The Abominable: A Novel

Saturday, May 16, 1925

The Deacon’s plan, before he stole my book and stalked off, was for us to wake in the middle of the night, make some hot tea and get dressed by our hissing lanterns, and be out of the tent and climbing toward Camp V somewhere around four in the morning, so as J.C., Reggie, and I crawl deeper into our mummy bags to get some sleep, I set my pocket watch to vibrate me awake at 3:30. The watch is a beautiful and expensive thing, a gift from my father upon my graduation from Harvard, and whatever else happens on Mount Everest, I most dearly want no harm to come to it. It has a clever little feature whereby one can set a time and the watch will soundlessly announce that set time with the insistent flutter of a small metal arm set into the back of the device.

I keep the watch in a waistcoat pocket, and at 3:30 a.m. there comes the frenzied flutter over my heart. Despite my fatigue, I awake at once.

Oddly, I’ve managed to sleep quite a bit during the few hours allowed us. Once Jean-Claude had shaken me awake and whispered, “You’re not breathing, Jake,” and I’d taken a snort of English air from the bottle we’d rigged between us, but other than that, it has been my best sleep so far at altitude. At Camp III, just the exertion of rolling over had led to my gasping awake, panting from the effort, and I’d kept rolling over onto irritating patches of my own frozen breath, but here, 1,500 feet higher, I’ve slept like a baby.

Well, we aren’t leaving for Camp V this morning. The sides of the tent are still rippling and snapping, and I can clearly hear the rattle of countless snow pellets on canvas. Another day to sleep and catch up on rest, I think gratefully while burrowing back into my bag, even while the more conscious part of my brain knows that staying another day at this altitude isn’t a good idea.

The term “Death Zone” wasn’t used much in 1925, but the basic understanding of it was just becoming known after three British expeditions to Everest.

Here at Camp IV our bodies are already suffering the consequences of altitude. I mentioned earlier in this narrative that there’s as much oxygen at altitude as at sea level—20.93 percent, to be pedantic—but with the decreasing atmospheric pressure, our lungs and bodies can’t gain access to that precious resource. Way down at Camp I, at only 17,800 feet of altitude, the atmospheric pressure—and thus the oxygen our bodies can normally drag into our lungs—is half that at sea level. If we make it to the summit of this mountain at just over 29,000 feet, the pressure will be one-third that at sea level, barely enough oxygen to allow one to stay conscious and not enough to prevent headaches, nausea, severe “mountain lassitude,” and—perhaps the worst thing from a climber’s point of view—severe mental grogginess, hallucinations, and impaired judgment.

So above 8,000 meters—a little more than 24,000 feet, not much more than 500 feet higher than where we are sleeping this night on the North Col—the once-and-future term “the Death Zone” becomes an absolute imperative not to linger. At and above 8,000 meters, your body is dying—literally dying, more so every minute you stay at such an altitude. The technical term is necrosis. Not only will brain cells be dying by the millions, Dr. Pasang has explained, but the rest of the brain fails to function properly in the fog of oxygen deprivation, even while our circulation becomes thick and sluggish and major organs begin to swell (as our hearts already have for all of us, even the Sherpas), literally swelling toward bursting, or generally just shut down and cease to work at all.

Our average heartbeats have long since quickened to 140 beats per minute or more, making every upward step or simple physical activity dangerous as well as difficult. In a vain attempt to get more oxygen to our muscles and brains, our blood has already dramatically thickened in our veins, increasing the likelihood of fatal strokes or thrombosis every hour we stay at this altitude or climb higher. Ironically, because the blood in our veins has turned a much darker red due to oxygen shortage, our faces, lips, and extremities tend to glow blue.

Only the occasional whiff of English air helps us ward off some of these more severe problems.

And we’re still 5,500 feet below the mountain’s summit.

Thinking We have to get down lower soon, I nonetheless burrow deeper into my eiderdown bag and drift back to sleep. I admit to taking a long inhalation from the oxygen tank first. It warms my frozen feet and toes.

Then someone or something is crashing through the tent doors and I snap awake, trying to sit up. It takes three attempts to do so.

Reggie is gone. Out to the loo? I think but then notice that her sleeping bag is missing.

It’s the Deacon coming in through the door flaps amidst a flurry of snow and a moving wall of cold air. If it weren’t for the red bands he’d earlier wrapped around the arms of his goose down duvet, I wouldn’t recognize him: he’s absolutely coated with snow and ice, his flying helmet, balaclava, and goggles are rimmed with icicles, and his huge outer mittens make cracking-ice noises when he tries to remove them. He has an ice-covered oxygen rig on his back, but the mask isn’t over his face, and I’m sure the regulator has been switched to Closed.

“Chilly morning,” he says, panting.

I pull my watch out. It is a little after seven a.m.

“Where have you been, Ree-shard?” J.C.’s beard, I notice, is coming in much more nicely than mine. I seem to be all stubble and itch.

“Just seeing if the North Ridge will go,” answers the Deacon. “It won’t.”

“The snow?” I say.

“The wind,” says the Deacon. “It must be well over one hundred and twenty miles per hour. I was trying to walk up the slabs while leaning forward so far that my nose was almost touching granite.”

“Climbing alone?” says Jean-Claude, a hint of rebuke in his voice. “Not what you would advise us to do, Ree-shard.”

“I know.” The Deacon has fumbled our Unna cooker into place just inside the Whymper’s outer vestibule, and is trying to use his frozen hands to get a match lit indoors and transferred to the cooker. The wind blows it out each time. “To hell with it,” he says and brings the cooker inside—another total breach of fire safety protocol. I light the Meta for him, and he sets a cauldron of snow in the most sheltered part of the small vestibule.

“I don’t think we’ll get to Camp Five,” he says, unzipping outer layers as if the below-freezing temperature in the tent were some tropical climate.

“I poked my head in to wake them all,” continues the Deacon. “Reggie’s been up for a while, working on a stove that won’t bring water to boil. Evidently this morning’s giving them some insomnia, headaches, breathing problems, cold toes, sore throats, and sour thoughts.”

The Deacon shows white teeth through the icicles still dangling from his new beard. “I think this beautiful bitch of a mountain has already declared war on us, my friends. God or the gods or destiny or chance grant that we be worthy of the challenge.” Suddenly he pulls off his inner mitten and silk glove and thrusts his bare, bluish right hand toward me. “Jake, I apologize sincerely and completely and without reservation for my idiocy in taking and tossing your book last night. There’s no excuse for such behavior. I shall buy you a new copy—perhaps get Bridges to autograph it for you—as soon as we get back from this adventure.”

Since Robert Bridges has been the Poet Laureate of England since 1913, I consider that one hell of a decent offer.

I don’t know what to say, so I just shake his offered hand. It’s like grasping a slab of frozen beef.

Reggie comes in and laces the tent flaps behind her. She’s wearing every bit of goose down outerwear we had available. The only thing that would prevent her from climbing the mountain dressed as she is now is the high Laplander furred boots that several of us prefer to wear in camp while our mountain boots dry. The Laplander boots have relatively soft soles that won’t work on near-vertical snow, rock, and ice.

“Tenzing Bothia’s sick,” she says without greeting or prelude. “He’s been vomiting the last six or seven hours. We need to get him down…at least to Camp Three but preferably lower.”

The Deacon sighs. We have a tough decision pending. If we stay here at Camp IV on the Col, we get weaker by the hour, but we’re in a good position to make a break for Camp V high on the North Ridge if the weather moderates. Then again, that may not happen for a week or more. But if we all go down, there’ll be hell to pay in terms of logistics. Camp III at the bottom of the ice wall is already overflowing with Sherpas, every tent filled. Some of them are probably already suffering from mountain lassitude and also may have to be evacuated down the mountain to Base Camp. Our loads—meant for Camps V and VI and our search for Percival up there—are spread out between Camps I and IV, with the carefully planned schedule of alternating Sherpa carries now shot to hell.

I know that every Everest expedition so far—all three of them—has run into this same problem, no matter how careful the planning or how large the number of porters, but that’s little solace to us now as we huddle in this flapping Whymper tent at 23,500 feet.

“I’ll take Tenzing down,” says Jean-Claude. “And I’ll take Tejbir Norgay with me.”

“Tejbir’s feeling all right,” says Reggie. “Just tired.”

“But he can help me with Tenzing on the ropes,” says J.C. “And the two of us can help him down to Camp Two or One if we have to go that far.”

The Deacon thinks a moment and nods. “If we all go down now, we’ll be bumping six Sherpas out of the tents at Camp Three.”

“We’ll only have three of your jumars left for descending or ascending fixed ropes if we have to follow you or fix ropes higher,” I say. My mind feels like it’s been wrapped in fuzzy wool.

“I still know how to rig a friction knot,” says Reggie.

I want to slap my forehead. How quickly we get addicted to new devices. A friction knot on the fixed ropes is probably safer during descent than the mechanical doohickey that J.C. has built. Not as convenient, but surefire.

“Well, the three of us—Jake, Lady Bromley-Montfort, and I—still have to decide how long we should stay up here,” says the Deacon through iced whiskers. “We’re using the oxygen tanks for sleep and to help us when we feel seedy at night, but it’s a losing game just to stay here using up the English air. It’ll just mean more O-two rigs will have to be portered up for our real work at Camps Five and Six…not to mention any chance at a summit bid or for a sustained search for Lord Percival and Meyer…and we have only so many in reserve. Any thoughts about what we three do next?”

I’m actively surprised that the Deacon is putting this to a vote, or seeming to. Both his military background and personality usually lead him to take charge in any situation. And in Darjeeling we’d all agreed—even Reggie—that he’d be in charge when it came to the climbing part of the expedition.

Into the brief silence Jean-Claude says, “I think I can get Tenzing as low as he needs to be today and still climb back up here to Camp Four before nightfall. I can also relay orders to Pasang and everyone else as to who carries what up in relays as soon as the weather clears a little.”

“You can do all that descending and re-climbing,” says Reggie, “in this blizzard? In this wind? In this cold?”

Jean-Claude shrugs. “I believe so. I’ve done similar trips in similar weather in the Alps…and without the fixed ropes that we have in place now on both the ice wall and glacier. I’ll get new batteries for my Welsh miner’s lamp for the last part up here in the dark.”

“All right,” says the Deacon. “I suggest we follow Jean-Claude’s plan, get Tenzing as low as he needs to be today, move Tejbir down so we have some extra space for the next group of Sherpas carrying from here to Camp Five. But only for the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours—the four of us shouldn’t stay here longer than that. What do you all think?”

Again I’m surprised he’s putting it to a vote. I tell myself that it shows how much the Deacon respects our opinion.

“I agree,” says Reggie. “It’s Saturday morning. If this wind and snow haven’t disappeared or died down sufficiently by Monday morning, I vote we all go down—at least as low as Camp Two. The Sherpas can just damned well make room for us or go down to Base Camp.”

“Tomorrow, Sunday, is the seventeenth of May,” Jean-Claude says in a small voice.

The Deacon only stares at him.

“The day you designated as our summit day, Ree-shard.”

The Deacon’s only response is to run his bare hand through his wet beard. Much of the ice has remained there, but some has melted.

J.C. begins pulling on his outer layers. “I’ll go get Tenzing and Tejbir and start down now. Reggie, it’s your choice, but I suggest that you move into the Whymper here until we get more people back up the mountain to the Col. Every little bit of body heat helps the cause. When I get back, it will be four of us here. The Sherpas I bring can have the other tent.”

“I agree,” she says. “I’ll go get my things and let Tenzing and Tejbir know they’re going with you, Jean-Claude. I’ll be back in a minute and…oh…I’m bringing a book to read…Dickens’s Bleak House. I presume that it will be safe from search or seizure?”

The Deacon only smiles ruefully and scratches at his wet beard.

I awaken the next morning at 3:30 a.m. to the tripping of the little brass watch hammer vibrating over my heart. Immediately I become aware that there’s something missing…something wrong.

The wind has died away. Not a sound except the rasp of the others breathing. The tent walls are lined with the frost from our breath, but those walls aren’t moving. The air is very, very cold. I listen harder but can hear neither wind nor the previously constant background noise of blowing snow hitting canvas.

I pull on my boots and down jacket as quietly as I can, slither out of my bag, and try to slip out the door without waking anyone. Jean-Claude had returned after dark, at almost ten p.m. He reported that he’d delivered Tenzing to four Sherpas at Camp II to be brought down to Base Camp with no difficulty, and then he drank nearly two full thermoses of water we’d set aside for him and fell asleep almost before he was in his bag.

Outside, I stretch and take a few careful steps away from the snow-heaped tents. Too many steps and I’ll be in crevasse territory or near the edge of the Col. When I’m sure I’m on safe ground, I pause and look down and up and around.

What an incredible sight.

The moon is waning somewhere between half and quarter full, but there’s enough light from that bright sliver and from the full sky of stars to make the snow slopes and summit of Changtse behind me and Everest above me glow white and bright as if generating their own cold lunar radiance. To the north, below the Col, heavy moonlit cloud masses churn in the milky light, surging as thick as overflowing cream to within 200 or 300 feet of the top of the North Col. Camp III and everything below is socked in—as I would later hear my biplane-pilot friends use the term—but the sky up here is bright with stars and the moon. Farther to the north, rising out of the clouds like the finned spine of some great glowing saurian thing, I can see a procession of snow-topped 8,000-meter peaks marching deep into Tibet, perhaps into China.

“An impressive view, isn’t it?”

I just about jump off the Col at the sound of the soft voice behind me. The Deacon’s been standing there all this time.

“How long have you been up?” I whisper.

“A while.”

“Is that the monsoon piling up down there?”

The Deacon-shadow shakes its head. “Remember, the monsoon comes from the west and south. That’s just the storm from the north that’s been bothering us. There’s a lot of weather from the north until about ten days to a week before the monsoon arrives from the west. That week or so is the best climbing weather of the year for Everest.”

He pours something from a thermos and hands me the cup. I drink it greedily: tepid Ovaltine.

“Do you think we’re in that window of good weather?” I whisper.

“Hard to tell, Jake. But I think we should push on to Camp Five today.”

I sip my drink and nod. “Shall I wake the others?”

“No, let them sleep,” whispers the Deacon. “Jean-Claude’s worn out. I notice that Reggie’s not sleeping well…had to use the oxygen repeatedly. I’ll make breakfast for you climbers starting in an hour. You can sleep until five or so.”

“‘You climbers’?” I repeat. “Aren’t you climbing to Camp Five today?”

“I don’t think so.” He’s speaking to me, but his eyes are constantly scanning the moonlit North Ridge, the North East Ridge, and the summit of Everest. “With luck, the two Meade tents that we positioned there will still be up there waiting for you. You and Reggie and Jean-Claude can settle in and prepare for the search for Bromley. I think to do a search in the right way, we’ll also have to have a Camp Six as close to twenty-seven thousand feet as we can. I’ll go down when you three start climbing and come back up later today with Pasang and the strongest Tigers. We’ll use Jean-Claude’s bicycle apparatus to get heavy loads up to the North Col and then repack food, oxygen rigs, and at least one tent for the highest camp and get it to you tomorrow morning. Monday.”

“Today’s summit day,” I whisper. “The seventeenth.”

I can see the Deacon’s teeth gleam in the moonlight. “If it weren’t for this search, it could be. All four of us push straight on and make the bid for the summit, returning to Camp Five by dark.”

“But you’re not going to do that? I thought you—the three of us—were going to make a dash for the summit and search afterward. What made you change your mind?”

The thin shadow shakes its hooded head. “I could lie to Lady Bromley-Montfort and tell her that we’d look for her cousin’s remains on the way down from the summit, but I’ve been up above twenty-six thousand feet, Jake. She was right in Darjeeling. One shot at the highest ridges on Everest and this damned mountain just takes everything out of you. One day you’re filled with adrenaline and ready to go for the summit come hell or high water. The next day, Sherpas are helping you stagger down to Base Camp—your energy gone, your heart enlarged, your eyes half-blinded, and your toes and fingers frozen. I almost set the summit dash for today, but I promised the lady that we’d search for Percival, and we’ll spend a couple of days doing just that before we decide if we’re still strong enough for a summit attempt.”

I look up at the snow-to-black whaleback of the North Ridge rising steeply above us. I haven’t brought an oxygen rig out, and I find myself gasping for breath just to keep standing there. Part of me is relieved at this reprieve—I don’t want to disappear up on those heights the way Mallory and Irvine did last year—but a larger part of me is bitterly disappointed. This may be the end of our summit dreams. Why has the Deacon changed his mind at this late date? Our goal has always been to climb the damn mountain.

“That will mean a lot of time spent above eight thousand meters,” I finally say aloud.

“Probably too much.” He seems to be acknowledging that he’s decided to throw away our best chance at climbing Mount Everest, but he’s not telling me why he’s decided this. Especially so late in the game. I can see the North East Ridge gleaming like a highway of diamonds far above us. All the way to the summit. And no hint of the usual killer winds.

“Do you think there’s much chance of actually finding Lord Percival?” I manage at last.

“No,” says the Deacon. “Not one chance in a hundred would be my guess. But we promised we’d try. We took Lady Bromley’s money.”

I have nothing to say to that. I hand back my empty cup, and he screws it onto the top of the thermos.

“Go get some more sleep, Jake. Take a few whiffs of good old English air, stay warm, and sleep if you can. I’ll wake you when I get breakfast heating on the Unna cooker.”

Before crawling back into the tent, I take a final look around at the magical landscape: Everest and its lesser attendant peaks glowing in the starlight, clouds clustered below the level of the North Col, only the slightest visible streamer of spindrift coming off the summit of the ultimate peak we’re climbing toward in a few hours. For the first time since we’ve set out from England, part of me feels, with real assurance rather than abstract bravado—We could have climbed this damned mountain today. We still can climb it in the next couple of days if we don’t waste a lot of time hunting for a dead man. It’s possible.