The Abominable: A Novel

It didn’t matter. We all collapsed on a solid little snow platform on the north side of Mushroom Rock, adjusted our oxygen flow to “High” for a five-minute O₂ fix, and stared dully through our thick goggles. Only Reggie was active, and what she was doing made no sense to me at all.

At the north edge of this platform there was a tiny extrusion of rock protruding out into a snow cornice that had been building and accumulating there for years, if not decades. Even in our stupefied mental states, we all knew that this cornice was death—one step there and the weight of a man (or woman) would send one plummeting right through it and all the way down to the Kangshung Glacier on the south side of the ridge.

But Reggie was crawling on her belly toward that stone lip and treacherous snow cornice.

J.C. was the first to realize that we were about to lose our female climbing partner. He pulled down his mask and shouted, “Reggie, don’t! What are you doing? Stop!”

She glanced back over her shoulder at us. She’d tugged up her goggles, but otherwise her face—or the few square inches around her eyes that I could see of her face—didn’t look all that insane. Of course, hypothermia sufferers rarely do when they go into their death antics.

“See that bite taken out of the cornice?” she asked. Her voice did sound a little excited and breathless, but not necessarily irrational.

We looked and then we did see it—about six feet to the left of her rocky diving board to hell.

“So what?” I said. “Come back here, Reggie. Please. Just crawl back.”

“Oh, shut up, Jake,” she said over the wind whistle and low howl. She pointed to the “bite” she’d mentioned. There was about a five-foot-wide arc missing in the otherwise wind-formed and geometrically ruled snow-and-ice cornice.

“Lady Bromley-Montfort is saying that someone could have fallen through there,” Pasang said in his not unpleasant Oxbridge singsong. “Perhaps a year ago.”

“If someone had fallen a year ago,” I said between heavy coughs, “that cornice would have rebuilt itself.”

“Not necessarily,” said the Deacon. “Go ahead, Reggie. Be careful.”

She wiggled her way further out onto the tiny spur of rock—I certainly wouldn’t have trusted my weight to that wee bit of stone overhanging such a fall—and then she pulled her binoculars from where she’d hung them against her back. Looking straight down, she slowly swept the glasses back and forth twice and then froze.

“There they are,” she said.

“Who?” I cried. My first thought was that the Germans were sneaking up on us from the vertical south side of the ridgeline.

“Meyer and Cousin Percival,” said Reggie, her voice flat.

“Certainly you can’t see all the way down to the glacier with those field glasses,” said Jean-Claude.

Reggie sighed, shook her head, and shouted over the rising wind. “They didn’t fall that far and they’re still roped together. The rope caught on a crag projecting out about a hundred feet below this ridge. Meyer’s body is hanging head down on the left side of the crag. Percy’s body is hanging free, turning in the wind, head up, on the west side of the crag.”

“How could Mallory clothesline rope stay intact in such a fall, against sharp rock, for a full year, at this altitude?” whispered Jean-Claude.

Reggie couldn’t have heard him over the wind, but the Deacon did. “Who knows?” he said. Then, loud enough for all of us to hear—“What we have to do now is to figure out a way to get both of them up here before that old rope finally snaps.”

I thought of the Germans with guns in hot pursuit…or perhaps “cold pursuit” would be a better term. Had they reached the First Step yet? The Blind Step rock on the traverse? No matter, they were behind us, and the Deacon had said that Bruno Sigl would never give up. And the Nazi had both a Luger and the Deacon’s sniper rifle. And other armed fascists had been climbing with him.

I decided not to mention the Germans right then. Or to think about them.

“Uncoil the ropes,” said the Deacon. “Reggie, stay where you are. We’ll come to you. Somebody has to be lowered down to get ropes around each of the dead men.”

“I’ll do it,” J.C. said at once. “I’m the lightest.”

The Deacon nodded.

I thought, Thank God it won’t be me, and then was immediately ashamed.

The Deacon and Pasang standing, J.C. and I crawling on all fours, we all moved toward Reggie and the north lip of the North East Ridge.

18.

Working out the rope, knots, harness, carabiner, and belay logistics for attempting to recover the two dangling bodies was a tad complicated—at least for weary, oxygen-starved minds laboring to be minimally coherent above 28,000 feet.

First we anchored four ropes to the bollard of Mushroom Rock, whose stone “stem” looked solid enough to tie off several grand pianos with no strain. One of the ropes went to Reggie, who—at Pasang’s and the Deacon’s insistence—had to carabiner-clip her waist harness onto an anchored rope. But watching her lying on the spur of rock, her head and shoulders far out over the breathtaking drop, was still unnerving.

With the belay rope tied off on the bollard and two ice axes near the lip of the cornice keeping the ropes from cutting through the snow and ice at the edge—Pasang was holding two more ropes with the proper lariat loop and knots already tied in—the Deacon and I slowly belayed Jean-Claude over the edge of the long drop. Reggie was our eyes.

“All right…slowly…good…good…slowly…good…he’s about fifteen feet above the spur and the bodies now… good…slow…stop…no a little more…there!”

I was glad I couldn’t see my French friend dangling there next to that rotten-tooth rock spur almost ten stories below with the ancient frayed three-eighths-inch rope caught over it, the rotting cotton line holding two dead bodies slowly twisting in the incessant winds.

“He’s gesturing that he wants to tie Percival on first,” said Reggie. “He needs about six feet of slack and the second rope.”

Pasang blithely walked right up to the edge of the rock spur next to Reggie and dropped the rope needed for tying onto the body. Then he calmly walked back and handed it to me. The plan was for the Deacon to continue belaying J.C., for me to pull up Bromley’s body once J.C. cut him loose from the old rope, and for Pasang to pull up Meyer’s corpse once it was secured. If it was ever secured.

But first Jean-Claude had to get the two extra ropes over the corpses’ heads and shoulders and knotted and firmly secured under their arms.

“Jean-Claude has his feet on the crag and is leaning out almost horizontally to pull in Percy’s body,” reported Reggie.

Even just hearing that description made me a little queasy. We’d learned to trust the Deacon’s Miracle Rope on this expedition—mostly in the heavy loads it had hauled up without snapping while we were using J.C.’s bicycle-pulley device—but no one’s life had depended upon the rope in the way J.C.’s did now. All four of us mountaineers—including Reggie (but not Pasang, whose mountain skills seemed to come naturally)—had come of age in an era when ropes, like Mallory’s and Irvine’s, broke more often than not when any serious load or drop pressure was applied.

“Keep lowering…,” said Reggie, talking to me now because I was to the Deacon’s right and letting out the first 100-foot-long rope that Pasang had handed me, one with a pre-made lasso at its end. “All right, he’s got it… another four or five feet of slack, please, Jake…all right he’s trying to get the loop over Percy and under his arms…Percy’s arms won’t move.”

“Rigor mortis?” I whispered to Pasang, who was standing nearby with the second long strand of rope.

“No, that was over a year ago,” Pasang said softly so that Reggie wouldn’t hear the words above the wind. “Lord Percival has just been frozen solid for a long time.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling very sorry I’d asked.

“He’s got the loop over but is having trouble getting the slipknot pulled tight,” said Reggie.