The Abominable: A Novel

“Too bad,” said Reggie. “We’ll never know if he and Irvine made the summit.”

“There were several cameras with them, I believe,” said the Deacon. “Teddy Norton told me that Mallory himself was carrying a Vest Pocket Kodak.”

When we pulled the small pouch around where we could get into it, I felt, again wearing only my undergloves, something hard and metallic inside. “I believe we’ve found that camera,” I announced.

It wasn’t. The hard lump consisted of a large package of Swan Vesta matches and a metal tin of meat lozenges. We set them back in place. Other metal objects found in Mallory’s pockets included an almost casual variety of personal gear, as if Mallory had just stepped out for a winter walk in Hyde Park: a stub of a pencil, a pair of scissors, a safety pin, a little metal holster for the scissors, and a detachable leather strap that had connected his oxygen mask to his leather motorcycle helmet. I knew what the last item was because I had an almost identical strap under my chin at that moment.

We returned the lozenges, matches, and other things to his pouch and pockets, but kept turning up more items: a very used—as in snotty—plain handkerchief with a tube of petroleum jelly in it (the jelly was for his chapped lips, we knew, since we each also carried one of those—same brand), and a much nicer and rather elaborately monogrammed—G.L.M.—handkerchief in a blue, burgundy, and green foulard pattern. This handkerchief was wrapped around some papers. The Deacon looked through the papers, but they all appeared to be personal letters which he did not read beyond the salutations and whatever was written on the envelopes (one was addressed to George Leigh Mallory, Esq., c/o British Trade Agent, Yalung, Tibet). They were personal and basic expedition business letters, not interesting save for one strange series of numbers scrawled in pencil along the margins of a letter that had been sent to him from some lady not his wife.

“Those are oxygen pressure readings,” said Jean-Claude. “Perhaps notes on how far they could get on their tanks of air that last day.”

“Only five pressures given here,” said Reggie. “I thought they left Camp Four with more than five oxygen tanks.”

“They did,” said the Deacon.

“Nothing there to help us understand anything, then,” said Reggie.

“Perhaps not,” said the Deacon. He nodded and refolded each letter, set each back in its own envelope, wrapped all of them neatly in the monogrammed handkerchief, and set the handkerchief back in the dead man’s pocket.

Even though we had taken nothing, I still felt like a grave robber. I’d never gone through the pockets of a corpse before. The Deacon seemed rather used to doing so, and I realized he almost certainly had—perhaps hundreds of times—on the Western Front

In other pockets we found only Mallory’s folding pocketknife and his goggles.

“That could be important,” said Reggie. “His goggles being in his pocket.”

I didn’t understand at once—I was too busy coughing at the moment—but Jean-Claude said, “Yes. It was either twilight or after dark when they fell…Mallory started his climb the day after he saw Norton so snow-blinded. It’s all but certain that he would only take his goggles off after sunset.”

“But were they climbing upward or downward when one or both fell?” asked Pasang.

“Down-climbing, I would think,” said the Deacon.

“Did they have an electric torch with them?” asked Reggie.

“No,” said the Deacon. “Odell found it in their tent at Camp Six and brought it down. The fact that they’d not brought their only electric torch tells almost conclusively that they left Camp Six after sunrise. Also that George Mallory was quite the forgetful sort of chap.”

“Let’s not speak ill of the dead,” I said between coughs.

“Not ill,” said the Deacon. “Just factual. George was always losing or forgetting something or leaving something behind on the first two expeditions I spent with him—his socks, his shaving kit, his hat, his roll of toilet paper. It was just his way.”

“Still…,” I began, and found I had nothing else to say.

The Deacon shielded his eyes—we’d been doing the search without wearing our goggles since the clouds were so heavy above us now—and looked as far up the slope as he could in the swirling snow. “Those gullies below and this side of the First Step, below the Yellow Band, would have been very hard to down-climb in the dark, without an electric torch or any flares or lanterns or candles.”

We all peered up at the ridges and gullies of rocks far above this lower part of the face. “Based on how intact his body is—and the obvious fact that he was still conscious and trying to self-arrest when he came to a stop—it’s obvious that Mallory didn’t fall from as high up as the North East Ridge,” said the Deacon, confirming my earlier hunch. “Almost certainly not from as high up as the Yellow Band. More likely he fell from one of the gullies or minor rock bands further down, closer to us here.”

“So Sandy Irvine may be right up there waiting for us,” said Reggie.

The Deacon shrugged. “Or it was Irvine who fell first, pulling Mallory off his footing. We’ll never know unless we find Irvine’s corpse as well.”

You mean we’re going to continue searching after this? was my exhausted thought.

That’s when the Deacon brusquely ordered us all back to Camp V before the howling wind rose higher and the already snow-diminished visibility grew worse.

“So nothing we found on George Mallory can tell us whether he and Sandy Irvine reached the summit or not,” Reggie is saying. “Both Mallory’s watch and altimeter are broken and missing their hands.”

“Perhaps it is what’s missing that gives us our best clue,” says the Deacon.

I rise a little from the depths of my filthy goose down sleeping bag. “The Kodak camera?”

“No,” says the Deacon. “A photograph of Mallory’s wife, Ruth. Norton and everyone else I spoke to said that Mallory had taken the photograph with him from Camp Four—certainly no one ever found it there or at either of the two higher camps—and he had promised Ruth that he would leave it on the summit for her.”

“Or just at his high point before turning back—God alone knows where,” says J.C.

The Deacon nods at that and chews on the stem of his cold pipe.

“The absence of a photo isn’t proof that he reached the summit,” says Reggie.

“No,” agrees the Deacon. “Only that he left it somewhere. Perhaps, as Jean-Claude suggested, at their highest point before turnaround…wherever that was.”

“The missing camera interests me,” says Dr. Pasang. His deep voice is as gentle and unhurried as ever.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because when does one relinquish a camera to someone else?” asks the tall Sherpa.

“When you ask him to take your picture,” says Reggie. “As Mallory might have—giving the Kodak to Irvine on the summit, after taking the younger man’s photograph.”

“Only conjecture,” says the Deacon. “What isn’t speculation or conjecture is the fact that if we’re to have any hope at all of searching more tomorrow, we all have to get some sleep.”

“Easy for you to say,” I get out between coughs. “I just can’t seem to sleep at these goddamned altitudes.”

“Watch your language, Jake,” says the Deacon. “There’s a lady present.”

Reggie rolls her eyes.

“I have sleeping pills with me,” says Pasang. “They should guarantee at least three or four hours’ sleep.”

There is a silence, and I imagine that everyone else is thinking what I am—So we’d all be snoring away when the winds blow our tent over the edge of the mountain.

I start to give my opinion, but Reggie holds up her palm, silencing me. “Ssshh, everyone,” she whispers. “I hear someone. Someone screaming.”

My forearms break out in goose bumps.

“In this wind?” says the Deacon. “Impossible. Camp Four is much too far below us and…”

“I hear it as well,” says Pasang. “Someone is out in the dark screaming.”