The Abominable: A Novel

14.

This climb up the North Face through the Yellow Band and beyond toward the North East Ridge was the most demanding and technical climbing we’d yet encountered on Everest. Despite the much steeper incline, the more challenging terrain, and ever more terrifying exposure to the 8,000-foot drop, we still hadn’t roped up. There were numerous ways through the maze of overhanging rocks and snow masses, most of them up steep snow gullies, and most of them leading to dead ends with dangerously overhanging snow masses or blocking boulders. The Deacon had chosen the one he thought would have the best chance of exiting onto the somewhat shallower slope that should open out onto the ridgeline not too far east of that large outcropping on the ridge called the First Step. I suppose we weren’t roped together both out of stupid habit after hours of parallel climbing and because we were concentrating on front-crampon-kicking our way up the steep gully, jabbing our ice axes in ahead of us, leaning heavily on them, panting for breath (we were using our bottled oxygen only intermittently, which added to our mental dullness), and then kick-stepping our separate ways up another agonizing step or two. All this kicking led to clumps of falling snow—theoretical precursors to real avalanches—that no one wanted to follow directly below and behind. We were spread out with no one person really leading the climb, no prescribed order of climb, and no one within grabbing distance of anyone else should anyone slip and start sliding. But every time I looked, the Deacon was first, the highest, the one breaking trail; then came Jean-Claude, then me, then Pasang, and then—at least 15 feet lower than her Sherpa friend and following in his tracks—Lady Bromley-Montfort.

Reggie fell when we weren’t quite two-thirds of the way up the steepest part of the snow gully.

I was leaning on my ice axe and looking almost straight down past my boots at the moment and I saw her slip. Her right cramponed boot came down on a rock that should have been the protruding point of a solid boulder beneath the snow—we’d used many such boulder tips as footholds already in this gully—but it wasn’t. The loose rock rolled out from beneath her, Reggie fell heavily onto her side, the air going out of her with an “Ooomph,” and she began sliding immediately.

To her credit she’d held on to her ice axe during the hard fall and then rolled onto her front, braced herself properly, and dug the broad adze edge in to begin her self-arrest. It was done with the sure, sudden grace of an accomplished climber.

But the damned 12-point crampons—so useful in our climbing the last few days—dug into the snow as she was sliding, the points digging deep, and flipped her over, the large ice axe flying out of her hands.

Now she was sliding down the gully headfirst toward the steep drop-offs and sharp rocks below. Pasang swung around at once and began loping in impossibly broad strides down the steep gully snow, but he had no chance of intercepting her. She was two-thirds of the way down the gully now and picking up speed toward a 100-foot drop-off that fell to the high point of the great catchment basin where I’d found Mallory’s body far below. Beyond that point, it would all be terrible tumbling and smashing.

Then Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort did an incredible thing.

Instead of grabbing helplessly at snow with her mittens or gloved fingers to slow her accelerating slide as most of us would do, she continued spinning down the ever-widening gully-chute but deftly reached back to her rucksack, which had somehow stayed on her as she plummeted toward the drop-off, and pulled the two short J.C.-designed ice hammers from where she’d had them strapped securely in webbing above the side water bottle pockets.

With almost no time left before she was launched out over the most vertical part of the North Face, Reggie made sure she’d looped the wrist straps of the hammers around her wrists, used the tip of one hammer to spin herself around so that she was head upwards, and then raised each arm and hammered the pick points deep in the snow. Three lightning-fast blows like that and she’d stopped spinning, but she was still sliding.

Two more deep thrusts, using the weight of her upper body to keep the points of the hammers buried so deep in the snow that her mittened hands weren’t visible, she slowed to a stop just yards above the drop-off to the full North Face.

The Deacon and Pasang continued hopping and crampon-bouncing perilously back down the gulley, losing in minutes countless feet in altitude that it had taken us the better part of a painful hour to gain. They arrived at Reggie’s side—she was still lying spread-eagled and facedown in the snow, her crampons raised—at almost the same instant. J.C. and I turned to join them, but the Deacon shouted at us to stay put—we’d lost enough time.

Within a minute, Reggie was sitting up—Pasang’s cramponed boot giving her a footrest to keep her from sliding as she sat on the snow—and soon she was drinking hot tea from a thermos the Deacon had produced.

The wind was still so negligible that J.C. and I could hear everything Reggie said from almost 100 feet below our site on the near-vertical slope. “Stupid, stupid,” she kept muttering. “Stupid!”

Pasang was looking her over—reaching beneath her outer layers to feel her arms, legs, and torso in ways that made me sorry that I wasn’t a doctor—and called up to us that other than some bruises and contusions, Lady Bromley-Montfort seemed all right.

“We need to know about your ankles,” the Deacon said in a worried tone. Often the impact of crampons flipping one over during a steep slide sprains or breaks ankles, or snaps the lower leg bones, as we’d seen so clearly with George Mallory’s corpse—and he hadn’t even been wearing crampons when he died. It had just been his heavy boots that had caused that compound fracture of the tibia we’d seen gleaming whitely.

With both men’s help, Reggie stood, wobbled slightly, was steadied by Pasang’s huge hand, and said, “They’re sore—my ankles, I mean—but no real sprain. Nothing broken.”

Pasang knelt in front of her right then and for a moment I thought he was praying; then I realized he was simply re-tightening the lady’s crampon straps.

“Here’s your ice axe back,” said the Deacon, handing it to her.

Reggie frowned—I could see the side of her face from where I stood leaning on my axe 100 feet up-slope—and said, “This isn’t my ice axe.”

“It has to be,” said the Deacon. “I found it where it bounced about twenty feet to the base of that gully to your right.”

Reggie pointed. “There’s my old axe up there, half buried there about halfway down the gully. I feel stupid for letting go of it. This is a new Schenk ice axe.”

“You did not let go of your own ice axe, my lady,” said Dr. Pasang. “It was ripped out of your hands. Had you tightened the wrist strap on it—as you did on the ice hammers—the wrenching torque certainly would have snapped your wrist.”

“Yes,” said Reggie in a distracted voice. “But whose axe is this? It looks brand-new, but the wood of the shaft is darker than mine. And it has three notches on it here about two-thirds of the way up the shaft.”

“Three notches?” said the Deacon in an odd-sounding voice. He took the ice axe from her and studied it carefully. Then he removed his binoculars from his pack and began scanning the narrower gully to the right of the one in which J.C. and I were still standing. Every second I was not moving made me colder, especially my feet.

“There is something up there,” said Pasang, pointing upward.

“Yes,” said the Deacon. “A man. Or a body.”

With the two tall men half-supporting Reggie for her first dozen cramponed steps or so, all three of them started climbing steadily—not back up the gully we’d almost climbed and in which J.C. and I waited, but toward the narrower, steeper one to our right. Someone or something was waiting up there for us.