The Abominable: A Novel

12.

With the possible exception of my solo night climb of the Mount Erebus volcano in Antarctica some years later, in the 1930s, I’ve never had a more beautiful and enjoyable climb than that night’s climb in May of 1925 up Everest’s North Ridge from Camp IV at 23,000 feet to our Camp VI at 27,000 feet. It was perhaps the most perfect mixture I’ve ever experienced of the physical joy of climbing in a staggeringly beautiful starlit setting with the psychological joy of climbing with friends I loved.

Of course, later, I wondered if the combination of codeine and Benzedrine that Dr. Pasang had ladled into me had anything to do with the profoundly good feeling I was enjoying. I was dimly aware that my throat still felt as though I’d swallowed a jagged metal object about the size of my hand, but since the coughing had been alleviated to the point where I could use an oxygen mask again easily, that strange sensation was no longer so urgently bothersome.

We climbed unroped, spreading out during the initial snow-on-rock stretch of the ridge just above the North Col, then back in line—but still with our headlamps and electric torches dark—and using our jumars to clamp onto the many fixed ropes we’d set in place during all the steep parts of the tilted-slab sections of the climb.

Rather than taking turns leading, as a team would when breaking through deep snow, we took turns bringing up the rear, since the last person had the fatiguing job of pulling each length of fixed rope free from its eyeleted stakes, coiling it, and hauling it over his or her shoulder until the next length needed to be undone.

“Ah…,” said Jean-Claude during one of our pauses to change anchor climber, “…I understand the need to…ah…deny our fixed ropes to les boches who will be climbing in pursuit…but will not the lack of any fixed rope make our own descent a tad difficult?”

“We’ll discuss that when we take a five-minute break at Camp Five before pushing on,” said the Deacon. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t had his oxygen mask up or flow valve open during the entire climb so far. We were hauling so many oxygen rigs up with us, I didn’t understand why he might be hoarding O₂ now.

We pushed on. None of us were using our bottled air now, although we had extra rigs and bottles cached at both Camps V and VI. We seemed, by silent agreement, to be saving it for…something.

Twice we heard the distant echo of a rifle shot from the valley far below, but neither time did I hear a ricochet on the rocks around us or that somewhat disturbing new sound of steel-jacketed bees buzzing past me. Even with the telescopic sight that the Deacon had thoughtfully put on his Lee-Enfield for the Germans to use against us, finding dark-gray-suited human figures—we’d swapped our Finch duvets for our dun Shackleton jackets as an outer layer once again, along with our canvas wind trousers over the down leggings—against rock and dirty snow at night evidently was, as the Deacon had said, a near impossibility from one vertical mile below. Hitting us with aimed rifle fire from that distance, the Deacon reassured us, was a less likely threat to us than lightning, being run over by a lorry, rockfall, or avalanche. (But since the last two were real threats to us, even at that moment, I might have done a little more worrying, had I not been in a state of pharmaceutical near bliss.)

We paused at Camp V for five minutes of the promised rest and high-flow O₂, but then spent another fifteen minutes or so there taking down Reggie’s Big Tent and parceling out the staves and canvas and rain fly and ground cloth into our various rucksacks. There were more oxygen rigs there than we could carry, so we spent even more time laboriously hauling them fifty yards or so out onto the rock and scree field of the North Face, where we hid them behind a large triangular boulder. The somewhat distinctive shape of that boulder would be our only guide if we needed to find that English air on our way down—assuming any of us came down alive—since we could hardly mark the cache with our wands or flags for the Germans to find and use.

We also left most of the heavy, coiled fixed rope we’d retrieved there with the oxygen rigs. Each of us carried about 150 feet of coiled Miracle Rope over our shoulders or in our rucksack—even though we still had no plans to rope up during this part of the climb—and we just had to hope that this would be enough if a particularly difficult stretch presented itself.

We were all panting and gasping after we’d packed away all the parts of Reggie’s Big Tent—and renewing our own rucksack-carried oxygen bottles after storing the extra and partially empty tanks on the North Face and traversing back to the North Ridge—when I finally asked the question I’d been waiting to ask. “What about the lack of fixed ropes coming down?” I asked the Deacon. “Are we going to retrieve them from the pyramid rock out there and from wherever we stash the next ones above and reset them on the way down? We’ll probably be very tired.”

“That’s one answer,” said the Deacon between hits from his own oxygen tank. He was finally using English air like all the rest of us except for Pasang. “If the Germans give up—or if we can kill them all somehow—and if we come back down this way.”

“How else could we get back down?” asked Jean-Claude. “The North East Ridge back toward Lhakpa La is impossible, Ree-shard. It is a sheer knife ridge studded with cornices, arêtes, pinnacles, and thousand-foot drops. Descent to the Kangshung Glacier beyond the North Ridge is a ten-thousand-foot vertical impossibility. So what other ways down—besides falling—might you be considering?”

The Deacon was leaning on his big ice axe, his massive load looming over his head. He gave J.C. a wolf’s grin. “I was considering a traverse,” he said. Only the absence of any real wind this amazing night allowed us to talk using normal tones.

“A traverse,” said Jean-Claude and looked out at the face, up at the summit, back to the face where the Grand Couloir gleamed in the starlight. “Not to Norton’s Grand Couloir and down, I trust,” he said. “It becomes a sheer drop a few hundred feet below here, but the avalanches would carry us away long before that. No traverse on or across the North Face can get us down, Ree-shard.”

“True,” said the Deacon. “But what about a traverse from the North Summit across to the South Summit and then down to the South Col, to what Mallory named the Western Cwm?”

There was a moment of silence at that suggestion, but I could see Reggie’s teeth gleaming in the starlight. Between the Deacon and Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort, it was suddenly as if we were being led up the tallest mountain in the world by two hungry wolves.

“That’s…nuts,” I said at last. “We have not a single clue as to what the ridge is like between the North Summit and the South Summit…or even from the First Step to the North Summit on this side, for that matter. Even if we were somehow to reach the highest summit of Everest and make that traverse to the South Summit, which I doubt is possible in itself, the descent from the South Summit to the South Col is probably doubly impossible. No one’s ever seen that bit of ridge, much less attempted it…ascending or descending.”

“This is true, my friends,” Jean-Claude said solemnly.

“Let’s talk about it more when we get to Camp Six,” said the Deacon.

“I see little lights down where Camp Three used to be,” said Reggie.

“Les boches are going to start chipping steps in the wall to the North Col in the dark and will climb towards dawn,” said J.C.

I wanted to continue the conversation about this impossible traverse over the two summits of Everest, but there was no time for that. We hitched up our rucksacks, left the tumbled Meade tent and the torn-to-rags Meade tent where they lay in the snow, and began trudging up the steep ridge slope again. Luckily for all of us, the fixed ropes began again less than 200 feet above Camp V. With the Deacon falling back to last place to retrieve and coil ropes as we climbed, doing the really heavy work, the rest of us clamped our jumar devices onto the thick ropes and began sliding our way up, the entire line of us stopping every fourth step to gasp for more air.

We were all using what the Deacon had taught us as the “Mallory technique”: take in as deep a breath as you can—even while knowing it’s not enough in the thin pressure at this above-8,000-meter altitude—and use it for those four steps before stopping, panting, and repeating the process.

And so the five of us kept climbing toward the dawn.