The Abominable: A Novel

Monday, May 18, 1925

Jake,” Reggie says softly, “if you’re awake, you might want to see this.”

I’m awake all right. Our “Camp VI” is a sad joke—the small 10-pound two-pole Meade tent precariously perched on a tilting slab so steep that we had to set our feet against the boulder that anchored the downhill end of the tent and sleep on an incline so steep that it felt as if we were half-standing. At least I’d thought to tie down an extra blanket on the flat face of the slab while we were lashing and weighting the tent to the side of the mountain, so the pure cold of this alien world at 27,000 feet hadn’t completely flowed up and into us from the cold rock all night.

I’d slept a few minutes during the darkness. I’d also been vaguely aware that, cocooned in our bags as we were, Reggie and I were still huddling together—rather like two passengers crowding together for warmth on the packed upper deck of an oddly tilted British double-decker bus on a London winter day. At least the winds were mild during the night. The suspense of waiting to be blown off this ridiculous excuse for a perch wouldn’t have allowed me even my few moments of half-sleep.

“Okay,” I say and sit up for the terrible ordeal of pulling on outer layers and boots that have stayed with me in the bag all night. My only concession to hygiene is to put on the last pair of clean cotton undersocks that are in my rucksack. It helps psychologically, if in no other way.

I crawl out of the uphill end of the tent. It’s like coming up and out of a hoar-frosted tunnel. Or perhaps it’s more like being born and finding out that you’re on the moon.

The band of sunlight has just moved down across our happy little home at 27,000 feet and I realize that the hissing noise I’ve been hearing for a while now isn’t snow, it is the last of the Unna cookers and Meta fuel blocks working to melt pathetically small pots of snow, one after the other. It must have been working for a while now, because Reggie—decked out in all her layers and sitting on her folded-up sleeping bag, boots braced against a ridge in a slab to keep her from sliding off the mountain—has already filled three of our thermoses with…something tepid.

I try to remember the boiling point of water at 27,000 feet—164 and some decimal degrees Fahrenheit? 162?—anyway, something so cool that before long, if we keep climbing, it seems the water will be boiling in the pot without any burner under it.

Actually, I vaguely remember George Finch saying that if we humans ever managed to get into outer space—totally above the atmosphere—our blood would boil in our veins and brains even while the temperature on the shaded side of our bodies might be more than 200 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. “Of course,” Finch had added to make us feel better (it was while we were eating dessert at the four-star Zurich restaurant), “you wouldn’t have to worry about your blood boiling in outer space, since your lungs and bodies would already have exploded like those poor deep-sea creatures we dredge up from the depths from time to time.”

That had put me off my pudding.

I haul my sleeping bag up the slab slope to sit next to Reggie. As I’m tucking it under my butt, my boots slip—I haven’t put on crampons yet because my fingers aren’t up to all the strap-tying—and Reggie has to steady me with a firm hand again before my heels can find another wedge of rock to hold the rest of me in place. We’d had to move slightly onto the North Face to find even this pathetic campsite. There’d been no sign of Mallory and Irvine’s Camp VI from last year; we may have missed seeing it in the long shadows, rock mazes, and swirling snow at dusk. And while the Face here next to the North Ridge and just below the Yellow Band doesn’t seem all that steep—perhaps the 35- to 40-degree slate roof of the church that George Mallory had so famously climbed as a boy would be a good comparison—one real slip might well keep one falling the 6,000 feet or so to the East Rongbuk Glacier.

“How do you feel, Jake?” I realize that she’s not using oxygen, and I’m glad I haven’t yet dragged my overnight oxygen tank out of the tent.

“Great,” I say dully. If my skull had been stuffed with wool down at Camp V altitude, up here at Camp VI it was mostly empty except for pain…and thinking or speaking is enough to cause that pain to leap and cavort.

“You coughed all night,” says Reggie.

I’d noticed that. The constant cough—caused, I presume, by the unbelievable dryness that reaches into the smallest vesicles in your lungs and dries up the mucus in your throat at this altitude—sometimes makes you feel that you’re literally going to cough your guts up.

“Just the cold air,” I say. In truth, I feel that there’s something solid stuck in my throat. It’s a nauseating thought and I try not to dwell on it.

Reggie opens her arms. “I thought you might like to see the sunrise.”

“Oh…yeah…thanks,” I mumble.

My God, it’s beautiful. Part of my malfunctioning brain and warmth-desiring soul is dimly aware of this beauty. After a moment, both the reality of what I’m seeing and a bit of the rising sun’s warmth begin to sink into the semi-ambulatory chunk of frozen, coughing, shivering flesh that I’ve become.

At this moment, Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort and I are, without any doubt, the highest people on the planet to be touched by the rising sun. I look to my left and crane my aching neck to gaze up at the summit of Everest—so close! so infinitely far away!—just 2,000 impossible feet above, less than a mile of ridgeline to the west of us now, and the radiance of the sun shining a benediction on the reddish rock of the summit. The gleaming snowfields of the Summit Pyramid below the final vertical section to that summit look like something divine, something not of this world.

This altitude is not of this world, I think dully. We humans are not meant or evolved to be up here, I think, with some small sense of panic stirring in me. At the same time, a totally contradictory thought rises to the surface: I’m meant to be here. I’ve waited all my life for this.

What had John Keats said about Negative Capability—holding two opposite ideas in one’s mind at the same time without straining to reconcile them? Beats me. Maybe it hadn’t been Keats at all…maybe it had been Yeats or Thomas Jefferson or Edison. Wait…what was I just thinking about?

“Here, drink some of this,” says Reggie and hands me one of the thermoses. “It’s not hot, but it has caffeine in it.”

The tepid coffee almost makes me gag, but I decide that vomiting this stuff all over Reggie wouldn’t be the proper way to thank her for getting up before dawn at the top of the world to heat my morning coffee.

I realize that from time to time Reggie has been using the binoculars slung around her neck to scan the slopes below us.

“Anything?” I say.

“There’s just enough snow on the North Face…to make…every rock and boulder in it look like a human body at first glimpse.” She lowers the binoculars. “No. Nothing to see yet. Except those two human beings climbing directly towards us.”

“What?” I say and borrow her binoculars. It takes me a minute to find what she’s talking about, even with her pointing to help, since the objects are just gray specks moving slowly against gray-black rock along the ridge. It’s only when they move in front of the occasional small snowfield that I actually realize that the specks are alive and climbing.

“The Deacon leading,” I say.

“And Jean-Claude?”

“No, the second man on the rope is too tall for J.C. It must be a very tall Sherpa whom the Deacon is…wait! It’s Pasang!”

She takes the glasses back. I watch her face light up with pleasure. Somehow, that view is a perfect complement to the world of warming blue sky, clouds far below us in the valleys, huge glaciers visible winding back upon themselves where there are no low clouds, and scores of summits 20,000 feet and more in altitude igniting with the sun’s rays one after another like a series of tall, white candles being lit by an invisible altar boy. Below each newly lighted candle lies the white altar cloth of countless glaciers, ridges, and pristine snowfields.

It takes another half hour for the two figures to reach us—during much of the last part of that climb they are hidden from us as they work their way through the maze of gullies that starts about 1,000 feet below the Yellow Band and continues to the ridgeline above us—but then, suddenly, they’re with us. Waiting for our friends to reach our altitude has given Reggie and me time to eat a hearty breakfast—some English biscuits, bits of chocolate, a few spoonfuls of semi-thawed macaroni, and then a bit more chocolate and coffee. Reggie and I haven’t been conversing—the silence is what a writer type such as I’d once imagined myself to be (at least until I met that Hemingway fellow in Paris) might describe as “companionable.” So I content myself with trying to get my groggy brain in gear by naming the summits already glowing with light: the cliffs and North Peak of Everest itself, of course; the snowy top of what must be Kanchenjunga far to the east; Cho Oyu to the west; Lhotse just beginning to catch the light to the south; the more distant Gyankar range slowly changing from intangible shadow to granite solidity in the sun’s rays; and far, far away, peering at us over the now visible curve of the earth, some incredibly high peak in Central Tibet. I have no idea what it might be.

Then the Deacon and Pasang are here, still roped together on 60 feet of Deacon Miracle Rope. Reggie and I exchange pleasurably guilty glances about this—we never did rope together during the previous day’s climb, not even after we moved out onto the North Face or had to claw our way up through the gullies, using our hands in some steep places. I can’t quite understand why that little secret between us pleases me so much.

“It’s not even seven a.m.,” says Reggie. “When on earth…did you leave? And from where?”

Pasang’s oxygen mask has been dangling free of his face for the entire time I’d been able to see him through the binoculars. I doubt that he’s run out of O₂, since I can see the tops of two tanks poking out of his rucksack. Those should easily have got him up from the North Col, even at the high-flow rate. And it’s certainly not like Dr. Pasang to show off. Perhaps he can just climb higher than us Europeans without needing the bottled oxygen. Whatever the fact of it may be, the Deacon has been wearing his mask until they arrive at our slab and find solid footing, but now shuts off the flow valve, lowers his mask, and stands gasping for a long moment before replying to Reggie’s question.

“Left…a little after…two a.m.,” he manages. “Camp…Five. Got there…yesterday…afternoon.”

I look at the Welsh miner’s lamp rigs still strapped over their wool caps just under their goose down hoods and have to smile. Between George Finch’s goose down garments, J.C.’s crampons and various other inventions, the Deacon’s new ropes and careful logistics, and my dashing, daring enthusiasm, we’ve all brought something special to this fourth and by far smallest expedition to Mount Everest. But it’s been Lady Bromley-Montfort’s damned miner’s lamps and idea of beginning the climb in the middle of the night, whether there’s a full moon out or not, that’s probably made the biggest difference in how high we’ll get.

“You made good time,” says Reggie. She unfurls her sleeping bag so that it’s at the Deacon’s feet. “Have a seat, gentlemen. But make sure your boot soles and heels have a good grip on something first.”

Pasang grins and continues standing, turning to look out at the view, then turning again to look at the Yellow Band, North East Ridge, and Summit Pyramid of Everest itself all looming so deceptively close above us. The Deacon takes great care in removing his rucksack—in 1922, he’d once told us, Howard Somervell had been somewhere around 26,000 feet when he’d carelessly set his pack down only to watch it fall 9,000 feet to the main Rongbuk Glacier—and propping it between two small boulders behind him as he slowly seats himself. Neither man has put on goggles yet; the Deacon’s face is burned so dark by high-altitude sunlight that he and Pasang might have passed for brothers.

“We…made good time,” the Deacon says at last, “because some…incredibly thoughtful…persons strung…hundreds of feet of…fixed rope on the few steep…parts.” He nods his thanks in our direction. “The red-flagged bamboo wands…through the…gullies were also…a…welcome touch.”

“It seemed the least we could do since we were coming this way anyway,” says Reggie with another warming smile.

“It’s good you…came up here a…day early,” says the Deacon. “Gives us a full extra day for searching the North Face.”

“We’re not going to search the entire North Face, are we?” asks Reggie. I know she’s not serious.

The Deacon smiles thinly and gestures downward. I notice that his lips are cracked and bleeding.

“We’ll follow the plan…of imagining a huge trapezoid…running down from the North East Ridge from…where the North Ridge meets it near the First Step.” He shifts awkwardly to look up toward the First Step, only the top of which is visible from this vantage point, and says, “My God, it all seems possible from here, does it not, Jake? But that verdammte Second Step…”

Reggie hands him her binoculars and the Deacon studies the Second Step the way I had earlier. “A bit of a rock-climbing problem, that,” he says. “But of course, that’s why we brought you along, Jake. You’re our leader on rock.”

“‘A bit of a rock-climbing problem’!” I exclaim. “I’ve been looking at that damned Second Step through the glasses for…the better part of an hour…when I haven’t been enjoying the sunrise…and it’s just as Norton or whoever it was at the RGS described it. The hundred-foot-tall vertical prow of a goddamned dreadnought coming out of the mists at you.” I take a few gulps of breath. “I apologize for the language, Reggie.”

“As you goddamned well should,” she says.

“Anyway,” continues the Deacon, shucking off his overmittens and opening gloved hands toward the steep expanse of rock below us, “we’ll search the trapezoid we…decided on earlier, but starting down from here, Camp Six, will be easier than climbing…from Camp Five.”

“Will you two have the energy to search today?” asks Reggie.

Pasang grins again. The Deacon makes a slightly sour face.

“We still have two full oxygen tanks left,” says the Deacon. “How about you two?”

“Two each,” I confirm.

As if reminded, the Deacon pulls his recently depleted tank out of his rucksack and disconnects it from the valves and rubber tubing. He starts to set it carefully between jagged rocks but Reggie stops him.

“Jake and I discovered something…fun…when we discarded our first tank yesterday evening,” she says.

The Deacon’s eyebrows rise slightly toward his miner’s lamp.

Reggie takes the tank from him, holds it high over her head with both gloved hands, and hurls it out and away from the North Face.

It hits about 60 feet down the slope, bounces another 50 or 60 feet before touching rock again, and keeps hurtling lower—a silver blur in the rich morning light—with echoing clangs that seem to go on forever. Then it disappears.

The Deacon shakes his head but grins. “If that lands on one of our Sherpa friends a mile below on the North Col, I’m not taking responsibility,” he says. “That reminds me. There’s that sheer drop-off on the Face not too far below the level of Camp Five straight below us—all the way over to the Grand Couloir. That sets…the lower boundary of our search area.”

“I’ll say what I said before,” Reggie says softly. “That’s still hundreds and hundreds of acres. Vertical acres.”

“Not quite vertical,” says the Deacon. “Thank heavens.” He reaches under his now unzipped down outer layer and pulls a folded sheet of paper from some pocket. As the Deacon unfurls it, I see a more formal version of a diagram he had drawn and which we’d discussed during the trek across Tibet and again at Base Camp.

Four horizontal lines in different-colored inks go zigzagging left to right and then back again across a sketch of the North Face of Everest stretching roughly between the North Shoulder, now to our east, and the Grand Couloir hundreds of yards to our west.

“Lady Bromley-Montfort,” the Deacon says formally, “you’ve been our prime climber so far, so if you’d be so kind as to continue on up about four hundred feet to the bottom of the Yellow Band above this basin and search from east to west along the ridge there below the Yellow Band gullies. I don’t believe…you’ll have to clamber up into any of the…gullies themselves. Just use your binoculars. The shelf up there sort of peters out just short of Norton’s Great Couloir, so please don’t go further than that. You can use the First Step on the ridge above as a guideline…just turn back before you get very far west beyond it.”

Reggie nods but says, “You’re not giving me the bottom of the Yellow Band because it’s the widest and safest and easiest ledge to traverse up here, are you?”

“On the contrary,” says the Deacon, his expression serious, “I’m giving it to you because that search route offers the longest fall. And also”—now his expression is mischievous rather than serious—“because it involves climbing and all the rest of us get to descend. Dr. Pasang?”

“Yes?” Pasang says. It’s the first word I’ve heard from him today. He sounds no more breathless than if we were chatting at sea level.

“Would you be so kind as to descend a couple of hundred yards to that ill-defined rock rib…” The Deacon pauses and points it out. The “rib” is so ill-defined that it takes us all minutes to see it properly, but my guess is that it’s the same traversable “horizontal ridge” that Norton and Somervell had returned from the Grand Couloir on when Norton set the world’s highest climbing record of 28,600 feet last year—known record, that is, since no one knows how high Mallory and Irvine had climbed before dying.

“Please take that as far as it stays solid to the west, then drop down a few hundred feet and follow the best line back east toward the North Ridge,” continues the Deacon. He looks up at the tall Sherpa. “You did this morning’s climb brilliantly without oxygen, Pasang, but you might want to go onto English air for parts of the search. Just to help you stay alert.”

“All right,” says Pasang. He’s shielding his eyes and looking down at the steep rooftop slabs far below that will be his broad search area.

“I’ll take this large area of the basin between Dr. Pasang’s so-called ill-defined rib to the level of Camp Five,” says the Deacon.

“That’s a large area, Richard,” says Reggie. “And very steep. Very exposed.”

He shrugs. “And I’ll be very careful. Don’t forget to keep your goggles on, my friends. Even if you’re just on dark rock, remember…”

“Colonel Norton,” I say.

“Yes,” says the Deacon. “We’ll use one tank of oxygen apiece and try to keep the second tank in reserve for tonight, but we should be back at Camp Five together by two p.m. I don’t think any of us had adequate rest last night, and I…don’t want…any more altitude health problems if we can help it.” He looks at me. “Your cough is getting worse, Jake.”

I shake my head irritably. “It’ll go away when I go back on bottled air.” I know it won’t—my throat still feels like I’ve got a chicken bone caught in it—but I don’t want to argue or whine.

The Deacon nods, obviously not convinced, and opens his pack. “I have something for each of you,” he says and pulls out what look to be three short, wide-barreled black metal pistols.

“Dueling pistols?” says Reggie, knowing better. I’m the only one who laughs, and that soon turns into my hacking cough.

“I did not know that Very signal pistol came in such a small size,” says Pasang. The Deacon is setting out colored Very shells, each not much bigger than a shotgun shell—both shells and pistols much smaller than any nautical or military Very gear I’ve ever seen. I’d seen the Deacon write the word on a list in London. I hadn’t known why at the time, and he spelled it “Verey” for some reason (evidently it was an English thing), but I’d always seen such pistols spelled “Very,” after the name of the fellow who first designed the flare guns.

“My Webley and Scott Mark Three flare pistol in the War was a blunderbuss of a thing,” the Deacon is saying. “Big brass flared barrel. Fired a one-inch-caliber flare—the kind of one-inch-bore Very pistol you’ve probably seen, Jake. But some German boffin designed these smaller twelve-gauge Verys for night patrol work. We captured a few.” He pulls his larger British-made Very pistol out of his pack to show us the comparison. It and its flare cartridges are easily twice the size of the smaller German ones laid out on the rock before us. Even in smaller size, the flare pistols have that ugly, black metal, totally functional German look to them.

“So,” I say, feeling sarcastic this fine morning at 27,000 feet on the North Face of Mount Everest, “the army just let you walk off with three of the smaller German ones and your larger British Very pistol? How generous!”

“I admit I did walk off with the big one,” says the Deacon. “No one thought to ask for it back and I didn’t remind them. A lot of that was going on during the demobilization. The smaller ones for you—and I gave Jean-Claude his yesterday—I purchased via mail order from the Erma-Erfurt Company before they went out of business.”

“How do we use them?” asks Reggie, all business now. She’s picked up one of the pistols and—showing her familiarity with firearms—has broken open the breach to make sure it isn’t loaded. She fingers the smaller, color-coded 12-gauge shells lying atop the flat rock next to the Deacon’s hand.

“You see, the flares come in three colors—red, green, and what we called ‘white star’ during the War,” continues the Deacon. I have to admit that he doesn’t sound like he’s lecturing: just explaining something to friends. “I suggest that we use green to signal that we’ve found something and that the others should come to you. Red to signal that you’re in distress in some way and need help. White to signal that everyone should return to Camp Five.”

“So if I fall off the mountain,” I say, still feeling a little lightheaded and silly, forgetting completely for the moment the grim purpose of our search, “I should fire a red flare on the way down?”

The other three look at me as if I’ve grown a second head.

“Couldn’t hurt, Jake,” the Deacon says at last. “You’re lowest—closest to the drop-off.”

Then we’re all busy for a moment, pulling on our rucksacks and setting the Very pistols and their cartridges in the outside pockets, reachable without having to remove the packs, but safely away from our oxygen tanks.

“About searching in the area so low on the Face,” says Reggie when we’re all loaded up and standing. “Do you really think that Percival could have fallen that far from the North East Ridge or from the Face just off the North Ridge?”

The Deacon doesn’t shrug, but there’s the sound of a shrug in his soft tones. “Once a body begins falling on a slope this steep, Reggie…it tends to continue falling for a long way. If the fall started with a snow avalanche the way Sigl says it did, then Percy’s and Meyer’s bodies would have picked up vertical velocity right from the beginning of the fall.”

“So their corpses probably wouldn’t be here on the Face still at all,” says Reggie.

The Deacon doesn’t answer, but we can all hear the silent Probably not. That sudden drop-off some 2,000 feet below us, the more-than-8,000-vertical-foot fall, is terrible even to think of.

“But I don’t think Bruno Sigl told us the truth about an avalanche being the cause of your cousin’s and that Meyer fellow’s death,” the Deacon adds. It’s the first time I’ve heard him that decisive on the subject.

“But if Percy and Meyer fell off the other side, the south side, of the North East Ridge above us…,” begins Reggie.

“We won’t find them,” the Deacon says with a flat finality. “More than twelve thousand feet almost straight down to the Kangshung Glacier. Even if we climb this mountain along the…North East Ridge…the way Mallory said he was going to…there’ll be very little reason to look off the south side. We couldn’t make out bodies—or parts of bodies—from that altitude. Especially after a year of snowfall down there. And I’m not going anywhere near the inevitable snow cornice up there.”

“What about me?” I ask.

“What about you?” says the Deacon.

“The actual parameters of my search area.”

“Oh,” says the Deacon and points to the line of blue ink farthest down on the search-grid map. “I gave you the most dangerous bit, Jake. This lowest area just above the drop-off. I wouldn’t think that you’d have to go too far below the level of Camp Five—not right down to the drop-off lip itself—since any human body that had fallen that far from the North East Ridge would be in small pieces. Or at least terribly mangled. Food for the goraks…the high-altitude ravens that fly even this high. Oh, I apologize, Lady Bromley-Montfort.”

“For what?” Reggie asks coolly.

“For being so stupidly insensitive,” says the Deacon. He looks down.

“I’ve seen corpses in the mountains before, Mr. Deacon,” says Reggie. “And I’m well aware not only of what a long fall does to the human body but that even at these altitudes, some scavenger will have gotten at Meyer’s and my cousin’s bodies if they’re still somewhere on the mountain.”

“Still,” says the Deacon, almost certainly still being insensitive in his clumsy effort to ameliorate the harshness of his earlier comment, “the North Face at this altitude is a high desert. Even after only one year, there should be some mummification.”

I feel that I have to change the subject toward something more pleasant. Craning to look up at the tall Sherpa, I say, “Dr. Pasang, I’m surprised you were able to come climbing away from your patients. How is Tenzing Bothia?”

“He died,” says Pasang. “A pulmonary embolism—a blood clot caused by altitude that had moved and blocked the main artery to his lung. There was nothing I could have done to save him even if I’d been in the tent with him on the North Col that night. He died as he was being evacuated to Base Camp from Camp One.”

“Jesus,” I whisper to myself.

Reggie looks visibly shaken. “Amen,” she says.