The Abominable: A Novel

Monday, May 18, 1925

Since the Deacon is descending about half the catchment basin with me here on the North Face below the Yellow Band in order to reach his search area, he suggests we rope up for the part we’ll be descending together. I quickly agree.

I’m reminded again that many more climbers die descending mountains than trying to ascend them. As I’d also been reminded on the Matterhorn, when descending, one is facing outward rather than leaning into the mountain, so on steep but not vertical slopes a climber tends not to use his hands on descents when he might on the climb up, and you’re already going in gravity’s direction, no matter how slowly and carefully you try to move downward. This steep slab and snow slope stretching out below the “ill-defined rock rib” that the Deacon has asked Pasang to check isn’t as steep as the part of the Matterhorn where four of Edward Whymper’s comrades slipped and fell to their deaths on his triumphal first climb, but this damned down-sloping granite is still slick and dangerous—and much more difficult out here on the North Face than descending the better-defined and rather less dramatic pitch of the North Ridge.

We’ve traversed back to the east, toward the North Ridge, and I realize that the Deacon really wants to keep doing the east-west, back-east, west-again search patterns that he’d drawn for us.

We reach the steep pitch near our ridgeline furthest east. Our solo tent constituting Camp VI is invisible in the boulders above us, but we can clearly see the tents of Camp V (three now, the Deacon and Pasang having pitched Reggie’s Big Tent on a boulder about 80 feet above the other two the night before) hundreds of feet lower on the North Ridge. This is where the Deacon will start his search zone. We unrope, and I loop my part of the line and set it into my rucksack, being careful not to tangle it with the oxygen hoses. We’ve been on English air since starting our descent, and now the Deacon lowers his mask and lifts his goggles.

“Take care down there, Jake. No slips today.” A strong breeze has come up during our descent and the wind almost steals his words, but I’m watching his lips through my thick goggles. I simply nod and move off downhill. My search area begins at almost the same level as the three tents at Camp V, but further to the west on the North Ridge.

When I get to what I think is my designated altitude, I turn back toward the Grand Couloir and begin a careful traverse, my long ice axe usually in my left, uphill hand and always finding a grip for it before taking my next step. It’s hard searching for a dead body when one is always watching one’s feet and preparing for the next step.

I’ve put my crampons back on—even though the straps cut off circulation enough that my feet do get colder faster—and in the last two days of climbing I’ve noticed that it feels almost natural to have rocks and scree under the crampons rather than pushing up against the hobnailed soles of my boots. There are enough patches of snow and ice still on the North Face that the crampons come in handy every few yards.

Occasionally I stop, bend, lean on my ice axe, and crane my neck to look uphill to see if my friends are all right. Because of the distance and rocky-snowy background clutter, it takes a minute or two to see any of the three figures moving back and forth across their search areas; Reggie, the furthest away, stands out most clearly against the Yellow Band, that 700-foot-high band of what the geologist Odell had called, in his report to the Alpine Club, “a Middle Cambrian diopside-epidote-bearing marble, which weathers a distinctive yellowish brown.” Translated into English, that means that layer upon layer of little sea creatures, fossilized and locked in marble, were stacked here sometime in the Middle Cambrian period when the Himalayan Range was at the bottom of some ancient ocean. Even I—a C student in geology at my university—can understand that this was one hell of a long time ago. Now I see Reggie moving along that ridgeline just beneath the Yellow Band far above, stopping diligently from time to time to use her binoculars to peer up into the maze of gullies above her. Those gullies create mazes not far below the actual North East Ridge—our (and Mallory and Irvine’s) theoretical highway to the summit—and are a logical place to find Bromley’s and Kurt Meyer’s bodies if they fell off the ridge to this, the north side. I’ll feel bad if she’s the one to find her cousin’s corpse.

Or maybe Reggie, just like me, is simply using the binocular stops as an excuse to breathe. Even with the oxygen apparatus, these traverses are exhausting. I’m suddenly very glad that the Deacon has insisted that the search—including the walk back to Camp VI, or Camp V if we need the extra room—is to go on no longer than the contents of one oxygen tank, about four and a half hours. I feel like I could sleep for a week, but know that I won’t be able to do so in the cold, rocky angles of Camp V or VI, especially VI. Nor, for that matter, will I get any real rest anywhere up here above 8,000 meters. Fatigue on Mount Everest, I’m beginning to realize, is a cumulative thing. It just keeps building until it kills you or until you get the hell off the mountain.

I begin walking again, then suddenly realize that I’m getting too close to the Grand Couloir. I’m far west of where the First Step rises so far above me on the North East Ridge and almost have reached a point below the terrible Second Step. That’s the end of my search zone. Any further in this direction and I’ll be wading in the deep snows and steep exposures of Norton’s Couloir. I turn and angle downward as I zigzag back toward the east and the North Ridge, where the tilted tents wait.

The drop-off 100 or so feet below me now is a constant sense of menace at the back of my mind. One slip and I’ll be over the edge in a few flapping, screaming, helpless seconds. I’m sorry now that I made that stupid joke about shooting off a red flare as I fell; the fall to the glacier below would be the worst and last conscious moments of my life. I can think of few deaths more terrible.

What does one think about when falling thousands of feet through the air?

I try to banish that question by assuming that I will strike a rock and be safely unconscious before catapulting off the lip of this cliff to my death so much further below. That cheers me up a bit. But I don’t really believe it. Part of my altitude-stupid brain tries to calculate the actual arithmetic of how many minutes and seconds I’ll be conscious during the free fall.

“To hell with that,” I say aloud and spend my mental energy watching my boots and the snow-patched mountainside ahead of me.

I’m just thirty or so minutes into the search when I find myself wishing that the Deacon had provided us with individual wireless sets rather than these ugly flare pistols. Of course, the 60 pounds or so of each wireless might be a tad tiresome to carry at these altitudes, and the fragile vacuum tubes would require lots of padding and tender loving care to avoid breakage, but the real problem would be the 300 miles or so of electrical cord that we’d each have to trail behind us as we…

I stop and shake my head to clear the fuzziness away. Something seems to be fluttering downhill from me, like branches shaking on a bush or shards of silk blowing in the wind. Or some spectral thing waving at me. Beckoning to me.

I can also see something green in the same small patch of snow below and ahead of me where I’d seen some sort of motion.

That’s odd. My mind works dully, shifting its gears through high-altitude molasses. I didn’t think green plants grew this high.

Wait. They don’t grow this high.

I stop and raise my binoculars. My hands are so unsteady that I have to crouch, almost losing my balance in doing so, and then steady the glasses on my planted ice axe.

The “green plant” is a single green leather boot on the right foot of a corpse lying facedown on the steep slope, his arms stretched above him as if he were still trying to arrest his slide. The left foot is bare except for remnants of stockings. The “small patch of snow” isn’t snow at all. It appears to be marble-white flesh visible through rents in the corpse’s shirt and trousers. The motion is rags or fragments (or flesh?) blowing in the rising wind.

My second muddled thought is Is this Lord Percy Bromley or the Meyer fellow, or could it be the Deacon or Pasang or even Reggie? Did one of my friends fall without my seeing or hearing them? Such an unnoticed event is all too possible, locked away as I am beneath my layers of leather and goose down, oxygen mask and goggles, with the regulator burbling air at me audibly with every breath. A marching band might have fallen behind me without my hearing or seeing them.

No, neither the Deacon nor Pasang—nor Reggie for that matter—is wearing green leather boots today. And now I can tell, even from hundreds of feet away, that this dead body has been there awhile. I notice that the waves of scree—those small, loose rocks that make up so much of the North Face here—have slid down to cover parts of the head of the corpse.

Moving more carefully than ever, I’m quite aware of the Very flare gun in my rucksack pocket, but I’m not yet willing to use it until I get a closer look. Working to watch my feet rather than the distant apparition, I begin the steep descent toward the corpse and the terrible drop-off beyond it.