The Abominable: A Novel

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 Theodule 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