The Abominable: A Novel

“Yes,” says Sigl. His tone around the English word has a finality to it, as if the interview is now over.

“And yet,” says the Deacon, steepling his long fingers, “you tell me that both you and the doomed men were able to shout and be heard at a distance of over thirty meters—a hundred feet apart—even with such a wind roaring over the ridge.”

“What are you suggesting, Englander?”

“I am suggesting nothing,” says the Deacon. “But I’m remembering that when I was on that ridge at that altitude in nineteen twenty-two and then forced off the ridge with two other climbers and onto the rocks of the North Face by the wind, we couldn’t hear each other’s shouts at five paces, much less at thirty meters.”

“So you are calling me a liar?” Sigl’s tone is very low and very tight. He’s taken his hands and forearms off the table, and his right arm moves as if he is taking something—a small pistol, a knife—from his broad belt.

The Deacon sets his pipe down carefully and lays both of his long-fingered, rock-scarred hands palm down on the table. “Herr Sigl, I am not calling you a liar. I am trying to understand Bromley’s—and his Austrian climbing partner’s—last minutes alive so that I can report in detail to Lady Bromley, who is beside herself with grieving. So much so that she has fantasies that her son is still alive on the mountain. I presume that once you left the ridgeline to continue climbing along the face, the force and roar of the wind died enough that you were able to shout thirty meters to Bromley.”

“Ja,” says Sigl, his face still closed with anger. “That was precisely the situation.”

“What,” asks the Deacon, “did you shout to them, especially to Bromley, and what did they say in return before the avalanche? And which of the two appeared to be snow-blind?”

Sigl hesitates, as if any more participation in this interview will be too much of a surrender for him. But then he speaks. His friend with the strange eyebrows and haunted eyes, Herr Hess, appears to be following all the exchanges in English with absorbed comprehension, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps the thin man is merely straining to understand a word or two, or is waiting impatiently for Sigl to translate. At any rate, he seems quite interested in the exchange.

I’m convinced, though I’m not sure why, that the man to my immediate right—the famous climber Karl Bachner—does understand the English being batted back and forth.

“I called to Bromley, who seemed to be leading the snow-blinded and staggering Meyer, ‘Why are you two so high?’” says Sigl. “And then I shouted up at them, ‘Do you need help?’”

“Were your six German explorer friends with you on the ridge then when you were shouting toward Bromley?” asks the Deacon.

Sigl shakes his cropped and shaven head. “Nein, nein. My friends were more affected by the altitude than was I. They were either resting at Camp Three—as your English expedition had called it—or just come up onto the North Col. I had climbed the North Ridge to Camp Five and above alone. As I explained in my various newspaper and alpine journal reports, I was alone when I encountered Bromley and his snow-blind partner. Certainly you have read my statements before this?”

“Of course.” The Deacon resumes smoking his pipe.

Sigl sighs, seemingly at the perverse slowness of his English interlocutor.

“If you don’t mind my asking, what was your destination, Herr Sigl? Where were you originally headed with those Mongolian horses and mules and gear?”

“To see if I could meet George Mallory and Colonel Norton and perhaps reconnoiter Mount Everest from a distance, Herr Deacon. Just as I explained earlier.”

“And perhaps to climb it?” asks the Deacon.

“Climb it?” repeats Bruno Sigl and laughs harshly. “My friends and I had only basic climbing equipment—nowhere near enough to lay siege to such a mountain. Also, the monsoon was already weeks overdue and might descend upon us at any minute. It was your Bromley who was foolish enough to think that he could climb Everest using the few leftover tins of food, fraying rope ladders, and snow-covered fixed ropes that Mallory’s expedition had left behind. Bromley was a fool. To his last steps onto the unstable snow, he was a total fool. He killed not only himself but a fellow countryman of mine.”

Several of the German climbers to the right of me nod in agreement, as does the Rudolf Hess fellow. The big man with the shaved head next to Sigl, the fellow introduced as someone’s bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, continues to stare straight ahead through all this banter as if he is drugged. Or simply totally uninterested.

“My dear Herr Deacon,” continues Sigl, “by all accounts Mount Everest is not the mountain for a solo ascent.” He looks at me hard. “Or even for two…or three…ambitious alpine-style climbers from different countries. Mount Everest will never be climbed alpine style. Or by solo ascent. No, I only wanted to see the mountain from a distance. Besides, it is a British hill, is it not?”

“Not at all,” says the Deacon. “It belongs to whoever climbs it first, whatever the Royal Geographical Society’s Alpine Club might think about the matter.”

Sigl grunts.

“When you shouted at Bromley and Meyer on the face, that last day,” continues the Deacon. “Could you describe again what you said to them?”

“As I said, it was very brief,” says Sigl. He looks impatient.

The Deacon waits.

“I asked them—shouted to them—‘Why are you so high?’” Sigl says again. “And then I asked if they needed help…they obviously did. Meyer was obviously snow-blind and so exhausted that he could not stand without Bromley’s help. The British lord himself looked confused, lost…dazed.”

Sigl pauses to drink more beer.

“I warned them not to step out onto the snow slope, they did, the avalanche began, and that was the end of all conversation with them…forever,” says Sigl. It’s obvious he is not going to repeat the story again.

“You said that you called to them in German as well as in English,” says the Deacon. “Did Meyer respond in German?”

“Nein,” says Sigl. “The man the Tibetans in Tingri had called Kurt Meyer seemed too exhausted and in pain from his snow blindness to speak. He never said a word. Right up until the avalanche took him away, he never uttered a word.”

“Did you say—shout—anything else to them?”

Sigl shakes his head. “The snow shifted under them, the avalanche carried them off the face of Everest, and I made my way back to the more solid ridge—almost crawling in the howling winds—and retreated down to Camp Four and then the North Col and then away from the mountain.”

“You couldn’t see any hint of their bodies below?” asks the Deacon.

Sigl is angry now. His lips are thin and his voice is a bark. “The drop from that point on the North Face to the Rongbuk Glacier below is more than five of your verdammte English miles! And I was not looking for their corpses eight kilometers below, Herr Deacon, I was using my ice axe to get off my own loose slab of snow—which might join the rest of the avalanche any second—and back to the ice-covered slabs of the North Ridge so that I could descend to the North Col as quickly as possible.”

The Deacon nods his understanding. “What do you think those two were up to, then?” The Deacon’s voice sounds sincerely curious.

Bruno Sigl looks down the table toward Bachner and the other German climbers and I wonder again How many of them are following this conversation in English?

“It’s obvious what the truth was,” says Sigl, a tone of audible contempt in his voice now. “I stated it a few minutes ago. Were you not listening, Herr Deacon? Do you not see it as obvious yourself, Herr Deacon?”

“Tell me again, please.”

“Your Bromley—veteran of a few guided climbs in the Alps—decided that he could use the remnants of ropes and camps left behind by Norton and Mallory’s group to climb Mount Everest on his own, with only the idiot Kurt Meyer as his porter and fellow climber. It was pure Arroganz…Stolz…what is the Greek word…hubris. Pure hubris.”

The Deacon nods slowly and taps his lower lip with the pipe stem as if a serious mystery has been cleared up. He says, “How high do you think they got before turning around?”