The Abominable: A Novel

Too often—as the number of deaths of alpine climbers showed each year—there isn’t.

Doing this kind of blind step in the Alps was dangerous, but many of the falls there were manageable if one’s partner had a good, solid belay stance.

None of the five of us on this steep, slippery traverse slope had a belay stance worth a plugged nickel. All four others could be belaying the Deacon—or whichever one of us was stupid enough to try this blind step—and a fall would almost certainly mean that all five would be pulled off the rock of the North Face. There were a few stubby rock protrusions at our feet or above our heads, but none big enough and solid enough to provide a tie-off belay—and even with Deacon’s Miracle Rope, the odds seemed overwhelming that the rope would snap with such a sharp belay point anyway.

“Okay,” I called from the rear. “What next? We go back to the First Step to think about this awhile? Throw rocks at the Germans?”

“To hell with going back,” called the Deacon.

He untied from the rope he shared with Reggie and Pasang, and then peeled out of his Shackleton jacket and Finch duvet, then put the gabardine Shackleton anorak back on. He stuffed the jacket and his two layers of mittens into his rucksack, which he removed and carefully handed to Reggie to prop between her body and the cliff wall. Then he looked down at his goose down trousers and stiff mountain boots and I knew he was considering removing his 12-point crampons. In the end, he chose to keep them on.

He then took the climbing rope back and tied it around his waist. I thought that perhaps only J.C. and I noticed that the knot he used was made to look like a simple overhand loop knot but was really a slipknot, certain to come undone from the Deacon without any tension or tug on the belayer if he fell. I understood and said nothing; Jean-Claude said nothing. Perhaps it was at that moment that I fully realized how brave a man Richard Davis Deacon really was.

Reggie cried, “No! Let us try to belay! Please, Richard!”

The Deacon didn’t even look at her. “There’s no belay stance anywhere along this line I took,” he said, already staring at the smooth rock of the blind step he had to take. I could sense him going over his moves in his mind, mentally rehearsing what his body had to do physically in a few seconds.

“All right,” he said and extended his right leg as far as it would go and hopped out onto the smooth stone of the abutment column.

He began to slide at once, and rather than follow the human instinct to claw for a handhold—of which there was none at all—the Deacon spread his palms, the wool of his gloves pressing hard against the stone, his anorak and belly and groin and balloon-fabric outer trousers pressing against the smooth rock face. He slowed, then almost stopped. The Deacon was connected to the mountain now only by the slightest hint of surface friction. I knew from experience that it was not enough friction to keep him from sliding and falling.

And he was falling. His sickening downward slide toward the overhang slowed almost to a stop and then began—inexorably—again.

The Deacon didn’t wait. Friction and speed were his only weapons, and of the two of them, speed was the more important. He scrabbled to his right as he slid, his body still spread-eagled, his palms and cheek and belly and thighs and crampon points pressing and scraping against rock, keeping himself from peeling off with all the pressure his tired body could exert, and when he’d slid to the far side of the arched seven-foot column, he pushed off the other side of the bulge just as if he were sure that there was a ledge or foothold or handhold waiting for him there.

Of course, he couldn’t see that any of these things were there around the blind step of the rock column. It might be another no-holds smooth rock column for all he knew.

The Deacon disappeared, and there was no sound or visible motion for a long moment. But the rope hadn’t played out, the lying knot he’d tied around himself to no purpose hadn’t given way. Yet. Most important, there was no scream yet from a human body hurtling down through 8,000 feet of empty air.

I found myself wondering if the Deacon would scream when he fell.

Finally, the steady voice came from somewhere on the other side of the rock bulge—“Wonderful ledge over here. Perfect belay stance with tie-offs on the rock. And I see where we can easily climb up toward the Mushroom Rock.”

We let out a collective breath, but no one said anything. Somewhere in the back of my weary mind was the question of all questions—What about when we have to come back this way? Normally a climber would use one or more fixed ropes in a situation like this; if one were an iron-mongering German climber, perhaps he would find the tiniest crack to drive in pitons for footholds.

But we couldn’t rig a fixed rope here. It would only help those who were pursuing us. (And I confess to thinking—hoping—that perhaps one or more, or all, of the Germans would fall to their deaths on this terrible blind step.)

But no, if Reggie’s Sherpa friend Kami Chiring was telling the truth, the great German alpinist Bruno Sigl had already solved this problem once.

“Let me do all the belaying,” came the Deacon’s voice from out of sight around the column. J.C. and I understood, and Reggie did as well, I was sure. It meant that only the Deacon had the stance and backup to hold if someone slipped, and we were to stay the hell away from any belay attempt.

Reggie’s boots did slip, but she scrambled, the belay rope went tight from the Deacon’s end, and he all but pulled her around the rock and out of sight onto the ledge with him. Pasang went across like a great, splayed spider. Jean-Claude did the blind step with pure, sure speed and rock-slapping friction. I managed, coughing even as I scuttled.

Then we were on a real ledge on the other side, together again, and I saw the path up through the overhanging rocks that the Deacon had shouted to us about.

“Think it’s close enough to where the ridge widens out to Mushroom Rock?” asked Reggie.

“Yes,” was the Deacon’s only response. And then, all tied together for the first time—the Deacon using an actual, reliable figure-eight-on-a-bight knot when he tied in this time—we clambered upward toward the North East Ridge. One by one we kick-stepped our way up and then out onto the narrow ridgeline.

The sun was past the zenith. The wind was stronger and colder than before. The lenticular cap around the summit of Everest had become a large gray mass pressing down on the mountain at an angle; it reminded me of the jostled-sideways unraveling wool cap on Sandy Irvine’s corpse.

We were too busy celebrating the wonderful flatness of the bit of wider ridge here at the odd mushroom- shaped rock. I knew that kind of wind- and tectonic-shaped top-heavy rock spur was actually called a bollard. More important to us than the stupid rock formation, after the miles of wildly tilted and slippery slabs and boulders, this snowy but relatively flat area on either side of the Mushroom Rock—roughly eight feet wide by about twelve feet long—seemed like a great, flat, safe football field to all of us.

“Perfect place for a camp,” said the Deacon.

“You have to be kidding,” I said between gasping coughs, removing my oxygen mask at every paroxysm. “We’re above twenty-eight thousand feet here.” It was true that our hearts were swollen, our muscles were failing, our kidneys, stomachs, and other internal organs were not doing their jobs properly, our blood was too thick and ready to spawn embolisms, our red blood cells were doing without the oxygen they needed, and our brains were oxygen starved and running like an automobile with its last few dregs of gasoline in the tank. We were metaphorical inches from hypothermia—which has a wider range of terrible symptoms than merely going to sleep and freezing to death, not the least of which would be intemperate belligerence and a need to rip our clothes off as we froze—and literal inches from a 9,000-foot drop to our south side and a 10,000-foot drop a few more feet away to the north side.

But for the moment, we were very happy. There were no armed Germans in sight yet, and we’d reached our temporary objective.

And maybe the Deacon was right. This would be one hell of a Camp VII. With the use of O₂ tanks, climbers could get a relatively good night’s sleep here—especially in Reggie’s solid, wind-proven Big Tent— get a very early start with Welsh miner headlamps glowing, and have only a two- or two-and-a-half-hour climb to the summit of the world.

Unless, of course, the winds came up during the night. Or the Germans shot us. Or we froze to death first.