The Abominable: A Novel

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