The Abominable: A Novel

17.

Climbing the First Step, even with the use of the Deacon’s fixed lines, was exhausting—every action was exhausting up there above 28,000 feet—but after we’d crossed over the top, we felt better about being out of the line of sight of the five German climbers who were following us. Then, just after we’d retrieved and coiled our fixed lines from the First Step, Reggie had to tug down her mask and go and spoil my newfound sense of relief.

“Of course,” she said, “if Sigl really did confront Cousin Percy and Kurt Meyer here on this section of the North East Ridge, as Kami Chiring thought he saw him doing, then that means that Sigl has already climbed to this height. He probably holds the record—for anyone living, that is—for reaching a high point on Everest before this. He may know a faster way around this First Step.”

“How high did Colonel Norton get in his climb up the Great Couloir?” asked Jean-Claude. “I thought it was about even with our ridge here…twenty-eight thousand feet.”

“Norton turned around at twenty-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-six feet, his high point in the steep Couloir itself,” said the Deacon. “Somervell reached twenty-eight thousand feet, below and behind Teddy Norton, just making the traverse across the North Face without climbing much in the Couloir.”

“High-climb records won’t count for much if Sigl and the other Germans really do know a faster way around this First Step,” I gasped out over my mask.

The Deacon ignored me and pointed out over the steep, snow-blown, and rocky North Face. The Great Couloir looked like a vertical white scar on that dark face. “Norton and Somervell were out there, several hundred yards west of us and almost directly below the summit before they turned around. We’ll beat Norton’s record if we keep climbing along this ridge to the base of the Second Step…it’s up around twenty-eight thousand two hundred and eighty feet.”

“Just seven hundred feet below the summit,” whispered Jean-Claude, his words almost lost under the rising wind that was making us lean toward the west, every loose rag or tag end of our clothing flapping like wash on the line in a mild hurricane.

“Seven hundred feet,” agreed the Deacon. “But still quite a distance to our west and about three to five hours of ridge climbing from here. Come on. I see the Mushroom Rock, do you?”

We all peered into the wind and blowing snow—it hurt when it struck the few exposed parts of our faces. About halfway between this First Step and the much more imposing and terrifying huge Second Step was a low boulder that did indeed appear to be shaped like a mushroom.

“We can’t stay on the ridgeline here!” shouted Jean-Claude. “Too narrow. Too corniced. Wind too high. Too exposed to the Germans’ rifle fire if they get over or around this First Step.”

The Deacon nodded and started the traverse by dropping down onto the North Face and trying to find footholds and a rough route westward. We were roped in two groups at this point—the Deacon, Reggie, and Pasang on the first rope. Jean-Claude and me on the second. Before we separated into two single-file groups for this tricky traverse, I shouted to Reggie, “What do we do to look for Lord Percival during this part?”

“Just try not to fall,” she shouted back. “It looks—at least through my field glasses—as if there’s a relatively flat spot there at Mushroom Rock. We’ll pause there and look around. My guess is that if Percy and Meyer actually fell from the North East Ridge, it was from there.”

And this is what we did—dropping down below the ridgeline and seeking out a traverse route there. The exposure along the crumbling rocks and bands of snow just yards north and below the razor-sharp ridgeline was terrifying—I could look straight down and see the tiniest specks that were the tents on the North Col some 5,000 feet lower, a full mile of empty air between them and me, although I couldn’t tell if they were our tents or the Germans’. I was certain that if we fell roped together, we’d just keep bouncing and being torn apart until those bits and pieces of us showered down all across the East Rongbuk Glacier somewhere east of the old Camp III.

It didn’t help our sense of too much exposure when three of the five of us ran out of air in our first oxygen tank and had to stop on uncertain footing in order to switch the valves over, get help pulling the empty tanks out of our rucksacks, and then get more help from the next person on the rope unhooking the fittings and tubes. Nor did it lessen my sense of insecurity on that slope when Reggie—quite deliberately—lobbed her silver metal tank as far out from the face as she could throw it underhand. It first struck some 200 feet below and kept clanking and bouncing its way on down the North Face long after we could no longer see it. The goddamned tank seemed to make falling noises for goddamned ever. I decided then that Lady Reggie Bromley-Montfort had somewhat of a sadistic streak in her.

J.C. and I tossed our tanks out as well, but it bothered me to watch mine keep falling and falling and falling, so I turned my face back into the snowy rock wall and set my leather-helmeted forehead against the cold rock. Jean-Claude and I helped each other make sure that our flow valves for the second of our three tanks were set at the lower flow rate of 1.5 liters per minute and that the regulator definitely was set to “On.” I needed oxygen along this stretch; I didn’t want to do anything stupid or to perform more clumsily than I absolutely had to. I was tempted to set the flow valve to 2.2 liters per minute, but I knew that I had to conserve what little English air was left.

What made this traverse so dangerous was the loose footing—the entire slope for 100 or 200 feet below the ridge on this north side was made up of small, downward-sloping, and wobbly slabs, a slippery mess of loose, sliding chips of stone, and entire gravel fields of what looked to be shale broken up by ages of extreme freeze and thaw. There were also apparently innocent patches of snow between boulders that were actually deep pits. “Tiger traps,” Reggie called them, and I presumed she’d had some experience with shooting or trapping tigers in her decade in India. But I doubt if the noble members of the Raj actually trapped the tigers in snow pits. One could drop chest-deep into such snow-filled pits, and it would be hellishly energy-expending and dangerous for his climbing mates to try to get him (or her) out.

The Deacon avoided the snow pits, probing ahead of him always with his long ice axe, using the same axe to point out the pits or especially slippery parts to the rest of us. So far, no one had fallen in or fallen off.

And then we came to a dead end.

“Damnation,” I heard the Deacon say softly from 40 feet in front of me. Like everything else up here, words were blown from west to east.

It wasn’t exactly a boulder blocking our way, but rather a long, smooth extension of granite that ran from the razor ridge above to a point about 20 feet below our current traverse route. But I saw at once that there’d be no easy going under or over or around this obstacle. Above us, the mass of smooth rock turned into an airy arête—a high, brittle, serrated pinnacle that was the North Ridge for those few fatal yards. No one would be free-climbing that today. At least not by starting from this point on the North Face.

Our traverse line at this level below the ridge offered the best solution to solving this smooth-bulge problem, but as best solutions often go in mountain-climbing problems, this one stank to high heaven.

It was a blind step…a blind leap…the kind of move a climber has to make in the Alps, perhaps 20,000 feet lower than where we were at that moment, when he just pushes out around a smooth slab, hoping that the friction of his spread-eagled self against the steep rock will keep him from falling for the three or four seconds he needs to get his foot to the other side—a side still invisible because of the curve of the damned rock. So the climber just has to pray that there will be a foothold or fingerhold there on that other side. Sometimes there is. Too often—as the number of deaths of alpine climbers showed each year—there isn’t.

Doing this kind of blind step in the Alps was dangerous, but many of the falls there were manageable if one’s partner had a good, solid belay stance.

None of the five of us on this steep, slippery traverse slope had a belay stance worth a plugged nickel. All four others could be belaying the Deacon—or whichever one of us was stupid enough to try this blind step—and a fall would almost certainly mean that all five would be pulled off the rock of the North Face. There were a few stubby rock protrusions at our feet or above our heads, but none big enough and solid enough to provide a tie-off belay—and even with Deacon’s Miracle Rope, the odds seemed overwhelming that the rope would snap with such a sharp belay point anyway.

“Okay,” I called from the rear. “What next? We go back to the First Step to think about this awhile? Throw rocks at the Germans?”

“To hell with going back,” called the Deacon.

He untied from the rope he shared with Reggie and Pasang, and then peeled out of his Shackleton jacket and Finch duvet, then put the gabardine Shackleton anorak back on. He stuffed the jacket and his two layers of mittens into his rucksack, which he removed and carefully handed to Reggie to prop between her body and the cliff wall. Then he looked down at his goose down trousers and stiff mountain boots and I knew he was considering removing his 12-point crampons. In the end, he chose to keep them on.

He then took the climbing rope back and tied it around his waist. I thought that perhaps only J.C. and I noticed that the knot he used was made to look like a simple overhand loop knot but was really a slipknot, certain to come undone from the Deacon without any tension or tug on the belayer if he fell. I understood and said nothing; Jean-Claude said nothing. Perhaps it was at that moment that I fully realized how brave a man Richard Davis Deacon really was.

Reggie cried, “No! Let us try to belay! Please, Richard!”

The Deacon didn’t even look at her. “There’s no belay stance anywhere along this line I took,” he said, already staring at the smooth rock of the blind step he had to take. I could sense him going over his moves in his mind, mentally rehearsing what his body had to do physically in a few seconds.

“All right,” he said and extended his right leg as far as it would go and hopped out onto the smooth stone of the abutment column.

He began to slide at once, and rather than follow the human instinct to claw for a handhold—of which there was none at all—the Deacon spread his palms, the wool of his gloves pressing hard against the stone, his anorak and belly and groin and balloon-fabric outer trousers pressing against the smooth rock face. He slowed, then almost stopped. The Deacon was connected to the mountain now only by the slightest hint of surface friction. I knew from experience that it was not enough friction to keep him from sliding and falling.

And he was falling. His sickening downward slide toward the overhang slowed almost to a stop and then began—inexorably—again.

The Deacon didn’t wait. Friction and speed were his only weapons, and of the two of them, speed was the more important. He scrabbled to his right as he slid, his body still spread-eagled, his palms and cheek and belly and thighs and crampon points pressing and scraping against rock, keeping himself from peeling off with all the pressure his tired body could exert, and when he’d slid to the far side of the arched seven-foot column, he pushed off the other side of the bulge just as if he were sure that there was a ledge or foothold or handhold waiting for him there.

Of course, he couldn’t see that any of these things were there around the blind step of the rock column. It might be another no-holds smooth rock column for all he knew.

The Deacon disappeared, and there was no sound or visible motion for a long moment. But the rope hadn’t played out, the lying knot he’d tied around himself to no purpose hadn’t given way. Yet. Most important, there was no scream yet from a human body hurtling down through 8,000 feet of empty air.

I found myself wondering if the Deacon would scream when he fell.

Finally, the steady voice came from somewhere on the other side of the rock bulge—“Wonderful ledge over here. Perfect belay stance with tie-offs on the rock. And I see where we can easily climb up toward the Mushroom Rock.”

We let out a collective breath, but no one said anything. Somewhere in the back of my weary mind was the question of all questions—What about when we have to come back this way? Normally a climber would use one or more fixed ropes in a situation like this; if one were an iron-mongering German climber, perhaps he would find the tiniest crack to drive in pitons for footholds.

But we couldn’t rig a fixed rope here. It would only help those who were pursuing us. (And I confess to thinking—hoping—that perhaps one or more, or all, of the Germans would fall to their deaths on this terrible blind step.)

But no, if Reggie’s Sherpa friend Kami Chiring was telling the truth, the great German alpinist Bruno Sigl had already solved this problem once.

“Let me do all the belaying,” came the Deacon’s voice from out of sight around the column. J.C. and I understood, and Reggie did as well, I was sure. It meant that only the Deacon had the stance and backup to hold if someone slipped, and we were to stay the hell away from any belay attempt.

Reggie’s boots did slip, but she scrambled, the belay rope went tight from the Deacon’s end, and he all but pulled her around the rock and out of sight onto the ledge with him. Pasang went across like a great, splayed spider. Jean-Claude did the blind step with pure, sure speed and rock-slapping friction. I managed, coughing even as I scuttled.

Then we were on a real ledge on the other side, together again, and I saw the path up through the overhanging rocks that the Deacon had shouted to us about.

“Think it’s close enough to where the ridge widens out to Mushroom Rock?” asked Reggie.

“Yes,” was the Deacon’s only response. And then, all tied together for the first time—the Deacon using an actual, reliable figure-eight-on-a-bight knot when he tied in this time—we clambered upward toward the North East Ridge. One by one we kick-stepped our way up and then out onto the narrow ridgeline.

The sun was past the zenith. The wind was stronger and colder than before. The lenticular cap around the summit of Everest had become a large gray mass pressing down on the mountain at an angle; it reminded me of the jostled-sideways unraveling wool cap on Sandy Irvine’s corpse.

We were too busy celebrating the wonderful flatness of the bit of wider ridge here at the odd mushroom-shaped rock. I knew that kind of wind- and tectonic-shaped top-heavy rock spur was actually called a bollard. More important to us than the stupid rock formation, after the miles of wildly tilted and slippery slabs and boulders, this snowy but relatively flat area on either side of the Mushroom Rock—roughly eight feet wide by about twelve feet long—seemed like a great, flat, safe football field to all of us.

“Perfect place for a camp,” said the Deacon.

“You have to be kidding,” I said between gasping coughs, removing my oxygen mask at every paroxysm. “We’re above twenty-eight thousand feet here.” It was true that our hearts were swollen, our muscles were failing, our kidneys, stomachs, and other internal organs were not doing their jobs properly, our blood was too thick and ready to spawn embolisms, our red blood cells were doing without the oxygen they needed, and our brains were oxygen starved and running like an automobile with its last few dregs of gasoline in the tank. We were metaphorical inches from hypothermia—which has a wider range of terrible symptoms than merely going to sleep and freezing to death, not the least of which would be intemperate belligerence and a need to rip our clothes off as we froze—and literal inches from a 9,000-foot drop to our south side and a 10,000-foot drop a few more feet away to the north side.

But for the moment, we were very happy. There were no armed Germans in sight yet, and we’d reached our temporary objective.

And maybe the Deacon was right. This would be one hell of a Camp VII. With the use of O₂ tanks, climbers could get a relatively good night’s sleep here—especially in Reggie’s solid, wind-proven Big Tent—get a very early start with Welsh miner headlamps glowing, and have only a two- or two-and-a-half-hour climb to the summit of the world.

Unless, of course, the winds came up during the night. Or the Germans shot us. Or we froze to death first.

It didn’t matter. We all collapsed on a solid little snow platform on the north side of Mushroom Rock, adjusted our oxygen flow to “High” for a five-minute O₂ fix, and stared dully through our thick goggles. Only Reggie was active, and what she was doing made no sense to me at all.

At the north edge of this platform there was a tiny extrusion of rock protruding out into a snow cornice that had been building and accumulating there for years, if not decades. Even in our stupefied mental states, we all knew that this cornice was death—one step there and the weight of a man (or woman) would send one plummeting right through it and all the way down to the Kangshung Glacier on the south side of the ridge.

But Reggie was crawling on her belly toward that stone lip and treacherous snow cornice.

J.C. was the first to realize that we were about to lose our female climbing partner. He pulled down his mask and shouted, “Reggie, don’t! What are you doing? Stop!”

She glanced back over her shoulder at us. She’d tugged up her goggles, but otherwise her face—or the few square inches around her eyes that I could see of her face—didn’t look all that insane. Of course, hypothermia sufferers rarely do when they go into their death antics.

“See that bite taken out of the cornice?” she asked. Her voice did sound a little excited and breathless, but not necessarily irrational.

We looked and then we did see it—about six feet to the left of her rocky diving board to hell.

“So what?” I said. “Come back here, Reggie. Please. Just crawl back.”

“Oh, shut up, Jake,” she said over the wind whistle and low howl. She pointed to the “bite” she’d mentioned. There was about a five-foot-wide arc missing in the otherwise wind-formed and geometrically ruled snow-and-ice cornice.

“Lady Bromley-Montfort is saying that someone could have fallen through there,” Pasang said in his not unpleasant Oxbridge singsong. “Perhaps a year ago.”

“If someone had fallen a year ago,” I said between heavy coughs, “that cornice would have rebuilt itself.”

“Not necessarily,” said the Deacon. “Go ahead, Reggie. Be careful.”

She wiggled her way further out onto the tiny spur of rock—I certainly wouldn’t have trusted my weight to that wee bit of stone overhanging such a fall—and then she pulled her binoculars from where she’d hung them against her back. Looking straight down, she slowly swept the glasses back and forth twice and then froze.

“There they are,” she said.

“Who?” I cried. My first thought was that the Germans were sneaking up on us from the vertical south side of the ridgeline.

“Meyer and Cousin Percival,” said Reggie, her voice flat.

“Certainly you can’t see all the way down to the glacier with those field glasses,” said Jean-Claude.

Reggie sighed, shook her head, and shouted over the rising wind. “They didn’t fall that far and they’re still roped together. The rope caught on a crag projecting out about a hundred feet below this ridge. Meyer’s body is hanging head down on the left side of the crag. Percy’s body is hanging free, turning in the wind, head up, on the west side of the crag.”

“How could Mallory clothesline rope stay intact in such a fall, against sharp rock, for a full year, at this altitude?” whispered Jean-Claude.

Reggie couldn’t have heard him over the wind, but the Deacon did. “Who knows?” he said. Then, loud enough for all of us to hear—“What we have to do now is to figure out a way to get both of them up here before that old rope finally snaps.”

I thought of the Germans with guns in hot pursuit…or perhaps “cold pursuit” would be a better term. Had they reached the First Step yet? The Blind Step rock on the traverse? No matter, they were behind us, and the Deacon had said that Bruno Sigl would never give up. And the Nazi had both a Luger and the Deacon’s sniper rifle. And other armed fascists had been climbing with him.

I decided not to mention the Germans right then. Or to think about them.

“Uncoil the ropes,” said the Deacon. “Reggie, stay where you are. We’ll come to you. Somebody has to be lowered down to get ropes around each of the dead men.”

“I’ll do it,” J.C. said at once. “I’m the lightest.”

The Deacon nodded.

I thought, Thank God it won’t be me, and then was immediately ashamed.

The Deacon and Pasang standing, J.C. and I crawling on all fours, we all moved toward Reggie and the north lip of the North East Ridge.