The Abominable: A Novel

were doing on the mountain at all. Why were they there? Why were you and your six German friends there? Your report in the journals said that you and several other German…explorers…had come south to Tibet through China. That your permit was Chinese, not Tibetan, but for some reason the Tibetan dzongpens accepted it as they would an official pass. You told the Frankfurter Zeitung that you’d diverted your route when you heard in Tingri that a German and an Englishman had rented yaks and purchased climbing equipment in the Tibetan town of Tingri Dzong, and that you and your friends had gone south to investigate…out of sheer curiosity. Nothing more.”

“Everything I told the newspapers is correct,” Sigl says in a dismissive tone. “You and your American comrade came all the way to Munich to hear me confirm what I have already explained?”

“Much of it makes little or no sense,” says the Deacon. “Lady Bromley—young Percival’s mother—will be very appreciative if you can help us discover the missing facts. That’s all she wants.”

“And you have come all this way to help the old lady learn a few more…how do you say it in England?…tit- bits about her son’s death,” says Sigl with an expression very close to a sneer. I marvel that the Deacon keeps from losing his temper.

“Was this Kurt Meyer from your…ah…exploration group?” asks the Deacon.

“Nein! We had never heard of him before the Tibetans in Tingri Dzong told us his name…and that he had ridden southeast toward Rongbuk with Lord Percival Bromley of England.”

“So Meyer was not a climber?”

Sigl drinks a long gulp of beer, belches, and shrugs. “None of us had ever heard of Kurt Meyer. We heard his name only from the Tibetans in Tingri who had spoken to him. Between those of us at this table, we know almost all of Germany’s and Austria’s real climbers. Ja, meine Freunde?” He is addressing the question to his fellow Germans. They nod, and several of them say “Ja” even though Sigl just told us they didn’t understand English.

The Deacon sighs. “Rather than my directing questions to you that make you feel like you’re in a courtroom, Herr Sigl, why don’t you just tell us the full story of why you were there at the approaches to Everest, and what you saw of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer? Perhaps you even know why the two men’s ponies had been shot.”

“We saw the ponies lying there dead when we arrived,” says Sigl. “The Camp One area, as you know, Herr Deacon, is very rough moraine. Perhaps the ponies had both broken their legs. Or perhaps Herr Bromley or Herr Meyer had gone mad and shot the ponies. Who knows?” The German climber shrugs again.

“As for our reason for ‘following’ Bromley and Meyer to Rongbuk Glacier,” continues Sigl, “I shall reveal to you what I have told no one—not even our local newspapers. My six friends and I were merely interested in meeting George Mallory, Colonel Norton, and the other climbers we had heard were attempting Everest that spring. Obviously, since we were in China during most of our trip, we heard no news of Mallory’s and Irvine’s deaths, or even that the expedition had reached the mountain. But when the Tibetans in Tingri told us that Bromley was headed for the mountain they call Chomolungma, we decided—as you British and Americans say—‘Why not?’ And so we went southeast rather than back north.”

(Und zo ve vent soudeast razzer zan back nord. Sigl’s accent is beginning to grate on me for some reason.)

“But certainly,” said the Deacon, his tone polite but insistent, “when you saw that Norton’s and Mallory’s Base Camp had been abandoned, except for scraps of tents and dumps of uneaten canned food, you must have known that the expedition had already departed. Why then continue up the glacier all the way to the North Col and above?”

“Because we saw two figures descending the North Ridge, and it was obvious they were in trouble,” snaps Sigl.

“You could see that from Base Camp, twelve miles away from Mount Everest?” asks the Deacon, more in a tone of wonder than one of challenge.

“Nein, nein! We had gone up to Camp Two after finding the dead ponies, thinking that Bromley and this Meyer person whom we’d never heard of might be in some difficulty. We saw them on the ridgelines from Mallory’s Camp Two. We used fine German field glasses—Zeiss—the best in the world.”

The Deacon nods his acknowledgment of this fact. “So you set up your own tents at the site of Mallory’s old Camp Three just below the thousand-foot ascent to the North Col, then climbed onto the Col itself. Did you use the rope ladder that Colonel Norton’s group had left behind for the last hundred-some vertical feet?”

Sigl waves away that suggestion with a flicking motion of his fingers. “We used no old ladder or fixed ropes. We used our own ice-climbing axes and other German techniques to ascend the ice wall.”

“Kami Chiring reported seeing several of your men coming down from the Col using Sandy Irvine’s rope ladder,” says the Deacon.

“Who is this Kami Chiring?” demands Sigl.

“The Sherpa you met and aimed a revolver at near Camp Three that day. The one you told the story of Bromley’s death to.”

Bruno Sigl shrugs and sneers. “Sherpa. There you have it. Sherpas lie constantly. As do Tibetans. My six friends and I went nowhere near that worn-out rope ladder. We had no need to, you see.”

“So you were on a purely exploratory trip through China, but you brought your mountain- and ice-climbing gear with you,” says the Deacon, getting out his pipe and beginning to fill it. The huge room cannot get much smokier than it is already.

“There are mountains and steep passes in China, Herr Deacon.” Sigl’s tone has gone from surly to contemptuous.

“I did not mean to interrupt your narrative, Herr Sigl.”

Again Sigl shrugs. “There is very little…narrative, as you call it…left, Herr Deacon. My friends and I climbed to the North Col because we could see that the two figures descending the North Ridge were in trouble. One appeared to be snow-blind and was being led, almost held up, by the other.”

“So you set up camp on the North Col?” says the Deacon, lighting and breathing his pipe alive.

“We did not!” cried Sigl. “We had no camp on the North Col.”

“Kami Chiring saw at least two tents on the same ledge on the Col that Norton and Mallory had used for their Camp Four,” says the Deacon. Again, his voice is more curious than challenging. A man simply trying to ascertain a few facts to help a grieving mother get over the confusing disappearance of her son.

“The tents were Bromley’s,” says Sigl. “One was already in tatters from the high winds. The same winds that forced the retreating Bromley and Meyer off the ridgeline onto the unstable snow of the face just above Camp Five. I shouted at them in both English and German not to go onto the face—that the snow there was not stable— but either they did not hear me through the wind or they ignored me.”

The Deacon’s heavy eyebrows rise slightly. “You were close enough to speak to them?”

“To shout to them,” Sigl says in tones one would use with a slow child. “We were still thirty meters or more apart. Then the snow under them simply shifted and fell thousands of feet down the face in one roaring mass. They disappeared completely in the avalanche and I heard no more from them.”

“You didn’t attempt to go lower to see if they might have survived?” There is no accusation in his voice, but Bruno Sigl still bridles and glowers as if he’s been insulted.

“It was impossible to go lower on that face. There was no face left. All the snow on it had disappeared with the avalanche, and it was obvious that young Bromley and Kurt Meyer were dead—buried under tons of snow thousands of feet below—gone. Hinuber.”

The Deacon nods as if he fully understands. I remember that he had seen—and warned George Mallory against trying to ascend—the long snow slope leading to the North Col, a slope that had killed seven of Mallory’s porters in the avalanche on Everest in 1922.

“You wrote in your newspaper reports and in fact have just repeated that the wind on the ridge leading up to Camp Six was so terrible that both Lord Percival and Herr Meyer had to retreat to the rock bands and ice fields of the North Face for their descent to Camp Five,” says the Deacon.

“Ja, that is accurate.”

“Presumably, Herr Sigl, you were also forced off the ridge and onto the face during your ascent in searching for the two men. That means you met them, saw them, and shouted to them, and they to you, while on the face rather than the ridge. Which would explain the avalanche that would not have happened on the ridge itself.”