The Abominable: A Novel

9.

A few years ago as I write this memoir in the winter of 1991–92, in this combination hotel-for-old-folks and assisted-living-home where I live here in Colorado, the manager—Mary Pfalzgraf, a wonderful woman—asked me to fill the Wednesday “guest speaker” role in the atrium by giving a little talk on mountain climbing. I did just that—gave a “little talk” (seven minutes by my watch)—to half a dozen other residents, mostly about night climbing in the Andes and Antarctica and about how beautiful the starry skies were in both places (with the aurora australis shimmering and dancing in curtains of light in the latter). There were only two questions from the tiny audience of my chronological peers: Howard “Herb” Herbert, my most faithful dominoes opponent, asked, “Where’d you lose those two fingers on your left hand, Jake?” (I had a hunch he’d wanted to ask that question for a long time but had been too polite to do so.) “Alaska,” I told him truthfully. (I didn’t go into the details of the nine days in a snow cave at 16,000 feet; nine days that had cost the lives of two of my fellow climbers.) Then Mrs. Haywood, rather far gone in Alzheimer’s, I’m afraid, asked, “Can you climb mountains in your sleep? While you’re sleeping, I mean?”

“Yes,” I answered at once. I knew that because to this day I have no memory of the first forty-five minutes of our climb to the North Col that Wednesday morning in the wee hours of May 20, 1925. I was climbing in my sleep.

What woke me on the ice cliff climb to the North Col was suddenly poking my head and shoulders above the solid blanket of thick cloud. It felt like coming up and out of the sea into the open air, and it awakened me at once.

My God, it was beautiful. It was very late, so I was sure that the last fingernail crescent of waning moon had risen, but it was still hidden somewhere behind the looming North and North East ridges of Everest. The summit of our beloved/hated mountain and its omnipresent plume of spindrift, however, were beautifully backlit by intense starlight. Even when I’d gone out west in my Harvard climbing days, hundreds of miles from any city, I’d never seen stars this bright. Nor so many at once. Nor had they ever appeared this brilliant to me even from the depths of the Alps while bivouacking on a peak shielded from city lights or farm lanterns by countless other alpine peaks. This Himalayan sky was unprecedented. The Milky Way arched above the starlight-on-snow-lit summit of Everest like a solid highway bridging the night sky; there was no diminution of the number or brightness of stars near the horizons, merely an abrupt cutoff between thousands of stars and hundreds of starlit snowfields and glaciers and summits.

The wind was gone. For the first time in days, the air—at least at this altitude of about 23,000 feet—was still. The nearby and distant peaks—Changtse, Cho Uyo, Makalu, Lhotse, Ama Dablam, Lho La, and ones I couldn’t identify in my exhausted state—appeared close enough to reach out and pluck, like white-tipped coneflowers.

When we pulled ourselves off the swaying rope ladder and onto the narrow inset ice shelf of the North Col, I realized that the Deacon wasn’t with us. Had he fallen off when I’d been climbing in my sleep? Had he been shot?

“He stayed below to tie loads on,” J.C. explained.

“Tie loads on what?” I said.

“Onto the continuous rope attached to the pulleys attached to the bicycle,” said Jean-Claude. “Remember? That’s how we’re going to get those dozen or more heavy loads from your foraging at Camp Three up here to the North Col.”

It came back to me as I forced myself to be more awake. When the Deacon had said he’d stay below and tie on loads until they were all pedaled and cranked up, I’d thought it was nuts—any of the Krauts could hear the rope and pulley working, freeze him in the beam of a powerful searchlight or electric torch from Camp III, and easily shoot him with the rifles they had—but I hadn’t said anything at the bottom of the 1,000-foot face to the North Col. I’d been too intent upon remembering how to attach my jumar clamp to the fixed ropes, how to release the cam when I had to slide J.C.’s device upward, and how to haul my already too-heavy pack up the rope ladder for the final 100 feet or so without tumbling backward into the shifting ice mist.

With our crampons and flashing ice chips kicked up by the crampons gleaming in the bright starlight, J.C., Reggie, Pasang, and I hurried along the slippery ledge to where Jean-Claude had secured his bicycle apparatus.

It was like a dream. Because of the weight of the oversized loads that the Deacon was tying onto the rope down in the roiling clouds below, J.C., Pasang, Reggie, and I took turns pedaling the pulley-bicycle. It was exhausting. Two of the others who weren’t pedaling would signal the pedaling person to stop, lean out over the sheer drop or use their ice axes to hook onto the load, and pull it to the ice ledge, and the third person would untie the ungainly load from the continuous pulley rope and begin carrying or dragging it to the far end of the ledge.

This extreme effort went on for almost thirty minutes, and then there came four fast tugs on both ropes—the prearranged signal from the Deacon that all the loads had come up and he was cutting the rope from below and coming up himself—so we pulled the long pulley rope up, tied it onto one of the rucksack loads, made sure the rucksacks and other loads were secure over where we had to climb up off the ledge onto the North Col proper, and then we went back to the top of the rope ladder to wait.

After an endless wait, feeling the ladder and fixed ropes tugging and jiggling under our testing hands like a line with a big fish on it but never sure in the silence whether it was our friend or nine or ten Germans climbing toward us down there in the cloud, the Deacon emerged from the fog, climbed the last 30 feet or so to the ledge in the clear air, dumped the huge coil of fixed rope he’d brought up with him, and laboriously pulled himself up and over to where we were waiting with outstretched, ready-to-help arms.

“Shall we pull the ladder up behind you?” asked Reggie.

Too tired to speak for the moment, the Deacon shook his head. A moment later, and after we’d given him a brief snort of English air, he said, “Leave it in place. I brought a full-sized axe and two hatchets from Camp Three in one of those loads. When the Germans start climbing up that ladder in the morning, we’ll wait…wait…wait until they’re high enough on it, then cut it from here.”

So that’s why he’d brought up the fixed rope that we had rigged as a handhold along the length of the vertical section, but especially alongside the caver’s rope ladder. Without that rope there’d be nothing to cling to if the ladder suddenly gave way.

“We’ll have to post a guard here through the night,” said Jean-Claude. “Les boches may start climbing the ladder at any time. Or perhaps they will fool us by chopping steps on the slope and ice wall.”

“No,” said the Deacon. He paused another minute to regulate his breathing and said, “I don’t think they’re coming tonight. It’s been so cloudy down there for the past two days, I’m not even sure they saw the ladder and fixed ropes.”

“But they will follow our footsteps to them,” Pasang said.

The Deacon managed a tired nod. “True. But in the daylight, I think. And Sigl will send someone up the rope ladder to test it.”

“You are sure it’s Bruno Sigl down there, then?” said Reggie.

The Deacon shrugged. “Sigl or someone just like Sigl. It doesn’t really matter. They’ll be climbers and right-wing German political fanatics and I can only hope that their political fanaticism overwhelms their climber’s common sense. But no guards for us tonight. We’re going to haul as much of that gear as we can across the Col to Camp Four, get as warm as we can get, and sleep for as long as we can. It’s a calculated risk—and there’ll be hell to pay if the Germans do come up that ice cliff in the dark—but we all need the rest.”

“But if Sigl and his killers do come up that rope ladder tonight…,” I began. I was happy when the Deacon interrupted me; I really hated hearing my voice tremble the way it was.

The Deacon put his hand on my shoulder. “We’re too tired already, Jake. We’ve had almost no sleep for three days and nights at altitude. And sometime in the morning we’ll all have to start climbing again, no matter what the weather’s like. I say we sleep now and deal with the Germans in the morning, when they try to make it up here to the North Col.”

No one said anything for a moment, but then, one by one, each of us nodded. “Reggie, Dr. Pasang,” said the Deacon, “if you’d be so kind—drag one or two of those heavy loads across the Col top to Camp Four and please set out our sleeping bags there. We have extra bags in each load if you need them. The Unna cooker is in the load I chalk-marked Number One…we should get that out tonight and set it up in the vestibule of the tent, even if we wait till morning to use it. Pasang, perhaps you could coil and carry these hundreds of feet of rope from both the bicycle pulley and from the caver’s ladder railing. Just set it outside one of the tents at Camp Four, along with whatever load you can drag there.

“Jake, Jean-Claude,” he continued, “why don’t you come with me over to the wonderful bicycle-pulley-lifting thing and we’ll cut all the tie-downs and pull up all the anchors and stakes and lug that metal monstrosity over to this part of the ledge.”

“Why, Ree-shard? We have already cut and coiled the long rope that worked from the pulley. Why bring the bicycle machine here?”

“Because we don’t have any boiling oil handy,” said the Deacon.