The Abominable: A Novel

at a half-moon rising above the jungle. It was a Tuesday, and I was one day from dropping off most nations’ maps, into the high-desert wilderness of Tibet.

I thought of Reggie. Had she brought a nightgown? Or did she sleep in some combination of her clothes and underwear or in pajamas as most of us did? Or in the nude as the Deacon did, even in places where centipedes and snakes had been common?

I shook my head again to rid myself of that image of Lady Bromley-Montfort. At the very least, Reggie was a decade older than I—probably more.

So what? asked my brandy-liberated brain.

I looked at the half-moon rising—bright enough to paint the upper rain forest leaves silver and diminishing stars to invisibility in its slow climb toward the zenith—and imagined various acts of heroics I might perform during the coming trek or climb, something that would endear me to Reggie in some manner greater than, or at least different from, the mere friendship we seemed to enjoy now.

She baked me a birthday cake. She’d known the date of my birthday and carted in all that flour and sugar and canned milk—and found eggs somewhere in this village or the last—and worked with Semchumbi and J.C. over an open kitchen fire to bake it. I had no idea how that was done, but the cake had been delicious, down to its chocolate icing. And there had been a small conflagration of twenty-three small wax candles burning on it.

She baked me a birthday cake. In my calf love, I edited out J.C.’s and Semchumbi’s contribution to the cake and the Deacon’s hearty singing and back-clapping and the rare gift of the brandy. She baked me a birthday cake.

Before I started blubbering, I managed to crawl back into my tent, remove my boots, and struggle into the sleeping bag, trying to keep that single thought—She baked me a birthday cake—as my last before dreaming, but my actual last thought before falling asleep was—Now I’m 23. Will I survive to be 24?

My first morning at Everest Base Camp, I wake with a splitting headache and nausea. This is profoundly disappointing since I’ve only recently felt 100 percent after the bout of dysentery that Dr. Pasang cured more than a month earlier in Sikkim. I always thought, since I was the youngest, that I’d be the healthiest during this expedition, but it’s turning out that I’m the invalid of the group.

For a moment I can’t remember what day it is, so before crawling out of my warm sleeping bag into the terrible cold—our thermometer will show us later in the day that the high temperature will be minus nineteen degrees Fahrenheit—I check my pocket calendar. It is Wednesday, April 29, 1925. We’d fallen behind Norton and Mallory’s trekking time way back in Sikkim but made up for that with shortcuts Reggie showed us in the long trek west across Tibet to the mountain-fortress village of Shekar Dzong before turning south to the Rongbuk. We also spent only one night in villages where the previous expeditions had spent two. It was precisely one year ago that Mallory, Irvine, Norton, Odell, Geoffrey Bruce, Somervell, Bentley Beetham, and a few other high-climbers with hopes of reaching the summit had awakened to their first day in Base Camp at this very spot.

I realize that Jean-Claude is already out of his bag and stirring, and he wishes me a good morning as he lights our small Primus stove. He’s already dressed and has been out far enough from the campsite to bring back clean snow for melting for our first coffees. No Sherpas are showing up at our tent door with hot morning drinks as they had during the trek in, but presumably Semchumbi is using the largest, multiple-grill Primus to prepare our breakfasts in the large, round experimental tent which Reggie brought along and which we’ve been using for our common mess tent when a mere large tarp isn’t enough to shelter us from the increasingly harsh elements.

We are carrying three basic types of tents on this expedition: the heavier A-shaped Whymper tents used for so many years and on previous expeditions, which we plan to pitch only at the lower camps; the lighter but sturdy Meade-pattern A-type tents for the upper camps; and this igloo-shaped experimental tent of Reggie’s. It is a prototype of a specially framed hemispherical tent made by the firm of Camp and Sports, with its outer shell double-skinned in a Jacquard material. “Reggie’s Big Tent,” as we call it, has eight curved wooden struts, each of which can be folded in the middle for easy hauling. The groundsheet is sewn in, and up here in the cold, I’ve watched Reggie and Pasang supervise the setting out of a separate and thicker groundsheet that Reggie says was made especially for her by the Hurricane Smock Company. There are two mica windows in this exceptional domed tent—of course our other tents all have only tied-up openings and no windows—and the Big Tent has rather complicated but almost windproof lace-up doors. The Big Tent also has a ventilating or stovepipe cowl that can be turned in any direction to accommodate the winds. It’s made for four or five people to sleep in—comfortably—and we can easily squeeze in eight or nine during mealtimes.

The first day Reggie and Pasang erected this igloo-tent on our trek, the Deacon sourly announced that the contraption looked like a Christmas plum pudding minus its sprig of holly.

But, as it turns out, the Big Tent will be warmer and more windproof than any of our Whymper or Meade- pattern tents. I will make a note of this during our first days at Base Camp: future expeditions should bring smaller versions of the hemispherical tent, perhaps four hinged and curved struts rather than eight, for the most dangerous camps—IV, V, and VI, even VII if such a higher camp is ever pitched—up on the mountain where tent platforms have to be hacked out of snow and ice or laboriously created by moving stones. Not only would such a round footprint be smaller on the mountain, but the howling winds today will flow over and around the Big Tent, while our A-tents are already flapping with a noise like multiple rifle shots.

“What’s the weather like?” I sleepily ask J.C. as I accept my first cup of hot coffee from him.

“Look,” says my friend.

Taking care not to spill my coffee, I crouch next to the tightly ribbon-tied tent opening and peer out.

It is an absolute whiteout of a blizzard. I can’t see the other tents pitched nearby, not even the central Big Tent.

“Oh, damn,” I whisper. I’d thought it cold in our tent, but the high winds blowing in chill me through two layers of long underwear and the third layer I’d slept in. “Did the Deacon make it back from his reconnoiter toward Camp One last night?”

How ironic and sad would it be if our experienced climbing leader had been caught by the storm and died on his first night out from Base Camp.

J.C. nods and sips his coffee. “He came back about midnight, shortly before the heavy snow and higher winds started up. His face mask was covered with ice, and, according to Tenzing Bothia, Ree- shard was very hungry.”

“So am I,” I say as I finish the coffee. The nausea and headache are still there, but I’m convinced that I’ll feel better if I eat something. “I’ll finish dressing, and what do you say we see if we can make it over to the Big Tent for breakfast?”

It was April 18 during our trek in to Everest when the bandits struck.

We were more than halfway through our five-week trek. We had spent two nights camping near the larger Tibetan town of Tinki Dzong and had just decided not to divert down the Yaru Chu Valley on the chance of getting a glimpse of Everest—the weather was terrible, constant clouds, sleet, snow, and wind. We were on the main trade route trail approaching the 16,900-foot pass of Tinki La, when suddenly horsemen clattered downhill and surrounded our group, herding the Sherpas and trailing mules up to the front with us.

There were about sixty men on horseback, all wearing elaborate leather, wild furs, and long-flapped hats. Their faces and eyes and skin color were more Asian-looking than the villagers we’d seen during our two and a half weeks in Tibet. Most of these bandits wore mustaches or wispy beards, and the leader was a big man, barrel-chested, ham-fisted, with cheeks as hairy as his hat. They all carried rifles, ranging from what looked to be muskets from the last century to ancient Indian Army breechloaders to modern Enfields from the Great War. I knew that Reggie and Pasang had each brought a rifle in a scabbard—for hunting—and I’d accidentally glimpsed the Deacon packing what must have been his Webley service revolver in his rucksack in Liverpool, but none of these three made any move to go for their weapons as the bandits galloped, trampled, and swooped around us, herding us together like sheep.

Many of our Sherpas—especially the non-Tigers—looked frightened. Pasang looked disdainful. The mules made an uproar at this interruption of their daily routine and then quieted. My little white Tibetan pony tried to bolt, but I planted my feet, grabbed its saddle, and half-lifted it off the ground until it calmed down.

The bandits’ larger Mongolian ponies were shaggy, but their manes and tails were elaborately braided, and they were closer in size to a real European horse than to our ridiculous ponies.