The Abominable: A Novel

23.

We huddled low on the east side of the bench rock at the top of the face in order to talk, but first we all indulged in five or eight minutes of English air, on full flow. It helped a little, and I didn’t cough anything else up while inhaling or exhaling.

Finally we put down our masks and got down to business.

“I can’t believe that Jean-Claude is gone,” Reggie said. We leaned closer to hear her, but the high winds seemed to be moderating somewhat, as if Everest were allowing us a brief moment for remembrance of our friend.

But despite that lull in the wind, no one else said anything for a long minute or two. “It’s decision time,” said the Deacon.

I didn’t understand. “What decision? A dozen Germans, including Sigl, are dead, including the one Reggie shot with her flare pistol and the ones who fell from the ladder on the North Col. There’s nothing stopping us from going back down the mountain, back to what’s left of Base Camp, and then getting the hell out of here. Back to Darjeeling.” That was a long speech for a man with such a sore throat, and I was sorry my three friends had been forced to hear the rasp and scrape of it.

“I think Herr Sigl came in force this year,” said the Deacon. “A dozen of them may be dead, but I’d be surprised if someone with Sigl’s cunning didn’t leave one or two on the glacier, in the Trough, or down by Base Camp. Just to make sure none of us get away.”

“We have to get those photographs and negatives back to London,” said Reggie. “That’s our highest priority. That is what Jean-Claude and all our Sherpas died for, whether our Sherpa friends knew it or not.”

The Deacon nodded and then nodded some more but then shook his head. Then he looked up, over the top of my head to the west, and said, “I want to climb the mountain. But I’ve never abandoned a fellow climber in need and I won’t start now, Jake.”

I was stunned at this. “If you want to keep climbing, I’m fit to come with you,” I lied. It felt like the bloody trilobite I’d coughed up had eaten out my insides—the way the goraks had got at Mallory and hollowed him out.

“No, Mr. Perry, you are not fit to go with him,” Pasang said quietly.

I blinked angrily at him. Who was he to deny me my life’s dream?

A doctor, responded the oxygen-supplied remnant of my brain.

“The summit should be about two hours’ climbing from here—maybe two and a half with slow going and breaking trail in deep snow on the Summit Pyramid,” said the Deacon. “But we have oxygen for the entire round-trip.”

“No, we don’t,” I rasped, confused again. “We’ve barely one full tank apiece.”

“Jake, didn’t you notice the tanks on Sigl and the other Germans we just shot?” said the Deacon. “They’re our rigs—Jean-Claude’s rigs. The Germans must have looted them from our reserve cache at Base Camp. They probably didn’t use more than two full tanks each in their climb to the North East Ridge…that should leave at least eight extra tanks for us. Full tanks.”

I understood then that we were in a unique position to try for the summit—a far stronger chance than Mallory and Irvine’s on their last day. They’d had to climb all the way from Camp VI at 27,000 feet on two or three tanks each. And their carrying rigs were much heavier. We were already above the Second Step—two hours away from the summit and only about 800 vertical feet below it. And we had not only a surfeit of oxygen rigs but also Reggie’s Big Tent, which we’d hauled up with us…something we could use if we were forced by sudden bad weather to bivouac up here. For every expedition before ours, a bivouac above 27,000 feet meant certain death. For our expedition, with Reggie’s tent, our goose down clothing, and ample tanks of English air, it would be just another first. One of many for the Deacon-Bromley-Montfort-Pasang-Perry-Clairoux Expedition.

The thought of J.C.’s name and the memory of his joyous drive to climb this damned hill made tears freeze on my lashes.

“I want to go, too,” I rasped. “We’ll all go. Step onto the summit at the same time.”

“No,” said Pasang. “Mr. Perry—you must excuse me, sir—you didn’t bleed too much when you coughed up the frozen mucous membrane to your larynx. But further climbing, more hours or even days at altitude, might cause a pulmonary embolism at the very least. Another night at this altitude would almost certainly be fatal.”

“I’ll risk it,” I rasped. But already I felt the lethargy trying to pull me down onto the snowy rock.

“Can we make it to the summit and back by nightfall?” asked Reggie. “Or would we have to pitch my tent somewhere exposed, like at Mushroom Rock?”

The Deacon took a breath and shook his head. “I’m planning to go alone. And I’m not planning to return.”

I tried to shout then but my throat hurt too much. I took a shot of English air instead.

“You plan to commit suicide up here just to climb this hill?” Reggie shouted. “You are a coward despite what Cousin Charles told me and despite all your shiny medals!”

The Deacon smiled.

What’s funny? I remember thinking. I kept hearing and re-hearing the hiss that had flowed out of J.C.’s oxygen tank after the bullet had passed through both him and the metal bottle. It had sounded, even at the time, like the sound of Jean-Claude’s soul being forced out of his body.

“If going to the summit and not coming down isn’t suicide, what is it?” Reggie demanded of the Deacon. She looked about ready to punch him.

“You remember when Ken visited me in Sikkim…?” asked the Deacon.

“K. T. Owings!” I rasped. “What the hell does he have to do with anything?”

“Yes. Well, Ken has lived in Nepal on his own farm in the Khumbu Valley just below the south approach to Everest ever since he decided to leave the world right after the Great War. He’s still a poet; he just doesn’t show anyone his work now. And he’s still a climber, although no one hears about his climbs now.”

“Are you saying,” Reggie said testily, “that your chum Ken Owings has climbed Everest and will be waiting up there for you on the summit with an airship or something?”

The Deacon flashed a grin. “Nothing so dramatic, Reggie. But Ken has reconnoitered the approaches and cols and ridges to Everest from the other side—the south approach—and promised me that he and some Sherpa friends would leave path wands and crevasse ladders in place way down in the Khumbu Glacier Ice Fall. He says that may be the most dangerous part of the climb, and it’s right near his Base Camp on the south side.”

“There is no Base Camp on the south side,” I croaked, my voice sounding like long fingernails being dragged down a blackboard.

“There is now, Jake,” said the Deacon. “Ken has been climbing the last week and more—setting fixed rope—leaving tents on the South Col for me.” He looked at Reggie. “For us.”

“South Col,” I repeated, wincing from the pain. I’d heard and thought “North Col” so many thousands of times in the last nine months that it hardly seemed possible that there was a South Col to Everest—or that it might ever be relevant to anything.

“Nepal’s forbidden to foreigners,” said Reggie. “You’ll be imprisoned, Richard.”

The Deacon shook his head a final time. “Owings has friends there. His farm in the Khumbu Valley employs about a hundred locals, and he’s respected. He converted to Buddhism in nineteen nineteen—really converted, not like my meditate-in-the-morning, shoot-Germans-in-the-afternoon shallow sort of conversion—and many in Nepal consider him a holy man. He’ll find a place for me.”

Reggie looked at him for a very long silent moment. “Why do you want to go away from everything, Richard? Leave everything you know behind?”

When he finally spoke, the Deacon’s voice was thick. “I feel—as you once put it so beautifully, Reggie—that the world is too much with me, and not necessarily in a Buddhist sense. The best part of me never came back from the Great War.”

Reggie rubbed her cheek and then looked up at the white Summit Pyramid gleaming behind the Deacon’s head. “I’ve been fulfilling my duty as a Bromley and as a proud Briton since I came to India when I was nine years old,” she said. “I took over managing the tea plantation when I was fourteen and have run it ever since. Our income from that plantation keeps the House of Bromley in England going. When I was twenty-six, I married an old man I didn’t love—to get an infusion of fresh funds to keep the plantation going. Lord Montfort died before I really got to know him…and he never made any effort to get to know me. I’m tired of doing my duty.”

“What are you saying, Reggie?” I asked.

“I’m saying that I would love to set foot on the summit of Everest and wouldn’t mind seeing forbidden Nepal for a few years, Jake.”

“I will climb with you then, my lady,” said Dr. Pasang.

She touched his arm. “No, my friend. This time you do not come with me. Jake needs to get down to Base Camp and Darjeeling. We need to get those photographs to the right people. I’ve never ordered you to do anything, my beloved Pasang, but I beg you to take Jake down and return to the plantation while I do this thing.”

Pasang looked for a second as if he was going to argue, but in the end he only bowed his head. His dark eyes looked moist, but it might have been the wind that caused that.

“You know where I keep my will,” Reggie was saying to him when I’d finished taking another snort of English air. “You know the combination to that safe. You’ll find that I’ve left the plantation to you and your family, Pasang.

“There is a clause in the will,” continued Reggie. “A codicil that stipulates that should I die or disappear, one-third of the plantation’s profits shall continue to flow to Lady Bromley in Lincolnshire…until her death. Then all profits are yours to do with as you wish, my dear Pasang.”

He nodded again, not lifting his eyes to hers.

“Wait,” said the Deacon. “No one’s going to attempt the summit this afternoon—much less try to traverse beyond to where Ken left fixed ropes and tents and supplies—unless we’re absolutely sure that Jake can get down safely with only Pasang accompanying him.”

“Wait a minute,” I croaked. “We can spend the night in Reggie’s Big Tent at Mushroom Rock and decide all this in the morning. I’ll probably be fit as a fiddle by then. We can all go to the summit, and you can try that idiotic idea of traversing south to Nepal if you want—both of you! Pasang and I will come back down this way.”

Pasang was shaking his head. There was a soft but final firmness in his voice. “No, Mr. Perry. I am very sorry. You must go down today.” He turned to Reggie and the Deacon. “Mr. Perry can walk almost unassisted—I believe he will continue to be able to do that for a while, especially during a descent. When he no longer can, I shall carry him. When we are off the mountain and his breathing improves, I shall escort him down to Rongbuk Monastery and then make arrangements for us to return to Darjeeling.”

“Hey!” I croak-coughed. “Don’t I get a say in…”

Evidently I didn’t.

We all stood. The wind had died down appreciably, but the lenticular hat was back on Everest’s summit.

The Deacon pulled out his large Very military pistol and fired a flare high into the sky toward and beyond the summit. A white star-flare, the phosphorus burst much brighter than our regular mountaineering flares.

White, green, then red, I remembered K. T. Owings saying to the Deacon about ten thousand years earlier in Sikkim.

“I believe,” said the Deacon, his voice a strange mixture of sadness and a weary sort of exaltation, “that I…that we”—he looked at Reggie, who nodded—“can reach this summit, traverse the steep crest line between the two summits, rappel down that Big Step Ken told me about, and get to the fixed ropes Owings and his Sherpas have set up on the southern approach ridge by…before…midnight. If we can’t down-climb with our torches and headlamps, we’ll bivouac in the Big Tent somewhere beyond the South Summit and leave the tent behind us when we continue our descent in the morning.”

“That’s nuts,” I said. “The first ascent of Everest—that we know about—and you want to do a damned traverse down the southern way. Totally nuts.”

The Deacon and Reggie only grinned at me. The world had gone insane.

“One favor,” said the Deacon. “Keep all your belay rope and the extra coils—and J.C.’s coil there as well—but leave that hundred feet of rope going down the Second Step for us to pull up after you’ve descended. If we do have to turn back from the summits, we’ll need it. All right?”

I nodded dumbly.

The Deacon took a folded piece of paper from some inside pocket and said, “Here’s the name and address of the man in London to whom you have to deliver those photographs, Jake. Deliver them to him personally. No one else. For God’s sake don’t lose this.”

I nodded again and put the folded paper in my buttonable wool shirt pocket beneath all my outer layers. I didn’t unfold the paper or think to glance at the name, I was so shocked and depressed at realizing that I really was going to have to go down rather than up…and after I’d free-climbed the Second Step for them!

But mostly, I think, this sudden surge of deep depression came from my bottomless sense of loss at Jean-Claude’s sudden death. The truth was just settling deep into my mind and soul that I’d never see my friend from Chamonix again, nor hear his laugh.

“Pasang,” said Reggie, “if for whatever reason you rather than Jake needs to be the one to go to London to deliver your various copies of the photos, you know whom to see and where to go, do you not?”

“I do, my lady.”

The Deacon offered his hand. I shook it, still not believing we were parting.

“Stay alive,” I heard myself saying to him.

“I will,” said the Deacon. “Remember, my destiny is to die on the North Wall of the Eiger…not on Everest. You feel better soon, Jake.”

And then Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort kissed me. On the lips. Hard. She stepped back next to the Deacon, and I had a last look at her beautiful, incomparable ultramarine eyes.

“Don’t forget to pull your goggles back down,” I said dully.

Then Pasang and I were jumaring down the rope we’d so conveniently left for Bruno Sigl to climb, then we were down on the snow at the base of the still-terrifying Second Step, and then I could see the Deacon hauling up the long rope, and then, in an eyeblink—he was gone. They were gone. Presumably hiking up the widening west end of the North East Ridge onto the snowfields that led to the Summit Pyramid and the summit.

And I was heading back down.

Walking single file along the knife-edge ridge toward the dead Germans lying in the snow, I started crying like a baby. Pasang patted my back and squeezed my shoulder. “It is the trauma of your choking,” he said.

“No it isn’t.”

I hadn’t heard the Deacon give orders or suggestions to Dr. Pasang, but as we came to each of the four dead Germans, he seemed to know exactly what to do. I confess that I only leaned on my ice axe, trying to breathe through my ragged, torn throat, and watched.

First, he searched each German, removing certain documents but mostly the pistols they carried. One of the dead men had a Schmeisser submachine gun tucked under his outer shell and another had the Deacon’s Webley pistol, which Pasang handed to me. I tucked it into my duvet pocket under my Shackleton anorak. Pasang was also relieving each of the four dead men of their oxygen rigs before going through their carryalls or small rucksacks, pulling out anything we might need or that might be of intelligence importance and placing it in his own full bag. He filled one of the canvas carryalls and handed it to me.

“We shall wear the metal oxygen rigs from now on, Mr. Perry, and leave the heavier rucksacks behind,” he said. “We will carry our other items in these shoulder bags.”

My mind was so dull that it was hard to do the math, but I was pretty sure that three full oxygen tanks for each of us should get us down to Base Camp—or at least to the lower camps where we’d hidden some of Jean-Claude’s new breathing rigs. I doubted if the Germans had found them all.

“You concur with the plan, Mr. Perry?”

I nodded, still unable to speak.

Before we set off—before Pasang even tugged up the heavy shoulder straps of his new O₂ rig and various kit bags—he took out a long, curved penknife, cut the ropes connecting each of the four dead men, and dragged the bodies one by one to the lip of the south side of the ridge and shoved them over the edge. I felt a strong emotion through the general numbness at the time, but I couldn’t have said whether it was outrage at these four Germans despoiling the glacier below, where J.C.’s body must lie, or some raw, unholy joy that four of the Germans had paid for Sigl’s crime.

The actual disposal of the bodies made sense to me only much later. All five of us had assumed in 1925 that there would be more English expeditions coming soon—perhaps as early as 1926. None of us could have guessed that the next expedition wouldn’t be until 1933, and that—although they found Irvine’s ice axe, they wouldn’t think to climb down to where it pointed to find Irvine himself—the ’33 expedition wouldn’t even get beyond the First Step. The ’38 expedition, a small one, would be England’s last try at conquering Everest from the north.

But we didn’t know that. Leaving a trail of dead Germans just beyond Mushroom Rock, especially Germans all shot by a British sniper rifle, might cause some sticky diplomatic cables between Berlin and Whitehall. And pushing the corpses off the North East Ridge onto the North Face wall wouldn’t have been wise: we’d found Mallory’s and Irvine’s bodies on that face through sheer chance. It wouldn’t be good for these Germans ever to be found.

As I watched Pasang dispose of the last of the German bodies, I did realize one important thing. The coughing up of that frozen…thing…from my throat, combined with the illness that frozen mucous membrane had given me for days now, had weakened me far more than I’d been willing to admit. Even to myself. Standing there on the ridge, watching Pasang do the work of tidying things up, I felt the last of the adrenaline-rush energy that had gotten me up the Second Step flow out of me like water down a drain.

Dr. Pasang was right. If I’d tried to push on to the summit—as much as I thought I needed to—or even spent one night camped at this altitude, I would have died. This truth came to me while I was standing on the North East Ridge so close to the summit, but ready now to head down, wanting only to survive and to do my duty for Reggie and the Deacon and Cousin Percy and Kurt Meyer—and in a way for our Sherpa friends who’d been killed. And for Jean-Claude. Especially for Jean-Claude.

Just get down, survive, and get those photographs to the British authorities who needed to have them.

When we got down off the ridgeline beyond the Mushroom Rock, I was certain that I didn’t have the energy to do the Big Step around the embedded boulder on the North Face again. But I stood and watched as Pasang made it look easy—knowing where the ledges and handholds are on the other side makes a huge difference—and then he belayed me across with no problem, although I did slip at the end of my swing and Pasang had to lift me up to the ledge as if I were a bag of laundry.

I was too tired and battered to feel embarrassed. I kept glancing up toward the summit, and once I thought I saw two tiny dots moving next to each other at the top of the snowy Summit Pyramid, just below the summit itself.

But I was too tired at that moment to pull my field glasses out of my canvas bag and look through them. I’ve always wondered since then whether I could have made out Reggie and the Deacon, if it truly was them on that final, steep Summit Pyramid.

Clipping on fresh oxygen tanks the Germans had found cached at Base Camp or east of Camp V where we’d hidden them, Pasang and I continued descending into the sunny afternoon. He wasn’t actually holding me up, but most of the time we walked together, and his arm was a steadying influence as I began to feel more and more woozy.

He guided me through the rest of that traverse along the ridge and then remembered precisely where to descend through the exit cracks onto the lower face and thus to our pathetic one-tent Camp VI, still standing (albeit still at the steep angle). The Germans evidently hadn’t seen it on their way up. There was a bit of food left—some chocolate, a can of sardines, one thermos of water we hadn’t taken up to the ridge with us—and we added all of it to our overflowing canvas carryalls.

It was at Camp VI, just before the clouds closed in and the snow began to fall again, that—while sitting on the boulder on the high side of the tent and bracing my elbows on my knees—I trained my field glasses on the summit of Mount Everest and, for the briefest few seconds before clouds shut off the view, saw something green and gold flapping there, right where the snowy peak of the steep pinnacle of the actual summit ridge should be.

Green and gold? The wind and weather were worsening up there, as they were down here at Camp VI at a mere 27,000 feet, but certainly the Deacon and Reggie wouldn’t have pitched her Big Tent right on the summit. That would be suicide.

Unless they meant to commit suicide together there, perhaps curled up together under both their sleeping bags, arms around one another, to be found by the next expedition to reach the summit.

Had they been lovers throughout this trip? I found myself wondering dully and with a true ache in my heart and belly. Had they made some insane pact to die together on the summit?

Then I remembered that Reggie’s Big Tent had no gold on it. It was the family crest flag of the Bromleys—gryphon and eagle battling for a golden lance or pike—that was green and gold. The silk flag that Percy had brought to the mountain and that Reggie had taken from the dead man’s pocket.

Percival’s and Reggie’s flag at the summit!

But the flapping I’d seen for so few seconds had been almost a person’s height off the snowy summit. How could they have…

Then I remembered. Reggie had taken Jean-Claude’s ice axe when we all parted, lashing it onto the outside of her pack next to the two short ice hammers there.

I grinned and rasped out a description of what I’d just seen to Dr. Pasang. He borrowed the glasses to look up, but the clouds were thickening then, and I don’t think he had a chance to see what I’d observed. That three-second glimpse of green and gold fabric flapping horizontally in the summit jet stream would stay with me for the rest of my life.

I was having some trouble breathing now, and when I’d pulled the straps of my metal-frame oxygen rig back on and set things back in their carryalls, I stood there next to that Camp VI boulder for a full moment, doubled over with rasping coughs. I realized that I’d coughed paint spatters of bright red blood onto the black boulder.

“Is this another frozen something in my throat?” I managed to rasp at Pasang when I’d finished my second spasm of coughing.

He had me open my mouth so that he could inspect it with the tiny light from one of Reggie’s Welsh miner headlamps.

“No, Mr. Perry,” he said at last. “No more obstructions. But what’s left of the lining of your throat is so raw and swollen that it may completely shut off your upper air passages unless we get down low very soon.”

“And then…I die?” I said. It was a sign of my fatigue that the answer to that question did not interest me more than it did.

“No, Mr. Perry. Should that happen, I will perform a simple tracheotomy…here.” His gloved finger touched near the hollow of my throat. “We have plenty of spare glass tubes and rubber hoses from the oxygen kits,” he added.

Will perform a simple tracheotomy—the import of that sentence struck me only later.

“What if that doesn’t work, Dr. Pasang?” My rasping, pained voice sounded dangerously close to a whine.

“Then, to prevent your lung from collapsing, I make a small entrance hole here to reinflate your collapsed lung and to get you breathing again,” he said, placing that gloved finger on the left side of my chest. “Again, the various bits of hosing and valves we have would work perfectly. The only problem will be sterilizing them with water boiling at such a low temperature up here.”

I looked down at my chest: a hole there with a bit of rubber O₂-rig hosing sticking out for me to get air? Reinflating my collapsed lung?

I rucked the oxygen rig higher on my back, tightened the straps, readied the face mask, and said in the firmest voice I could muster, “I’m strong enough to go down.”