The Abominable: A Novel

T he maps are spread out all over the long reading table in the library at Reggie’s main plantation house. I’ve seen few libraries this extensive, either in the homes of rich Boston friends or in England. Even Lady Bromley’s library did not extend to so many multiple levels, mezzanines, iron circular staircases rising toward broad skylights, or movable ladders. The reading table is probably fourteen feet long and flanked by globes of the earth—one showing ancient geography, one showing quite current—that must be six feet across. We stand around one end of the table as more colored maps are set under and beside the map of our proposed route Reggie showed us in the hotel.

We traveled up to the plantation that morning in style. At least Reggie and two of us traveled in style. Three trucks, the lead one driven by Dr. Pasang, hauled our food and gear up into the hills, but J.C. and I rode with Reggie in the plush compartment of a 1920 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. The chauffeur’s front seat was open to the elements—and it had started to rain—but Jean-Claude was comfortable on the thick cushions of the rear seat next to Reggie under the black top, not crowding her, while I sat opposite J.C. on a little jump seat that was no more than a leather-wrapped panel that folded down from the firewall separating us from the driver’s front seat. Every time we hit a deep pothole or serious bump—and the dirt road was all potholes and bumps—I’d fly up in the air off my little springboard, my bare head contacting the hard canvas of the roof, and come crashing down again. My long legs were all but intertwined with J.C.’s shorter ones, and I kept apologizing after every bounce.

The Deacon had chosen to sit up front, to the left of the chauffeur—a silent, short Indian man named Edward, so short that I wondered how he could see over the Silver Ghost’s endless hood. It was called the“Silver Ghost” but it was more a pale cream color than silver, except for the gleaming radiator, headlight mounts, five chrome stripes running down from the radiator to the equally gleaming bumper, windshield frame, and a few other shiny odds and ends, including the gleaming chrome spokes of the enclosed spare tires riding forward of the front doors on the low parts of the fenders.

The sliding panel that allowed Reggie to talk to the chauffeur opened only on the right side, the driver’s side. Between the roar of the engine and the roar of the sudden downpour on the thick roof, any of us would have had to shout for the Deacon to hear us. The glass on the panel behind the Deacon was frosted and etched with the same Bromley crest of a gryphon holding a jousting pike that I’d seen on the flag flying at Lady Bromley’s estate in Lincolnshire.

“How large is your plantation, Lady…Reggie?” asked Jean-Claude over the drumbeat of the sudden squall.

“This primary plantation, closer to Darjeeling, is around twenty-six thousand acres,” said Reggie. “We have a larger and higher plantation to the northwest, but the small train from Darjeeling doesn’t run to its fields the way it does here at the main plantation, so it costs more to get the tea leaves to market.”

More than fifty thousand acres, I’d thought. That’s a hell of a lot of tea. Then I remembered how Brits both in England and here in India drank the stuff morning, noon, and night, not to mention the hundreds of millions of Indian people who’d taken up the habit.

The steep hills were terraced here and there and green with rows of plants grown about as far apart as in a good vineyard, but much shorter. I caught glimpses of men and women in wet cotton saris and shirts working along the endless green rows that followed the curves of the hills like curving parallel lines on a topographic map. The shades of green were almost overwhelming.

After about twenty minutes, we turned off the steep dirt-rut road onto a long, rising lane of white gravel. I’m not sure what I expected at the end of that long driveway—perhaps another stone estate like Lady Bromley’s in Lincolnshire—but while Reggie’s home was appropriately large and surrounded by stables and other well- constructed outbuildings, it was more in keeping with the colors and style of a large Victorian-era farmhouse. The trucks followed us to the broad driveway but turned off toward the stables and garage before the Silver Ghost reached a wide gravel circle in front of the house, its center and fringes green with wet tropical plantings of all sorts. We stopped, and Edward rushed to open the door on Reggie’s side.

To this day, that remains my only ride in anyone’s Rolls-Royce.

The tropical darkness has fallen, we’ve eaten an excellent meal of veal along a dining room table even longer than the fourteen-foot reading table where we’d left the maps, and by the time all four of us—five if one counts the tall, silent form of Dr. Pasang—retire to that same library with brandy for everyone and cigars for J.C. and me, the Deacon is puffing away on his pipe and obviously still silently attempting to come up with some argument or reasons why Reggie cannot accompany us when we leave in 36 hours or so. Rather than gather around the map table again, we’re sitting at the hearth of a giant fireplace where the servants have lit a fire. It’s chilly above 8,000 feet here at the plantation.

“It’s simply out of the question, taking a woman on to Everest,” the Deacon is saying.

Reggie looks up from rocking the brandy in her snifter. “There is no question involved, Mr. Deacon. I am going. You need my money and you need my Sherpas and my ponies and my saddles and Pasang’s medical skills and my permission from the Tibetan prime minister—and you would need me to gain access to Tibet this year even if there weren’t the crisis of the lice and the dancing lamas.”

The Deacon shows a sour expression. At least she’s no longer calling him “Dickie,” I think.

“Crisis of the lice and dancing lamas?” inquires Jean-Claude between sips and puffs.

I’ve almost forgotten that J.C. hadn’t spent the autumn and winter in London as the Deacon and I had. I look to the Deacon to explain, but he shrugs and gestures for me to speak.

“You remember,” I say to Jean-Claude, “that the Deacon’s friend we met at the Royal Geographical Society, the photographer and filmmaker John Noel, paid the Everest Committee eight thousand pounds for all cinema and still photo rights to last year’s expedition.”

“I remember because I thought it was an extraordinary amount of money,” says J.C.

I nod. “Well, Noel was sure he could make a profit if the expedition were successful last year, but he couldn’t really make a dramatic film showing Mallory’s and Irvine’s disappearance since there was only one photograph taken of them before they left Camp Four, and clouds got in the way of Noel’s long twenty-inch telephoto cinema lens, so Noel made one of the cinema releases more of a travelogue—The Roof of the World, he called it. The Deacon and I saw it in January before you returned from France.”

“So?”

“So there were things in the film—including a scene where an old man is finding fleas in a beggar child’s hair and then crushing them between his teeth—that the Tibetan government evidently objected to. Others objected to a bit where Mallory’s widow is quoted in titles as saying that she regretted the whole enterprise. But mostly the Tibetans have been objecting to the dancing lamas.”

“Dancing lamas?” repeats Jean-Claude. “Noel filmed them at Rongbuk Monastery?”

“Worse than that,” says Reggie. “John Noel paid a group of lamas to leave the Gyantse Monastery and to perform—live in cinemas in London and other British cities—what Noel in the film calls a ‘devil dance.’ The monks have turned into quite the performing troupe, some dancing while others play drums and blow on thigh-bone trumpets. It’s been very popular with English cinema-going audiences. Quite different from the usual fare. At the same time, the lamas were introduced as ‘holy men’ to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The uproar between Tibet and His Majesty’s Government has been ample enough for the Everest Committee to be turned down, by Tibet, for its proposed 1926 Everest expedition. It may be a decade or more before the British Alpine Club and Everest Committee receive another climbing permission.”

“Ahh,” says J.C. “I can see why the Tibetans feel humiliated. But how did the Tibetans learn what was happening in English cinema houses?”

Reggie smiles as the Deacon irritably repacks his pipe. “It isn’t really the Tibetans who are causing this moratorium on British expeditions to Everest,” she says. “It is Major Frederick Marshman Bailey.”

“Who the devil is Major Frederick Marshman Bailey?” I ask. This is the first I’ve heard of either the man’s name or the fact that it was he, not the Tibetans, who were throwing a spanner into the Everest Committee’s efforts to get a future climbing permission.

“He’s Political Officer for Sikkim,” says the Deacon from around his pipe stem. He sounds very angry. “Remember our maps? The easternmost province of the Raj in India, the one we have to trek through to get to Tibet? It’s a quasi-independent kingdom called Sikkim. Bailey got the Dalai Lama at Lhasa to back him on all this