The Abominable: A Novel

C alcutta is a terrifying city, with Kipling’s “sheeted dead” underfoot on an evening walk—not dead bodies, it turns out, but people wrapped in their sheets and sleeping on what passes for sidewalks—and everything smelling of incense, spices, human piss, cattle, the not unpleasant sweat-and-breath scent of multitudes, and fragrant smoke from burning cow dung. All the dark-skinned men’s stares are curious, dismissive, or outright angry, while the women’s stares—even the Mohammedan women’s eyes peering out from beneath and above the black cloth covering them from head to foot—are alluring, inviting, and, for me, filled with sexual promise.

It is only the twenty-second of March, 1925, far from the terrible summer pre-monsoon heat and the downpours of the later-summer monsoon rains, but the air of Calcutta already feels like a wad of wet blankets wrapped around me head to toe.

At least these have been my impressions so far during our two and a half days here.

Everything is strange to me. Even though I’d crossed the Atlantic in a liner from Boston to Europe last year, the five weeks of travel on the HMS Caledonia from Liverpool to Calcutta seemed a thousand times more exotic. The first days were rough going—the tugs barely got us out of Liverpool harbor against the wind and waves—and I was surprised to find out that I was the only one of the three of us who did not succumb to seasickness at some point on the voyage. The pitching and rolling seemed like a fine game, a simple challenge in getting from Point A to Point B and then onward and upward to the wooden deck, where I ran my twelve miles daily and nightly in a pitching, rolling oval, and I never had a hint of the nausea that all but ruined the early part of the voyage for Jean-Paul and the Deacon.

Except for the slow boredom of transiting the Suez Canal and the storm in the western Mediterranean that kept me belowdecks for a day, the voyage to Calcutta was a pleasant experience. At Colombo—a small white town seemingly being besieged by ferocious, impenetrable jungle on all sides—I bought some lace and mailed it to my mother and aunt in Boston. Everything was new and exciting. And I knew—but did not then fully appreciate—that everything was prelude.

The 1921, ’22, and ’24 Everest expeditions all came through Calcutta on the way to their official starting point—Darjeeling—but funded and backed as they were by the Mount Everest Committee of the Alpine Club and that club’s parent, the Royal Geographical Society, there were always agents in Calcutta ready to sort out the crates of supplies and materiel, so that when the climbers arrived, everything they needed was either already loaded onto the train for Darjeeling or ready to be loaded.

We, of course, being a secret and illicit expedition, have no agents waiting in Calcutta. The Deacon is in charge of spending Lady Bromley’s money—at least until “Cousin Reggie” takes over here in India—and the Deacon soon tells Jean-Claude and me the Hindi word bandobast, meaning “arrangements.” Evidently bandobast in Calcutta (where most of the people speak Bengali, not Hindi, but the word is still used here, it being, I assume, almost a universal concept in all of multilingual and multiethnic India) means the same as baksheesh in the Middle East—i.e., bribes necessary to get even the simplest thing done.

But since the Deacon was on the two earliest Alpine Club expeditions with Mallory and others and was interested in all aspects of them, including this administrative greasing of the wheels to get things done in Calcutta (and, Jean-Claude and I can only hope, later in both Darjeeling and Tibet), our twelve heavy crates—amongst other things we had to bring from Europe, we’re bringing a lot of the Deacon’s new high-quality rope on this expedition for reasons I’ll explain later—have been moved from the docks to the train station freight depot by early this third afternoon of our stay in Calcutta.

There is a night train from Sealdah Station just beyond Calcutta called the Darjeeling Mail that we’ll be taking in a few hours, but that train—a real train, as it were—only goes as far as Siliguri, a little trading station out in the middle of nowhere which we’re supposed to reach about 6:30 the next morning. There we’ll have to switch to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, by all accounts a narrow-gauge toy of a train that has to chug its way 7,000 feet up the mountain foothills of the southernmost Himalayas to Darjeeling, where the Bengali English government of the Raj spends its summers. The entire train voyage will be about 400 miles, and the Deacon informs us that it will probably be too hot and dusty to get any sleep during the Darjeeling Mail part of it.

No matter. I don’t plan to spend much of the time on the train sleeping at any rate.

We receive a telegram from “Cousin Reggie” on our first morning here:

MEET AT HOTEL MT EVEREST DARJEELING TUES. 24 MARCH. I WILL ASSUME COMMAND OF THE EXPEDITION AT THAT POINT.

L./ R. K. BROMLEY-MONTFORT

“‘Assume command of the expedition,’ my arse,” says the Deacon, crumpling the telegram flimsy in his long-fingered hand and throwing it on the ground.

“What does the ‘L.-slash’ in this thing stand for?” asks Jean-Claude, who is retrieving and flattening out the crumpled telegram.

“‘Lord,’ I presume,” says the Deacon, biting down so hard on the stem of his unlighted pipe that I expect it to snap. “Lord Reginald K.-something Bromley-Montfort.”

“Why does he keep the Bromley in his name?” I ask. The ways of British near-royalty are still a mystery to me.

“How the hell should I know?” snaps the Deacon. He is rarely this short-tempered. Both Jean-Claude and I take a step backward, shocked by his tone. “I just wish this Lord Bromley-Whatsis, his serene buggering Highness, had bloody well buggered himself down to Calcutta from the hills and helped us bandobast these buggering great heavy crates to the bloody freight depot a full buggering day earlier, is what I damn well wish. This is his lousy country, his culture where bloody damn venal bribery is necessary everywhere to get the least bloody thing done, and where no one can keep a simple bloody appointment on time. So where is this ‘commander of the expedition’ when we actually need his fat arse?”

Jean-Claude and I look at each other and I think we are thinking the same thing. When George Mallory came this way a year earlier, he had no administrative responsibilities until they reached Tibet and the team leader, Geoffrey Bruce, fell ill during the five-week trek in to Everest Base Camp. Because of Bruce’s heart problems and trouble adapting to altitude even on the Tibetan passes long before Everest came into sight, the expedition’s doctor ordered the 58-year-old Bruce back to Darjeeling, and Colonel Norton, who had been the climbing leader, assumed overall command of the expedition with Mallory becoming climbing leader.

But even with the responsibility of planning the climbing logistics, Mallory had been free of the heavier administrative responsibilities of overseeing the entire expedition, renting mules and porters, handling all the Tibetan governmental and other requirements, and—most tiring—dealing with the personalities and sudden illnesses and weaknesses of the entire British climbing team and its melange of more than a hundred porters.

Jean-Claude and I stare at each other after the Deacon’s sudden outburst—as I say, in the more than year and a half I’ve known Richard Davis Deacon, I’ve never heard anything like this from him (his usual response to logistical or climbing setbacks is a shrug and an ironic smile, followed by the lighting of his pipe)—and I know we’re both thinking that while Jean-Claude and I had been free to enjoy the ocean voyage here (or, for J.C., “enjoy” it between brief bouts of debilitating seasickness in the choppy parts), the Deacon had been dealing with thousands of unsettled money, administrative, logistical, and climbing details.

During the trip on the HMS Caledonia, although the Deacon did some daily exercising to stay in shape, he never had the time to go jogging miles around the pitching deck as I did each day. Usually he could be found at his tiny first-class stateroom desk, poring over topographic maps of Everest and its vicinity, photographs, and the private and public accounts of the three previous British expeditions—including a score of notebooks that the Deacon himself had filled during the ’21 and ’22 expeditions before he’d fallen out of grace with Mallory.

We are only on the first step of the trip—preparing for the train ride from Calcutta to Sealdah to the little town of Siliguri and then uphill to Darjeeling, where the real trek to Everest always begins—but the Deacon is exhausted.

And it’s even more than that, I also realize. The Deacon has been infuriated by this Lord Bromley-Montfort’s arrogant telegram. This “Cousin Reggie” was supposed to finance our expedition from Darjeeling on to Everest, not “take command of it.” I don’t blame the Deacon for his reaction—I’m seriously worried about what will happen when the two men actually meet sometime in the next forty-eight hours—and I have the sickening sense that our entire Mount Everest expedition may be in imminent danger of collapsing. It certainly wouldn’t be the first major