We rise.
“One last thing,” asks the Deacon, after again thanking his former associates and climbing partners for their time. “We all know something about Bruno Sigl—he’s been a German alpine climber for years, but never an explorer to my knowledge. But what about Kurt Meyer? Why would Bromley have chosen to try to climb Everest, even a little way up, with this Austrian or German?”
Colonel Norton shrugs. “The Alpine Club has been in touch with the German and Austrian alpine and climbing clubs, but they say they have no record whatsoever of a Kurt Meyer as a registered climber. It’s strange.”
“It’s all very strange, if you ask me,” says Dr. Hingston as we all walk through the Map Room on the way to the banquet hall. “Damnably strange.”
And then there are all-around handshakes and farewells to us that are much warmer than the first greetings.
Outside, a north wind is blowing in from Kensington Gardens across the broad avenue. It’s scented with plants and flowers still blooming, but there’s also a stronger, sadder scent of leaves fallen and moldering. The not unpleasant smell of death in autumn. The clouds are low, and I can smell rain coming.
“We’d best find a cab,” says the Deacon.
None of us says a word during the entire ride back to the hotel.
Chapter 5
A fter the October memorial services and Alpine Club reports and our interview with Norton, Somervell, Noel, Odell, and Hingston, but before our November trip to Munich to meet Sigl, Jean-Claude and I want to start packing for Everest. The Deacon overrules us. He says that there are two things we have to do before we start planning the materiel and logistics for such an expedition.
First, says the Deacon, we have to learn about George Mallory—something that will show us something important about the challenge of climbing Everest that’s ahead of us—and for that we have to drive to Wales. (I know nothing about Wales except that I seem to remember that they use no vowels in their spellings there. Or was it
We have a few weeks until the Deacon and I leave for Germany. He’s arranged a meeting with Bruno Sigl in Munich in November. In the meantime, the Deacon has reminded me that Jean-Claude lost not only all three of his older brothers in the Great War but also two uncles and a half dozen other close male relatives.
With that background, I find it surprising that Jean-Claude accepts German clients in his Chamonix Guide work and, the Deacon says, is as careful, protective, and polite to them as to any of his French, Italian, British, American, or other clients. But down deep, J.C. does, the Deacon says, deeply hate
But the Munich trip lies ahead in November.
“First,” says the Deacon after we’ve filled most of the backseat and all of the boot of a borrowed automobile with full rucksacks and climbing gear, including a
“Penny Pass?” I say, even though he hadn’t pronounced it that way. “That sounds like some place in a Tom Mix western.”
Rather than answering, the Deacon ignores me as he starts the engine and drives us out of town and west toward Wales.
It turns out that Pen-y-Pass is an area of tall crags and vertical rocky slabs in the region near Mount Snowdon in north Wales. We pass a hotel situated at the summit of the pass that—according to the Deacon—used to host many climbing parties in the early days of British rock climbing, many of them brought there by the preeminent rock climber of the time, Mallory’s older friend Geoffrey Winthrop Young, whom Mallory met way back in 1909.
I wouldn’t mind a big lunch and a pint at the hotel, but we keep driving. We’ve packed sandwiches and water in our rucksacks, but I secretly hoped for something better.
There have been plenty of climbable, fun-scrambling crags right along the dirt road we’ve been driving on for an hour now, but the Deacon keeps driving past them until, in an absurdly remote area, he finally parks the coupe and says, “Get your rucksacks and all that gear out of the boot, chaps. And tie it on well. It’s going to be a long hike in.” It is. More than two hours of covering rough country to get to his chosen crag. (I can’t remember now whether it was named Lliwedd or Llechog, but it is a
Jean-Claude and I are ready to sit, study the face of the crag—which is daunting—and eat our pathetic lunches, but the Deacon insists we wait and walk just a while longer.
Surprisingly, he leads us around the massive crag to a backside where getting to the summit would be child’s play, just scrambling up tumbled boulders and easy ledges to the top. This is precisely what we do, which irritates me. I hate taking the easy way to a summit, even though that’s often the best way to do reconnaissance on a vertical rock face. Many great rock climbers do it, even rappelling down to check things out before starting their climb—although the Deacon tells us that after George Mallory did just that on this crag, after his rappelling recon, he let his climbing partner at the time, Harold Porter, take the lead.
The Deacon doesn’t allow us to eat even after we’ve hauled our loads to the top of the crag. The narrow summit, it turns out, is all but useless for climbing reconnaissance because of that view-obscuring overhang just 40 or 50 feet below the summit.
“Belay me,” says the Deacon and hands me one of the longer coils of rope we’ve dutifully hauled to the summit. It makes sense that I belay him—I’m by far the heaviest, tallest, and probably the strongest of the three of us, and there’s really nothing good to tie on to for a belay from up here—but it’s still irritating. It will waste energy I’ll need for any scrambling on the face of this crag that the Deacon might be planning for us.
Luckily there’s a ridge of rock along the summit line where I can wedge both feet solidly, adding some non- skid insurance to my one-man belay. I feel Jean-Claude behind me pick up the rope, although if both the Deacon and I get pulled off, the odds are almost zero that the smaller, lighter Jean-Claude could arrest our fall. He would simply join us in the 300-foot tumble.
The Deacon is nonchalantly smoking his pipe as he rappels backward and out of my sight over the edge of the summit. He rappels quickly, bouncing down eight and ten feet at a hop, and the load on the rope is significant. I brace myself in the classic belay pose, the rope over my shoulder as well, and am glad for the crack in the crag-wall summit in which I can dig my booted heels.
Still holding the moving end of the rope, Jean-Claude steps up to the edge of the drop, leans over, looks, and says, “He’s out of sight under the overhang now.”
Then, shockingly, the rope goes slack. He’s still moving—I have to feed some more rope out—but he’s moving horizontally, along some ledge, requiring no full belay. Then the rope stops moving and I hold my position and Jean-Claude leans further over the drop and says, “I can see smoke coming up over the overhang. The Deacon’s sitting on some damned ledge and smoking his pipe.”
“While I’m starving,” I say.
“I want the wine I brought,” says Jean-Claude. “This is no fun at all. What does any of this rock climbing have to do with our climbing Everest—no matter what Mallory and the Deacon may have achieved on these stupid rocks before the War? Mount Everest is not a rock-climbing challenge—it is snow and ice and glacier and crevasse and ice walls and high ridges and steep snowfields. This trip to Wales is a waste of our time.”
As if he’s heard us, there’s a warning tug on the rope, and then I’m on full belay again, leaning back to take the Deacon’s full weight—which is not great, thank heavens, since he has a Sherlock Holmesian thinnesss to him
