The Abominable: A Novel

24.

Tracts of Mount Everest that take days—or even weeks—to ascend can often be descended, at least to the glacier camps, but many times even to Base Camp, in a mere matter of hours: a long afternoon.

But that’s with fixed ropes in place. We’d pulled up most of our miles of fixed rope to deny the Germans an easy ascent. We’d also pulled out route marker wands and flags that separated the proper path up…or down…from dangerous dead ends in a vertical couloir snowfield ending in a long drop to the Rongbuk or East Rongbuk Glacier.

Pasang seemed to know his way. The afternoon clouds were closing around us in earnest now, and pellets of snow were lacerating the tiny exposed parts of my cheeks outside the oxygen face mask. I was on full 2.2-liter flow—Pasang didn’t even seem to be using his oxygen most of the time—but I simply couldn’t get enough air down through my swollen-shut throat. And every breath I did manage to swallow hurt like hell.

Certain odd things happened during these hours.

When we were at the site of our old Camp V—the Germans had set the last remaining Whymper tent on fire for some reason—Pasang parked me on a rock near the burned remnants, actually tying off my climbing rope to the rock for a few minutes, as if I were a child or a Tibetan pony to be kept in place, while he went to search for the extra oxygen rigs and food stores that we’d hidden in the boulders to the east, toward the North Ridge. Any that Sigl and his friends hadn’t found and appropriated, that is.

While I was sitting there, taking my oxygen mask off at regular intervals in desperate and doomed attempts to drag in more air and oxygen from the thin atmosphere, Jean-Claude came down the snowy slope and sat next to me on the boulder.

“I’m really happy to see you,” I rasped.

“I’m happy to see you as well, Jake.” He grinned at me and leaned forward to rest his chin on his mittened hands propped on the adze of his ice axe. He wore no oxygen rig, no oxygen mask. I figured that they must have come off during his fall to the glacier.

“Wait,” I said, straining to think clearly. I knew that something wasn’t logical here, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it for a moment or so. “How can you have your ice axe?” I said at last. “I saw Reggie carrying it on her rucksack as she and the Deacon headed for the summit.”

Jean-Claude showed me the light wood shaft of the axe. There were three notches about two-thirds of the way toward the blade. “I borrowed Sandy Irvine’s axe from where you left it on that rock,” said J.C. “Sandy said he didn’t mind.”

I nodded. That made sense.

Finally I worked up the courage to say, “What’s it like being dead, my friend?”

J.C. gave me that Gallic shrug I was so used to and grinned again. “Être mort, c’est un peu comme être vivant, mais pas si lourd,” he said softly.

“I don’t understand. Can you interpret that for me, J.C.?”

“Sure,” said Jean-Claude. He slammed the point of his ice axe deep in the snow again so that he could lean on it as he faced me. “It means…”

“Jake!” came a call from Pasang through the shifting snow flurries.

“I’m here!” I rasped as loudly as I could without screaming from the pain in my throat. “I’m here with Jean-Claude.”

J.C. took his watch from his Finch duvet pocket. “I need to go down ahead and mark the routes for you and Pasang. I will talk to you later, my dear friend.”

“Okay,” I said.

Pasang came up out of the swirling snow cloud carrying two fresh oxygen tanks for us to swap out to and yet another canvas bag of edibles, water, and other supplies.

“I couldn’t hear you well, Mr. Perry,” he said. “What did you just shout?”

I smiled and shook my head. My throat hurt too much for me to repeat it. Pasang added the replacement tank to my rig, set the flow valve to high again, made sure that air was flowing, and helped me attach the leather strap of my oxygen mask to my leather motorcycle helmet.

“It’s getting colder,” he said. “We’ll have to keep moving until we get to Camp Four on the North Col. Is it all right if I tie you in close on the rope…fifteen feet? I want to be able to see you—or hear you if you need help—even through the blowing snow.”

“Sure,” I said into the mask and valves, the syllable almost certainly unintelligible to Pasang. After he’d tied on the short rope, I stood, swayed, got my balance with the tall Sherpa’s help, and started to head off down and to the left toward the steep North Face rather than the North Ridge. Pasang tapped me on the shoulder and held me back. “Perhaps I should lead for a while, Mr. Perry.”

I shrugged, trying to make it as exquisitely Gallic as J.C.’s shrug had just been—but of course I couldn’t. So I stood there stamping my cold feet until Pasang passed me on the rope, and then I began to plod along close behind him.