The Abominable: A Novel

18.

Working out the rope, knots, harness, carabiner, and belay logistics for attempting to recover the two dangling bodies was a tad complicated—at least for weary, oxygen-starved minds laboring to be minimally coherent above 28,000 feet.

First we anchored four ropes to the bollard of Mushroom Rock, whose stone “stem” looked solid enough to tie off several grand pianos with no strain. One of the ropes went to Reggie, who—at Pasang’s and the Deacon’s insistence—had to carabiner-clip her waist harness onto an anchored rope. But watching her lying on the spur of rock, her head and shoulders far out over the breathtaking drop, was still unnerving.

With the belay rope tied off on the bollard and two ice axes near the lip of the cornice keeping the ropes from cutting through the snow and ice at the edge—Pasang was holding two more ropes with the proper lariat loop and knots already tied in—the Deacon and I slowly belayed Jean-Claude over the edge of the long drop. Reggie was our eyes.

“All right…slowly…good…good…slowly…good…he’s about fifteen feet above the spur and the bodies now…good…slow…stop…no a little more…there!”

I was glad I couldn’t see my French friend dangling there next to that rotten-tooth rock spur almost ten stories below with the ancient frayed three-eighths-inch rope caught over it, the rotting cotton line holding two dead bodies slowly twisting in the incessant winds.

“He’s gesturing that he wants to tie Percival on first,” said Reggie. “He needs about six feet of slack and the second rope.”

Pasang blithely walked right up to the edge of the rock spur next to Reggie and dropped the rope needed for tying onto the body. Then he calmly walked back and handed it to me. The plan was for the Deacon to continue belaying J.C., for me to pull up Bromley’s body once J.C. cut him loose from the old rope, and for Pasang to pull up Meyer’s corpse once it was secured. If it was ever secured.

But first Jean-Claude had to get the two extra ropes over the corpses’ heads and shoulders and knotted and firmly secured under their arms.

“Jean-Claude has his feet on the crag and is leaning out almost horizontally to pull in Percy’s body,” reported Reggie.

Even just hearing that description made me a little queasy. We’d learned to trust the Deacon’s Miracle Rope on this expedition—mostly in the heavy loads it had hauled up without snapping while we were using J.C.’s bicycle-pulley device—but no one’s life had depended upon the rope in the way J.C.’s did now. All four of us mountaineers—including Reggie (but not Pasang, whose mountain skills seemed to come naturally)—had come of age in an era when ropes, like Mallory’s and Irvine’s, broke more often than not when any serious load or drop pressure was applied.

“Keep lowering…,” said Reggie, talking to me now because I was to the Deacon’s right and letting out the first 100-foot-long rope that Pasang had handed me, one with a pre-made lasso at its end. “All right, he’s got it…another four or five feet of slack, please, Jake…all right he’s trying to get the loop over Percy and under his arms…Percy’s arms won’t move.”

“Rigor mortis?” I whispered to Pasang, who was standing nearby with the second long strand of rope.

“No, that was over a year ago,” Pasang said softly so that Reggie wouldn’t hear the words above the wind. “Lord Percival has just been frozen solid for a long time.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling very sorry I’d asked.

“He’s got the loop over but is having trouble getting the slipknot pulled tight,” said Reggie.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Deacon’s face covered with sweat. His belay rope to Jean-Claude was tied off to Mushroom Rock, but the Deacon was carrying all the weight over his shoulder and once around his waist. He’d taken all the layers off his hands except for the thin silk gloves that made up the bottom layer, and now I could see blood soaking through the silk.

I admit that I was nervous. The phrase “dead weight” takes on a terrible reality when one actually has to lift a dead person. Nothing on earth seems quite so…heavy.

“All right, Jake…he has Percy’s body tied on…,” said Reggie.

I started to pull on the rope but Reggie shouted “Stop!”

I’d forgotten that J.C. had to finish securing Meyer’s corpse to the new rope belayed by Pasang and only then cut the old rope that had held both bodies hanging there for almost a full year. We’d lose more than the corpses if those four ropes got tangled or crossed, or snapped.

“Jean-Claude’s feet came off the crag,” reported Reggie. “He’s swinging free, trying to get his boots back on the rock.”

I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the feeling of swinging freely, on a single rope held by a single man, over a drop of that magnitude.

The Deacon grunted, more from the exertion of the belay, I realized, than in acknowledgment of Reggie’s report. The tug from J.C.’s fall from the crag when I made him lose his footing with my premature pulling on Percy’s rope had been fast, hard, and harsh against the Deacon’s hands, shoulder, and middle.

“All right, his boots are touching rock again,” reported Reggie.

Sweat dripped from the Deacon’s stubbled chin. We’d all been off oxygen for quite a while now. Our rucksacks were stacked against the south side of Mushroom Rock.

Pasang had started lowering the third rope—the rope and lasso for Kurt Meyer—even before Reggie called him forward to do so. When 50 feet or so were played out, he ducked on all fours under my taut rope and then under the Deacon’s line to J.C. so that he’d be to the far left of our line of three busy belayers.

“A little more…a little more…slowly now…,” Reggie was reciting. “There, he has it. Give him another five feet or so of slack, Pasang.”

Pasang calmly did so.

“Darn…,” said Reggie. “He can’t reach Meyer from his half-perch on the crag. He’s going to have to swing out to grab him.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I whispered. Anything can and usually does go wrong when there are multiple ropes dangling in such a confined area.

“Do you need help?” I whispered to the Deacon, who was bracing his boot soles—he’d removed his crampons for this—hard against a little ridge of rock about five feet north of the Mushroom Rock.

He shook his head and beads of sweat flew west in the rising wind.

“He’s swinging…he’s swinging again…he missed,” reported Reggie. “Now he’s pushing off almost horizontally from the crag to try again.”

“Jesus,” I whispered again. I think it was a prayer this time. I realized that I’d come to trust the Deacon’s Miracle Rope in most basic rappel and belay situations, but if the frayed old rope parted before Jean-Claude got the loop tight around Meyer’s body—and if J.C. then tried to hold on to the corpse, as I was sure he would—the weight of the two men, one living and one dead, suddenly would be on the single line that the Deacon was belaying. Even though the end of that rope was tied off to the Mushroom Rock, I doubted if it could hold the doubled weight.

J.C.’s belay rope grew tauter than ever, the line cutting through the edge of the cornice and pressing down hard on our double-ice-axe setup. We’d run multiple lines from those axes to other anchors, and two back to the much-encircled Mushroom Rock bollard.

The Deacon grunted and held J.C.’s swinging weight. The silk of his gloved hands was dyed red now.

“Meyer’s upside down,” reported Reggie. “Jean-Claude is working to spin him around right-side up.”

How can even the Deacon’s Miracle Rope keep from snapping under this pressure? I thought again. Well, we’d see in the next minute or two. In the meantime, I kept a steady but not lifting pressure on the rope running down to Lord Percival Bromley, the man who could have been the sixth Marquess of Lexeter if he’d survived.

“He’s got him!” cried Reggie. “He’s tying the loop off under Meyer’s arms. Now Jean-Claude’s swinging back to the crag.”

The Deacon grunted slightly. The blended rope was stretched so taut that it looked as if he was trying to land a giant marlin with only his bloody hands, arched back, and braced body.

“Jake, Pasang, get ready,” called Reggie. “Jean-Claude is going to cut the old rope now. He has his penknife open.”

I’d found a low boulder-ridge on which to brace my boots—I’d kept my crampons on since I didn’t know if I’d have the dexterity to strap them on again—and now I leaned back, bracing myself for the pull and dead weight to come.

The rope grew taut…but there was very little pull and almost no sense of weight. Had goraks hollowed Bromley’s corpse out the way they’d eaten into George Mallory’s abdominal cavity through the poor corpse’s exposed rectum? Jesus Christ, for Reggie’s sake, I hoped that wasn’t the case.

“Pull!” cried Reggie—needlessly, I thought, since both Pasang and I were pulling in our loads hand over hand. Only the Deacon remained on passive, strained belay. We’d decided before J.C. went over the cliff that we’d get the bodies up before pulling in our living friend—just to keep the various ropes free from tangling, for one reason; to keep J.C. and his belay line free of a free-falling corpse for another reason.

Bromley reached the cornice, and naturally his corpse hung up under the overhang of ice and snow.

“Give me a second,” said Reggie and leaned most of her weight out on the rotten, treacherous, already once-broken cornice, fishing around with her extended ice axe the way a captain’s mate would use a gaff to reach under a boat to bring in a big fish.

She hooked the rope. Percy’s head and shoulders bobbed up into sight, and I pulled for everything I was worth.

“Get back on the rock!” growled the Deacon, and I realized he was saying it to Reggie. She did so, creeping backward in no great hurry.

Now Meyer’s corpse, being pulled in by Pasang, came up onto the North East Ridge with no problem, the dead man’s head and shoulders sliding up and through the crescent-shaped hole that he and Percival Bromley had broken through the cornice almost a year ago. I noticed—distantly, since all my sense impressions seemed to be coming from a great distance at that moment—that yards of the old, frayed rope, cleanly cut in the middle by Jean-Claude just minutes before, still dangled from each dead body.

When the bodies were secure, pulled as far up toward us and Mushroom Rock as we could get them while leaving some room for ourselves, Pasang and I dropped our belay ropes and joined the Deacon on his. Reggie stayed on the rock spur, her head and shoulders hanging further out than before. She signaled down to J.C. that we were ready to bring him up.

This, I knew, would be the real test of the Miracle Rope. I wished we’d had enough rope with us to pass two lines around Jean-Claude, but 200 feet of what we did have had been needed for the dead bodies.

Now we pulled—slowly, constantly, the three of us in perfect rhythm, watching the frail line snake over the doubled shafts of the anchored horizontal ice axes. Reggie was calling out the distance remaining after each pull.

“Forty feet…thirty…twenty-five…Jean-Claude’s feet can’t reach the cliff face, he’s just hanging free…”

We knew that from the weight against our shoulders and hands. The Deacon was still bearing the brunt of that weight.

“Fifteen feet…ten…five…careful now!” Reggie quit calling distances, reached down, grabbed our friend’s anorak, and helped pull J.C.’s shoulders into sight. The three of us on belay tugged again and he came up and over and onto his hands and knees and quickly crawled away from the cornice. Reggie had almost fallen forward when her burden popped up onto the ridge, but Pasang had shifted his large right hand to her anchor rope and pulled it hard, tugging her back onto the rock spur. She also crawled toward us on all fours. After we’d retrieved all of the ropes, undone knots, and coiled and safely stowed the ropes under Mushroom Rock, we crouched in a tight circle around both bodies.

“This is my cousin Percival,” Reggie said just loud enough to be heard over the wind. She pulled off her mittens and gloves and set her bare hand against the worn wool and tattered Shackleton gabardine over his chest.

There was no smell of decay. The exposed portions of both bodies’ faces and hands—and a bit of Meyer’s chest under a rip in the fabric there—were bleached almost white by ultraviolet rays, as Mallory’s back had been, and the skin of each man looked slightly mummified, and their eyes and cheeks had fallen in the way corpses’ faces do, but the goraks hadn’t been at them. I had no clue as to why not. There was a bullet wound visible in Meyer’s upper left shoulder—it shouldn’t have been an instantly fatal wound, the Deacon said—but although we rolled Bromley’s body over carefully, we found no entrance or exit wounds on him.

“So the Germans didn’t kill Lord Percival?” I said, my voice thick with fatigue, altitude, and emotion.

“They killed him, my friend,” said Jean-Claude. “But not by shooting him. Rather, by shooting Herr Meyer and making Lord Percy either jump or be shot the same way.”

“Put your gloves back on, Reggie,” the Deacon said gently. I’d just watched him pull wool gloves over his now bloody silken ones.

“Lady Bromley-Montfort,” said Pasang, “we shall search Lord Percival for you.”

Reggie shook her head. “No. Pasang, will you please help me with Percy? Then analyze Meyer’s bullet wound. The rest of you can look through Meyer’s clothing.”

“What are we hunting for?” asked Jean-Claude.

“I don’t know exactly,” said Reggie. “But it will be very portable. Meyer carried it for thousands of miles across Europe, the Middle East, and then Persia and China.”

We treated the bodies with a slow gentleness, although they were far beyond feeling any insult or injury. Perhaps we were just following Reggie’s tender-touch lead.

The first thing I noticed about Meyer, despite the weathering effects of hanging in midair off Mount Everest for a year, was that he looked very, very young.

“How old was this Austrian?” I asked no one in particular.

“Seventeen, I believe,” said Reggie. She was absorbed with going through her cousin’s pockets.

Neither Meyer nor Bromley had a rucksack on. We went through the many pockets of what was left of their outer anoraks, wool trousers, Norfolk jackets, and waistcoats. Meyer had multiple letters in German in his left jacket pocket—I couldn’t even decipher the Fraktur handwriting on the envelopes—and his Austrian passport, stamped at a score of border crossings.

In Meyer’s left jacket pocket was a large wad of pound notes.

“Good God,” I said. “Are these real?”

The Deacon fanned through them. The clumps of bills were still banded, and the writing on those bands was still quite clear—NATIONAL PROVINCIAL BANK LTD. LONDON.

“This is a real bank, Ree-shard?”

“It had better be,” said the Deacon. “I have what little money I have left stored there.” He was counting the bills. “There’s fifteen thousand pounds here.”

“So your cousin Percy was paying for this information,” J.C. said to Reggie.

She looked up from the pockets she was searching. “Probably. It’s what he did with his sources willing to risk their lives and their families’ lives to betray their Austrian or German masters. From the little Percy told me—usually after a fine dinner and much wine—espionage is mostly about paying unsavory characters.”

“So,” I said, pointing to the body of the dead young man we were still searching, “this Austrian was an unsavory character.”

“I believe not,” said Reggie, her words almost lost in the gusts of wind from the west. “Look at his passport again and you’ll see why he probably did what he did, and risked everything to do it.”

I looked at the Austrian passport and its description, but I could find nothing especially interesting. NAME: Kurt Abraham Meyer. BIRTHDATE: 4 Oct. 1907. OCCUPATION: apprentice typesetter.

“Here,” said the Deacon and pointed to the Fraktur-labeled category: RELIGION. Under it was written, in the perfect penmanship of some bureaucrat: HEBREW.

“He spied for your cousin because he was a Jew?” I asked Reggie, but she didn’t respond.

Instead, she’d removed a thick, solid manila envelope from the Norfolk jacket breast pocket of her cousin’s corpse. She was careful not to let the increasing wind gusts grab the envelope out of her hands, shielding it with her body.

Inside the larger envelope were five smaller ones. Each one seemed to hold the same number of photographs—seven. I couldn’t exactly see what the photographs were because Reggie was still hunched over the package, but I was thinking that for £15,000 in cash, they’d damned well better be photostats of Count von Zeppelin’s newest military airships.

“Ahhh,” said Reggie, and the syllable combined a sense of the air being knocked out of her and the confrontation with some revelation. “Do you want to see what Percy and Meyer died for, gentlemen?”

All of us, except for Pasang, nodded. The doctor was busy cutting away waistcoat and shirt fabric on Meyer’s corpse to inspect the bullet wound in his upper shoulder, just below the collarbone.

“Be careful,” said Reggie. “There are five identical sets of these, but this set has the negatives. Don’t let any of the pictures blow away.” She handed one of the packets of photographs to the Deacon, who looked at all seven, nodded slowly, and carefully handed the packet to Jean-Claude.

J.C. made up for the Deacon’s nonreaction by responding physically and vocally, his head snapping back as if he’d been confronted by a bad smell, his arms thrusting the photos further from him, and crying, “Mon Dieu, these are…this is…these are…abominable.”

I strained to see the pictures over his shoulder but only could catch glimpses of white figures against a dark background.

“Abominable,” J.C. rasped again, shaking his head. “Completement abominable!”

He turned his face away and handed me the photos. I had to clutch them tightly in both hands and lower my face toward them to see them in the wind. Then I remembered that my snow goggles were still in place and roughly shoved them up as I went through the seven black-and-white photographs.

Each photo was of a very pale, very thin man in his late twenties or early thirties having sex with what I counted as four different young men—no, with boys. The oldest boy having sex with this man must have been about thirteen. The youngest was no older than eight or nine. The photographs were very clear, the naked flesh very white against a background that was very dark save for the gray blur of tumbled sheets. The room looked to be a cheap European hotel room, perhaps Austrian, with heavy furniture and dark painted walls. The photographer must have used a flash or a long exposure, because shades were drawn on the one window visible in the snapshots. The sharpness of each photograph and the critical depth of field suggested a high-quality camera. Each print was about five by seven inches, and the negatives were in a paper sleeve at the bottom of the packet.

For only seven photographs, an incredible variety of deviancy was on display. I confess that my expression must have shown my shock as I looked through the pictures and then looked through again. Modesty should have made me look away after seeing the first print, but I had to see—it was the same compulsion I would feel in later years when passing a serious highway accident.

The adult male was a very thin and obviously poorly fed fellow, his ribs and hipbones rampant, some scabs visible; a man who probably looked bourgeois enough, with his hair parted on the left side as suggested in these photos and his severe, short, greased-back haircut carefully combed—but in the tumble and passion of these moments, that greasy hair stood out in wild tufts. The man had thin lips and a stern demeanor in the only photograph where his mouth was not hanging open either in the throes of passion or in the midst of some more explicit and disturbing sex act he was involved in.

In one photograph, the man was buggering the youngest boy while simultaneously sucking the small, stiff penis of the thirteen-year-old. In another photograph, a boy no older than ten was masturbating the adult male while the man played with the genitals of two of the younger boys as the fourth boy, the oldest, perhaps fouteen years old, stood naked and looked on with a dull, almost drugged expression.

The oldest boy’s face was strangely familiar, and then it hit me with a shock—it was Kurt Meyer! And only four years or so younger than when he’d died here on Everest.

“Oh…God,” I whispered.

One photograph was almost impossible to make out—a sprawl of five white, emaciated bodies on the tumbled sheets, connecting and pleasuring each other in so many disturbing ways that my innocent Protestant American mind couldn’t quite take it in. The only face fully visible in that shot was of the adult—the older man. I stared at the face, trying to ignore all the couplings and gropings in the photograph, and realized I’d also seen him before. Once. In a photograph on a poster in a Munich beer hall. The face had been somewhat older, a little fuller, the man in the Nazi poster in his mid-thirties rather than the early thirties that these photos suggested, but the intensity of the dark gaze was the same, as was the ridiculous Charlie Chaplin mustache. At that moment, I couldn’t remember his name.

I put the photos back in the envelope and looked up at Reggie, J.C., and the Deacon. “This is what your cousin died for?” I gasped out at Reggie. “These are what we’ve been fleeing for our lives about…these…obscenities?”

“It is abominable,” Jean-Claude repeated softly, his gaze averted.

“Abominable?” I shouted. “It’s goddamned nuts! I’ve never seen anything like this before and never want to again. But who cares if some German does deviant things with street urchins? Who could give a damn about any of these photographs!”

“The adult man using these children is not German,” said Reggie. “He’s Austrian, although he lost his Austrian citizenship when he moved to Germany a few years ago. And you know that he’s the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—a very dangerous group, Jake.”

“He’s in jail!” I shouted. “The Deacon and I heard that last November when we met Sigl in that damned beer hall in Munich!”

“He was released last December,” said the Deacon. “While we were buying boots and rope in London.”

“I don’t care if he’s a socialist!” I shouted, standing and pacing around the Mushroom Rock in my agitation. “Who cares about goddamned socialists—we have thousands of them in New York, probably hundreds in Boston where I live. Why would Lord Percival risk his life…die?” I pointed at the corpse at my feet. I noticed the “Douglas Fairbanks mustache” now, as well as dark stubble on the dead man’s cheeks and chin. For a sickening moment that almost made me swoon, I remembered that hair kept growing after a person died.

“…all this for nasty photos of a damned socialist?” I finished weakly.

“He’s not a socialist, Jake,” said Reggie. “He’s a Nazi. The Nazi.” She was fumbling in her rucksack for something.

“Who cares?” I said again. “Even I know that there are a hundred crackpot political factions in Weimar Germany. Even I know that, and I can barely tell a Democrat from a Republican. Why should we climb almost to the summit of Mount Everest…and have that climb ruined by this…and suffer all we’ve suffered just to receive filthy photographs of one sick pederast and his victims? And, for God’s sake, you can see that one of the victims—one of the kids in that room—was young Kurt Meyer. The guy who sold your cousin Percy this package of trash!” In my fury, I held the envelope up into the wind between two fingers and said, “I’m throwing this crap away.”

“Jake!” snapped Reggie.

I looked down at her. She had her 12-gauge flare pistol held steady in both hands and was aiming it directly at my gaping face.

“If you let those photos go,” she said in flat tones, “I’ll kill you with this, I swear to God I will. I love you, Jake. I love all of you. But give me the photos back or I’ll shoot you in the face. You know I will. I did it with the German on the glacier.”

In that instant and that second, I knew she was telling the truth—both about loving me, probably like a brother, alas (or like her dead cousin), and also about being ready to kill me in a second if I threw those photos away. Then I remembered the red flare burning through the gaping mouth of Karl Bachner and the liquid from his eyes running down his cheeks like melted wax.

I carefully handed the envelope of photos and negatives back to Reggie.

“What I’m curious about,” the Deacon said in conversational tones, as if nothing had happened between Reggie and me, “is who took the photos. Not…Bromley?”

“No,” said Reggie. Her voice suddenly sounded infinitely weary. “Although Percival had to frequent some of those…establishments and circles…in his guise as a dissolute pro-Austrian, pro-German British expat. It was Kurt Meyer who took those photographs. With a rather sophisticated little camera that had a time delay. Percy had given it to him for just this purpose.”

All of us shifted our gaze to the body of the dead Austrian. He was so young. I noticed for the first time that a ginger-colored shadow under Meyer’s nose was obviously a boy’s attempt to grow a man’s mustache.

“So Meyer was also a spy?” I said, not really expecting an answer.

“He was on the payroll of British intelligence,” said Reggie. “And Kurt Meyer was also a Jew.” She said it as if that explained everything.

For a moment I thought she was saying that, naturally, Jews were greedier than anybody else and would do anything for money—I’d known no Jews at Harvard or in my Boston social life, of course—but then I remembered that the Nazis weren’t overly fond of Jews, even German or Austrian Jews. But this Hitler bastard had been in bed with a bunch of Jewish boys—everyone in the photos except the adult Nazi had been circumcised. Nothing made sense. Everything was just…dirty. I shook my head.

“Kurt Meyer was also one of the bravest men my cousin Percival ever worked with,” she said. “And Percy had worked with hundreds of brave men, most of them doomed to terrible deaths by their courage.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“Here it is,” said Reggie, who’d continued looking through her dead cousin’s pockets after setting down the Very pistol with which she’d threatened to kill me.

She pulled out a folded piece of green silk that I first thought to be a fancy handkerchief—rather like the one that had been on George Mallory’s body—but, when unfolded by Reggie, turned out to be a three-foot-by-four-foot flag of a gryphon battling an eagle over a gold medieval-looking lance.

I’d last seen that flag—or a larger version of it—flying over the Bromley estate when we’d gone to visit Lady Bromley.

“Did your cousin seriously think that he and this…boy…might really summit Mount Everest?” asked the Deacon.

“Obviously their only choice was to keep climbing higher from their Nazi pursuers,” said Reggie, still rather tart in tone. “With Mallory and Irvine’s expedition’s fixed ropes and camps still intact, it gave them a chance. But the Germans turned out to be better climbers. Still…Percy approached everything he did with more than one hundred percent effort, so perhaps he could have summited this mountain from Mallory and Irvine’s highest camp had Sigl not caught up to them, although that hadn’t been Percy’s intention when he climbed away from the Germans.” She put the folded flag away somewhere in her own layers of clothing. “Now I will climb it for him.”

“No one’s going to climb anything if we don’t hurry,” called Jean-Claude over the wind roar.

While we’d been busy looking at pornography, chatting, deciding whether to kill one another, and so forth, J.C. had taken his binoculars from his rucksack and walked over to the snowy, treacherous south edge of the North East Ridge, looking down and back the way we’d come.

“Les boches are just now solving the Blind Step problem,” he called to us. “They will be here in thirty minutes or less, depending upon Herr Sigl’s climbing skills. I suggest that we finish our business here and leave soon.”

“Leave for where?” I said between terrible fits of coughing. I knew I had to get down, down to where the air was thick enough for me to breathe even with these shards of lobster shells and clacking claws in my throat.

The Deacon turned his head and looked to his right and up—and then up some more—at the looming and impossible Second Step less than a hundred meters away. Not that far above that impossible Second Step—or so it seemed—the summit of Mount Everest looked to be exhaling a twenty-mile-long howling tail of gale-driven spindrift.