did you really invent this doodad?”

My friend grins. “I did, but in collaboration with my father, who was helping a young French gentleman named Henri Brenot, who wanted some sort of mechanism for climbing free-hanging ropes in caves. Since it was just for one person, my father didn’t think to patent it, nor did Brenot, who called his larger cave rope-ascender devices singes—monkeys—so I decided to modify it, make it smaller and safer with stronger, lighter metal, added the curved handle and its handle guard, which we can fit our mittens into, and designed a sturdier cam to lock on to the rope without fear of slipping or shredding the line, and…voilà!”

“But ‘Jumar’ was really your dog’s name?”

Jean-Claude only grins more broadly and begins mechanically ascending—I’ve already begun thinking of it as “jumaring”—up the fixed rope.

A year ago, it would have taken Mallory or Irvine or Norton or any of the others four or five hours to get up this ice wall to the North Col, especially in a swirling snowstorm such as J.C. and I have just climbed through. Mallory would have spent much of his time on the ice face bent almost double, dutifully and exhaustingly using an ice axe to chip new steps out of the snow and ice. J.C. and I kicked in the front spurs of our new 12-point crampons and jumared up in less than forty-five minutes—and that included a time-out halfway up to hang from the rope and eat bars of chocolate. We did use our long ice axes, but only to stab into snow with our left hands for balance on the way up or to bat away the ice and snow covering the next few yards of fixed rope above us.

The traverse from the ice shelf across the North Col to Camp IV at the northwest corner under the tall seracs should have been worrisome in so serious a storm, but the Deacon and others have done such an excellent job of setting out permanent bamboo wands and red pennants that even in high winds and the near whiteout, it’s as easy as walking along a well-marked eight-foot-wide highway between invisible 100-foot drops into crevasses.

Camp IV now consists of one medium-sized Whymper tent, brought up in separate loads, as well as the RBT—Reggie’s Big Tent—and two smaller Meade tents in which the Deacon planned to store loads for higher carries. When some of this stuff goes up to Camps V and VI, the Meade tents as well as the Whymper tent here will host Sherpas on their way up or down in the theoretical supply line.

The Deacon and Tejbir Norgay look up in surprise as we come through the Whymper tent door, shaking snow off our outer layer into the small vestibule before joining them. I imagine we’re a sight in our high-cinched eiderdown hoods, full-face leather flying helmets, glowing headlamps, iced-over goggles, and snow-rimmed Shackleton anorak shoulders. The two men obviously aren’t expecting company as they huddle over an Unna cooker, the Meta fuel boiling up a big pot of something—at the pathetically low temperature it takes to boil things at 23,500 feet. Water boils at somewhere around 170 degrees Fahrenheit at this altitude, as opposed to 212 degrees at sea level. Although 170 degrees may sound hot, by the time the cold air hits it, our “boiled” liquids are down to around body temperature.

When we reveal our faces, the Deacon says, “Just in time for dinner, gentlemen. Beef stew. And we’ve made plenty.”

J.C. and I are surprisingly ravenous. Evidently the nausea we shared after the morning’s sky burial has worked itself out during our hours of trekking and climbing.

I’ve expected a rebuke from the Deacon regarding Babu Rita’s death, but it never comes—not even a pointed question as to whether we enjoyed the sky burial or had an interesting time with the Breakers of the Dead. I know that the Deacon himself has attended such terrible rites, but he makes no mention of it, ironic or otherwise. My guess is that he sympathizes with our reaction to the horrors we’ve seen. I know that Richard Davis Deacon also liked Babu very much.

“What is the climbing plan, Ree-shard?” asks J.C. when we’ve finished the last of the stew and reheated biscuits and are sipping our tepid coffee.

“In the morning, unless the weather gets actively worse, we’ll try the North Ridge to Camp Five,” he says. “I managed to get the two Meades up there a few days ago…we can only hope they haven’t blown away or been carried all the way down to the glacier by an avalanche.” He points to where J.C. and I have dumped our oxygen rigs in the corner of the tent. “Did you use any of that on the way up?”

We shake our heads.

“Good,” says the Deacon. “But we have extra sets cached here at Camp Four, and I recommend that you have one tank between you during the night…use the double-breathing hookup. If you get cold or really start feeling bad, a little oxygen at the one-point-five-liter flow rate will help out. We’ll all need some sleep if we’re going to climb in the morning. Speaking of which, did you bring extra batteries for those miner lamps?”

I nod.

“Good,” he says again. “When I say ‘in the morning,’ I mean around three-thirty or four a.m.”

I’m tempted to say So you’re following Reggie’s advice after all, but I decide against it and ask only, “Where are Reggie and Tenzing Bothia?”

“In the RBT,” says the Deacon. Suddenly he grins. “Lady Bromley-Montfort challenged me at Camp Three this morning when she overheard me talking about the RBT with a couple of the Sherpas there. She demanded to know what this ‘RBT’ she’s been hearing from various men stood for. When I told her ‘Reggie’s Big Tent’ and apologized for the familiarity with her name, she just said ‘Oh’ and blushed like mad. I have to wonder what she thought we were talking about.”

I have to think about this for a minute before a possibility strikes me…“Reggie’s Big…,” and then it’s my turn to blush. I pour more coffee to hide my embarrassment.

The wind claws at the walls of the Whymper, but there’s no sense of imminent collapse as there’d been a week ago at Camp III. And even if this tent were to tear free, we have the two unused Meades and Reggie’s Big…Tent…as lifeboats in the storm.

Unless, of course, we don’t have time to get out of the tent when its tie-downs and stakes pull free in the gale. In that case we’ll just all try to claw through canvas as the Whymper slides over the edge into a bottomless crevasse or a thousand vertical feet down onto the glacier proper.

We’re settling into our sleeping bags and still sipping the last of our coffee when I take out the book I’d packed up with me. It’s the popular wartime anthology of English verse The Spirit of Man, and I begin reading a Tennyson poem aloud to everyone when the Deacon suddenly says, “Excuse me, Jake. May I see that book?”

“Of course.” I stop reading and hand it to him.

The Deacon stands, still in boots, tugs on his down jacket, furls up his sleeping bag, grabs his personal rucksack, and goes out the tent door into the maelstrom.

Confused, smiling to myself thinking it’s some joke—perhaps having to do with toilet paper, although we’ve all brought some with us—I stick my head and shoulders out of the Whymper tent just long enough to see the Deacon hurling The Spirit of Man into one of the deeper crevasses. Then he disappears through the swirling snow toward one of the gear-crowded Meade tents.

I close the tent flap and turn toward J.C. and Tejbir. Both men look as startled and confused as I feel.

I’m shaking my head, trying to think of something to say, wondering if the altitude has driven our older English friend temporarily mad, when the flaps are suddenly unlaced and Reggie steps through. She’s not wearing her down outer layers but is carrying them and her eiderdown sleeping bag and inflatable sleeping cushion.

“May I come in?” she asks after she’s already inside and re-lashing the door shut behind her.

“Please…yes…please do…of course,” J.C. and I are babbling. Tejbir continues staring and I remember that his grasp of English tends to slip when he’s upset or confused.

We make room as Reggie lays out her sleeping pad and bag, takes off her unlaced boots, and slithers down into her bag while still sitting up. She speaks to Tejbir in rapid-fire Nepalese and the Sherpa nods, gets into his boots, folds his sleeping bag, grabs his rucksack, and goes out into the storm.

“I just suggested to Tejbir that since I’d be sleeping in this tent tonight—if it’s all right with you fellows—Tenzing Bothia might be lonely in my dome tent. Tejbir took the hint. This will give us more room to spread out.”

Sleeping in here tonight, I think giddily. Then I realize the absurdity of my Victorian-era shock. Besides the mummy-style sleeping bags themselves, all three of us are still dressed in multiple layers of cotton, wool, and goose down. I’m reminded of a tale I’d heard in England about Sir Robert Falcon Scott at the South Pole. Evidently Scott was rather stuffy about rank and social class—he’s said to have hung a blanket between the enlisted men’s and the officers’ parts of the single room in the large shack they built near the coast—but during the early part of his push to the Pole, while there were others there who would return to the shack and survive the experience, someone deferentially asked Scott why he took more time than the others when he stepped out into the terrible cold at night to attend to the call of nature. “Basically,” Scott is reported to have said, “it’s the problem of getting two inches of business out of seven inches of clothing.”

In other words, Lady Bromley-Montfort was safe with us tonight. Of course, she would have been even if we’d all been sleeping naked.

“I was out going to the loo when I saw Mr. Deacon throw a book over the side of the cliff and then take himself off to make room in the Meade tent we half-filled with provisions for the upper camps,” she says.

This gives me pause. Going to the loo? For urinating in storms like this, we male climbers don’t leave the tent—we’re not as particular about such things as Scott was—but merely use what we politely call “a piss bottle.” We covertly—or not so covertly—dump it outside when conditions improve, but I’ve never thought about the problems a woman climber might have with even the simpler form of…“going to the loo.” I find myself wondering if she teeters on the edge of crevasses, and I also worry about her getting frostbite.

I won’t admit to blushing again, but I do look away until I regain my composure.

“What was the book?” asks Reggie. I realize that J.C. is waiting for me to answer.

“Oh, the Robert Bridges anthology of English verse, The Spirit of Man,” I say quickly. “I’d heard that George Leigh Mallory had read aloud from it to his tent mates here at Camp Four and thought it might be…appropriate…if…,” I trail off.

Reggie nods. “I understand why Mr. Deacon tossed the book off the Col.”

I look at J.C., but he looks as confused as I feel. Has the Deacon gone a bit mad because of the altitude? Are we supposed to believe that he’s still angry at Mallory—or jealous of him? Nothing seems to make sense.

Then Reggie asks something that takes me from the realm of the surreal directly to the impossible.

“Have either of you seen your friend Richard Davis Deacon naked?” she asks in a calm voice.

Jean-Claude and I look at each other again, but neither of us can muster more of an answer than a headshake toward her.

“I didn’t think so,” she says. “I have.”

My God, she and the Deacon have been lovers since we met her in Darjeeling, I think. All the irritable banter has been a smokescreen.

J.C. somehow manages to ask the important question. Perhaps it’s easier for a Frenchman. “May I ask when have you seen him naked, my lady?”

Reggie smiles. “The first night you were all at my Darjeeling plantation. But it’s not what you’re thinking. I had Pasang deliberately drug Mr. Deacon’s brandy with a draught of morphine so that he’d sleep deeply. Pasang and I then examined his body using only candles for light. Luckily, in warmer climes, your Mr. Deacon sleeps in the nude. It was nothing personal, you understand. Purely a medical necessity.”

Now, there’s absolutely nothing to say to this, so I don’t. It’s not only crazy but outrageous. Nothing personal? What could be more personal than someone drugging you to inspect you while you’re naked? I find myself wondering if she and Pasang inspected all of us that night—I remember sleeping deeply. But why would she?

Neither J.C. nor I ask that question aloud, but Reggie answers it.

“Did either of you know Mr. Deacon before the War?”

We shake our heads.

“Did either of you know him during the years immediately after the War?”

Again we signify we did not. Sometimes I forget that Jean-Claude met and began climbing with the Deacon just two months before I did.

Reggie sighs. “Captain R. D. Deacon was cited in no fewer than fourteen official despatches during the War,” she says softly. “Do you get the full import of that information?”

“That Ree-shard is very brave?” J.C. says tentatively.

Reggie smiles. “Amidst all that carnage and bravery,” she says, “to be singled out for praise in four or five despatches is extraordinary. To be mentioned in seven or eight is usually associated only with those so courageous that they invariably died in battle. Captain Deacon—he refused multiple attempts to promote him to major or colonel, you know—was in the thick of the battle at Mons, when they inserted the British Expeditionary Forces into the hole in the front at the First Battle of the Marne, at Ypres—which many British soldiers pronounced ‘Yippers’—at Loos in the Battle of Artois in nineteen fifteen, at the Somme in February nineteen sixteen when the British lost fifty-eight thousand men before breakfast the first day, in the crater at the Battle of Messines, and finally in some of the worst fighting at both Passchendaele in nineteen seventeen and the Second Battle of the Marne in nineteen eighteen.”

“How do you know all this?” I ask.

“My late cousin Charles was one source,” says Reggie. “Cousin Percival was an even better source.”

“I thought that Percival—young Bromley—hadn’t fought in the War,” says Jean-Claude.

“Percival did not fight in the War,” says Reggie. “At least not as a soldier in uniform in the way Captain Deacon and my cousin Charles did. But Percival’s contacts in the government and the War Department were…let us say…extensive.”

“But your cousin Percy was dead by the time you knew that Ree-shard was coming on this mission,” persists J.C.

“Oui,” says Reggie. “But dropping Percival’s name opened certain doors…or I should say file drawers…for me in the last few months.”

“I don’t understand,” I say, the protest more than audible in my tone. “How on earth does the Deacon’s admirable war record justify you and Pasang drugging him and looking at him naked as he slept?”

“I had already made arrangements for this spring’s expedition to find Percival’s remains,” Reggie says. “I had three alpine guides—Swiss—lined up to come back here to the mountain with me. When I heard that you and Jean-Claude were coming with Mr. Deacon—who saw his chance to use my aunt Elizabeth’s wealth to fund you all—and that you’d actually landed at Calcutta, I had to know if Mr. Deacon was physically fit.”

“Of course he is,” I say, not even trying to hide the indignation I feel. “You’ve seen him trek and climb. He’s almost certainly the strongest of us all.”

Reggie shrugs slightly, but not enough to show apology or regret. “I knew from Cousin Charles—and the classified War Department records Charles’s and Percival’s contacts had got for me—that Captain Deacon was wounded no fewer than twelve times. At no time did he allow himself to be invalided home to England the way, say, George Mallory did. Mallory was a second lieutenant in the Fortieth Siege Battery at the Somme—he served all of his time at the Front in an artillery unit behind the front lines, as such—and while he saw men killed near him, Second Lieutenant Mallory was never posted directly at the Front for any length of time the way Richard Deacon was in the infantry. Mallory was invalided out and back to England for surgery—it was an old ankle injury which occurred before the War, the result, I believe, of a fall while rock scrambling in a quarry. He was invalided out of France on eight April nineteen seventeen, the day before the Battle of Arras, in which forty thousand British soldiers died. And the battle in which Captain Deacon was wounded for the fifth time. George Mallory—who had friends on high, no pun intended—spent most of the rest of the War in England, both recuperating and working in training units. He was still on convalescent leave when he felt well enough to go climbing at Pen-y-Pas in Wales with friends. Mallory was ordered back to his artillery battalion in time for the terrible Battle of Passchendaele, but he missed arriving there on time due to another injury in England—this time damage to his foot and thumb when he had an accident with his motorcycle in Winchester. You might say, if such things were possible to say, that Second Lieutenant George Mallory had an easy war.

“Captain Deacon, on the other hand, kept returning to the Front in spite of his injuries. He never allowed himself to be invalided back to England. As far as I know, he never returned to England during the entire War—very, very unusual for an officer. It was only a day’s travel from the Front to London or home, and officers took advantage of almost every leave to make that trip. As for the despatches and wounds, I was also aware that, at least twice, Captain Deacon had been directly exposed to mustard gas.”

“His lungs are fine,” I say. “His eyes are fine.”

“Ahh,” says Jean-Claude as if he finally comprehends something.

Reggie shakes her head. “You don’t understand, Jake. Mustard gas not only attacks the eyes and lungs and mucous membranes in a person but—as it did with poor Cousin Charles—when it’s spattered directly upon one’s body, the yellow powder of the gas eats directly into flesh and muscle in a wound that will never heal. Sufferers from mustard gas contact have bleeding, suppurating wounds that have to be re-dressed every day of their lives. My dear cousin Charles suffered from precisely such suppurating wounds. Do either of you remember the name John de Vere Hazard?”

“Hazard was on last year’s expedition,” says Jean-Claude. “He’s the fellow who left four Sherpas behind here on the North Col in a storm—a storm like this one—and made Mallory, Somervell, and the others risk their lives going up from Camp Three to get them down.”

Reggie nods. “Mr. Hazard received the Military Cross during the War. A very serious decoration for exemplary service and for receiving wounds in the line of duty. Mr. Deacon won it four times during the War. Mr. Hazard came on the Everest expedition last year with his wounds—especially bad were the ones caused by contact with solid mustard gas, but he also had shrapnel in his back and wounds from machine gun fire in his thigh and hips. Hazard’s wounds opened while he was climbing here. Beneath his wool and cotton, the poor man was bleeding constantly. When he was most needed, he was most incapacitated.”

“How can you know all this?” I say again.

“My cousins Charles and Percy had many contacts,” says Reggie. “I’ve also had a long history of exchanging letters with Colonel Teddy Norton, whom you met last autumn at the Royal Geographical Society digs.”

“So,” says J.C., “you felt that you had to…vet, I believe is the legal language in English…vet Richard Deacon by having Dr. Pasang look at his wounds while the Deacon slept under the influence of morphine at your plantation?”

“Yes,” says Reggie. There’s no defiance in her tone, but still no sound of shame, either.

“What did you find?” asks Jean-Claude.

I turn to shoot a harsh glance at J.C.

“Scar tissue in more than a dozen places, as you might imagine,” replies Reggie. “Some muscle in his left calf missing due to a machine gun wound there. At least three sets of scars on his torso where shrapnel or bullets passed all the way through Captain Deacon, obviously not striking any vital blood vessels or organs. Naked, your Captain Richard Davis Deacon’s scars, front and back, look like a spider has been weaving white webs in his flesh.”

“That took one hell of a lot of cheek to spy on him like that,” I say, my voice as harsh as I can make it while still speaking to a lady.

Reggie nods. “It did. It was an almost unforgivable violation of Mr. Deacon’s privacy. But I had to know. The three Swiss alpine guides I’d contacted to help me in the retrieval of Percival’s body had already set sail from Europe, and I had to cable them in Colombo if I was going to cancel their participation and climb here with the three of you instead.”

“Did Ree-shard pass your muster?” J.C. doesn’t sound angry, only a little bemused. I doubt if he’d use the same tone if it had been him whom Reggie had been peering at naked. Or, on second thought, perhaps he would.

“He did,” says Reggie. “But Pasang informs me that due to the placement and severity of some of the old wounds, your Mr. Deacon must be in constant pain.”

“So what?” I say. “A lot of world-class alpinists climb through pain.”

“Probably not this much pain,” replies Reggie. “And I regret that I lied to all of you about my dear cousin Charles succumbing to his wounds while you were in transit to India. In truth, he took his own life. According to my aunt Elizabeth—Lady Bromley—after more than seven years of bravely tolerating his wounds, he simply could no longer bear the pain. He used his service revolver.”

This silences us for several long minutes.

“Just out of curiosity,” Jean-Claude says at last, “would you tell us again the names of the three Swiss guides you’d hired?”

Reggie names them again and Jean-Claude whistles, eyes wide with awe or respect. “I am surprised, Lady Bromley-Montfort, that you turned them back and have come with us.”

Reggie smiles. “I paid the three Swiss guides a fee for their time, sent them a generous cheque when they turned back from Colombo, but you three were already being paid by my aunt. And my aunt receives her income from the plantation in Darjeeling which I’ve run since I was fourteen years old. Going ahead with you three—and Pasang and the Tiger Sherpas—seemed like the most economical thing to do. But I had to know about Mr. Deacon’s wounds…whether his body was up to this climb or not. He’s thirty-seven years old, you know.”

“George Mallory was thirty-seven when he disappeared last year,” I say idiotically. No one responds.

Jean-Claude shrugs his upper body out of the cocoon of his sleeping bag. He has to free his hands. He cannot talk earnestly without the use of his hands.

“But, Madame, you asked us if we had known Ree-shard Deacon in the years right after the War. Is that period somehow relevant to your concerns about our friend’s leadership?”

“Do you have any knowledge of Mr. Deacon’s actions right after the War?” asks Reggie.

“Only that he came to the Swiss and French Alps and spent most of his time climbing,” says J.C.

Reggie nods. “Mr. Deacon’s mother died some years before the War. His father died of a heart attack in nineteen seventeen. Mr. Deacon had an older brother, Gerald, but he was killed as an RAF pilot in early nineteen eighteen. That left Richard Davis Deacon not only in total possession of his two huge estates—Brambles, the larger home, makes my aunt Elizabeth’s Bromley House look like a shack in comparison—but also an earl, a peer of the realm, and a member of the House of Lords.”

“Earl Deacon?” I say.

Reggie laughs. “I love Americans. No, Mr. Deacon is, despite his objections, the ninth Earl of Watersbury.” She pronounces it in that slurry British way…Watrsbreee.

“Despite his objections?” says J.C., his palms upward now.

“Mr. Deacon cannot legally renounce his hereditary title,” says Reggie. “But he refuses to answer to it, has given away most of his estates, and will not take his seat in the House of Lords.”

“I didn’t know that someone would not want to be an earl,” I say. “Nor that he has to be, even if he doesn’t want to be.”

“Neither do many people in the United Kingdom,” says Reggie. “In the meantime, in nineteen eighteen, from France, I believe, Mr. Deacon donated his two estates and twenty-nine thousand acres and the estates’ revenues to the Crown. He suggested they turn his nine-hundred-year-old primary home, Brambles, into a convalescent home. He never returned to it after the war. He has a small income—I believe derived from royalties coming in now and then from novels or poetry he wrote under various noms de plume before the War—and he’s stayed in the Alps almost constantly since nineteen eighteen.”

“Are you saying that Richard Davis Deacon is nuts?” I ask her.

Reggie looks straight at me, and those ultramarine eyes are narrowed. “Nothing of the sort,” she says sharply. “I am trying to explain why your friend took your book of poetry and threw it over the ice cliff.”

“I don’t get it,” I say.

“Mr. Deacon knows that in September nineteen fourteen, when war with Germany was barely under way, the newly created—and top-secret—War Propaganda Bureau had a secret meeting with some of England’s top writers and poets at Wellington House, Buckingham Gate. Thomas Hardy was there, as was Mr. H. G. Wells…”

“War of the Worlds!” I cry.

Reggie nods and goes on. “Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield—the Catholic writer—G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle…G. M. Trevelyan, J. M. Barrie…”

“Peter Pan!” cries J.C.

“Evidently Mr. Deacon was a well enough respected poet that he was also invited,” she says softly. “Along with his poet friend Robert Bridges. All they were asked to do during the War—even the relatively younger men such as Mr. Deacon—was to be exempted from the military call-up and to use their literary talents for the war effort. Primarily in keeping the British public’s morale up and never…never…allowing them to know how terrible the actual fighting might turn out to be.”

“But the Deacon enlisted instead,” says Jean-Claude, his fingers now folded together as if in prayer.

“Yes,” says Reggie. “But his poet friend Robert Bridges stayed behind and didn’t write another word of his own poetry throughout the War. Instead, Bridges edited an anthology of inspiring English verse—the very Spirit of Man that George Mallory read from twice here at Camp Four and which you tried to read from this evening, Jake.”

I’m confused. “But it’s all good English verse,” I say. “Classic stuff. There’s even one of the Deacon’s early poems in it.”

“And no mention whatsoever of war,” says Reggie.

“That’s correct,” I say. “A lot of topics but no English verse about war. And…”

Suddenly I stop. I think I’m beginning to understand.

“The newspapers were part of the propaganda effort,” says Reggie. “Of course they had to be, hadn’t they? Casualty lists had to be published there, but the real war was never described in its terrible detail…not once. All newspapers were willing subjects of the Propaganda Bureau. My cousin Charles wrote me in nineteen seventeen that Lloyd George had told C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian that, and I think I quote correctly, ‘if the people really knew’—he meant what the slaughter in France and Belgium was really like—‘if the people really knew, the War would be stopped tomorrow.’”

My voice, when I try to speak, is slow and cautious, as if my words were threading their way through a crevasse field. “So The Spirit of Man…was part…of the Propaganda Bureau’s…effort to keep the War going no matter what the cost in lives.”

Reggie says nothing and doesn’t even nod, but I can see that she’s proud of me for catching up to things. I’m not used to being the slow pupil in the class, but I pride myself on being smart enough to know if and when I am.

Jean-Claude looks troubled. “Reggie—Lady Bromley-Montfort,” he says just loudly enough to be heard over the noise of the wind rattling the tent walls, “you must have another reason for telling us this incredibly personal information about Ree-shard.”

“I do,” says Reggie. “I know how eager all three of you are to use my aunt’s money to get a chance to climb Mount Everest. But you see, I’m not totally convinced that dear Mr. Richard Davis Deacon wants to return from the mountain.”