The Abominable: A Novel

“Ja,” replied Finch, “the tracks of some huge biped our friend Richard here and the late, overly lamented George Mallory found above twenty-two thousand feet on Lhakpa La, the high pass from where Richard had suggested to Mallory—correctly suggested, as it turned out—that they might be able to see a possible approach route to Everest. But on the way up—this is in late September nineteen twenty-one, I believe— they found the tracks of the monster instead of a view. True?” He turned toward the Deacon.

“Twenty September,” said the Deacon, setting down his coffee cup with great precision. “Deep into the monsoon season. The snow was pure powder and hip-deep.”

“But you made it to the summit of this little mountain—more a peak of its own than a pass, ja? —despite the snow,” said Finch. It was not a question.

The Deacon scratched his cheek. I could tell that he wanted to light up his pipe but was refraining from doing so while Finch was still enjoying his dessert. “Mallory and I cleared the icefall all right, but the deep snow slowed us down and made the porters with our tents turn back eight hundred feet below the summit. We all— Mallory, me, Wheeler, and Bullock, with Wollaston, Morshead, and Howard-Bury in reserve—made it to the top and set up camp on the twenty-second.”

“What about the tracks of a monster?” insisted Jean-Claude.

“Yeah, what about the monster?” I asked. It was one of the first times I’d spoken, except to ask for something to be passed to me, during the entire meal.

“Above the icefall, on both the twentieth and twenty-second, where none of our climbers or porters had gone before, there were deep marks both in the loose snow and in the firmer, frozen-over parts of the ascent, where we could climb without fully breaking through the crust,” said the Deacon, his voice very soft. “They appeared to be from a two-legged creature.”

“Why say ‘appeared’?” demanded Finch. A slight smile was forming under his fuzz of a mustache. “Mallory, Wollaston, Howard-Bury, and all the others who made it up to the saddle summit of Lhakpa La swore that they were the giant clawed footprints of some mammal-like, two-legged living thing.”

The Deacon sipped the last of his coffee. The waiter bustled over, and we all accepted more coffee so we could keep the table longer.

“How large were the prints in the snow?” I asked.

“A paw print of a human-like foot fourteen to sixteen inches long?” said Finch, turning it into a question as he turned toward the Deacon.

Our friend only nodded. Finally, setting the coffee cup down again, he said, “By the time Wollaston and the others got up to the saddle of Lhakpa La, our porters—Mallory’s and mine, since we were leading that second attempt—had stomped all over the original tracks we saw. There was no way for any of the British climbers to be sure of what was what or the precise length of any track in the snow.”

“But George Mallory took photographs,” said Finch.

“Yes,” said the Deacon.

“And those photos were almost identical to tracks reported and photographed on a high pass in Sikkim way back in eighteen eighty-nine,” said Finch.

“So they tell me,” said the Deacon.

Finch chuckled and turned toward Jean-Claude and me. I am sure I looked as goggle-eyed as Jean-Claude did.

“The porters knew exactly what the tracks were and who or what had made them,” said Finch in his soft German accent. “They were made by Metohkangmi…a yeti.”

“By whom?” I said, my cup of coffee still frozen in space as if I could neither drink from it nor set it back on its saucer. “By what?” said Jean-Claude almost in unison.

“Yeti,” repeated Finch. “Not one of the many demons who the locals believe live in or on the mountain, but a real, living, breathing, blood-eating man-thing…a creature-monster, eight feet tall or larger. Huge feet. A gorilla-like or manlike monster that can survive at altitudes of twenty-two thousand feet and above near Everest.”

Jean-Claude and I looked at each other.

Finch ate strudel and smiled again. “I saw tracks myself the next year, in nineteen twenty-two, when Geoffrey Bruce and I climbed all the way to the North East Ridge for the first time. They were in an icy snowfield at about twenty-five thousand feet—a snowfield that none of our people had yet climbed to—clearly tracks of a biped like us, but with almost twice the stride of even the tallest man, and in the shallower parts of the snowfield where the tracks were embedded mostly in soft ice, we could see the actual outline of the foot—almost sixteen inches long, with what looked to be claws on the toes.” He looked at the Deacon. “You were there at the Rongbuk Monastery when we talked about the yetis in nineteen twenty-two, yes?”

The Deacon nodded.

Finch looked at Jean-Claude and me again. “Rongbuk Monastery is a very sacred place since it’s near the village of Chobuk, right across from the entrance to the valley that leads eventually to Chomolungma…”

“Chomolungma?” interrupted Jean-Claude.

Finch had turned back toward the Deacon and for some reason continued to look at him as he answered J.C. “The locals’ name for Mount Everest. It means something like ‘Goddess Mother of the World.’”

“Ah, oui,” said Jean-Claude. “I had forgotten. Colonel Norton had mentioned that name when we spoke to the climbers at the Royal Geographical Society.”

“So the monks at the Rongbuk Monastery knew about this…yeti creature?” I asked. I didn’t want to let the subject of the “monster” drop.

Finch nodded and said to the Deacon, “You were there with me right at the end of April in nineteen twenty- two and you heard what the Rongbuk lama and his priests said about yetis on Everest. Was it four of the creatures that the lama said lived there?”

“Five,” said the Deacon. “Bruce kept pressing them on the tracks and the creatures, and the head lama— Dzatrul Rinpoche—told us calmly that he and the monks had seen five yeti. He said that they lived in the upper reaches of the valley, up to the North Col and even above that. The Rinpoche said that the yeti were more feared than the mere mountain demons, which might or might not exist. He said that the yeti were manlike, but taller, larger, with huge chests and powerful long arms. He said that the yeti were covered with long hair and had yellowish eyes. The lama told Bruce and us—you were there, Finch, I know you remember—that sometimes the yeti raided the village of Chobuk, but never the Rongbuk Monastery itself, drinking the blood of yaks, killing men with one swipe of their clawed paw-hands, and—I believe Geoffrey Bruce found this most interesting— carrying off the Chobuk women.”

“What would the monsters want with human women?” asked Jean-Claude in a small, almost childlike voice.

The other three of us had to chuckle, and J.C. blushed a bright crimson.

“The lama went on to say that when the village sent men up the glacier valley with weapons,” said Finch, his voice low so that none of the hovering waiters would hear, “they never found the yeti or the women, alive at least—always just the women’s gnawed skeletons and skulls. The women’s bones, said the lama, had always been sucked free of all their marrow. The eye sockets in the skulls looked, he said, as if they had been licked clean.”

I finally had to set my coffee cup down into its saucer. They both rattled. The sound made me imagine Mount Everest winds blowing through gnawed ribcages and the hollowed-out eye sockets of a skull.

The last of his coffee drunk, glancing to make sure that our silent trio had finished, George Ingle Finch gracefully waved over the waiter, his rock-ravaged fingers writing in air to signal for the bill. When the bill came, he gestured, with equal grace, for it to be presented to the Deacon.

We came out the front door of Restaurant Kronenhalle and turned left onto Ramistrasse and into the full force of the freezing wind blowing in off the lake. A teeth-chattering block and a half later we reached the Quaibrucke bridge but turned left onto an empty avenue named Utoquai and trudged southeast along a frozen lakeside walkway. A low concrete railing to our right was guarded by fangs of icicles. A constant rumbling below reminded us that the ice—the lake was frozen solid near the shore, icy but liquid water starting a hundred yards or so out—was grinding up against the cement breakwater below that railing. The wind was roaring hard enough to