The Abominable: A Novel

deciding on outerwear (actually, when he had been deciding), “but I know Finch was warmer than all the rest of us in ’twenty-two, plus the eiderdown is lighter than more layers of wool, and the Shackleton overjackets should keep the down loft dry, so it’s worth the wager.”

I never liked the word “wager” used when it applied to our lives on the highest mountain on earth.

The day after our visit to Messrs. Burberry, Jean-Claude and I joined the Deacon on a boot-purchasing trip to Fagg Bros. on Jermyn Street. There all three of us were fitted for a recently designed—for polar exploration, of course—leather-soled felt boot that was intentionally made oversized to accommodate at least three pairs of thick wool socks. Few of the 1924 climbers had chosen to wear the felt boots once they were above the lower glacier, which meant that no one knew for sure how the boots performed for rock and ice climbing at real altitude.

“Why can’t I use my own climbing boots?” asked Jean-Claude. “They have served me well for years. They only need re-soling from time to time.”

“All of us in the first two expeditions, even Finch, and all of the high-climbers on last year’s expedition, wore our own hobnailed boots,” said the Deacon. “And we all suffered from cold feet, several had frostbite, and some lost toes. Sandy Irvine told John Noel last year that the reason is that these specialized alpine climbing boots not only have the hobnails—in whatever pattern you choose, and Mallory and everyone chose different ones—but also have little metal plates driven between the inner and outer soles to give extra grip. And some of the ‘nails’ on the hobnails are serrated.”

“So?” I said, impatient at last with our team leader. “Did these expensive hobnailed boots give better grip? If so, the metal plates are a good idea, right? They can’t weigh that much.”

The Deacon shook his head in that way that always meant No, you don’t understand.

“Irvine did suggest we use fewer hobnails, for lightness’s sake,” he said. “In the army, we were told that every pound of weight on our feet was equal to ten on our back. Our leather boots during the War were substantial, but designed to be light—for maximum marching. But it’s not the weight that Sandy Irvine was warning Noel about, it was the transmission of cold.”

“Transmission of cold?” repeated Jean-Claude as if not sure of the English phrase.

“Leather soles and thick socks insulate against the terrible cold of the rock and ice high on the mountain to some extent,” said the Deacon. “But Irvine had a theory that the hobnailed boots everyone was wearing were conducting heat from the body through the feet via those metal plates and the hobnails themselves. Heat always flows to cold, of course, and that, according to Irvine’s theory, is why there were so many cases of near-frostbitten toes and some of the real thing. On our expedition, Henry Morshead had to have a toe and several fingertips amputated when we got back to India. He applied to the nineteen twenty-four expedition, but was turned down because of those injuries. So I agree with Sandy Irvine that the hobnailed boots lose body heat to the rock or ice.”

“Then why are we here?” I said. “I might as well wear my trusty old climbing boots if these more expensive hobnailed things are just going to get my feet colder sooner.” That sentence sounded childishly petulant even to my own ears.

The Deacon unfolded several papers from his jacket pocket. On each sheet were carefully diagramed pencil or ink drawings, with columns of handwritten text to either side. The spelling was terrible, but the instructions were clear—Sandy Irvine had made his own revision of the standard alpine climbing boot design, showing where layers of felt should be added between the welt and the nailed sole. Irvine’s summary (the Deacon confirmed that these were his actual notes, given to Captain Noel during the last days before Irvine disappeared with Mallory) concluded in precise handwriting but in terrible spelling, Boots shulde be spareingly naild for liteness —everry ouns counts!

“This spelling,” I said to the Deacon, holding up the folded note as if it were evidence. Everyone knew after the months of newspaper accounts and funeral oratory that Andrew “Sandy” Comyn Irvine had gone to Merton College, Oxford. “The result of high-altitude oxygen deprivation?”

The Deacon shook his head. “Noel said that Irvine was one of the cleverest young men he’d ever met…a near-genius at engineering and in-the-field tinkering…but there was some problem that never allowed the boy to learn to spell correctly. It didn’t seem to hold him back in any way. He rowed crew for the OUBC—Oxford University Boat Club—and was a member of the rather infamous Myrmidon dining club at Merton.”

“Infamous?” said Jean-Claude. He’d been carefully examining Irvine’s diagrams for the special boots and looked up in surprise. “Irvine was part of something…infamous?”

“A dining club of rich boys, most of them excellent athletes, who specialized in breaking university rules and windows,” said the Deacon. He took back the folded sheets of paper and handed them to the attentive Fagg Brother who had been discussing boots with us. “Now our decision is whether to go with Irvine’s design for the newer, possibly warmer alpine climbing boots, or stick to the new felt ones, or get the super-rigid types of boots that Jean-Claude has asked us to use with his newly designed crampons, or just bring our own.”

“Can we not do all four things?” asked Jean-Claude. “Soon I will show you why the very rigid boots I requested may be necessary on Everest. So the four types of boots—high felt for cold, extra-rigid for my new crampon design, Irvine’s felt and hobnail boots, and our own old boots, perhaps resoled, for backup. If Lady Bromley’s money allows?”

“It allows,” said the Deacon. He pointed to the diagrams and said to Mr. Fagg, “Two pairs of these specialized boots with the extra felt layer and metal-plates-not-touching-metal-nails for each of us. Two pairs of the extra-rigid boots—Jean-Claude has a page with the specifications. And two pairs each of the Laplander Antarctic felt boots. We have time to be measured now.”

But it was not Finch’s balloon coat or the Irvine-designed new boots that were the largest change made in outfitting our tiny new expedition in 1925.

As soon as J.C. had rejoined us after his last trip to France, he asked urgently for two days of our time before the end of January. The Deacon replied that it was impossible; he simply didn’t have two days to waste between January and late February, when we were destined to sail for India.

“It’s important, Ree-shard,” said Jean-Claude. At this point J.C. used the Deacon’s first name only on rare occasions, and I was always amused when he used the French pronunciation. “Tres important.”

“Important enough that the success or failure of the entire expedition may depend upon it?” The Deacon’s tone was not friendly.

“Oui. Yes.” J.C. looked at both of us. “I think that, yes, these two days may be so important that the success or failure of our entire expedition may depend upon it.”

The Deacon sighed and pulled out a tiny notebook-diary with calendar that he kept in his jacket pocket. “The last weekend in the month,” he said at last. “The twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of January. I have several important things…I’ll move them. That’s a full-moon weekend…will that make any difference?”

“It might,” said Jean-Claude. He flashed his sudden, wide, boy-like grin. “The full moon may well make some difference. Yes. Merci, mon ami.”

We left at sunrise—or what passed for sunrise on that freezing, gray, foggy, snow-spitting late January day—on Saturday the twenty-fourth. None of us owned an automobile, so the Deacon had arranged to borrow one from a friend of his named Dick Summers. It was a Vauxhall, and in my memory the vehicle was about thirty feet long—it had three rows of seats with plenty of legroom and tires that came up almost to my chest. (The mild irony, explained the Deacon, was that Dick Summers had used this same Vauxhall less than two years before to make the first-ever automotive crossing of the rough gravel road—little more than a trail, said the Deacon—in both directions over the difficult Wrynose and Hardknot passes in the Lake District. When I commented that I didn’t see much irony in this, the Deacon lit his pipe and said, “True. I forgot to add that while Summers did the driving on that adventure, Sandy Irvine rode in the third-row seat with two attractive young ladies.”)

We learned within moments of leaving Summers’s storage garage that the huge Vauxhall was better suited to summer expeditions over high passes than it was to winter driving. It was a convertible—what the Brits called “a ragtop” or “topless”—and although it had taken the three of us only thirty minutes of swearing and smashed fingers to get the impossibly complex roof apparatus properly raised and locked, and then another half hour to get the soft side and rear windows buttoned and snapped in properly, as soon as we were on a London street heading northwest out of the city, we realized that the damned machine had more gaps in its superstructure than a cheap colander. Within ten minutes of getting the huge auto onto the streets, snow was blowing in our faces and piling