The Abominable: A Novel

friends since they’d disappeared on the mountain in late May of 1925, I could understand their naming the boy Charles; it had been the name of Reggie’s cousin, Percy’s older brother so terribly wounded in the Great War and the Deacon’s childhood friend—but Ruth-Anne? It took me some digging in old London records years later to find that Charles Davis Deacon had had a younger sister, Ruth-Anne, who had died a month after her birth in 1899.

So I choose to believe to this day that Reggie and the Deacon married—or at least stayed together—and elected to live separate from the world in Nepal through the rest of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. But would the Deacon really have sat out the second war with Germany? Perhaps he felt he’d served enough.

I had various real jobs, but my climbing—especially with my friend Charlie—included an Alaskan expedition (along with another Harvard alumnus, Brad Washburn) to Mount Crillon in 1933, and another to Alaska’s Mount Foraker in 1934. It was during a third expedition to Alaska in the late 1940s that I spent nine days pinned down with four other men in a tiny snow cave at 17,900 feet. Two of the men died of hypothermia; I was lucky—losing only the last two fingers on my left hand to frostbite.

My first—almost reluctant—return to the Himalayas after my time with Byrd’s people in Antarctica was a reconnaissance of Nanda Devi, a beautiful mountain with a surrounding sanctuary protected by almost impenetrable cliffs, an amazing experience that I shared with my friend Charlie, Bill Tilman, Ad Carter, and other friends in 1936. In 1938 I also took a whack at K2—at 28,251 feet the second-highest peak in the world and, in my opinion, a far more dangerous one than Everest—along with some Harvard Mountain Club alums. (I believe I’ve mentioned that the club hadn’t quite come into existence when I was at school there.) No one summited that year.

I’ve also mentioned my work with the OSS during World War II and shan’t bore you with more details of that, other than to say that I used some classified channels to hunt for any mention of Reggie and Richard Davis Deacon—or even of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer and Bruno Sigl—but nothing new came to light.

In 1953, at the advanced and decrepit age of 51 years, I accompanied my friend Charlie on my last Himalayan adventure—acting as support climber on their second attempt on K2. No one reached the summit that year either—K2 is an even harsher mistress than Everest and holds her secrets dear—but I did have the unique opportunity to watch one man, Peter Schoening, belay four of his fellow climbers (including my friend Dr. Charlie) who’d slipped and fallen on a fatally steep ice slope. To my knowledge, a four-man-belay save at such an altitude has never been done before or since.

Unfortunately, one of the men with us—Art Gilkey—had been injured on the descent, and during our group’s attempt to get Gilkey off the mountain, the other members of what Charlie later called his “Brotherhood of the Rope” had securely tied Gilkey off—wrapped in his sleeping bag—on a steep slope while we crossed a dangerous spot by chopping steps, when either an unheard avalanche or Gilkey himself (for unknown reasons) slipped the secure anchors we’d left him tied to, and he slid to his death.

I’ve mentioned before that such falls in the mountains are not antiseptic—they almost invariably leave behind a trail of blood, torn flesh, ripped clothing, rent limbs, brain matter, and more—and Charlie never really recovered from our down-climbing for hours past the blood and torn remains of his close friend. Years later, Charlie would have severe bouts of depression and hallucinations of the highway ahead of his car filling with blood, almost certainly a result of what doctors are calling, now in the implausible future of 1992, “post-traumatic stress disorder.”

After that second K2 adventure and Art Gilkey’s death, I was done with the Himalayas forever.

But I’ve neglected the most important event during those decades. Some epilogue writer I am.

In 1948 I was in Berlin as part of an OSS Nazi officials debriefing mission and was reading a German newspaper—I’d picked up the language during the war—when I came upon an article that made me put down my beer and stare for several minutes.

Four crack German climbers had been trying a midwinter climb of the Eiger following Heinrich Harrer’s first successful route up the Eigerwand—the ferocious and climber-devouring North Face of the Eiger—when they came across the frozen body of a solo climber at the top of the so-called Spider, above that white web of deadly vertical snowfields and just below the Exit Cracks that lead to the final summit ridge of the 13,022-foot killer mountain.

The climber—who appeared to be far too old to be attempting the Eigerwand, a man in his mid- or late 50s at least—had obviously been stopped in the last pitches of his climb by a terrible storm that had swept across the North Face, trapped the man in his solo bivouac on a six-inch-wide ledge where he couldn’t climb or descend because of the weather, and frozen him to death. The man had no ID, wallet, or other forms of identification on him, and no one in the nearby village or the Kleine Scheidegg Hotel in the valley at the base of the Eiger’s North Face remembered seeing him pass through. The article also said that the German climbers reported there had been a slight smile on the frozen middle-aged climber’s face.

Richard Davis Deacon would have been 59 in the winter of 1948—an insane age to attempt any serious mountain face, much less while climbing solo, much less the Eigerwand. Although the body was never identified (or even seen again, since an avalanche had carried it away before the next summit attempt reached that height again in the late summer of that year), and the German climbers had no camera with them when they found the body, I can clearly imagine the Deacon’s face. I can even imagine his thoughts as the storm stopped his climb so very close to the summit as hypothermia began to set in. He would not have blamed the mountain.

He had always said that his destiny was to die on the North Face of the Eiger.

Whether this solo attempt by the Deacon—if it was the Deacon (no evidence other than my inner certainty says it was)—was something that happened after Reggie died or returned to India, or whether she was waiting for him to return to Nepal from the mountain, I can’t be certain. I can’t imagine her allowing him to attempt the Eigerwand solo, in winter, so soon after the war in Europe, but then neither can I imagine the Deacon being stopped if he’d set his mind to do something. The Germans had reported that the man had graying hair but that his frozen body looked to be in tip-top athletic shape—the body of a serious climber.

Finally, I kept in touch with Dr. Pasang for decades after we parted in 1925 and went to see him twice in India, once in 1931 and again in the summer of 1948. I made the second trip largely to show him the newspaper article about the solo climber who had died on the Eigerwand that winter.

Pasang was one of the richest non-maharajas in all of India, and he used his wealth well. Lady Bromley died in 1935, and the full wealth from the former Bromley Darjeeling tea plantations came to Pasang and his family—he had seven children, all of whom were successful later in life and three of whom, including a daughter, served in India’s parliament. Pasang passed much of his wealth along to the Indian people, endowing hospitals, hospices, clinics, scholarships, and grants for young Indian students with dreams of becoming doctors. The Lady Bromley- Montfort Research Hospital—specializing in treating and finding new ways to treat war wounds such as those from the land mine explosions in the Third World that have crippled so many children—is famous and thriving to this day.

Pasang died in 1973. His name and legacy are still revered not just in Darjeeling but across India.

Our correspondence over the decades was intermittent but rich with memory and emotion, and I’ve left word that our letters are to be sent to you, Dan, along with these notebooks and the Kodak Vest Pocket camera.

Ah, yes, the camera. George Mallory’s camera. I brought two important things back from the 1925 Everest trip—the Deacon’s Webley revolver, which I used in the Greek isles and elsewhere during World War II, and Mallory’s little Vest Pocket Kodak that we found on Sandy Irvine’s body above 27,000 feet on that May day in 1925.

I never developed the film in the camera—indeed, never removed the film from the camera—but years ago, in 1975, I believe, I was talking to a researcher from the Kodak Company who was doing some basic climbing with me in the mountains around Aspen, Colorado, and I asked him if film from such a camera left in the Himalayas (“at a high altitude” was my only other description) might still be developed…might still have images on it.

“Almost certainly,” said the expert. “Especially if it spent a good part of that time in the cold, dry air of the Himalayas.” Then he squinted at me almost slyly and said, “I bet you’re talking about the Kodak Vest Pocket camera that George Mallory had when he disappeared and which has never been found, aren’t you? I know even though you don’t talk about it that you once went to the Himalayas—K2, wasn’t it? You’re wondering if that camera were ever found, whether we could recover prints of Mallory and Irvine on the