The Abominable: A Novel

“I’ll walk with you to the Eisenbahn station,” said George Ingle Finch.

The train was on time, which, of course, is redundant. It was a Swiss train.

The Deacon and I were going back through France to Cherbourg and then to England to continue our preparations. Jean-Claude was returning to Chamonix briefly—mostly to say good-bye to the girl he was planning to marry, was my hunch—and would be joining us in London just before it was time to go to Liverpool and depart for India. On the train from Zurich, we each would be carrying our two leather Gladstone bags filled with the nine compressed eiderdown coats.

As we were preparing to board, Finch—who had been silent during the cold walk to the station—suddenly said, “There is one other thing I should tell you about the reason you are going to Everest…about Lord Percival Bromley, that is.”

We hesitated. The Deacon had one foot up on the lower step of the train car. There was no one behind us. We stood there holding our light valises and listened as steam from the train wrapped us in shifting folds of warm vapor.

“I did see Bromley one other time after I climbed with him years ago,” continued Finch. “He visited me here in Zurich—came to my home—in the spring of nineteen twenty-three. April. He said that he needed to ask me about one aspect of our ’twenty-two expedition…”

Finch seemed to be hunting for words. We waited in silence. Down the platform, the final passengers were boarding the train.

Letting out a breath in a small cloud that mixed with the steam, Finch went on, “It’s rather absurd, actually. Young Bromley wanted me to tell him everything I knew, everything we’d seen or heard, about…well…the Metohkangmi.”

“The yeti critter?” I said, surprised.

Finch managed a final smile. “Yes, Mr. Perry. Jake, I mean. The yeti critter. I told him about the tracks I’d seen high on the Rongbuk Glacier near the North Col, showed him photographs Mallory had taken the year before of the tracks he’d found on nearby Lhakpa La, and related what the lama at Rongbuk Monastery had said about the five yetis they were sure inhabited the upper reaches of the valley. That was all I had to show or tell young Bromley—hardly worth a trip to Zurich from Paris, where he was staying at the time—but he did not seem disappointed. Merely thanked me for my time and the information, finished his tea, and returned to Paris that same afternoon.” The conductor was waving his hands at us, pointing emphatically at his watch.

The Deacon said quickly, “Did Bromley tell you why he was interested in this yeti story?”

Finch merely shook his head. Then he stepped forward, bowed slightly, clicked his heels together in a formal manner that was almost Prussian, shook each of us by the hand, and said, “Good-bye, gentlemen. I somehow feel that I will never see any of you again, but I wish you all good fortune in your travels, in your adventure on Everest, and in your…search.”

Chapter 8

Seek out Messrs. Burberry, Haymarket

(“ask for Mr. Pink”).

T he Deacon had informed us the previous November that for the 1921 through 1924 expeditions, the Alpine Club and Everest Committee had allocated ?50 per man for his full “kit.” He also told us that most of these upper- class gentlemen had spent additional money of their own for their outfitting, so he had taken it upon himself to allocate ?100 of Lady Bromley’s budget for each of us in our outfitting and would add to that if necessary.

Even with the Deacon’s personal checklist from his ’21 and ’22 expeditions, as well as the updated 1924 gear list given to him to by his friend the filmmaker-climber Captain John B. L. Noel, finding and purchasing our clothing and specialized climbing gear for Mount Everest was almost the precise equivalent of preparing for a trip to the South Pole. But then, of course, the entire British effort to climb Everest to this date—up to and including the final disappearance of Irvine and Mallory the previous year—had used South Polar expeditions as their template: i.e., using porters to set a series of food and materiel caches in stages along the way to the Pole—or, in our case, at different altitudes on the mountain—and then shifting backward and forward through these camps until a smaller, select group, given a window of good weather, could make their dash for the summit, as Robert Falcon Scott had toward the South Pole thirteen years earlier, just him and his handpicked group of four good men planning to sledge their 1,600-mile round trip to the Pole and back. Since Scott and all four of his men had died during that ill-advised and bad-luck-plagued attempt, it was an analogy I tried not to dwell on.

Still, the clothing and materials we were buying now were very similar—with a few wonderful modern improvements—to what Scott and his men had worn to their cold deaths in the Antarctic.

The first item on the sacred List was windproof clothing, and for that, the List said, we should “Seek out Messrs. Burberry, Haymarket (‘ask for Mr. Pink’).” Jean-Claude and I were a little intimidated by what was reputed to be one of the ritziest of all London haberdashers—“outfitters to Ernest Shackleton” and all that. So J.C. and I went together on a day when the Deacon was busy with other expedition preparation business.

“Mr. Pink,” it turned out, was indisposed and not at the Messrs. Burberry establishment on Haymarket that particular day, but a formally dressed and impeccably polite “Mr. White” spent nearly three hours helping us choose clothing and sizes before we left with a receipt for our purchases and a promise that they would be delivered to our hotel that very afternoon. It turned out that the parcels beat us back to the hotel, and we’d only stopped for a single post-Burberry pint on the way.

The majority of what we purchased at Messrs. Burberry was in the Shackleton line of windproof knickerbockers, smocks, and gloves. We purchased fingerless woolen mitts that went inside larger mitts made of Shackleton gabardine. We added thick woolen mufflers to our Burberry-buying list.

We also needed protection for our heads and faces at Everest altitudes—or even at the 17,000-foot and higher altitudes of the many passes on the 350-mile hike through Tibet to the mountain—and, rather amazingly I thought, Messrs. Burberry sold leather flying, or perhaps motorcycle, helmets with rabbit or fox fur linings and earflaps that tied under one’s chin. Also available—and we each bought one— were face masks made of a thin, soft, breathable, leather-lined chamois. This awe-inspiring combination of leather flaps and straps and fur and brass toggles was topped off with massive goggles made of Crooke’s glass which could be sewn into the leather face mask and helmet if we so chose. The thick glass darkened our view and would shield our eyes from the terrible sunlight at high altitudes. Every climber knew the story of Edward Norton, who’d left his goggles off during his and Somervell’s daring 1922 traverse across the North Face and their failed attempt to climb up the snow-filled great gully that runs down the face of the mountain from the summit. The climbing was so technical that Norton removed his goggles for hours to make sure he could see where he was setting his hands and feet. He’d assumed that since he was climbing on bare rock more than on reflective snow or ice, the sunlight wouldn’t hurt his eyes.

They didn’t succeed in climbing the treacherous couloir, but that night upon descending to Camp IV, Norton was hit with blinding pain in both eyes. He’d given himself ophthalmia—snow blindness with an accompanying infection—and the pain and blindness afflicted him for sixty straight hours after that. They had to help the blinded man down to Advanced Base Camp and put him in a tent covered with sleeping bags to hold out the painful light. Norton’s suffering in that tent was said to have been terrible.

The Shackleton jackets—they were waxed-cotton anoraks, really—had helped keep the wool clothing from earlier expeditions from getting soaked through, but they did very little to hold in warmth, despite their theoretical resistance to wind. The Deacon had this wild idea that a climber—at least the three of us climbers—might be able to survive in the open after dark on Everest with the combination of Finch’s goose down jackets and our waterproof Shackleton jackets. Perhaps—not probably, but just perhaps—we would have clothing warm enough to keep us alive all night in an open bivouac above 25,000 feet.

The few layers that Irvine and Mallory had been wearing when they disappeared, said the Deacon, wouldn’t keep them alive for an hour of sitting still after sunset on the North East Ridge. “I can’t guarantee that Mr. Finch’s eiderdown coats will make the difference between life and death up there,” the Deacon had said when we’d been