The Abominable: A Novel

“That shouldn’t be a problem, Mr. Deacon,” Pasang says in a perfect Oxbridge accent. The soft, deep voice sounds as upper-class British as the Deacon’s. Perhaps more so. “We shan’t take more than five minutes.”

Pasang hands the umbrella to me and steps out into the rain to shout in both Hindi and Bengali to the dozen or so porters waiting silently in the downpour. The men rush to untie the crates and quickly load them onto the backs of the Ford carryalls. Somehow—I’ll never know how, except that J.C. is half-perched on my left knee while I am pressed sideways against the passenger-side door—the three of us squeeze into the cab of the first truck along with Pasang, who is driving. The downpour increases, and since the only working windshield wiper is banging away to clear the tiniest possible arc in front of Pasang, I can’t see a damned thing out the front, side, or back as the truck bounces, bucks, and grinds gears around unseen turns and up a seemingly endless series of steep and invisible switchbacks. Whatever Darjeeling looks like, I’m not going to see it this night.

Not one of the four of us says a single word during the ride up.

I’d expected the Hotel Mount Everest to be an old stone building set amidst other old stone buildings—gray, gray, gray. Instead we stop at a well-lighted and splendid-looking three-story Victorian structure perched high on a hillside. The hotel might fit an American’s mental image of Olde London Towne for all of its gables, rafters, towers, more gables, the elaborate porte-cochere with its brick drive and Elizabethan-style pillars, a shingled turret rising to the right of the main entrance, a garden out front with a white-graveled walkway, small leafy trees (not the great multi-trunked banyans of the lower elevations we’d climbed through on the tiny train) along the front of the hotel and elegant tall pines behind.

As we reach the hotel entrance, it stops raining so suddenly it’s as if someone has switched off a spigot. A full moon emerges from behind quickly scurrying clouds and illuminates the snowy summits of tall peaks to the north and east and west behind the hotel.

“We’re not that close to the Himalayas here, are we?” I ask as the three of us step further back from the hotel and its overhangs to look at what surely must be more clouds, not mountain peaks. Not so near to Darjeeling.

“That is moonlight on snow and ice,” Jean-Claude says. “Peaks and ridges.”

Despite the late hour, four handsomely attired bellboys have hustled out from the lobby and are now carrying in our personal baggage—some suitcases, but mostly rucksacks and duffels. The Deacon insists we go around back with Pasang and the other porters in the Ford trucks to make sure our gear is stored somewhere safe. That turns out to be in the large building that had obviously once served as the Hotel Mount Everest’s extensive stables. Pasang oversees the porters’ careful delivery and re-tarping of our crates into what had been three large stalls with high swinging doors.

“I think one of us should stay out here and keep an eye on our…,” begins the Deacon.

But with our crates counted and inspected, all tarps tied down, Pasang closes the stall doors, locks a heavy padlocked chain on the front of each, and silently hands the keys to the Deacon. “Everything should be quite secure for the night, Mr. Deacon. And I’ve posted a trusted servant from the plantation to sleep here and keep watch, just in case. One never knows.”

We trudge back to the front of the hotel amidst a wild myriad of almost overpowering scents: wet leaves and grass, rich soil, the richness of the flower gardens on both sides of the drive, wet mosses along a stream trickling down under an arched bridge, moist bark that makes up the driveway where the bricks and paving stop, and—perhaps most powerfully—the mountain-breeze-borne scent of hundreds of thousands of ripened and dampened tea plants growing along tens of thousands of green terraces on the steep hillsides now illuminated in moonlight above, around, and below the hill town of Darjeeling. Lights are coming on all over, many of them electric.

The hotel night manager is Indian, formally dressed in a cutaway and a high nineteenth-century collar, and he seems very excited to have us arrive in his establishment. The wide lobby is strangely empty except for the hovering bellboys, Pasang, and the three of us.

“Yes, yes, yes,” says the manager in his thick Indian accent, opening and swiveling the huge register and proffering a fine pen. The mahogany counter glows almost gold with its patina of age and use. “The Bromley Expedition, yes, yes,” continues the smiling manager. “We offer a very warm welcome indeed to the esteemed Bromley-Montford Expedition.”

The Deacon’s glower is almost, not quite, enough to extinguish the manager’s huge smile. “We are not the…Bromley Expedition,” our head climber says softly. “Our group doesn’t have a name. But if it did…it would be the Deacon-Clairoux-Perry Expedition.”

“Yes, of course, yes, yes,” says the manager, looking nervously at Pasang, who doesn’t so much as blink. “Half of our topmost floor, the Mallory Wing we call it now, our finest suites, sir, yes, yes, has been set aside for the Bromley Expedition.”

The Deacon sighs. We’re all tired. He signs the register, hands the pen to J.C., who signs and hands it to me. The liveried bellboys—not the same dark men who’d acted as porters with our crates—leap forward to lift our suitcases, rucksacks, and duffel bags. The three of us and a bellboy crowd into a single cage elevator—ancient, wrought-iron, electrically powered by God-knows-what, an intricate but workable mass of chains and gears. An operator begins to slide the cage doors shut.

“Just a moment,” the Deacon says, walking back to the registration desk. The manager snaps to attention like a Prussian officer being inspected by the former Kaiser.

“Is Lord Bromley-Montfort here already?” demands the Deacon. His voice is thick with an oncoming cold or mere fatigue. “I need to meet with him tonight if he’s still awake.”

The manager’s broad grin freezes in place, becomes a rather terrible rictus, and while his head both bows and shakes at the same time—yes, no, yes, no—his eyes flick to where Pasang has been standing silent in the same place amidst all the commotion with baggage and bellboys.

“The meeting is set for tomorrow morning,” says Pasang.

“Yes, yes, yes,” breathes the relieved manager. “The breakfast room is set aside for…yes…in the morning.”

The Deacon shakes his head, runs his hands through his thinning hair, and walks back to where the rest of us wait in the lift. We may be preparing to climb the tallest mountain in the world, but this night we’re too tired to climb three flights of stairs to our waiting luxury suites.

Chapter 10

Ultramarine is a strange and rare color: beyond sea blue, even beyond the deeper blue artists call marine blue. When my mother included ultramarine in her paintings, which was rarely, she would use her thumb to crush small balls of pure lapis lazuli into powder, wet the powder with drops of water from a glass or with her own saliva, and then, using strong, sure jabs of her palette knife, mix tiny amounts of that overpoweringly strong tone—ultramarine—into the seascape or skyscape on which she was working. In the slightest excess, it’s disturbing, unbalancing. In just the right amount, it’s the most beautiful color in existence.

T he suites in the Hotel Mount Everest are actual suites, which include sitting rooms with overstuffed Victorian furniture. Our corner suite has tall windows looking both southeast to the buildings of Darjeeling staggering down the hillside beneath the hotel, and when we part the drapes, glimpsed through ever-shifting clouds, high mountains with snowy, moonlit peaks rising like ramparts to the north and northeast. “Which one is Everest?” I ask the Deacon in reverent tones.

“That stubby low-looking little peak to the left center…the one you can’t really make out,” he says. “The closer giants like Kabr and Kanchenjunga block a good view of Everest from here.”

There is a bedroom for each of the three of us in this roomy suite, and…most wonderful of all…feather beds.

Jean-Claude and I would be happy to sleep late this next morning—when will be the next time we’ll be sleeping in feather beds?—but the Deacon, fully dressed down to the thumping lug soles of his alpine boots, ruins that plan by banging on both our doors, opening them, waking J.C., then stomping into my bedroom, throwing wide the heavy drapes to let in the high-altitude sunlight, and rousting me out just as the sun is rising.

“Can you believe it?” he snaps as I sit groggily on the edge of my wonderfully comfortable and warm