The Abominable: A Novel

15.

I was the first one to reach the man-in-the-other-gully because I cheated a bit; rather than descend our gully and re-climb the adjacent one, as Jean-Claude and the others were wisely doing, I used up most of my dwindling energy in free-climbing the nine-foot-high ridge of boulders separating our gully from the next one and dropping down into the snow there, barely arresting myself with wildly waving arms and a firmly and quickly sunk ice axe. But my idiotic and risky exertions got me to the corpse minutes before the others arrived.

And corpse it was, I saw at once. And—even with my very limited experience with dead bodies—it seemed a strange one.

The tall, muscular man looked as if he’d been sitting on a flat rock just a few yards above where his body had come to rest after it had finally tumbled over, still in a stiffened, seated position.

He was an English climber, there was no doubt of that. Like Mallory, he had no oxygen tanks or frame on his back—only a wind-tattered anorak over a Norfolk jacket and several visible layers of wool sweaters—and there were the remnants of a leather motorcycle or flying helmet strangely bunched up on the right side of his head, along with tattered and flapping remnants of a large wool overcap. He wore no goggles, and his face was bare to the elements.

What made his posture seem so strange to me, I realized, was that he was still frozen in a sitting-forward posture, his hands pressed together, fingers clasped, either in the motion of praying or trying to keep his hands warm. Those hands were pressed between his knees, which were so tightly closed against one another that they seemed a single frozen mass.

I steeled myself to crouch and look closer at his face.

It had been a handsome face and probably very young, although at least a year’s worth of Everest-altitude winds and sunlight had weathered it in odd ways. I could still see deep marks where a standard oxygen mask had been pressed down on the last day of his life near the bridge of his finely shaped nose and on both sides of what must have been a well-shaped mouth. It was disturbing to look at his mouth, actually, since either a final death scream or the tightening tendons associated with death had pulled it bizarrely open, shriveled lips pulled back and away from the white teeth, exposing a brown gum line.

His eyelids were closed—and the eyes themselves seemed deeply sunken, as if the eyeballs were missing—and frost and snow had settled in the occipital orbits. The right side of that once handsome young face appeared almost untouched except for odd, translucent strips of skin hanging from his cheeks, forehead, and chin. What I first took to be a wound from a fall, a split of flesh and skin on the left side of his face, was, I realized just before the others arrived, only an open gouge where goraks had been pecking at the frozen flesh to get at softer tissue below. This had exposed the poor man’s left cheekbone, all of his teeth on the left side of his face, and ridges of brownish ligaments and muscle tissue. It was as if that side of the corpse’s face was smiling broadly at me, and I confess that the effect disturbed me.

Half of his forehead and scalp had come free from the dislodged motorcycle helmet and wool cap, and the hair I saw there was short and so blond as to look white through my Crooke’s glass goggles. I tugged the goggles up for a moment to look more closely and realized that the short, still-combed-back hair was white—but almost certainly because it had been bleached so by a year of exposure to the ferocious ultraviolet rays at this altitude. There was white stubble on the intact right side of his face, but some of the stubble was still blond along the shaded jawline of the damaged side.

I looked around for a rucksack or other detritus from a fall, but the only pack the corpse carried was a small canvas gas mask carryall slung around his neck in front, just as George Mallory’s had been. Fighting down a sudden surge of nausea, I reattached my face mask to my leather motorcycle helmet, set the regulator valve to low flow, and gulped down some English air to get my brain cells working again.

I stepped back from the body just as my four climbing companions kicked their way up the last yards of the gully to stand beside me. There was a shared moment of silence, more to let our lungs fight for oxygen than out of any intentional respect for the dead man at our feet. That would come later…For now, I drank in the rich air set to the 15,000-foot level from my pressurized tank and blinked away black dots that had been briefly dancing in my narrowing cone of vision. That free climb over the ridge rocks, at above 28,000 feet, wasn’t the smartest thing I’d done this endless week.

I tugged my mask down. “Is this your cousin Percival, Reggie?”

Reggie shot me a glance almost as if she was unsure I was being serious. Then she saw I was and shook her head. Her tumble on the slope had allowed a few strands of her beautiful blue-black hair to escape her fur-lined leather flying helmet. She had also just pushed up her heavy goggles, the better to inspect the corpse, I assumed, and her eyes were a more lovely ultramarine color than ever.

“This man looks to have been in his early twenties when he died,” said Reggie. “My cousin Percy turned thirty-four last year. Also, Percy has—had—dark hair, longer than this, and a sort of thin black mustache the way Douglas Fairbanks wore it in The Mark of Zorro.”

“Who is this, then?”

“Gentlemen,” continued Reggie, her voice sad, “you are looking at the mortal remains of twenty-two-year-old Andrew Comyn ‘Sandy’ Irvine.”

Jean-Claude crossed himself. It was the first time I’d seen him do that.

I tugged my mask down long enough to say, “I don’t understand. I found Mallory seven or eight hundred feet lower…but there’s a rope around Irvine here, too. Also snapped off fairly close to the body…” I stopped.

The Deacon looked around. “You’re right, Jake,” he said. There was still only the lightest of breezes here above 28,000 feet. “Mallory didn’t fall from this height—down through the Yellow Band and across those poorly defined ridges and all those rocks—or his body would have been much more torn up.”

“They were down-climbing separately, then?” asked Jean-Claude. The disapproval in his tone of voice was that of a veteran Chamonix Guide.

“I don’t think so,” said the Deacon. “I think the accident—the fall—happened quite a ways below here, below the Yellow Band and that ridgeline, somewhere in those rock gullies below. One of them fell first—and, hard as it is to believe, I think it was Mallory.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because of the injury to Irvine’s knee,” said Pasang, panting.

I hadn’t noticed it. The fabric there just above the once light-colored but now filthy puttees was torn and caked with dried blood, the knee an exposed mass of gristle and smashed cartilage.

“What does that prove?” I asked before setting my mask back in place.

“It proves that Irvine had a small fall, Mallory a longer one,” said the Deacon. “But notice that the three-eighths-inch climbing rope has been broken off only ten or so feet from Irvine’s body—same as from Mallory’s—so my guess is that it snapped over a sharp rock edge, but not before giving both men internal injuries.”

“Which they died of?” asked Reggie.

“No,” said Pasang. “Mr. Mallory died from the results of his fall and the freezing night temperatures. But I think, as we all saw, that he must have lost consciousness from the terrible head wound, if not from the agony of the broken leg, within minutes, if not seconds. Mr. Irvine here was, I believe, pulled off his perch, probably a belay stance on a boulder somewhere below here, broke his knee in the short fall—very, very painful, by the way, a broken knee is one of the most painful injuries the body can sustain. But, with the rope broken, and probably hearing the diminishing screams and rock sounds of Mr. Mallory’s long fall, Mr. Irvine crawled some yards or even hundreds of feet uphill to this point before he sat in the darkness and froze to death.”

“Why would he go up the hill?” asked Jean-Claude. “Their Camp Six was several hundred yards downhill and to the east.”

“You remember that neither Mr. Mallory nor Mr. Irvine had a compass,” Pasang said softly. “Mr. Mallory was leading the way down through the rock mazes below the Yellow Band when he fell—perhaps—but definitely pulling Mr. Irvine off his belay stance before the rope broke, causing Mr. Irvine’s broken patella.”

“Patella?” said J.C.

“Kneecap,” said Pasang.

“But still,” persisted Jean-Claude, “why would Irvine drag himself up the hill when Mallory had fallen down it?”

“Perhaps because there was a remaining band of sunset light up here near the ridge and Sandy was very, very cold and thought it might give him a few more minutes of warmth and life,” Reggie suggested. “Anyway, here is his notebook.”

She’d taken it not from the gas mask carryall but from Irvine’s Norfolk jacket breast pocket. We all crowded around. As we’d seen before, Sandy Irvine’s spelling was atrocious—probably a case of dyslexia, I realized many, many years later—but here he’d used a dull pencil to abbreviate most of his words, and reading it was like deciphering a German code.

I tugged my mask down again. “What does this mean—dsdkd 1st btl 3.48 m. in2 asnt aft V jt blw 1st st aft u fl fl 2.2l alwy?”

Jean-Claude answered. He couldn’t read Sandy Irvine’s abbreviated scribble any better than the rest of us, but he was an expert on George Finch’s, Sandy Irvine’s, and his and his father’s modified O₂ tanks. “Discarded the first bottle—of oxygen—three hours and forty-eight minutes into the ascent after leaving Camp Five,” translated J.C. But he wasn’t done. “Just below the First Step,” he continued, “after using the full flow of two-point-two liters all the way.”

“That would be right,” said the Deacon, his voice almost hushed in respect. “If they’d gone on full flow all the way from Camp Five that morning, they would have discarded the first empty bottle somewhere just short of the First Step.”

“How many bottles of air did they have?” asked Reggie.

The Deacon shrugged. “No one’s sure. But from those notes I saw jotted on the margins of one of the old letters from Mallory’s pocket, wrapped in the fancy handkerchief…my guess is at least five between them.”

“My Lord,” whispered Reggie. “With five tanks, and leaving just before or after sunrise, they could have reached the summit of Everest and had enough bottled air to get them at least down past the Second Step again.”

“What do those last two entries say?” asked the Deacon.

“M lft R in btfl pls. bf vry prd. acd cnt b hlpd/Msl rp sn. ne hts bt nt as much as bee4. m sbfc hts mr. nt. mny srrs. Btifl. Vry vry cld noiw. Gby M I lv u an F and H nd Au TD. Im sry.”

The Deacon thought a minute then tried to snap his fingers through his thick mittens. “Mallory left the photo of Ruth in a beautiful place. Both very proud. Accident couldn’t be helped…Mallory slipped, rope snapped.”

“What about this last part?” asked Pasang, peering at the note in the bright sunlight. He pointed to the “ne hts bt nt as much as bee4. m sbfc hts mr. nt. mny srrs. Btifl. Vry vry cld noiw” line.

“Knee hurts, but not as much as before,” translated Reggie, who was getting the hang of the dead man’s shorthand. “My…” She paused at the “sbfc.”

“Sun-burned face?” suggested the Deacon.

Reggie nodded and sighed. “My sun-burned face hurts more. Night. Many stars out. Beautiful. Very very cold now.”

I didn’t want to start crying, so I stared hard through my thick goggles at the dead man. There was no emotion on his face either.

“This part?” asked Jean-Claude, pointing to the last few jumbled jottings: “Gby M I lv u an F and H nd Au TD. Im sry.”

The Deacon and Reggie looked at one another, the Deacon nodded, and Reggie translated in a strained but steady voice. “Good-bye, Mother. I love you and Father and Hugh—that would be Sandy’s older brother—and…Aunt T.D.” Reggie paused. “Aunt T.D., I’m all but certain. Christian name Christina. He mentioned her twice at that last dinner at the plantation. And then only…I’m sorry.”

“But it would have been just really dark, no moon, when they were trying to find their way down through these ledges and gullies,” said Deacon, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “Thus the goggles in their packs and pockets.”

“This is all…merde. Mere conjecture,” said Jean-Claude.

“Oui, my friend,” said the Deacon. “But Jake there may have found the proof that they made it to the summit.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Sandy Irvine’s note that Mallory had left the photograph of his wife, Ruth, in a beautiful place. And that they were both—Irvine and Mallory—very proud. It sounds like a modest summit claim to me.”

“Or perhaps Mallory left Ruth’s photograph at their highest point below the summit,” said Reggie. “Their turnaround point…when they decided they had to retreat or really be trapped by darkness. The view from anywhere up above the Second Step would be beautiful.”

“We’ll never know,” I said.

The Deacon looked at me. “Unless we try the two-summit traverse,” he said. “And find Ruth’s photo on the higher, North Summit up there.”

No one spoke for a while after that. I realized that we were all standing with our hands folded, as if praying for Sandy Irvine. We were certainly giving him that moment of silent respect I mentioned earlier.

“I’m sorry that the damned ravens got at his face,” I said suddenly.

“They did not on this side of his face,” said Dr. Pasang. He pulled his two layers of mittens off and pointed a thinly gloved finger to the strange translucent strips hanging from the right side of poor Irvine’s face. “This is peeling from a terrible sunburn when he was alive,” said Pasang. “That—especially with the oxygen mask digging into his raw and sunburned flesh—must have been terribly painful in his last few days and hours of life.”

“Irvine wouldn’t have complained,” Reggie said flatly.

The Deacon blinked. “I’d almost forgotten that you met him last year at your plantation near Darjeeling.”

Reggie nodded. “He seemed to be a marvelous young man. I warmed to him much more than I did to George Mallory.” She pointed toward his shoulder carryall and oversized Norfolk jacket pockets. “We should see what he’s carrying.”

“Please pardon us, Mr. Irvine,” said the Deacon. And with that he opened the flap of the gas mask carryall and started removing things.

As with Mallory, there were personal things—tins of throat lozenges, some papers, the same strap-on bit of leather to attach his oxygen mask—but there was also a small but heavy little camera.

“I do believe that this is George Mallory’s Kodak Vest Pocket camera,” said the Deacon.

“It is,” said Reggie. “He was showing it to Lady Lytton and Hermione’s brother, Tony Knebworth, at my bon voyage dinner at Bromley plantation the night before they left last March—a year ago March.”

“Let’s all put our goggles back on,” said the Deacon. “This snow’s bright.” He handed the Kodak Vest Pocket camera around saying only, “Please don’t drop it.”

The camera was small and black and not much larger than a tin of sardines. It would have slipped easily into one of either man’s oversized shirt pockets, but for some reason Irvine had chosen to carry it in his canvas carryall instead. J.C., bolder than I with historical artifacts, unfolded the little camera by pulling out the bellows that was attached to hinged and folding metal X’s. The mechanism opened easily, just as if it had not just suffered a summer monsoon and endless winter and hard spring at 28,000 feet on Mount Everest.

There was no viewfinder. To take a photograph, one held the expanded camera at chest level and peered down at a very, very small prism. The shutter release was one tiny lever. Mechanically, the Kodak Vest Pocket camera could not have been much simpler or more foolproof.

Still holding the camera to his chest, J.C. took a step back and uphill from all five of us—five including Sandy Irvine’s corpse. “The image is upside down.” Then he said, “Everyone say fromage.”

The Deacon started to say “Don’t, we—” but J.C. had already clicked the shutter.

“It works,” said Jean-Claude. “The Kodak Company should be commended. Perhaps I shall write them an advertisement recommendation.”

“How can you joke at a moment like this?” asked Reggie. Her voice was soft, but J.C. hung his head like a reprimanded child. None of us wanted to fall out of Lady Bromley-Montfort’s favor.

“If there was an image on that frame of film,” the Deacon said tiredly, “you may have just double-exposed it and ruined it.”

“No,” said Jean-Claude, pulling his goggles back in place. “I saw the little flange for advancing the film and advanced it before taking your group portrait. Fascinating that the mechanism hasn’t frozen.” He looked at the Deacon steadily. “If this is Mallory’s camera, why did Monsieur Irvine have it in his bag? Or did each man carry a Kodak Vest Pocket camera?”

“According to Norton and John Noel,” said the Deacon, “only George Mallory had a Vest Pocket Kodak. Irvine was supposed to have taken a couple of cameras with him from Camp Four those last two days, including one of Noel’s miniature cine cameras, but he doesn’t have any others in his pockets or messenger bag.”

The Deacon shook his head gloomily—the presence of Sandy Irvine’s body seemed to have oppressed him deeply, even though he’d never met the man—but then he brightened and looked up, moving his goggled gaze from one of us to the next. “Remember what Pasang said way below? When one wants his portrait taken with a Kodak, what does one do?” He seemed happy, almost giddy.

“Hand it to someone else to take the photo!” Reggie answered quickly. (More quickly, I noticed, than my mind was working, even fortified as it was now by English air.)

“If they reached the summit,” piped up J.C., “then Mallory would almost certainly have snapped a photo of Irvine, then handed the little camera to Irvine to take a snap of him. Irvine might have then put it in his own carryall. It makes sense.”

“We have to keep this camera,” said the Deacon.

“If we keep the camera,” said Reggie, “then we must take this final note from Sandy Irvine as well, send it to his mother and family.”

“We shall,” said the Deacon. “But only if we don’t find Cousin Percival and Meyer and their…whatever it is…and have to keep this expedition secret for a while. But you take the notebook, Lady Bromley-Montfort. If we survive the next few days and are allowed to talk about this expedition when it’s over, then I—hell, everyone—will want to know if Mallory and Irvine reached the summit of Everest last year.”

“Here, Jake,” said the Deacon. “I’ll keep Irvine’s notebook. You carry the camera. I would bet anything that in it are the exposed negatives that will answer all our questions about whether Mallory and Irvine summited last year.”

“Why me?” I said. For some reason the thought of carrying Mallory’s camera around bothered me, as if it were a great weight.

“Because you have the smallest load and because I think you just may survive this climb,” said the Deacon.