The Abominable: A Novel

25.

The North Ridge was still all downward-tilting slabs, usually under snow. I’d almost forgotten. If Reggie and the Deacon had done their traverse to the South Summit and down—rappelling down that big rock I was thinking of now as “K. T. Owings’s Step” (and would, nearly thirty years later, smile at its being renamed “the Hillary Step”)—the two of them would be descending on the upward-tilting friendlier slabs of the Southwest Ridge of Everest by now, moving down that rocky stairway toward the South Col and Western Cwm below that.

Or was that possible yet? They’d have had to make that traverse of the snow-corniced knife ridge between the summits—the one we’d been able to see from a few vantage points during our approach and climb. Was that even down-climbable, or was it the death trap that the cornice on the North East Ridge had been for Bromley and Kurt Meyer and Jean-Claude? No, not a trap for J.C., I thought. He’d known the fragile cornice was there and shoved Sigl onto it deliberately, knowing it couldn’t bear the weight of two men, even if one of them was a small, light Frenchman.

But could the Deacon and Reggie be on the Southwest Ridge by now, down to where Owings had promised fixed ropes? I had a vague memory of seeing two more flares in the skies over Everest’s summit before Pasang and I had reached our old Camp VI. Green and red. White, then green and red.

Owings had discussed that sequence. What was the message from the Deacon to his old friend? Put the Bovril on the Primus, we’re only hours out?

I doubted it. The Deacon had never liked Bovril.

Or perhaps the Deacon and Reggie had summited by now and done the smart thing: retreated back the way they’d come. Would they be at the single tent at Camp VI yet? No, wait, I dimly remembered that the Deacon had been carrying the heavy load of Reggie’s Big Tent and Reggie had an Unna cooker. They could stop anywhere.

But had they? How late was it? How many hours had passed since Pasang and I had left the Second Step?…Camp VI?…Camp V? I fumbled under my layers for my watch but couldn’t locate it. Had I loaned it to Jean-Claude when he’d visited me a while ago? I didn’t think so.

It would be dark soon, the sun soon to be eclipsed by the summit of Lhotse. We’d come out of one layer of cloud into a cold but fairly clear afternoon. I could see two green tents far, far below on the North Col.

I looked to my right and noticed three odd-looking objects floating in the sky about 10 degrees above the angle of the North Ridge. Odd.

They vaguely resembled kites or balloons in shape but were much more organic. Obviously living beings. They floated rather the way jellyfish do, but always keeping parallel with the uncomprehending Pasang and me as we descended the ridge. All three were translucent, and I could see dim colors—red, yellow, blue, white—flowing through them almost like the pulsing blood in someone’s veins. One of the floating objects had squarish stubs on each side, somewhat like vestigial wings. Another had an extension of its head part that looked a little like a bird’s beak, though almost transparent. The third thing had a tourbillion of cascading light particles near its center, almost as if it hosted a brilliantly lighted interior snowstorm.

All three floating things were pulsating in rhythm with one another, but not, I clinically noticed, in rhythm to the beating of my own straining heart. As Pasang led me lower, never turning to his right to look at them, the three objects floating above the ridgeline—each transparent but oddly dark, especially when a cloud passed behind them—kept pace with us.

I looked away. They did not stay in my field of vision when I turned my head.

To see if my mind was being affected by illness or altitude, I looked at the peaks spread out seemingly at our feet and tested myself by recalling their names and altitudes—Changtse beyond the North Col at 24,878 feet, Khartaphu there on the other side of the pass to the Kharta Glacier at 23,894 feet, the shoulder and summit fields of Pumori to my extreme left, 23,507 feet, and to its right, abutting the Rongbuk Glacier, the summit of Lingtren at only 21,142 feet.

My mind and memory didn’t seem to be malfunctioning.

I looked back to my right. The three organic objects still floated parallel to our path of descent, always staying at the same angle of degrees above the line of the North Ridge but shifting positions amongst themselves: now the one with the blunt bird’s beak on the left, then the one with the square little penguin wings pulsating and floating to the left of the triad, and finally the one with the coruscating center of pulsing light taking the lead as they descended with us.

Souls? Could souls look like that? Is that what we really look like—after we shake off our bodies?

I reminded myself that I didn’t believe in God, Heaven, Hell, or any sort of afterlife, not even the tidy Buddhist theory of reincarnation.

But three of them? What three souls would follow us into the darkness this evening?

Jean-Claude. Reggie. The Deacon.

I pulled my oxygen mask down so as not to screw up the valves and tried to speak, but succeeded only in choking out a cough…or perhaps a sob. It was loud enough to make Pasang, carefully picking his way down slabs ten feet ahead of me, stop and turn around.

Realizing that tears were freezing to my exposed cheeks, I could only point toward the three hovering objects. Pasang turned his head and looked. A few seconds later I followed his gaze.

Another wisp of snow cloud had moved in. The three organic floating things were gone. Although I’d seen other small clouds move in front of them and block my view before, they’d always been there after the cloud passed, but this time I was sure they would be gone for good. When the streamer of cloud passed, they were.

Whatever message those…creatures…had brought, they’d wanted to share it only with me.

I shook my head, signaling to Pasang that it was nothing and that I was okay, pulled my mask back into place, and we continued the long, dangerous slog downward.

There were three tents near the old site of Camp IV on the North Col—two of our green Whympers and a smaller, tan-colored German tent. All three were empty. Pasang thoroughly searched the German tent, coming out with only a few more documents, and then kicked it to shreds.

He untied from our common rope, gestured for me to sit on an empty packing crate while he went off to see if our hidden caches—gear we’d dangled down into one of the crevasses—was still there.

I went off oxygen for a while and just sat panting, every inhalation hurting my throat, every exhalation hurting it more, and tried to enjoy the heat from a Primus stove Pasang had lighted.

It was deep twilight when Pasang returned with two fresh oxygen tanks and some more food to put in the bubbling pot. All of the North Col and most of the North Ridge we’d come down were in deepening shadow now. Only the upper ridges, top fifth of the North Face, and actual summit of Everest continued to glow red and orange and white in the last, rich rays of the setting sun.

The snow plume from the summit was stretched out farther east than I’d ever seen it. The winds up there must be terrible—inhuman—fatal to any living thing.

They’re both on the Southwest Ridge or already huddled together in their buttoned-together sleeping bags in Reggie’s domed tent on the South Col, I told myself. But I didn’t believe it. I imagined their bodies lying frozen and stiff as Mallory’s and Irvine’s somewhere up there on this side of the summit or on the terrible snow ridge beyond. Or hanging dead on their climbing rope the way Meyer and Percival had. Waiting for the goraks to find them.

I knew at that second that even if I survived this day, this retreat from the mountain, even if I ever climbed again someday, I would never, ever, under any circumstances, return to Mount Everest.

Our caver’s ladder no longer dropped down the 100-foot vertical ice wall section of the 1,000-foot descent from the North Col, of course—we’d chopped away its support and dropped it and some climbing Germans so long ago—but the Germans had replaced it with some of their three-eighths-inch clothesline climbing rope attached to two new deadman anchors they’d sunk into the snow of the ice ledge at the lip of the Col.

Pasang and I took time to add a third deadman—we filled an empty rucksack from Camp IV with snow, buried it as deep as we could, and trampled the snow heavy on top of it—and I used a girth-hitch runner and one of the spare German carabiners to add our anchor to the two other deadman anchors.

But we still didn’t trust the damned rope they’d left. Luckily we both carried 120-foot lengths of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope we’d hauled from the Camp IV crevasse cache, and now we tied these to our rope waist harnesses with figure-eights-on-a-bight knots, and I then set the separate friction knots for rappelling. We no longer had any of Jean-Claude’s clever jumars with us. I realized that I should have asked him for a couple when he’d paused to chat with me up at Camp V.

So now we had two dangling ropes, one of which we trusted, so we could rappel down the ice face at the same time. The last thing we did before rappelling was to retrieve our Welsh miner’s headlamp rigs from the carryalls and fumble through the small batteries we’d brought until we found a few that would still work.

Then, with me leading for a change, we stepped backwards over the edge of the North Col and off Mount Everest proper in a quick belay to the remaining 900-foot snow slope below.

We discussed bivouacking for the night somewhere down past Camp III—we had a sleeping bag apiece—but both of us wanted to keep moving. Even at a night-hiking pace with our little headlamps showing the way through the glacier crevasses, we should be at Base Camp or beyond by dawn.

Pasang was leading on 30 feet of rope across the glacier as we’d just left the empty Camp III site when I fell through covering snow into a crevasse.

Pasang, hearing my shout, reacted immediately—as professionally as any professional climber who’s ever climbed—slamming his ice axe deep in the firm snow at his feet and bracing himself for the belay, so I only fell about 15 feet. I’d kept my ice axe as well, and it was jammed against the opposing walls above me, giving me a solid handhold to cling to while I formed Prusik knots with my free hand for the climb up.

But then I made the mistake of looking down deeper into the crevasse with my headlamp beam.

Twenty feet lower than me were dead, blue faces, dozens of them, with dozens of open mouths and frozen, staring eyes. Dead arms and blue hands reached up toward my boots from their snow-covered dead bodies.

I screamed.

“What’s wrong, Jake?” shouted Pasang. “Are you injured?”

“No, I’m okay,” I gasped as loudly as I could through my swollen throat and damaged larynx. “Just pull me…pull…”

“You do not want to Prusik while I belay?”

“No…just pull me up…fast!”

Pasang did so, ignoring the fraying of the rope over the icy edge of the crevasse. He was very strong. I had my ice axe free and was chopping holds as I came up. Then I was out.

I crawled over to where Pasang stood, winded and gasping—he hadn’t been using the oxygen rigs at all, reserving all the tanks for my use—as I described what I’d seen.

“Ahh,” said Pasang. “We’ve accidentally stumbled upon the crevasse that Herr Sigl and his friends used for the mass grave of our Sherpa friends at Camp Three.”

I started shaking and had trouble stopping. Pasang produced a blanket from one of his overstuffed carryall bags and laid it over my shoulders.

“Don’t you want to…go see?” I asked.

“Is there a chance that any of them might be alive?” he asked. Our headlamp beams danced upon one another’s chests in the dark.

I thought for a moment of the blue faces, frozen eyes, and frozen hands and bodies I’d seen piled down there. “No,” I said.

“Then I do not want to see,” said Dr. Pasang. “I believe I was some yards off the proper path. Would you care to lead for a while, Mr. Perry, the better to avoid more crevasses?”

“Sure,” I said and, setting my oxygen mask back in place, took the lead on the rope. Most of our marking wands were gone, but Sigl’s Germans had left readable boot prints where the original safe trail through the crevasses had been. I lowered my head to play the beam along ahead of me and concentrated on route finding and on forgetting everything else for a while. I knew that if I wandered off the true path, Jean-Claude would come back to set things right.

Camp II at 19,800 feet and Camp I at 17,800 feet were simply gone. Whatever the Germans had done with the remaining tents and caches, Pasang and I could find no trace with our headlamps. Because of our careful descent—and more due to my slow pace—it was approaching the false dawn now as we did the last mile or so from Camp I down to where Base Camp used to be at 16,500 feet. If there were a couple of Germans waiting for us down here as the Deacon had feared, our Welsh miner’s lamps would be a dead giveaway in a literal sense, but Pasang and I found that—as exhausted as we both were—we couldn’t stop until we got out of this damned valley.

Again and again I imagined Reggie and the Deacon alone, perhaps ill or injured, stuck far up there at Camp VI or Camp V—a different universe from this one in the glacier valley—stuck and ill or injured and awaiting rescue from Pasang and me.

There’d be no such rescue. I was having so much trouble breathing that I could barely stand and was staggering more than striding down the long moraine slope between looming penitente pinnacles and ice walls on either side. I couldn’t have climbed back up to Camp II if my life depended on it, and that didn’t even entail any glacier travel.

We came carefully out of the moraine ridges and pinnacles to where Base Camp had been. There was nothing left. All of the bodies had been removed, all the tents taken somewhere and most probably burned. It was as if the Deacon-Bromley Expedition had never been here at all.

The sky was getting lighter now—the black of night giving way to the slight gray glow of the predawn. Taking a wide half-circle around where the tents and sangas of Base Camp used to be, Pasang and I—still roped up for some reason—came out onto the gravel flats beyond the last of the moraine ridges. We clicked off our headlamps and put the leather rigs in the carryalls that we’d shifted to carrying on our backs, over the oxygen rigs. I had four of the heavy gas mask bags back there, bulging with everything from an Unna cooker we hadn’t used to extra pots and pans we’d brought along.

“What now?” I whispered painfully. “Can I take off these last two oxygen tanks?”

“Not yet, Mr. Perry,” Dr. Pasang whispered back. “You are still having great trouble breathing because of your inflamed and swollen throat. I really do not wish to do a tracheotomy unless I must.”

“Amen to that.” Even my whispers sounded ragged. “Which way, then? It’s eleven miles to the Rongbuk Monastery and we can ask for help there, but I doubt very much if I can make it beyond the monastery to Chobuk or Shekar Dzong.”

“Herr Sigl may have left friends at the monastery,” observed Pasang.

“Oh, shit.”

“Precisely,” said Pasang. “But let us try to walk those last miles to the vicinity of the monastery and then, dressed in a pilgrim’s cloak I’ve brought with me, I shall reconnoiter Rongbuk while you wait in the rocks at the base of the approach. If there are no Germans there, we shall place ourselves under the care and protection of the reincarnation of Padma Sambhava, Guru Rinpoche, the good Dzatrul Rinpoche, Holy Lama of the monastery.”

“A man, a plan, a canal…,” I rasped, not even amusing myself. “But first I think we should…”

I didn’t hear the shots until after the bullets struck.

The first impact made Pasang’s head snap forward in a mist of blood that covered my own face and lowered oxygen mask. An instant later I felt the second slug tear through my packs and O₂ rig and hit me high in the back, above and to the right of my left shoulder blade.

Pasang had already fallen forward, apparently lifeless, onto the sharp rocks beneath our crampons. Before I could open my mouth to shout, there was that impact against my upper back and I fell forward next to him, not even staying conscious long enough to break my fall with my forearm.

There was the pain in my back and throat and encroaching blackness; and then only the blackness.