The Abominable: A Novel

“No, only that it was very portable,” said Reggie. “That’s all Percy would let me know. He was supposed to have returned to Darjeeling by early July…with the thing, whatever it was. Sir John Henry Kerr, the acting governor of Bengal, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, currently the CIC and head of British Intelligence in India, both have been briefed by London—at least to the extent that Percival was trying to retrieve something of vital importance—and both are still awaiting word from me.”

“I don’t understand,” I said dully. “Why would anyone choose the slopes of Mount Everest for such an exchange? That’s nuts. There’s no way off once you’ve gone up—if someone’s waiting for you, I mean.”

Reggie looked at me. “Percy and Meyer didn’t choose Everest, Jake. They met up in Tingri Dzong. But Bruno Sigl and his thugs were close behind Meyer. In the end, Percy must have gone up the ladder that Mallory’s expedition left behind—first onto the North Col, and then, according to Kami Chiring, much higher, perhaps even to the North East Ridge. He must have prayed that the Germans couldn’t climb as high, couldn’t follow Meyer and him that far up the slopes—perhaps Percy thought that with the extensive caches of food that the Norton-Mallory Expedition had left behind on the mountain they could outwait the Germans below, or slip away in the imminent monsoon storms. Percy guessed wrong. Sigl must have brought some of Germany’s best climbers with him…all political fanatics. And now they’re back.”

There was more silence, broken only by the ever-lessening sound of wind through the ice walls around us.

Finally the Deacon said to Reggie, “But you’re willing to risk—even give up—your life to retrieve what your cousin Percy died to get.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going up the fixed ropes to the North Col with you tonight,” the Deacon said flatly. “We’ll keep climbing until we find Percy or until…” He stopped, but we all heard what came after the “until.”

“I’m going as well,” said Jean-Claude. “I hate the goddamned boches. I’d like nothing better than to plant a thumb in their eye.”

Before I could say anything, Reggie said, “I’m serious about you slipping away over the Serpo La and heading straight for Darjeeling, Jake. As an American, you’re neutral in all this.”

“The hell we are!” I said. “‘Lafayette, we are here!’ The Battle of Belleau Wood. The Battle of Cantigny. The Second Battle of the Marne. The Battle of Chateau-Thierry. The Meuse-Argonne. The…the…” I was so tired that I’d run out of American battles. “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” I added irrelevantly. Well, it had sounded good in my buzzing head.

“I’m going with you guys,” I said. “Just try to stop me.”

No one said anything or patted me on the back. Perhaps we were all too tired.

“One thing,” said Jean-Claude. “Do the rest of you think we have enough energy left to get up that thousand-foot snow wall and climb the rope ladder to the North Col, then cross the Col to Camp Four? Tonight?”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” said the Deacon.

Far below us and behind us, somewhere in the Trough forest of seracs and penitentes and 60-foot-high snow-shrouded ice pinnacles, came the echoing sound of three pistol shots. Then silence.

9.

A few years ago as I write this memoir in the winter of 1991–92, in this combination hotel-for-old-folks and assisted-living-home where I live here in Colorado, the manager—Mary Pfalzgraf, a wonderful woman—asked me to fill the Wednesday “guest speaker” role in the atrium by giving a little talk on mountain climbing. I did just that —gave a “little talk” (seven minutes by my watch)—to half a dozen other residents, mostly about night climbing in the Andes and Antarctica and about how beautiful the starry skies were in both places (with the aurora australis shimmering and dancing in curtains of light in the latter). There were only two questions from the tiny audience of my chronological peers: Howard “Herb” Herbert, my most faithful dominoes opponent, asked, “Where’d you lose those two fingers on your left hand, Jake?” (I had a hunch he’d wanted to ask that question for a long time but had been too polite to do so.) “Alaska,” I told him truthfully. (I didn’t go into the details of the nine days in a snow cave at 16,000 feet; nine days that had cost the lives of two of my fellow climbers.) Then Mrs. Haywood, rather far gone in Alzheimer’s, I’m afraid, asked, “Can you climb mountains in your sleep? While you’re sleeping, I mean?”

“Yes,” I answered at once. I knew that because to this day I have no memory of the first forty-five minutes of our climb to the North Col that Wednesday morning in the wee hours of May 20, 1925. I was climbing in my sleep.

What woke me on the ice cliff climb to the North Col was suddenly poking my head and shoulders above the solid blanket of thick cloud. It felt like coming up and out of the sea into the open air, and it awakened me at once.

My God, it was beautiful. It was very late, so I was sure that the last fingernail crescent of waning moon had risen, but it was still hidden somewhere behind the looming North and North East ridges of Everest. The summit of our beloved/hated mountain and its omnipresent plume of spindrift, however, were beautifully backlit by intense starlight. Even when I’d gone out west in my Harvard climbing days, hundreds of miles from any city, I’d never seen stars this bright. Nor so many at once. Nor had they ever appeared this brilliant to me even from the depths of the Alps while bivouacking on a peak shielded from city lights or farm lanterns by countless other alpine peaks. This Himalayan sky was unprecedented. The Milky Way arched above the starlight-on-snow-lit summit of Everest like a solid highway bridging the night sky; there was no diminution of the number or brightness of stars near the horizons, merely an abrupt cutoff between thousands of stars and hundreds of starlit snowfields and glaciers and summits.

The wind was gone. For the first time in days, the air—at least at this altitude of about 23,000 feet—was still. The nearby and distant peaks—Changtse, Cho Uyo, Makalu, Lhotse, Ama Dablam, Lho La, and ones I couldn’t identify in my exhausted state—appeared close enough to reach out and pluck, like white-tipped coneflowers.

When we pulled ourselves off the swaying rope ladder and onto the narrow inset ice shelf of the North Col, I realized that the Deacon wasn’t with us. Had he fallen off when I’d been climbing in my sleep? Had he been shot?

“He stayed below to tie loads on,” J.C. explained.

“Tie loads on what?” I said.

“Onto the continuous rope attached to the pulleys attached to the bicycle,” said Jean-Claude. “Remember? That’s how we’re going to get those dozen or more heavy loads from your foraging at Camp Three up here to the North Col.”

It came back to me as I forced myself to be more awake. When the Deacon had said he’d stay below and tie on loads until they were all pedaled and cranked up, I’d thought it was nuts—any of the Krauts could hear the rope and pulley working, freeze him in the beam of a powerful searchlight or electric torch from Camp III, and easily shoot him with the rifles they had—but I hadn’t said anything at the bottom of the 1,000-foot face to the North Col. I’d been too intent upon remembering how to attach my jumar clamp to the fixed ropes, how to release the cam when I had to slide J.C.’s device upward, and how to haul my already too-heavy pack up the rope ladder for the final 100 feet or so without tumbling backward into the shifting ice mist.

With our crampons and flashing ice chips kicked up by the crampons gleaming in the bright starlight, J.C., Reggie, Pasang, and I hurried along the slippery ledge to where Jean-Claude had secured his bicycle apparatus.

It was like a dream. Because of the weight of the oversized loads that the Deacon was tying onto the rope down in the roiling clouds below, J.C., Pasang, Reggie, and I took turns pedaling the pulley-bicycle. It was exhausting. Two of the others who weren’t pedaling would signal the pedaling person to stop, lean out over the sheer drop or use their ice axes to hook onto the load, and pull it to the ice ledge, and the third person would untie the ungainly load from the continuous pulley rope and begin carrying or dragging it to the far end of the ledge.

This extreme effort went on for almost thirty minutes, and then there came four fast tugs on both ropes—