The Abominable: A Novel

“The rucksacks and extra gear for above are all ready, correct?”

“Correct,” said Reggie.

“Then we’ll get the loads and head for Camp Five now,” said the Deacon.

I held my hand up like a student asking permission to go to the lavatory. “It’s not dark yet. The German down there who’s been firing your ’scoped Lee-Enfield has shown some talent. Won’t he pick us off one by one when we get to the snowfield on the North Ridge and become visible to anyone out on the glacier?”

The Deacon looked at the summit and ridges of Everest blocking the sunset—the Yellow Band and highest boulders and the North Ridge glowing brightly, the rest of the mountain and all of our North Col now in shadow.

“It will be almost dark by the time we’re on the North Ridge snow slopes,” he said softly. “We won’t be roped up. As we discussed this morning, we’ll be moving erratically—different paces—zigzagging up the slopes until we get to the fixed ropes, using no lights, not even our headlamps.”

“What about when we’re on the fixed ropes?” I said. “We’ll have to use the headlamps then—it will be too dark to climb and check our footing without them. Won’t we still be in range of the German sniper on the glacier?”

“Extreme range, yes,” said the Deacon. “But we’re not going to use our headlamps when we’re on the tough pitches where the fixed ropes are waiting, Jake. We’re going to use starlight and body memory and J.C.’s jumars.”

“Great,” I said.

“It will be great, mon ami,” said Jean-Claude. “Except for your constant cough, we all seem to feel well. We’ve acclimated—at least for this part of the climb. And climbing Mount Everest by starlight has to be the apogee of any climber’s lifetime.”

“So long as it isn’t the end of that lifetime,” I managed between coughs.

“I shall give you a little more of the anti-cough mixture, Mr. Perry,” said Dr. Pasang. “But not too much. We don’t want you getting sleepy and careless from the codeine. Luckily, I also have a pill that can help you stay awake.”

“We all may need that pill before the night’s over,” said the Deacon.

“And we’re climbing all the way to Camp Five in the dark?” I asked, feeling how tired I was from the day of constant coughing mixed with adrenaline rushes.

“No, Jake, my dear,” said Reggie, taking my gloved hand in hers. “Remember? We’ll pause to brew up and collapse the Big Tent at Camp Five, but we’re going all the way to Camp Six before dawn.”

Now I remembered the whole plan. Holy shit and fuck me, I almost said. But because there was a lady present and because I was a Harvard graduate and a gentleman—but mostly because it was 1925—I didn’t say it aloud.

Leaning against one another for support, keeping our heads low, we slouched our way toward Camp IV and our waiting loads and an absolutely unprecedented climb.

12.

With the possible exception of my solo night climb of the Mount Erebus volcano in Antarctica some years later, in the 1930s, I’ve never had a more beautiful and enjoyable climb than that night’s climb in May of 1925 up Everest’s North Ridge from Camp IV at 23,000 feet to our Camp VI at 27,000 feet. It was perhaps the most perfect mixture I’ve ever experienced of the physical joy of climbing in a staggeringly beautiful starlit setting with the psychological joy of climbing with friends I loved.

Of course, later, I wondered if the combination of codeine and Benzedrine that Dr. Pasang had ladled into me had anything to do with the profoundly good feeling I was enjoying. I was dimly aware that my throat still felt as though I’d swallowed a jagged metal object about the size of my hand, but since the coughing had been alleviated to the point where I could use an oxygen mask again easily, that strange sensation was no longer so urgently bothersome.

We climbed unroped, spreading out during the initial snow-on-rock stretch of the ridge just above the North Col, then back in line—but still with our headlamps and electric torches dark—and using our jumars to clamp onto the many fixed ropes we’d set in place during all the steep parts of the tilted-slab sections of the climb.

Rather than taking turns leading, as a team would when breaking through deep snow, we took turns bringing up the rear, since the last person had the fatiguing job of pulling each length of fixed rope free from its eyeleted stakes, coiling it, and hauling it over his or her shoulder until the next length needed to be undone.

“Ah…,” said Jean-Claude during one of our pauses to change anchor climber, “…I understand the need to… ah…deny our fixed ropes to les boches who will be climbing in pursuit…but will not the lack of any fixed rope make our own descent a tad difficult?”

“We’ll discuss that when we take a five-minute break at Camp Five before pushing on,” said the Deacon. As far as I could tell, he hadn’t had his oxygen mask up or flow valve open during the entire climb so far. We were hauling so many oxygen rigs up with us, I didn’t understand why he might be hoarding O₂ now.

We pushed on. None of us were using our bottled air now, although we had extra rigs and bottles cached at both Camps V and VI. We seemed, by silent agreement, to be saving it for…something.

Twice we heard the distant echo of a rifle shot from the valley far below, but neither time did I hear a ricochet on the rocks around us or that somewhat disturbing new sound of steel-jacketed bees buzzing past me. Even with the telescopic sight that the Deacon had thoughtfully put on his Lee-Enfield for the Germans to use against us, finding dark-gray-suited human figures—we’d swapped our Finch duvets for our dun Shackleton jackets as an outer layer once again, along with our canvas wind trousers over the down leggings—against rock and dirty snow at night evidently was, as the Deacon had said, a near impossibility from one vertical mile below. Hitting us with aimed rifle fire from that distance, the Deacon reassured us, was a less likely threat to us than lightning, being run over by a lorry, rockfall, or avalanche. (But since the last two were real threats to us, even at that moment, I might have done a little more worrying, had I not been in a state of pharmaceutical near bliss.)

We paused at Camp V for five minutes of the promised rest and high-flow O₂, but then spent another fifteen minutes or so there taking down Reggie’s Big Tent and parceling out the staves and canvas and rain fly and ground cloth into our various rucksacks. There were more oxygen rigs there than we could carry, so we spent even more time laboriously hauling them fifty yards or so out onto the rock and scree field of the North Face, where we hid them behind a large triangular boulder. The somewhat distinctive shape of that boulder would be our only guide if we needed to find that English air on our way down—assuming any of us came down alive—since we could hardly mark the cache with our wands or flags for the Germans to find and use.

We also left most of the heavy, coiled fixed rope we’d retrieved there with the oxygen rigs. Each of us carried about 150 feet of coiled Miracle Rope over our shoulders or in our rucksack—even though we still had no plans to rope up during this part of the climb—and we just had to hope that this would be enough if a particularly difficult stretch presented itself.

We were all panting and gasping after we’d packed away all the parts of Reggie’s Big Tent—and renewing our own rucksack-carried oxygen bottles after storing the extra and partially empty tanks on the North Face and traversing back to the North Ridge—when I finally asked the question I’d been waiting to ask. “What about the lack of fixed ropes coming down?” I asked the Deacon. “Are we going to retrieve them from the pyramid rock out there and from wherever we stash the next ones above and reset them on the way down? We’ll probably be very tired.”

“That’s one answer,” said the Deacon between hits from his own oxygen tank. He was finally using English air like all the rest of us except for Pasang. “If the Germans give up—or if we can kill them all somehow—and if we come back down this way.”

“How else could we get back down?” asked Jean-Claude. “The North East Ridge back toward Lhakpa La is impossible, Ree-shard. It is a sheer knife ridge studded with cornices, aretes, pinnacles,