The Abominable: A Novel

3.

No Everest expedition before ours had ever laid as much fixed rope as we had—and ours was the Deacon’s dependable Miracle Rope blend to boot—so no expedition members had ever had such relative ease of descending from Camp V.

Or at least we should have had such relative ease. In truth, the clouds were so thick and the wind gusts—up to fifty miles per hour was my guess at the time—were so frighteningly powerful and sporadic that descending the ridge and ice slope and glacier of Mount Everest on that Tuesday, May 19, was a pure nightmare for me.

Some of the marker wands remained in place, but others had been blown away by the night’s gales or blown sideways and covered with snow. At a hundred places during the descent on the North Ridge spur down to the North Col, I had to make the call. Do I go straight ahead here, or right here down that familiar-looking gully, or left down that steeper part? I kept remembering those dead-end gullies that led off to the east during our climb to Camp V in daylight, each wrong turn ending in a precipitous 6,000-foot drop-off to the main Rongbuk Glacier.

So I rarely chose a route to the right when I could find no flagged bamboo wands marking it. But twice a wrong left turn made me lead everyone out onto the North Face of Everest, and there were hidden precipices and vertical ice traps there as well. Both times I gingerly traversed backward until we were on the spine of the North Ridge again, and then I led the way down until we came across the next fixed rope and we could be sure where we were.

When we were wading through snow up to our waists on a somewhat lesser slope, I decided that we must be in the North Ridge’s snowfields not too far above the North Col, and I called for a pause and for J.C. to come forward and take my place and my oxygen tank to lead us through the crevasses.

“Remember, I want the rucksack back,” I said when I handed it over to him and before I slogged back to the rear of our three-person rope to tie in there. My flare pistol, cartridges, binoculars, empty water bottle, an extra sweater, and one half-eaten chocolate bar were still in the rucksack.

Jean-Claude’s descent was faster than mine had been; he found an iced-over crust area of the snowfield and almost glissaded us down despite our crampons. I realized then that after Babu’s death, I’d had enough of glissading for one expedition.

But a little more than two hours after setting out from Camp V, J.C. led us through the last few invisible crevasse fields to the small cluster of tents huddled in the shadow of the high seracs at the northeast corner of the North Col.

The entire camp was empty.

“Everyone scared,” said Lobsang Sherpa. “Last night I volunteer to go up. Tell you. Everyone else want to go down.”

“Why?” asked the Deacon. “If the yeti were supposed to be down below, wouldn’t everyone have felt safer staying at Camp Four?”

Lobsang shook his head almost violently. “Yeti climb,” he said. “They live up on Col in caves. They very angry at us.”

The Deacon didn’t bother to parse logic with the terrified Sherpa—I would at least have asked him why angry yetis would have started their depredations at Base Camp if they were angry at their homes on the North Col being invaded—but instead of discussing mythical monsters, we looked in the various tents for food and water. There were no water bottles or thermoses of drinks left behind—and the damned Sherpas who’d promised to stay waiting for us here at Camp IV two days earlier had taken the extra sleeping bags, Primuses, and Unna cookers with them as well—but Reggie found three overlooked Meta sticks, and we lit them and held blackened pots of fresh snow over the open fires at least to get meltwater. Then Pasang found two semi-frozen cans of spaghetti under a tangle of abandoned clothing in one of the Whymper tents, and the Deacon ferreted out a tin of ham and lima beans. We poured the mess into the last pot to cook over the waning fire.

All of us were tired and starved and dehydrated. And my coughing now that I was off oxygen was almost nonstop, the sensation that I’d swallowed a small chicken bone even more pronounced. But although Lobsang Sherpa was obviously terrified at the thought of staying at Camp IV a moment longer, and the rest of us were exhausted and had no appetite, it was imperative that we eat and drink something before heading down the ice cliff. We welcomed the tea and forced the food down.

With six of J.C.’s jumars available and so much fixed rope in place, the serious climbers among us could have rappelled down the ice face and most of the steep 800-foot slope beneath that face, but we set our pace to Lobsang’s skills and scuttled down the long caver’s ladder, still using the jumars and friction knots on the fixed ropes but as grips and brakes rather than aids to full-rappel rapid descents. It was still a relatively rapid and efficient descent, despite the increasing fogginess of clouds rising from the East Rongbuk Glacier valley.

“Is this the monsoon, Ree-shard?” asked Jean-Claude as our two strings of roped climbers bounced backward down the fixed ropes through ever-thickening cloud-fog.

“No, I don’t believe so,” said the Deacon. “The clouds are building in the south, but the wind’s still blowing from the north-northwest.”

J.C. nodded and saved his breath for rappelling down; he had Lobsang Sherpa more or less tied to his front, and the weary Sherpa would let out a cry at each backward bounce.

We found fourteen Sherpas—who, with Lobsang Sherpa, made up half the total complement we’d set out with—huddling at Camp III. There weren’t enough tents there to shelter fifteen Sherpas, so sitting men were virtually piled atop sitting men in the Whympers and Meades in ways that would have been truly comic had not their faces reflected so much terror. Others sat outside around a roaring campfire.

“Where the hell did you get fuel for a big fire?” the Deacon asked the first Sherpa he encountered who could speak some English—Semchumbi, the cook, who was supposed to stay at Base Camp or Camp I.

Semchumbi didn’t answer, but Reggie pointed to a pile of kindling to one side of the bonfire. The Sherpas had used an axe to smash up every packing crate we’d hauled to Camp III in preparation for high carries.

“Oh, that’s bloody great,” said the Deacon. “Just bloody great.” He took Semchumbi firmly by the shoulder. “Is this fire supposed to keep away yetis?”

Semchumbi nodded violently and, his English evidently forgotten, kept repeating, “Nitikanji…Nitikanji…”

“What does that mean?” the Deacon demanded of Dr. Pasang.

“Snow men,” said Pasang. “Same as yeti, which comes from ya te, which means ‘man of high places’—also, as you know, called Metohkangmi.”

“Snowmen,” said the Deacon in disgust. “Did anyone actually see these…snowmen?”

All fifteen of the Sherpas babbled at once, but Reggie and Pasang pointed out the only man who’d seen the actual monsters—Nawang Bura, who’d been in charge of all the pack animals during the trek in and who’d stayed at Base Camp the last three weeks to watch over the ponies and yaks we’d kept with us.

I knew that Nawang Bura spoke some English, but as with Semchumbi, he seemed to have lost it in his terror.

Reggie listened to the short, heavy man’s explosion of syllables and then interpreted for us: “Nawang Bura Sherpa says that he is the only man who escaped Base Camp alive. The Nitikanji came in last night just after dusk. Tall creatures with terrible faces, fangs, long claws, long arms, and heavy gray fur everywhere on them. Nawang Bura was just returning from Camp One when he saw them slaughtering everyone at Base Camp, so he turned and ran and escaped and survived, and came all the way up here to Camp Three with the few other Sherpas who’d been at Camp One and Camp Two. No one wanted to stay in the valley with the Metohkangmi when the creatures were so angry and hungry.”

“Hungry?” I said. “Is Nawang Bura saying that the yeti were killing and eating Sherpas down at Base Camp?”

Reggie passed the question along to the chief muleteer, Nawang Bura responded with a speech that went on for more than thirty seconds, and Reggie translated. “Yes,” she said.

“How many at Base Camp?” asked the Deacon.

Nawang Bura and a dozen other men answered at once.

“Seven,” said Reggie. “Seven yeti.”

“No, I didn’t mean yeti, damn it all. I meant how many Sherpas were at Base Camp? Are still there?”

Reggie spoke in Nepalese, a dozen or more men spoke at once in answer.

“Twelve Sherpas,” she said. “Semchumbi said that some ran north during the slaughter, away from the mountain, toward Rongbuk Monastery, but he saw more yeti kill them before they reached the plain beyond the river.”

“So,” said the Deacon, “seven yeti supposedly killing a dozen strong Sherpas.”

“Excuse me,” said Dr. Pasang. “Two of the Sherpas there—Lhakpa Yishay and Ang Chiri—were not so strong. They were kept at Base Camp until they recovered from the amputation of toes and fingers.”

“Seven yeti supposedly killing ten strong Sherpas and two recovering ones, then,” said the Deacon. “Did anyone think to bring up any of the three rifles that were at Base Camp?”

I had to think a second before remembering how many rifles the expedition had. Reggie had brought one for hunting, as had Pasang and the Deacon. All three rifles, after our arrival, had been kept in padlocked crates in a special sealed tent. It took permission of a sahib even for the cook to use one for hunting.

“Well, we do have this weapon,” said the Deacon and removed a huge pistol—not a Very pistol, but a real pistol—from his rucksack.

He snapped open the so-called Break-Top Revolver, showed all of us that it was empty of cartridges, and let each of us hoist it.

It was a heavy revolver, a Webley Mark VI. There was a stout leather lanyard—oiled almost black by grease and sweat and smoke—tied onto the metal loop at the bottom of the handgrip.

“It takes .455-caliber cartridges,” the Deacon said, showing us a box of the large, heavy cartridges, and then took the revolver back and proceeded to load all six chambers.

“Thank God we have a weapon with us,” said Reggie.

“Is it the pistol you used in the War?” I asked.

“I bought it before going to war and used it all four years. Now I only wish we’d brought the rifles up to Camp Three or Four. That was stupid of me to leave them all at Base Camp.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to the three rifles, even when Reggie or Pasang went out hunting with one. I assumed they were regular hunting rifles, although I remembered now that one of them—perhaps the Deacon’s—had boasted a telescopic sight mounted on it.

The Sherpas were babbling at Reggie again, but I could tell by the way Semchumbi hung his head that no Sherpas had thought to break into the “sahibs’ tent” and crates to get the rifles during the “yeti attack.”

“That’s all right,” said the Deacon. “No matter. We’ll get some extra tents from Camp Two to shelter the fourteen Sherpas up here, and then the five of us will go down to Base Camp and fetch the rifles. Which of you Sherpas wants to come with us to Camp Two?”

Dr. Pasang repeated the Deacon’s question in Nepalese. None of the Sherpas volunteered.

“Fine,” said the Deacon. “So I’ll choose you, you, you, you, you, and you…” He pointed out six of the Sherpas, including both Nawang Bura and Semchumbi. “You’ll come down to Camp Two with us, help us break down some tents, and haul them back up here to Camp Three.”

When Pasang interpreted the command and the men started shaking their heads, the Deacon snapped to the Sherpa doctor, “Tell them it’s not a request, damn it. It’s an order. If they don’t get at least three more tents up here tonight, some of these men will be dead by morning. Tell those six that we sahibs and Pasang will stay with them at Camp Two until they pack up at least four more tents to haul up here. We’ll wait until they get safely back on the glacier before the five of us head down to check out Base Camp. And they can have my pistol to bring back up to Camp Three.”

The six men sighed and hung their heads, but a couple of them brightened at the idea of getting the large Webley Mark VI pistol. Semchumbi said something which Reggie translated as “The cook says that if it is their destiny to die by the hands of yeti on Cho-mo-lung-ma, so be it.”

The Deacon only grunted. “Tell those six to get their rucksacks. And also tell them to get a bloody move on.”

Reggie leaned close to the Deacon and half-whispered, “Is it really wise to give up the only firearm we have?”

“I’m not giving it up,” said the Deacon. “I’m only lending it to Semchumbi until we return from Base Camp. There are fourteen Sherpas here who need protection. All five of us at least will have Very pistols.”

In ten more minutes we were ready. The Deacon made a small ceremony of handing his Webley revolver to Semchumbi and then set his heavy flare gun—loaded with a flare cartridge—in the large pocket of his Shackleton anorak. After a moment’s hesitation, Reggie, Pasang, Jean-Claude, and I took out our smaller Very pistols, loaded them with 12-gauge cartridges—I chose the white flare, which left me only one spare cartridge, the red one—and put the pathetic little flare pistols in our outer pockets.

“Do we want to rope up for the glacier?” asked Jean-Claude.

The Deacon thought a minute and then said, “I think not. I’ll lead with you alongside me to point out crevasses that may have been covered by last night’s snow. Jake, you help herd the six Sherpas in a tight pack, single file behind Jean-Claude and me. Where we step, they step. Reggie and Dr. Pasang, you please bring up the rear.”

To Semchumbi he said, “Tie the lanyard of my pistol to your wrist—that’s right—and don’t hold it by its handgrip unless you intend to shoot someone. There’s no safety for it, of course.”

Semchumbi handled the heavy gun as if it were a cobra, but it seemed to put some confidence back into the other five Sherpas and even in those who were to remain behind.

Everyone nodded. We left Camp III and started up onto and then down the long, dangerous glacier toward Camp II.