The Abominable: A Novel

Tuesday, May 19, 1925

It’s after midnight, but all five of us—the Deacon, Pasang, Reggie, Jean-Claude, and I—are sitting up in our sleeping bags in Reggie’s Big Tent, which has been pitched on the slab slopes at Camp V, each of us hanging on to one of the interior struts in an effort to keep the ever-rising wind from ripping the canvas apart or hurling us off the mountain. We are very, very tired.

I feel bad that we hadn’t taken time to bury George Mallory that afternoon—the previous afternoon, I realize, as I look at my watch. It’s the nineteenth of May now, two whole days after the Deacon’s planned summit day. The wind has grown stronger every hour, a lenticular cloud that had been hovering over Everest’s summit all morning descended on us in a whirl of snow after darkness fell, and if we’d stayed on the North Face with Mallory, we would have had to spend at least an extra hour or two hacking at the frozen rocks to free enough stones to cover his body. Even piling the thinnest layer of cairn stones would have taken more energy and time than we had with the storm coming in. After we’d searched the body carefully and made note of the position and clues as to his fall and jotted down notes of landmarks, such as they were, so we could find Mallory’s final resting place again when we had to, the Deacon announced that it was time to make the long west-to-east traverse to Camp V. When I objected, saying that Mallory surely deserved to be buried properly despite the approaching darkness and rising wind, it was Reggie who said, “He’s lain out here under the snow and sun and moon and stars for almost a year, Jake. Another night won’t matter. We’ll stay lower—here at Camp Five rather than Six—and come back to bury Mallory tomorrow.”

As it happened, of course, we never did.

I still feel bad about it.

But it turned out to be wise that we turned back when we did and traversed to Camp V rather than attempted to climb to the tiny Camp VI. By two p.m., the wind was raging hard enough to have ripped one of the small Meade tents at Camp V partially off its moorings. It was now a slumped, snow-covered green mass of canvas and snapped tentpoles on the steep mountainside. We could have labored to re-erect it, possibly using our ice axes as poles, but we didn’t bother. The other Meade tent had been ripped open by small falling rocks that tore through the canvas walls and roofs like canister shot. If anyone had been in that tent when those rocks hit, they would almost certainly have been killed. And there was a long night of higher winds and more hurtling rocks ahead of us.

So that leaves the five of us crowded into Reggie’s Big Tent, which had been pitched atop a tilted boulder but in the rockfall-proof lee of two larger boulders when the Deacon and Pasang carried loads to Camp V yesterday. (Sunday, I amend, when I again remember that it’s past midnight.) The Deacon and Pasang had not only weighted all the edges of the tent down with serious-sized stones and driven German steel pitons into solid rock for tent stakes, but also lashed the whole tent down with about twenty yards of the new high-tensile rope zigzagging back and forth over the apex of the dome and tied down to large boulders both lower than the tent and uphill.

Reggie’s tent is big enough for the five of us to gather in for a meal, everyone sitting up, but stretching out to sleep is going to be a difficult proposition.

Despite not having time to excavate frozen-in-place stones to bury Mallory, we’d spent a very cold hour huddled over his corpse on the North Face. Even though we’d found tags in his clothing reading “G. Mallory,” the Deacon wanted to be certain of the dead man’s identity. So at one point three of us used our knives to chip away at the gravel on the left side of his body where the corpse was frozen in place until we could leverage him up a little to get a glimpse of his front and face.

That process felt precisely like lifting a log that has been frozen in place in the soil through a long, hard winter.

In the end, it was the Deacon who’d scooted closer on his back and then lain supine under the stiff, suspended body long enough to look into the dead man’s face.

“It’s Mallory,” said the Deacon.

“What else do you see?” asked Pasang.

“His eyes are closed. There’s stubble on his cheeks and chin, but no real beard.” The Deacon’s voice sounded weary.

“I meant in terms of visible injuries,” said Pasang.

“There’s a terrible puncture wound on his right temple, over his eye,” said the Deacon. “Perhaps he struck a rock on the way down or the pick of his ice axe recoiled back against him as he tried to self-arrest.”

“Does the wound go all the way through the bone of the skull there?” asked Pasang.

“Yes.”

“Can we let him down now?” I asked, gasping for breath. We all had our oxygen masks lowered for this task. The exertion of simply lifting a partially hollowed-out frozen corpse was almost too much for me.

“Yes,” the Deacon said again, sliding out and away from the dead man. And then, almost whispering, he said, “Good-bye, George.”

We’d gone through Mallory’s pockets and poked through a canvas bag he’d had hanging against his chest. As I mentioned, the corpse wasn’t wearing the metal rig for oxygen tanks and had no rucksack—only that one small carrying bag pressed against his chest and under his arm, and a few things stuck in his pockets.

In the pocket of his Norfolk jacket there was an altimeter much like the ones we carried—specially calibrated for altitudes up to 30,000 feet—but the crystal had been broken in the fall and the altimeter’s hands were missing.

“Too bad,” said Reggie. “We’ll never know if he and Irvine made the summit.”

“There were several cameras with them, I believe,” said the Deacon. “Teddy Norton told me that Mallory himself was carrying a Vest Pocket Kodak.”

When we pulled the small pouch around where we could get into it, I felt, again wearing only my undergloves, something hard and metallic inside. “I believe we’ve found that camera,” I announced.

It wasn’t. The hard lump consisted of a large package of Swan Vesta matches and a metal tin of meat lozenges. We set them back in place. Other metal objects found in Mallory’s pockets included an almost casual variety of personal gear, as if Mallory had just stepped out for a winter walk in Hyde Park: a stub of a pencil, a pair of scissors, a safety pin, a little metal holster for the scissors, and a detachable leather strap that had connected his oxygen mask to his leather motorcycle helmet. I knew what the last item was because I had an almost identical strap under my chin at that moment.

We returned the lozenges, matches, and other things to his pouch and pockets, but kept turning up more items: a very used—as in snotty—plain handkerchief with a tube of petroleum jelly in it (the jelly was for his chapped lips, we knew, since we each also carried one of those—same brand), and a much nicer and rather elaborately monogrammed—G.L.M.—handkerchief in a blue, burgundy, and green foulard pattern. This handkerchief was wrapped around some papers. The Deacon looked through the papers, but they all appeared to be personal letters which he did not read beyond the salutations and whatever was written on the envelopes (one was addressed to George Leigh Mallory, Esq., c/o British Trade Agent, Yalung, Tibet). They were personal and basic expedition business letters, not interesting save for one strange series of numbers scrawled in pencil along the margins of a letter that had been sent to him from some lady not his wife.

“Those are oxygen pressure readings,” said Jean-Claude. “Perhaps notes on how far they could get on their tanks of air that last day.”

“Only five pressures given here,” said Reggie. “I thought they left Camp Four with more than five oxygen tanks.”

“They did,” said the Deacon.

“Nothing there to help us understand anything, then,” said Reggie.

“Perhaps not,” said the Deacon. He nodded and refolded each letter, set each back in its own envelope, wrapped all of them neatly in the monogrammed handkerchief, and set the handkerchief back in the dead man’s pocket.

Even though we had taken nothing, I still felt like a grave robber. I’d never gone through the pockets of a corpse before. The Deacon seemed rather used to doing so, and I realized he almost certainly had—perhaps hundreds of times—on the Western Front

In other pockets we found only Mallory’s folding pocketknife and his goggles.

“That could be important,” said Reggie. “His goggles being in his pocket.”

I didn’t understand at once—I was too busy coughing at the moment—but Jean-Claude said, “Yes. It was either twilight or after dark when they fell…Mallory started his climb the day after he saw Norton so snow-blinded. It’s all but certain that he would only take his goggles off after sunset.”

“But were they climbing upward or downward when one or both fell?” asked Pasang.

“Down-climbing, I would think,” said the Deacon.

“Did they have an electric torch with them?” asked Reggie.

“No,” said the Deacon. “Odell found it in their tent at Camp Six and brought it down. The fact that they’d not brought their only electric torch tells almost conclusively that they left Camp Six after sunrise. Also that George Mallory was quite the forgetful sort of chap.”

“Let’s not speak ill of the dead,” I said between coughs.

“Not ill,” said the Deacon. “Just factual. George was always losing or forgetting something or leaving something behind on the first two expeditions I spent with him—his socks, his shaving kit, his hat, his roll of toilet paper. It was just his way.”

“Still…,” I began, and found I had nothing else to say.

The Deacon shielded his eyes—we’d been doing the search without wearing our goggles since the clouds were so heavy above us now—and looked as far up the slope as he could in the swirling snow. “Those gullies below and this side of the First Step, below the Yellow Band, would have been very hard to down-climb in the dark, without an electric torch or any flares or lanterns or candles.”

We all peered up at the ridges and gullies of rocks far above this lower part of the face. “Based on how intact his body is—and the obvious fact that he was still conscious and trying to self-arrest when he came to a stop—it’s obvious that Mallory didn’t fall from as high up as the North East Ridge,” said the Deacon, confirming my earlier hunch. “Almost certainly not from as high up as the Yellow Band. More likely he fell from one of the gullies or minor rock bands further down, closer to us here.”

“So Sandy Irvine may be right up there waiting for us,” said Reggie.

The Deacon shrugged. “Or it was Irvine who fell first, pulling Mallory off his footing. We’ll never know unless we find Irvine’s corpse as well.”

You mean we’re going to continue searching after this? was my exhausted thought.

That’s when the Deacon brusquely ordered us all back to Camp V before the howling wind rose higher and the already snow-diminished visibility grew worse.

“So nothing we found on George Mallory can tell us whether he and Sandy Irvine reached the summit or not,” Reggie is saying. “Both Mallory’s watch and altimeter are broken and missing their hands.”

“Perhaps it is what’s missing that gives us our best clue,” says the Deacon.

I rise a little from the depths of my filthy goose down sleeping bag. “The Kodak camera?”

“No,” says the Deacon. “A photograph of Mallory’s wife, Ruth. Norton and everyone else I spoke to said that Mallory had taken the photograph with him from Camp Four—certainly no one ever found it there or at either of the two higher camps—and he had promised Ruth that he would leave it on the summit for her.”

“Or just at his high point before turning back—God alone knows where,” says J.C.

The Deacon nods at that and chews on the stem of his cold pipe.

“The absence of a photo isn’t proof that he reached the summit,” says Reggie.

“No,” agrees the Deacon. “Only that he left it somewhere. Perhaps, as Jean-Claude suggested, at their highest point before turnaround…wherever that was.”

“The missing camera interests me,” says Dr. Pasang. His deep voice is as gentle and unhurried as ever.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because when does one relinquish a camera to someone else?” asks the tall Sherpa.

“When you ask him to take your picture,” says Reggie. “As Mallory might have—giving the Kodak to Irvine on the summit, after taking the younger man’s photograph.”

“Only conjecture,” says the Deacon. “What isn’t speculation or conjecture is the fact that if we’re to have any hope at all of searching more tomorrow, we all have to get some sleep.”

“Easy for you to say,” I get out between coughs. “I just can’t seem to sleep at these goddamned altitudes.”

“Watch your language, Jake,” says the Deacon. “There’s a lady present.”

Reggie rolls her eyes.

“I have sleeping pills with me,” says Pasang. “They should guarantee at least three or four hours’ sleep.”

There is a silence, and I imagine that everyone else is thinking what I am—So we’d all be snoring away when the winds blow our tent over the edge of the mountain.

I start to give my opinion, but Reggie holds up her palm, silencing me. “Ssshh, everyone,” she whispers. “I hear someone. Someone screaming.”

My forearms break out in goose bumps.

“In this wind?” says the Deacon. “Impossible. Camp Four is much too far below us and…”

“I hear it as well,” says Pasang. “Someone is out in the dark screaming.”