The Abominable: A Novel

Chapter 1

The summit of the Matterhorn offers very clear choices: a misstep to the left and you die in Italy; a wrong step to the right and you die in Switzerland.

T he three of us learn about Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance on Mount Everest while we are eating lunch on the summit of the Matterhorn.

It is a perfect day in late June of 1924, and the news lies folded in a three-day-old British newspaper that someone in the kitchen at the small inn at Breuil in Italy has wrapped around our cold beef and horseradish sandwiches on thick fresh bread. I’ve unwittingly carried this still-weightless news—soon to be a heavy stone in each of our chests—to the summit of the Matterhorn in my rucksack, tucked alongside a goatskin of wine, two water bottles, three oranges, 100 feet of climbing rope, and a bulky salami. We do not immediately notice the paper or read the news that will change the day for us. We are too full of the summit and its views.

For six days we have done nothing but climb and re-climb the Matterhorn, always avoiding the summit for reasons known only to the Deacon.

On the first day up from Zermatt we explored the Hornli Ridge—Whymper’s route in 1865—while avoiding the fixed ropes and cables that ran across the mountain’s skin like so many scars. The next day we traversed to do the same on the Zmutt Ridge. On the third day, a long day, we traversed the mountain, again climbing from the Swiss side via the Hornli Ridge, crossing the friable north face just below the summit that the Deacon had forbidden to us, and then descending along the Italian Ridge, at twilight reaching our tents on the high green fields facing south toward Breuil.

I realized after the fifth day that we were following in the footsteps of those who’d made the Matterhorn so famed—the determined artist-climber 25-year-old Edward Whymper and his ad hoc party of three Englishmen: the Reverend Charles Hudson (“the clergyman from the Crimea”); Reverend Hudson’s 19-year-old protégé and novice climber Douglas Hadow; and the confident 18-year-old Lord Francis Douglas (who had just passed at the top of the British Army’s examination list, some 500 marks ahead of the next closest of his 118 competitors), the son of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry and a neophyte climber who’d been coming to the Alps for two years. Along with Whymper’s motley assortment of young British climbers with such wildly different levels of experience and ability were the three guides Whymper had hired: “Old Peter” Taugwalder (only 45, but considered an oldster), “Young Peter” Taugwalder (age 21), and the highly skilled Chamonix Guide, 35-year-old Michel Croz. In truth, they would have needed only Croz as a guide, but Whymper had earlier promised employment to the Taugwalders, and the English climber was always as good as his word, even when it made his climbing party unwieldy and two of the guides essentially redundant.

It was on the Italian Ridge that I realized the Deacon was introducing us to the courage and efforts of Whymper’s friend, competitor, and former climbing partner Jean-Antoine Carrel. The difficult routes we were enjoying had been Carrel’s.

We had our mountain tents—Whymper tents, they were still called, since the famous Golden Age climber had designed them for use on this very mountain—pitched on the grassy fields above the lower glaciers on both sides of the mountain, and we arrived on one side or the other just before dusk every evening, often after dark, there to eat lightly, to talk softly by the small fire, and to sleep soundly for a few hours before rising to climb again.

We climbed the Matterhorn’s Furggen Ridge but bypassed the impressive overhangs near the top. This was not a defeat. For one full day we explored approaches to that never-climbed overhang, but we decided that we had neither the equipment nor the skill to climb it direct. (The overhang would eventually be climbed by Alfredo Perino and Louis Carrel, known as “the little Carrel” in honor of his famous predecessor, and by Giacomo Chiara eighteen years later, in 1942.) Our modesty in not killing ourselves in an impossible—given the equipment and techniques of 1924—attempt on the Furggen Ridge overhang reminded me at the time of how I had first met the 37-year-old Englishman Richard Davis Deacon and the 25-year-old Frenchman Jean-Claude Clairoux at the base of the unclimbed north face of the Eiger—the deadly Eigerwand. But that is a tale for another time.

The essence is that both Deacon—known as “the Deacon” to many of his friends and climbing partners—and Jean-Claude, just become a fully accredited Chamonix Guide, perhaps the most exclusive climbing fraternity in the world, had agreed to take me along for months of their winter, spring, and early summer climbing in the Alps. It was a greater gift than I had ever dreamed of. I’d enjoyed going to Harvard, but my education with the Deacon and Jean-Claude—whom I eventually came to call “J.C.” since he did not seem to mind the nickname—for those months was by far the most demanding and exhilarating educational experience of my life.

At least until the nightmare of Mount Everest. But I get far ahead of my tale.

On our last two days on the Matterhorn we made a partial ascent of the mountain by its treacherous west face, then rappelled down to work out routes and strategies on the truly treacherous north face, one of the Alps’ final and most formidable unsolved problems. (Franz and Toni Schmid will climb it seven years later, after bivouacking one night on the face itself. They will ride their bicycles all the way from Munich to the mountain and, after their surprise ascent via the north face, will ride them home again.) For the three of us, it was a reconnaissance only.

This final day we had teased out routes on the seemingly unassailable “Zmutt Nose” overhanging the right part of the north face, then retreated, traversed to the Italian Ridge, and—when the Deacon nodded his permission to climb the final 100 feet—finally found ourselves here on the narrow summit on a perfect day in late June.

During our week on the Matterhorn we endured and climbed through downpours, sudden snowstorms, sleet, ice that turned rock to verglas, and high winds. On this final day, the weather on the summit is clear, calm, warm, and quiet. The winds are so docile that the Deacon is able to light his pipe after striking only a single match.

The top of the Matterhorn is a narrow ridge about a hundred yards long, if you wish to walk the distance between its lower, slightly broader “Italian summit” and its higher and narrowest point at the “Swiss summit.” In the past nine months or so, the Deacon and Jean-Claude have taught me that all good mountains give you clear choices. The summit of the Matterhorn offers very clear choices: a misstep to the left and you die in Italy; a wrong step to the right and you die in Switzerland.

The Italian side is a sheer rock face falling 4,000 feet to rocks and ridges that would stop a fall about halfway down the face, and the Swiss side falls away to a steep snow slope and rocky ridges hundreds of feet lower than the halfway mark, boulders and ridges that might or might not stop a body’s fall. There is enough snow here on the ridgeline itself for us to leave clear prints of our hobnailed boots.

The Matterhorn’s summit ridge is not quite what excited journalists like to call “a knife-edge ridge.” Our boot prints in the snow along the actual ridge prove this. Had it been a knife-edge ridge, with snow, our boot prints would have been on both sides, since the smart way to traverse a true knife edge is to hobble slowly along like a ruptured duck, one leg on the west side of the narrow summit ridge, one on the east. A slip then will lead to bruised testicles but not—God and fate willing—a 4,000-foot fall.

A slightly wider “knife-edge ridge” of snow, a vertical snow cornice, as it were, would have readied us for what Jean-Claude liked to call “a game of jump rope.” We’d probably be tied together on such a snowy knife edge, and if the climber directly ahead of or immediately behind you slips off one side, your immediate reaction (since there’s little hope of belay from such a snowy knife edge)—an “immediate reaction” made instinctive only by many drills—must be to jump off the opposite side of the ridgeline, both of you now dangling over 4,000-foot or greater emptiness, in the desperate hope that (a) the rope does not break, dooming both of you, and (b) your weight will counter his weight in the fall.

It does work. We practiced it numerous times on a snowy knife-edge ridge on Mont Blanc. But it was a ridge where the punishment for failure—or a rope break—was a 50-foot slide to level snowfields, not a 4,000-foot drop.

I was 6 feet 2 inches tall and 220 pounds, so when I played “jump the rope” with poor Jean-Claude (5 feet 6 inches tall, 135 pounds), logic would dictate that he’d come flying up over the top of the snowy ridgeline like a hooked fish, sending both of us sliding out of control. But because Jean-Claude had the habit of carrying the heaviest pack of any of us (and was also the quickest and most skilled with his long ice axe), the balancing act usually worked, the heavily stressed hemp rope digging into the vertical snow cornice until it found either rock or solid ice.

But as I say, this long summit ridgeline of the Matterhorn is a wide French boulevard compared to knife-edge ridges: wide enough to walk upon, at least single file in some places, and—if you’re very brave, supremely skilled, or totally stupid—to do so with your hands in your pockets and other things on your mind. The Deacon has been doing precisely this, pacing back and forth along the narrow line, pulling his old pipe from his jacket pocket and lighting it as he paces.

The Deacon, who could be taciturn to the point of silence for days, evidently feels expansive this late morning. Puffing on his pipe, he gestures for Jean-Claude and me to follow him in single file to the far side of the summit ridge, where we can look down on the Italian Ridge that saw the majority of the early attempts on the mountain—even by Whymper, until he decided to use the seemingly more difficult (but in truth somewhat easier due to the angle of the huge slabs) Swiss Ridge.

“Carrel and his team were there,” says the Deacon and points to a line a third of the way down the narrow, rock-steepled ridge. “All those years of effort and Whymper ends up making the summit two or three hours ahead of his old friend and guide from Italy.”

He’s talking, of course, about Whymper and his six fellow climbers’ first summit ascent of the Matterhorn on July 14, 1865.

“Did not Whymper and Croz throw rocks down upon them?” asks Jean-Claude.

The Deacon looks at our French friend to see if he is joking. Both men smile.

The Deacon points to the sheer face on our left. “Whymper was mad to get Carrel’s attention. He and Croz shouted and dropped rocks down the north face—nowhere near the ridge where the Italians were climbing, of course. But it must have sounded like cannon fire to Carrel and his team.”

All three of us gaze down as if we could see the heartbroken Italian guide and his companions staring up in shock and defeat.

“Carrel recognized his old client Whymper’s white slop trousers,” says the Deacon. “Carrel thought he was an hour or less from the summit—he’d already led his party past the worst obstacles of the ridge—but after he identified Whymper on the summit, he just turned around and led his party back down.” The Deacon sighs, inhales deeply from his pipe, and looks out over the mountains, valleys, meadows, and glaciers below us. “Carrel climbed the Matterhorn two or three days later, still from the Italian Ridge,” he says softly, almost speaking to himself now. “Establishing Italy’s secondary provenance to the mountain. Even after the British chaps’ clear victory.”

“Clear victory, oui…but so tragic,” says Jean-Claude.

We walk back to where we’ve stowed our rucksacks against some boulders along the north end of the narrow summit ridge. Jean-Claude and I begin unpacking our lunch. This is to be our last day on the Matterhorn, and it may be our last day climbing together for some time…perhaps forever, although I desperately hope not. I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my European Wanderjahr climbing in the Alps with these new friends, but the Deacon has some business in England soon, and J.C. has to return to his Chamonix Guide duties and an annual assembly of Chamonix Guides in that tradition-haunted Chamonix Valley, with its sacred brotherhood of the rope.

Shaking away any sad thoughts of endings or farewells, I pause in my unpacking to take in the view yet again. My eyes are hungrier than my belly.

There is not a single cloud in the sky. The Maritime Alps, 130 miles away, are clearly visible. The Écrins, first climbed by Whymper and the guide Croz, bulk blankly against the sky like the sides of some great white sow. Turning slightly to look north, I see the high peaks of the Oberland on the far side of the Rhône. To the west, Mont Blanc rules over all lesser peaks, its summit snows blazing with reflected sunlight so blinding that I have to squint. Swiveling slightly to face the east, I can see peak after peak—some climbed by me during the last nine months with my new friends here, some waiting to be climbed, some never to be climbed—the stuttered and irregular array of white pinnacles diminishing to a mere bumpy horizon wreathed in the haze of distance.

The Deacon and Jean-Claude are eating their sandwiches and sipping water. I snap myself out of my sightseeing and romantic reverie and begin to eat. The cold roast beef is delicious, the bread rich with a crust that makes me work at chewing. The horseradish makes my eyes water until Mont Blanc becomes even more of a white blur.

Looking south, I celebrate the view that Whymper wrote about in his classic book Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–1869. I can clearly recall the words I read only the evening before, read by candlelight in my tent above Breuil, the words describing Edward Whymper’s first view from the summit of the Matterhorn on July 14, 1865, this view that I’m devouring in late June of 1924:

There were forests black and gloomy and meadows bright and lively, bounding waterfalls and tranquil lakes, fertile lands and savage wastes; sunny plains and frigid plateaux. There were the most rugged forms, and the most graceful outlines—bold, perpendicular cliffs, and gentle, undulating slopes; rocky mountains and snowy mountains, sombre and solemn, or glittering and white with walls—turrets—pinnacles—pyramids—domes—cones—and spires! There was every combination that the world can give, and every contrast that the heart could desire.

Yes, you can tell that Edward Whymper was an absolute romantic, as were so many of the Golden Age climbers in the mid- and late 1800s. And his writing is flowery and old-fashioned by the lean, modern standards of 1924.

But as to the charge of being a hopeless romantic, I confess that I am as well. It’s part of my nature. Perhaps it is my nature. And although I’d graduated from Harvard as an English major ready to write my own great travelogues and novels—all in the lean modern style, of course—I’m surprised to find that Edward Whymper’s nineteenth-century wording—flowery prose and all—has once again moved me to tears.

So on this June day in 1924, my heart responds to the words written more than fifty years earlier, and my soul responds even more hopelessly to the view that prompted those words from the sentimental Edward Whymper. The great mountain climber was twenty-five years old when he first climbed the Matterhorn and saw this view; I’ve just celebrated my twenty-second birthday, two months before earning this view for myself. I feel very close to Whymper and to all the climbers—some of them hard-bitten cynics, but others romantics like myself—who have looked south at Italy from this very ridge, from this very throne of a low boulder.

During the autumn, winter, and spring months that I’ve been climbing in the Alps with Jean-Claude and the Deacon, there has been a question-and-answer session after each summiting, a catechism, as it were, for each mountain. The tone of the questioning has never been condescending, and I’ve actually enjoyed the process, since I’ve learned so much from the two alpinists. I’d been a good climber when I came to Europe from the United States; under Jean-Claude’s and the Deacon’s gentle, sometimes bantering, but never pedantic guidance, I know that I’m becoming an excellent climber. A world-class climber. Part of a very small fraternity indeed. More than that, the Deacon’s and Jean-Claude’s tutelage—including these summiting catechisms—have helped me learn how to love the mountain I’ve just climbed. Love it even though she may have been a treacherous bitch during my intimate time with her: rotten rock, avalanches, traverses without so much as a fingerhold, deadly rockfall, forced bivouacs on ledges too narrow to hold a book upright yet we were forced to cling there in freezing weather, hailstorms or thunderstorms, nights when the metal pick in my ice axe glowed blue with its anticipatory electrical discharge, hot days without so much as a sip of water and more bivouac nights when, without pitons to tie oneself in, you held a lit candle under your chin to keep from falling asleep and tumbling off into the void. Yet through all that, the Deacon and especially Jean-Claude were teaching me how to love the mountain, love her for what she truly was, while loving even the hardest times spent engaged with her.

The catechism for the Matterhorn is led by Jean-Claude and is briefer than most.

You must love something about every good mountain. Matterhorn is a good mountain. Did you love the faces of this mountain?

Non. The faces of the Matterhorn, especially the north face upon which we spent the most time, were not worth loving. They were rubble. They were constant rockfall and avalanche.

But you love the rock itself?

Non. The rock is treacherous. Friable. It lies. Drive in a piton with a hammer and you never hear the proper ring of steel against iron, of iron against rock, and a minute later you can easily pull the useless piton out with two fingers. The rock on the faces of the Matterhorn is terrible. Mountaineers know that all mountains are in a constant state of collapse—their verticality being inescapably and inevitably worn down every moment by wind, water, weather, and gravity—but the Matterhorn is more of an unstable pile of constantly crumbling rubble than most peaks. Love the rock here? Nowhere. Never.

But you love the ridges?

Non. The famous ridges of the Matterhorn—the Italian and the Swiss, the Furggen and the Zmutt—are either too dangerous, raked with rockfall and snow avalanche, or too tame, pocked with cables and fixed ropes for the lady climber and the seventy-year-old English gentleman. Love for this mountain’s ridges? There is none. At least not since Edward Whymper’s day, when all was new.

But you love the mountain. You know you do. What do you love?

Oui. The Matterhorn is a mountain that gives the climber numerous problems to solve, but—unlike the unclimbed north face of the Eiger and certain other peaks I’ve seen or heard about—the Matterhorn also gives a good climber a clean, clear solution to each problem.

The Matterhorn is a heap of tumbling rubble, but the faces and ridges are beautiful to look upon from a distance. She is like an aging actress who, beneath the sadly obvious and peeling makeup, still boasts the cheeks and bone structure of her younger self, and there are frequent glimpses of a once near-perfect beauty. The shape of the peak itself—standing alone, unconnected to other mountains—is perhaps the cleanest and most memorable in all the Alps. Ask a young child who has never seen mountains to draw a mountain, and she will use her crayon to draw the Matterhorn. It is that iconic. And with its upper north face actually bending out beyond the vertical, like a wave breaking, the mountain appears to be constantly in motion. And that sheer, overhanging face breeds its own weather, gives rise to its own masses of clouds. It is that serious a mountain.

And you love the ghosts.

Oui. The ghosts are there to love and cannot be avoided. Edward Whymper’s loyal guide Jean-Antoine Carrel’s patriotic betrayal in choosing to lead Felice Giordano up the Italian Ridge for the glory of an all-Italian first summit on July 14 of 1865. The ghosts of 25-year-old Whymper’s desperate dash to Zermatt—to try the opposing ridge—with his hastily assembled party of young Lord Francis Douglas, Reverend Charles Hudson, 19-year-old Douglas Hadow, the Chamonix Guide Michel Croz, and the two local guides, “Young Peter” and “Old Peter” Taugwalder.

The ghosts of the four dead men from that day speak the loudest from the stone to me, and any climber must learn to hear them and to love and respect climbing on the same stones they trod, sleeping on the same slabs where they slept, triumphing on the same narrow summit where Whymper’s seven shouted in triumph, and focusing hard on descending safely down the still treacherous section where four of them fell thousands of feet to their deaths.

And, mon ami, you love the view from the top.

Oui. I do love the view. It makes the aching muscles and bleeding hands all worthwhile. Better than worthwhile—forgotten. The view is all.

While I’m chewing and staring out at this view, Jean-Claude, catechism lesson for me completed, straightens out the newspaper that had been wrapped around the cheesecloth covering our sandwiches.

“Mallory and Irvine killed in attempt to conquer Everest,” he reads aloud in his soft French accent.

I quit chewing. The Deacon is in the process of tamping the embers or ashes out of his pipe before eating, batting the pipe against the side of his hobnailed boot, but he also freezes in place, boot on his knee and now empty pipe against the boot, and stares at Jean-Claude.

Our friend continues: “London, June twenty, nineteen twenty-four—The Mount Everest Committee has received with profound regret the following cablegram from…” He stops and thrusts the crumpled newspaper toward me. “Jake, it is your language. You should read it.”

Surprised, not understanding Jean-Claude’s reticence—as far as I know he’s as completely fluent in reading English as he is in speaking it—I take the paper, smooth it out some more on my knee, and read aloud.

London, June twenty, nineteen twenty-four—The Mount Everest Committee has received with profound regret the following cablegram from Colonel Norton, dispatched from Phari Dzong, June nineteen, at four fifty p.m.

“Mallory and Irvine killed on last attempt. Rest of party arrived at base camp all well that day. Two climbers who were not members of the expedition die in Everest avalanche on last day after others have left.”

The committee has telegraphed to Colonel Norton, expressing deep sympathy with the expedition. In the loss of their two gallant comrades, which must have been due to most unfavourable conditions of weather and snow, which from the first arrival at the scene of operations impeded climbing this year…

I continue reading the columns, part sorrowful report, part hagiography:

The tragic death of these two men—George Leigh Mallory, who alone of all those engaged in the present attempt had also taken part in the two previous expeditions, and A. C. Irvine, one of his band of recruits—is a terribly sad ending to the story of the assaults of the mountain that began three years ago. It is only a few days since we published Mallory’s own account of the second reverse suffered by the present expedition…

That reverse had been wind and snow, which had driven the men from their highest camps—“discomfited but very far from being defeated” was Mallory’s message to the Times. There followed several more paragraphs, summarizing Mallory’s refusal to surrender despite the cold weather, high winds, avalanches, and imminent onset of the monsoon that would end this year’s climbing season.

I pause and look at my two friends, seeking any signal that I should quit reading and hand the newspaper around, but Jean-Claude and the Deacon simply stare at me. Waiting for more.

A slight breeze has come up, so I grip the crumpled paper tightly now as I continue reading the long second column of prose.

Mallory wrote his whole dispatch in this spirit of one who was about to engage in a desperate battle. “The action,” he said, “is only suspended before the more intense action of the climax. The issue will shortly be decided. The third time we walk up East Rongbuk Glacier will be the last, for better or worse.” He had counted the odds and was ready to face them. “We expect,” he said in a later passage of his dispatch, “no mercy from Everest”: and Everest, alas! has taken him at his word.

I pause. The Deacon and Jean-Claude sit waiting. Far beyond the Deacon’s shoulder, a large raven hovers motionless on the slight breeze, its body poised above almost 5,000 feet of empty air.

I skip any criticism of the prose style and continue reading: Mallory’s history as a “distinguished mountaineer” and his absolute determination to summit Mount Everest (“Alas!” I think, but do not say), the contributions of General C. G. Bruce, Major E. F. Norton, and others in the past, surpassing the Duke of Abruzzi’s height record of 22,000 feet, set on a distant and irrelevant mountain named K2.

The story focuses on 37-year-old George Leigh Mallory, the determined and tested veteran of Everest, and young Andrew Irvine, only 22 years old—my age exactly!—leaving their high camp on the morning of June 8, presumably carrying oxygen apparatus, the two heroes being seen again only once more, hours later, by fellow climber Noel Odell, who glimpsed them “going strong for the top,” and then the clouds closing in, the snowstorm intervening, and neither Mallory nor Irvine seen again.

I read aloud that, according to the Times report, on the evening of their disappearance, Odell had gone all the way up to the precarious Camp VI, shouting out in the roaring high-altitude night in case Mallory and Irvine were trying to descend in darkness. Mallory had left his flare and lantern behind in the tent at Camp VI. He would have had no means to signal others below, even if he were alive in the terrible night.

After fifty hours had passed, said the Times tale, even the ever hopeful Noel Odell gave up hope and placed two sleeping bags in the shape of a T for observers with telescopes at the lower camps to see. The prearranged signal meant that no further search should be attempted—the two climbers were lost forever.

Finally I lower the paper. The rising breeze tugs at it. The raven no longer marks the blue sky, and the sky itself is darkening now with afternoon. I shake my head, feeling the strong emotion from my two friends but not really understanding the depth and complexity of it. “There’s just a little more of the same,” I say, my voice hoarse.

The Deacon moves at last. He puts his cold pipe in the chest pocket of his tweed jacket. “They said there were two more,” he says softly.

“What?”

“The first paragraph said that two men died. Who? How?”

“Oh.” I fumble with the paper, running my finger down the last column to the final paragraphs. Everything is Mallory and Irvine, Irvine and Mallory, and then Mallory again. But there at the end. I read:

After the main party had left Everest Base Camp, according to German explorer Bruno Sigl, who was on a reconnaissance mission for a possible future German attempt on Everest, Sigl witnessed thirty-two-year-old Lord Percival Bromley, brother of the fifth Marquess of Lexeter, and a German or Austrian climber whom Sigl identified as Kurt Meyer, being swept away by an avalanche between Camp V and Camp VI. Young Bromley—Lord Percival—while not a formal member of the Mallory Expedition led by Colonel Norton, had followed the expedition from Darjeeling to the Everest Base Camp. Although the monsoon season had arrived and Colonel Norton’s expedition had retreated from the mountain, it is thought that perhaps Lord Percival and Meyer were making one final attempt to locate Mallory and Irvine. The bodies of Lord Percival and the German or Austrian climber were not recovered.

I lower the paper again.

“Lord Bromley, a peer of your realm, dies on Mount Everest and it barely makes the newspaper,” mutters Jean-Claude. “It is all Mallory. Mallory and Irvine.”

“ ‘Lord Percival’ or ‘Lord Percy’ is how we say it in England,” the Deacon says very softly. “ ‘Lord Bromley’ is his older brother, the marquess. And Percy Bromley would have been a poor excuse for a peer even if he had been next in line. George Mallory, although from a humble background, was the royalty on that expedition.” The Deacon stands, puts his hands in his trouser pockets, and strolls away down the narrow ridge, his head lowered. He looks like nothing so much as an absent-minded professor walking on campus, pondering some esoteric problem in his field.

When the Deacon is out of hearing range, I whisper to Jean-Claude, “Did he know Mallory or Irvine?”

Jean-Claude looks at me and then leans closer, speaking so softly that it is almost a whisper even though the Deacon is many yards away. “Irvine? I do not know, Jake. But Mallory…yes, the Deacon knew him for many years. Before the War they were students in the same small college in Cambridge. During the War they crossed paths on the battlefields many times. The Deacon was invited by Mallory to go on the nineteen twenty-one reconnaissance and nineteen twenty-two Everest climbing expeditions, and did so. But there was no invitation from Mallory or the Alpine Club for this year’s attempt on Everest.”

“Good heavens!” Before today I thought I’d really begun to know my two new friends and climbing partners. Now it seems that I know—and knew—almost nothing. “It could have been Mallory and the Deacon, rather than young Sandy Irvine, missing on Everest,” I whisper to J.C.

Jean-Claude bites his chapped lip, looks to make sure that the Deacon is still far away on the Italian-side summit, seeming to be staring out at nothing.

“No, no,” whispers Jean-Claude. “During the first two expeditions, Mallory and the Deacon had several…how do you say it in English?…falling-downs.”

For a moment I imagine the two climbers falling while roped together but then understand. “Falling-out,” I say.

“Oui, oui. Serious outfallings, I am afraid. I am sure that Mallory had not spoken to the Deacon since they returned from the ’twenty-two expedition.”

“Falling-outs over what?” I whisper. The wind has risen again and is blowing icy pellets of summit snow into our faces.

“The first expedition…it was officially called a reconnaissance expedition, but the actual goal for Mallory and the others was to find the fastest route to the mountain through all the icefalls and glaciers at its base, and then begin climbing as soon as possible. I know that both Deacon and Mallory believed they might summit during that first effort in nineteen twenty-one.”

“Ambitious,” I murmur. The Deacon is still at his remote perch on the Italian end of the summit ridge. With the wind now blowing even more strongly from his direction, I doubt he could hear us even if we shouted. Still, Jean-Claude and I continue our conversation in little more than a hurried whisper.

“So Mallory insisted that the best way to the North Col—the most obvious route from the north side of Everest—was from the east, up the Kharta Valley. It was a…how do you say cul-de-sac?”

“Dead end.”

Jean-Claude grins. Sometimes I think he enjoys the rough-edged quality of English. “Oui—a very dead end. And Mallory kept leading them all around the mountain, pursuing one dead end after the other. He even had Guy Bullock go so far up the West Rongbuk that they almost crossed the border into Nepal, looking over to the south approaches to Everest and deciding that the glaciers and icefalls approaching the South Face and ridges were totally impassable. The solution had to be on this North Face side.”

“I wonder…,” I whisper, but more to myself than to J.C.

“At any rate, months were wasted,” says Jean-Claude. “Wasted at least as far as the Deacon was concerned—exploring ever eastward and westward, measuring everything, photographing everything. Never finding a workable approach to the North Col.”

“I’ve seen some of the photographs,” I say, glancing to make sure that the Deacon is still at the far end of the summit. He doesn’t appear to have moved a muscle. “They’re beautiful.”

“Yes,” says J.C. “But the first series of photographs for which Mallory climbed a serious peak to gain the perfect vantage point, he put the plates in the camera the wrong way around. Nothing came out on the print, of course. Bullock and the others did most of the real photography.”

“What’s this got to do with Mallory and the Deacon falling out?” I ask. “Almost becoming enemies after so many years of association and…I presume…mutual respect?”

Jean-Claude sighs. “Their first base camp near the mountain was pitched at the head of a small valley where a river runs down onto the plain. They must have walked by that valley a hundred times but never explored it. The Deacon wanted to look into it as a possible approach to the North Col right from the beginning, but Mallory always overruled him, insisting that it just ran to the East Rongbuk Glacier and stopped. They could see the entrance to a side valley—easy walking with gravel and just pinnacles of old snow as all that was left of the former glacier—and the Deacon suggested that this valley might curve west again—which it does—and would give them a safe and easy path to the North Col and the beginning of their climb. Mallory said no to that…what is the word?…that opportunity, and the weeks of useless reconnoitering to both the east and west dragged on. Also, Mallory and the Alpine Club had decided the summer monsoon season was the best time to try to climb Mount Everest, but by June, even Monsieur Mallory had to agree that the summer monsoon season, with its endless snowfall, was bad, bad…a bad time to reconnoiter the mountain, much less to attempt a climb—since the storms were much…how do you say it?…more fiercer higher up.”

“So that was their nineteen twenty-two falling-out,” I whisper.

Jean-Claude smiles almost sadly. “The last brick…no…what do you say? The last something that breaks the back of the camel?”

“Straw.”

“The last straw was the Deacon’s constant urging that they climb Lhakpa La to get a view from there. For many weeks Mallory thought such an effort would be useless and said no to the Deacon’s request.”

“What’s Lhakpa La?” I ask. My knowledge of Mount Everest’s immediate geography in this late June of 1924 is just about nonexistent. Essentially I know that the tallest peak in the world shares a border with Nepal and Tibet, that Tibet is the only way one could get to it—given the politics of the era—and that this meant the climb, should it ever happen, will have to be up the North Face. Up the North East Ridge above the North Ridge and the North Face, to be specific, if all of the expeditions’ photographs are to be believed.

“Lhakpa La is a high pass to the west that separates the Kharta Glacier from the East Rongbuk Glacier,” says J.C. “They climbed to it in an absolute blinding blizzard, holeposting…is that the word, Jake?”

“Postholing.”

“Postholing up to their waists in the deepening snow, able to see nothing even when they reached the flat area they assumed was the summit. Even setting up their tents was a nightmare in the blizzard, and Mallory was furious at the waste of time. But then, in the morning, the weather completely cleared, and from their snow-covered camp on Lhakpa La they could see the perfect route to the North Col—directly up the valley and side valley which Deacon had argued so many times they explore, and then across snow and ice up onto the other side of the cwm and then, without any apparent difficulty, up onto the North Col itself. And from there, directly to the North Ridge all the way up to the high North East Ridge. But the monsoon snows kept burying them, the winds were terrible, and even though they reconnoitered the correct route all the way to a thousand-foot ice wall that led up onto the North Col, it was too late in the year to attempt the summit. They withdrew from the mountain on the twenty-fourth of September—without ever actually setting foot on the bare rock of Mount Everest.”

The Deacon has been smoking his pipe again, but now he is batting out the ashes. He’ll be returning any minute now.

“So that’s what caused their falling-out,” I whisper. “And it kept the Deacon from going with Mallory on this year’s Everest expedition.”

“No,” says Jean-Claude. His whisper now is fast and harsh. “It was an incident at the end of the second expedition—the men had barely been in England a few weeks after the nineteen twenty-two expedition before they began mounting their return in ’twenty-four. The Deacon was invited, but grudgingly. A part of a letter from Mallory to his wife was somehow copied and distributed among climbers in nineteen twenty-three, and I mostly remembered—but later looked up—exactly what Mallory wrote: ‘Despite the years that I’ve known Mr. Deacon—and we were quite good friends at Cambridge, especially during the climbing in Wales after those school days were over, I don’t find myself greatly liking him. He is too much the don, too much the landlord, too much the coddled poet, and one with not only Tory prejudices that come into the open from time to time, but with a highly developed sense of contempt, sometimes bordering on actual hatred, for other sorts of people than his own. Our friend Mr. Richard Davis Deacon loves being called by his common nickname, given to him by the other men, and there were only fifty of us total, in his first year at our little Magdalene College, Cambridge—“the Deacon”—I am sure it flatters his inflated ego. At any rate, Ruth, after the last expedition I felt I should never be at ease with him—and in a sense I never shall be. He is well informed and opinionated and doesn’t at all like anyone else to know things he doesn’t know. And when he is lucky in his random guesses, as he was about finding our route from the summit of the pass called Lhakpa La, he takes his good fortune as his due—as if he were the leader rather than I.’”

“You have a hell of a memory, my friend.”

Jean-Claude looks surprised. “But of course! Are not young students in America required to memorize hundreds of pages of verse and fine literature and other materials? Word for word? And punished severely if they fail? In France, memory is learning and learning is memory.”

The Deacon is looking back this way, his expression still vacant, obviously still thinking hard about something. But I am sure he will rejoin us in a minute.

“Quickly,” I say to Jean-Claude, “tell me what happened on the nineteen twenty-two expedition which was the last straw that broke the back of the camel that was their friendship.”

I admit it is not the finest sentence I’ve ever constructed, but Jean-Claude looks at me as if I’ve suddenly begun babbling in Aramaic.

“In ’twenty-two they all felt that they had a strong chance for the summit,” begins Jean-Claude, as the Deacon starts to stroll back in our direction. “They climbed the imposing ice wall onto the North Col, traversed it to the North Ridge, climbed that ridge to the North East Ridge, and headed for the summit—but terrible winds drove them off the ridge onto the North Face itself, and there progress was slow and dangerous. They had to retreat to base camp. But on the seventh of June, Mallory insisted on another effort up the North Col—still imagining, despite day after day of deep monsoon snow, that they might still make the summit.

“The Deacon argued against taking porters and climbers up the North Col again. He pointed out that the weather had turned and the summit was lost to them this year. More importantly, the Deacon knew much more about snow and ice conditions than Mallory—whose expedition time on glaciers and in the Alps was very limited—and the Deacon said that the conditions were perfect for avalanches. Just the day before, returning from a reconnoiter of the North Col, some of the climbers, upon descending toward the rope ladder they’d left on the ice wall, found a fifty-meter-wide area where a slide had wiped out their tracks during the past two hours. The Deacon refused to go.”

That same Deacon is less than 50 feet away now, and we would have to cease the conversation if not for the wind howling and certainly drowning our words. But still Jean-Claude hurries with the last sentences.

“Mallory called the Deacon a coward. That morning, seven June, Mallory led a party of seventeen men up to the North Col, all the Sherpas roped together. The avalanche hit them about two hundred meters below the North Col on exactly the type of slope the Deacon had warned them about. Nine of the porters were swept away together. Mallory missed being carried away by only a few meters, but even he was caught up in the tidal wave. Two of the porters were later dug out, but seven died and their remains were buried in the crevasse to which they had almost been carried by the avalanche. It had been, as the Deacon had tried to explain, madness to attempt to cross those loose snow-slab slopes under such conditions.”

“My God,” I whisper.

“Exactly,” Jean-Claude agrees. “The two old friends have not spoken since that June day two years ago. And the Deacon was not invited on this year’s expedition.”

I say nothing. I’m stunned that the Deacon might—had it not been for this “falling-down” between Mallory and him—have been invited on such an important adventure. Perhaps the adventure of the century. Certainly the heroic tragedy of the century, if the newspapers are to be believed. I think about immortality, such as it is, how it seems to come for Brits only after a hard death, and how it is being crafted for George Leigh Mallory now by words in the London Times, the New York Times, and a thousand other newspapers.

We’ve missed all this the past four days—concentrating only on our climbing, our descending, our sleeping, and our climbing again.

“How did…,” I begin, but immediately fall silent. The Deacon has almost reached us. The rising wind tugs at his wool jacket and tie. I can hear his hobnailed boots—almost certainly nearly identical to the ones worn this past week by Mallory and Irvine—crunching and see them leaving new prints in the shallow snow of the Matterhorn’s summit ridge.

His hands still in the pockets of his woolen trousers, his pipe cold in his upper-right pocket, the Deacon gives Jean-Claude an intense look and says softly, “Mon ami, if you had a chance to try to climb Mount Everest, would you take it?”

I expect Jean-Claude to make some joke—it would be in his nature to do so despite the sad news in the newspaper—but instead he looks up at our de facto leader for a long, silent moment. The Deacon’s disturbingly clear gray eyes look up from J.C. and seem so focused on a distant point that I actually check behind me to see if the high-flying raven has returned.

“Oui,” Jean-Claude says at last. “Mount Everest is very large and very far away, far from my valley of Chamonix where I have duties as a guide and patrons waiting for me—and it is more a British mountain, I think, than one yet open to the world—and I think it is now and shall continue to be a cold killer of men, my friend Richard Deacon. But, oui, mon ami, if I were to get the chance to go climb the beast, I would go. Yes. Absolutely.”

I’m waiting for the Deacon to ask me the same question and am not sure exactly how I’ll respond—but there is no question for me.

Instead the Deacon says loudly over the wind, “Let’s go down the face and then take the Swiss Ridge toward Zermatt.”

This is a small surprise. Our better tents and sleeping bags and the bulk of our supplies are on the Italian side, on the high slopes above Breuil. Ah, well. It will just mean another long hike over Théodule Pass and back. As junior member of the trio, I’ll probably get the duty. I only hope I can find a mule to rent in Zermatt.

We start down the suddenly steep ridge toward the shaded, near-vertical roof of the mountain—“the bad bit,” Edward Whymper had called it when they ascended, and so it fatally proved itself when they descended—and the Deacon surprises me as well as Jean-Claude (I can tell by Jean-Claude’s almost infinitesimal hesitation) by saying, “What do you say we rope up for this part?”

We had done the bulk of our climbing on face and ridge unroped. If one falls—well, he falls. Most of the ridge and large slab work here requires no ropes for belay, and the downward-tilting north face slabs such as we are going out on now are too treacherous for any real belay. There are almost no outcroppings or projections over which the highest climber can toss a safety loop, as is the alpine mountaineer’s habit in 1924.

Uncoiling the different strands of rope over my shoulder, I now play out the shortest one. We all tie on at the waist, only about 20 feet separating us. There is no discussion of order. Jean-Claude goes first—he is strongest on snow and ice but also brilliant on sheer rock slabs such as we’re going to encounter in a minute—then I go second, the least experienced climber here but very strong with my arms, and finally the Deacon. The Deacon as sheet anchor. The Deacon as third man on the rope, responsible for belaying both Jean-Claude and me if we fall…a belay on this treacherous rock that would be beyond the abilities of almost any man on earth, as well as almost certainly far beyond the snapping point of our thin hemp rope.

But the brotherhood of the rope gives a strong sense of security even when the rope is thin to the point of being little more than a metaphor. And so does the fact of Richard Davis Deacon as our anchorman on the rope. We go over the Swiss edge of the summit and begin our descent.

When not placing my feet most carefully on the wet and downward-sloping narrow slabs, I notice that there are old fixed ropes and one metal cable hanging or pitoned in further away from the edge of the face: a few of the ropes strung by solicitous guides this summer; most of the others many years old and quickly turning to powder due to age, winter weather, and high-altitude sunlight hastening the chemical and physical processes of their own slow, certain disintegration. “Clients”—tourists to these high peaks, strangers to the way of rock, ice, rope, and sky—tie on to these fixed ropes, some using them for a quick rappel down this almost vertical and disturbingly exposed “bad bit” of the mountain, but while one rope might hold you in such a rappel, the one next to it might snap immediately and send you hurtling thousands of feet to the boulders and crevasses of the glacier below.

It’s almost impossible to tell, just by looking, which hemp ropes are new and reliable and which are ancient, rotten, and certain death to clip on to. That’s what guides are for.

The three of us stay clear of all the ropes as we descend, Jean-Claude angling us closer to the edge of the face, where rockfalls and small snow avalanches are more frequent, even in June. He is trading the slight chance of rockfall or avalanche during the minutes we’re on this part of the face for the definite advantage of more solid footing closer to the ridge.

But why come this way? Why reproduce the last steps of doomed Lord Francis Douglas and the other members of Edward Whymper’s summit party from July 14, 1865?

Most people even mildly interested in mountain climbing know that there are more serious accidents during the descent stages of a climb than during the ascent, but what they might not know is that a climber has a different relationship to the mountain, especially while climbing on rock, during each of the ascent/descent stages. Climbing up the mountain, the climber is leaning into the rock face, body intimately spread out against the rock, cheek touching rock, fingers groping for any ledge or handhold in the rock, the climber’s entire body seeking out even the smallest ledges, fissures, wedges, overhangs, slabs—it’s like making love to the mountain. During the descent stage, it’s usually more common for the climber to be facing outward, thus making it easier for the climber to see the tiny ledges and footholds in the yards and meters beneath and beside him; that way the climber’s back is against the rock, his face turned toward (and attention now on) the drop beneath him, much of the view now being the empty sky and beckoning void rather than the very solid and reassuring rock or snow mass.

So descending a mountain is almost always more frightening for the novice climber and more demanding of full attention for even the most experienced climber. Descents claim more lives than the mere climbing of a mountain. But even as I’m taking care to set my feet and hands and following J.C., even as I’m wondering why the Deacon seems to have suggested this particular death route that claimed more than half of Whymper’s party, much of my mind keeps turning over the question Why didn’t the Deacon ask me if I’d be willing to climb Mount Everest?

Of course, it would have been a silly and useless question: I have no money to join one of the Alpine Club’s Himalayan expeditions. (In a real sense, it is a sporting club for men of means, and I’ve already spent most of the modest inheritance I received when I turned twenty-one so that I could come to Europe to climb.) And it is the British Alpine Club—they don’t invite Americans along. British climbers and their Old Boy establishment consider Mount Everest—named for a British cartographer by a British surveyor—an English hill. They’d never invite an American, no matter how skilled he might be.

What’s more, I simply didn’t have the experience required for those heroes who attempt Everest. I had done a good deal of climbing during my years at Harvard—more climbing than studying, to be honest, including three small summer expeditions to Alaska—but that and my months here with Jean-Claude and the Deacon weren’t enough experience or training in advanced techniques to take on the tallest and perhaps fiercest unclimbed mountain in the world. I mean, George Leigh Mallory had just died on Everest, for God’s sake, and it might well have been his wonderfully physically fit but young and relatively novice high-climbing partner, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, who’d fallen and pulled Mallory with him to his death.

And finally, I admit to myself as we edge another few meters lower, the rope connecting the three of us always properly a little slack, I don’t believe, when push comes to shove, that I have the nerve to go try Everest, even if the Alpine Club should suddenly decide to invite an underskilled and anxious impoverished Yank to accompany their next Everest expedition. (And I know there will be another expedition. Once the Brits get their teeth into some huge heroic expedition challenge, they simply don’t give up, even when their heroes—Robert Falcon Scott, George Mallory—die in the attempt. Stubborn people, those Englishmen.)

But suddenly Jean-Claude and I are at the precise point where four members of Whymper’s first successful summit party fell to their terrible deaths.

I have to interrupt my own narrative here to say that I know it seems strange that I am suddenly going to describe an accident that happened in July of 1865, 60 years previous to the adventure I hope to tell you of that took place in 1925. But as you’ll see, at least one of the seemingly irrelevant details of that tragedy of the Whymper party’s first successful ascent of the Matterhorn became the improbable element which allowed the very unofficial and almost totally unreported Deacon-Clairoux-Perry Himalayan Expedition of 1925.

The Whymper party had climbed the mountain roped together—all seven of them—but for some reason, they began the descent in two roped groups. Perhaps Edward Whymper’s group and the excellent guide Michel Croz’s were impeded by their giddiness and fatigue. On the first rope of four men, Croz—the best climber of them all—went first, followed by the true amateur, Douglas’s friend Hadow, then the fairly experienced mountaineer Hudson, and finally the 18-year-old gifted amateur climber, Lord Francis Douglas.

The three remaining men—still standing at the extreme Swiss edge of the summit as their fellows began to descend—then roped up together: first “Old Peter” Taugwalder, then “Young Peter” Taugwalder, and finally Edward Whymper. Two mediocre guides and one excellent climber. Thus the descending victorious summit party consisted of four British climbers—one a professional, one a gifted amateur, and two pure amateurs—two only moderately competent Valaisans (the Taugwalders), and one truly gifted Savoyard, Michel Croz. By all logic, the supremely experienced guide Croz should have led the expedition—making decisions as well as leading the way—but although he was in the lead of the descent through the “treacherous bit” above the sheer overhang, it was still Whymper who commanded the expedition. And Croz had his hands full; although Hudson was a great help, occasionally steadying or even physically setting the following Lord Francis Douglas’s feet on the proper niches and holds, Croz was doing the same to the more anxious and infinitely less physically capable Hadow for every step of this difficult descent. And Croz had to do this while finding the best and safest route down and then right to the easier summit ridge.

And so the seven descended the “treacherous bit” between the summit and the curving overhang which Jean-Claude, Deacon, and I had just come down.

But just above the spot where we now stood—the fatal spot, as it were—Lord Francis Douglas, the youngest among them, had the courage and brains to suggest that they all rope up and descend together, one team, just as they’d successfully ascended the mountain. I don’t know why Whymper or Croz had not suggested it earlier.

In point of fact, it offered almost no additional safety. This “treacherous bit” of the Matterhorn descent below the summit and above the wave-cresting overhang is difficult now in 1924 with fixed ropes, clear routes established, and a majority of the loose rock long since kicked free of the mountain by climbers. In Whymper’s day, the “treacherous bit” was even more treacherous, especially in terms of “objective danger” such as rockfall, but the greatest danger here—then and now—is that while the niches, fingerholds, and footholds are tiny and hard to find, the projecting boulders and flat areas where a man can brace himself for a belay are all but nonexistent.

So while the seven climbers, especially the amateurs, felt much more confident now that Whymper and the two Taugwalder guides were tied to their rope—by a totally inadequate rope connecting Old Peter and Lord Francis Douglas, it was discovered later—the new arrangement really didn’t offer much, if any, additional safety.

And then it all happened at once. Despite a legal inquest in Zermatt which questioned all the principals just days after the event, despite later articles and newspaper stories and books by Whymper and all the other survivors, and despite a thousand newspaper stories about the event, no one is completely sure what happened and in which sequence.

It seems most probable that the rankest amateur, the 19-year-old Douglas Hadow, missed his step—even with Croz’s guiding hands—and fell, hitting Croz hard and pulling the guide off his own perch. The combined weight of the suddenly plummeting Croz and Hadow must have plucked the more experienced Reverend Charles Hudson and the amazed Lord Francis Douglas off their tiny footholds in less than a second. In almost an instant, four of the seven roped men were bouncing and sliding toward their deaths.

The remaining three on the rope—“Old Peter” Taugwalder, still connected to Lord Francis Douglas and the other falling men by a cheap piece of rope, then “Young Peter,” then Edward Whymper himself—acted immediately out of instinct and years of experience.

Old Peter was the only one who had any real chance of stopping the fall by a strong belay. He had a good, comparatively broad foothold. More than that, he was standing below one of the very few rock outcroppings on this entire “treacherous bit” of descent, and he’d looped the climbing rope around it without even thinking about it. Above him, Young Peter and Whymper grabbed what rock they could with one hand and braced themselves for a desperate belay with their other hands on the rope.

The rope went as taut as an arrow in flight. The physical shock of impact from four falling and constantly accelerating human bodies on the three braced men—especially on Old Peter—was terrible. The rope whipped through Old Peter’s hands, leaving a terrible sear that remained for many weeks. (In his guilt and dismay, Old Peter would show anyone who would look his scarred hand.)

But despite the loop around the small outcropping above Old Peter—or perhaps because of it—the rope snapped in midair. Much later, Edward Whymper told a reporter that he had perfectly remembered the terrible sound of that snapping for twenty-five years and would until the moment of his own death.

In his book Whymper wrote:

For a few seconds, we saw our unfortunate companions sliding downwards on their backs, and spreading out their hands, endeavouring to save themselves. They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one, and fell from precipice to precipice on the Matterhorn-gletscher below, a distance of nearly 4,000 feet in height.

It takes a while for men to fall almost a mile. Luckily—if that’s the word—they are almost always dead and largely dismembered long before they reach the bottom. Many was the time that I’d heard climbers—both in the States and in Europe—describe the horrors of slowly descending for hours after a comrade or comrades had fallen. It was not pristine. Each described following intermittent trails, on rock and snow and ice, of blood—so very much blood—and shattered ice axes and shredded, bloody clothing and boots, and, always, fragments of rended body parts.

Whymper and the Taugwalders’ route—when they finally worked up the nerve to begin moving again, which was up to half an hour after their friends’ fall, according to Whymper (who blamed the blubbering, terrified Taugwalders for the delay)—was on the slab-stepped ridge itself. From that angle they had a clear view of the bloody path of their friends’ violent descent—bodies bouncing from boulder to boulder, ricocheting from precipice to precipice—down the sheer north face of the Matterhorn onto the unyielding ice of the Matterhorn Glacier.

In the end, it took Whymper more than two days to urge, cajole, threaten, bribe, and shame the Zermatt guides to climb back up to that glacier to “retrieve the bodies.” The local guides—members all of a strong guides’ trade union—obviously knew better than the gifted amateur British climber what “bodies” would consist of after such a fall. The guides also had a much better appreciation of what Whymper was calling “a simple climb to the base of the mountain.” The climb to the glacier at the base of the north face of the Matterhorn was a dangerous proposition—in some ways as dangerous as climbing the mountain—with hidden crevasses, seracs that could collapse at any time, unstable pinnacles and leaning towers of old ice, and a maze of ice boulders in which men could, and usually did, get lost for hours or days.

But eventually Whymper got his volunteers—paid “volunteers” in the case of most of the guides who grudgingly agreed to go on Monday (on Sunday they all had to stay in Zermatt for Mass)—and eventually they found the bodies.

Whymper later admitted that he’d fully hoped, through some miracle of soft snow and lucky sliding for almost a vertical mile, that he would find one or more of his climbing partners alive.

Not even close.

What was left of the three corpses was scattered on the ice and rock at the base of the north face. Rocks were falling all around the “rescuers” almost the entire time they were there, but when the guides fled for cover, Whymper and other Englishmen who’d joined him held their ground. Or, to be specific, the Brits stupidly and stubbornly held their spot on the glacier, with rocks and boulders slamming down all around like cold meteors.

At first no one, not even Whymper, could distinguish the bits of one corpse from another. But then the Englishman was able to identify his guide and friend Michel Croz by a bit of his beard. Croz’s arms and legs had been torn off, as well as most of his skull, but a fragment of his lower jaw remained, and the beard there was the color of Croz’s beard. One of the guides who returned when the rockfall let up, an old friend of Michel Croz’s, identified scars on a shattered forearm lying many yards away and a hand atop an ice boulder with more scars that Croz’s friend well remembered.

Oddly enough, there were slight tatters of trousers left around Croz’s dismembered trunk, and six gold coins had stayed in the pocket during his entire descent.

Someone noticed that Croz’s crucifix—without which he never climbed—had dug itself deep into the surviving fragment of the guide’s lower jaw, embedding itself as deep and solidly as a cross-shaped bullet. One of the men, Robertson, clicked open his penknife and dug it out, thinking that Croz’s family might want it.

Hudson’s remains were identified only by his wallet, and by a letter from his wife that had completed the descent with him when his arms, legs, and head had not. Whymper found one of Hudson’s gloves and, wandering wider on the bloodied glacier, picked up a broad-brimmed English sunhat that he, Whymper, had only recently given Croz.

The majority of Hadow’s remains were scattered between those of Croz and Hudson.

As the guides ran for shelter during another rock avalanche, Whymper stood by the bodies and noticed for the first time that the rope was still attached between what was left of the torsos of Croz and Hadow, and also between Hadow and Hudson.

There was no body of Lord Francis Douglas. Some records say that the men that day found one of Douglas’s boots—no human foot inside—while others say that it was a belt that Whymper had noticed Douglas wearing during the ascent. Another story says that it was a single glove.

Whymper’s realization at that moment was that the first three men had been secured by one of the thicker, more solid ropes, while Old Peter Taugwalder had tied Douglas to himself by a much thinner, lighter rope, not often used for roping the actual climbers. There was no doubt in Whymper’s mind at that moment that Old Peter had deliberately used a less secure rope in case the first four men should fall. In later years, the famous British climber came close to accusing the old guide of this in plain words and print.

In truth, though, all the ropes—even the thinner one Old Peter Taugwalder had around his shoulder when it came time to tie Lord Francis Douglas on to the common rope connecting all seven of them—had been used without any thought or undue concern as connecting ropes between the climbers during the descent that day and on many others. Edward Whymper simply didn’t concern himself with relative rope thicknesses, tensile strengths, and the mathematics of breaking points in different diameters and makes of rope until after the tragedy on his day of triumph on the Matterhorn.

No one ever did find the remains of 18-year-old Francis Douglas, and this fact gave rise to an odd little footnote to the tragedy.

Lord Francis Douglas’s somewhat elderly mother, Lady Queensberry, as Whymper wrote, “suffered much from the idea of her son not having been found.”

In truth, it was worse than that. Lady Queensberry soon became obsessed with the morbid conviction that her young son was still alive somewhere on the Matterhorn—trapped high in an ice cave, perhaps, while surviving by eating lichens and bits of mountain goats, drinking the water that tumbled over his prison from the snows above. Perhaps—most probably Lady Queensberry thought—her beloved son Francis was injured, unable to descend on his own and even unable to find a way to signal to those so far below. Or perhaps, she told one old friend during a visit, Francis had survived the fall to the glacier—after all, he wasn’t attached by rope to those who had died so horribly—and was even now eking out a cold survival in a crevasse somewhere.

Men of honor such as Professor John Tyndall—who had almost joined Whymper on the famous first ascent—then returned to the Matterhorn to carry out systematic searches for Douglas’s remains. He wrote to Lady Queensberry and promised “to exert to the full extent of my abilities in the difficult and dangerous—but necessary for your piece of mind—task of finding and returning your brave son’s body to his native land and ancestral home.”

But Douglas’s mother wasn’t interested in someone returning her darling son Francis’s body. She knew he was alive and she wanted him found.

She went to her grave believing that Lord Francis Douglas still lived, stranded high on the north face of the Matterhorn or wandering the cold blue caverns beneath the glacier at the mountain’s foot.

So the Deacon calls a halt to our descent through the “treacherous bit,” and Jean-Claude and I stand there a few meters lower than him, both of us getting colder by the minute (the north face is in full shadow now and the wind has grown colder as it increases its howling), and—at least on my part—wondering what the hell old Richard Davis Deacon is up to. Perhaps, I think, he’s getting senile. After all, the Deacon, although physically more fit than I am at 22, is entering his dotage at age 37 (the precise age of George Mallory when he disappeared on Everest this same month).

“This is the place,” the Deacon says softly. “Precisely the place where Croz, Hadow, Hudson, and Lord Francis Douglas fell and went over that edge…” He points only 40 or 50 feet below, where the arching crest of the Matterhorn’s picturesque overhang becomes an invariably fatal drop.

“Merde,” says Jean-Claude, speaking for both of us. “Jake and I know that. You know that we know all that. Don’t tell us, Richard Davis Deacon, former schoolteacher that you are, that you brought us down this miserable route with no fixed ropes—we have a dozen or more to choose from just thirty steps to your right, and I’d be delighted to drive in a piton and clip in a fresh rope if you like—don’t tell us you brought us this way just so you could show and tell us a piece of history that everyone who loves the Alps and this mountain has known since we were in short pants. Let us quit talking and get off this fucking face.”

We do so, moving easily and confidently to our right, always aware of the emptiness below us here, until we move out onto the relatively safe slabs—a series of upturned steps was the way Whymper once described the ridge after giving up on the Italian side (downturned slabs) and trying this Swiss Ridge—and from there we unrope, and the descent becomes, despite the continued danger of rockfall or slipping on ice, “easy as eating your piece of pie,” as Jean-Claude would sometimes say.

We knew now that, barring any nasty surprise, we’d reach the Hornli Hut at 3,260 meters, almost 11,000 feet—a comfortable enough hut for one perched on a narrow ledge and wedged into the mountain itself—before full darkness fell. Two-thirds of the way down we reached an old cache of ours. (Our cache—mostly just some extra food, water, and blankets for the hut—was set almost exactly where Whymper’s people had left their rucksacks during their ascent. What must the three survivors have felt and thought on their silent descent as they lifted their dead friends’ four rucksacks and carried them down the mountain with them?)

I realize that I’m feeling morbid and depressed as hell—plus my week of climbing the Matterhorn, not to mention the many previous months with these two men, is now over. What am I going to do now? Go back to Boston and try to get a job? Literature majors tend to end up teaching literature they love to bored freshmen who couldn’t give the slightest bucket of warm spit about the material, and this thought of making my future living in the Fifth Bolgia of the Eighth Circle of Academic Hell depresses me even more. Jean-Claude looks pretty miserable as well, but he has a great job to return to as a Chamonix Guide. He’s very close friends with the Deacon and obviously sorry to see the long climbing vacation—and relationship—end for now.

The Deacon is grinning like an idiot. I’m not certain that I’ve ever seen Richard Davis Deacon fully grin before—smile ironically, sure, but grin like a normal human being? Much less grin like an idiot? Uh-oh. Something is very wrong with that grin. His voice, although audibly excited, is slow, almost formal in its Cambridge cadences. The Deacon is taking turns making serious eye contact with each of us as he speaks—something else he rarely does.

“Jean-Claude Clairoux,” he says softly. “Jacob William Perry. Would you care to accompany me on a fully funded expedition to climb Mount Everest in the next spring and early summer of nineteen twenty-five? It will just be the three of us as climbers and some necessary porters—including a few high-climbing Sherpas to help establish the high camps, but still just porters. We will be the three climbers—the three men attempting the summit. Only us.”

This is where Jean-Claude and I, knowing that this must be pure fantasy or mean-spirited bullshit, should be shouting, “You can’t be serious” and “Go tell it to someone who just got off the boat, Limey,” but this is the Deacon speaking, so the young French Chamonix Guide and I look at each other intently for a long few seconds, turn back to the Deacon, and say in total solemnity and almost perfect unison…

“Yes. We’ll go.”

And so it begins.