The Abominable: A Novel

platform. But mostly it’s the wind up there. Camp Six is bad enough, but closer to the North East Ridge, that wind rolls over and down most of the time. It can carry away a climber, much less his tent.”

“You originally wanted a rapid alpine assault from Camp Five at twenty-five thousand three hundred feet or lower, Ree-shard,” says J.C. “The three of us climbers carrying just a rucksack, bread, water, chocolate, and perhaps a flag to plant on the summit.”

The Deacon smiles wryly.

“And maybe a bivouac sack,” I say. “For when we get caught by the sun setting while we’re descending the Second or First Step on the way down.”

“Aye, there’s the rub,” says the Deacon, audibly scratching his stubbled cheek. “No one’s ever survived a night bivouac at those altitudes. It’s hard enough to survive in a tent with a working Primus at Camps Four, Five, and Six. That’s why I’ve decided that we have to make the assault from Camp Seven, or, failing that, from a high Camp Six, as Mallory and Irvine did. But start earlier. Perhaps even at night as Reg…as Lady Bromley-Montfort has suggested. Those little headlamps work pretty well. But I haven’t worked out how we avoid freezing to death while attempting to climb before dawn—or after sunset, for that matter.”

“As far as surviving,” begins Reggie. “Excuse me a moment…” She leaves the tent and snow blows in. Pasang remains behind, retying the door cords.

The Deacon looks at us but we shrug. Perhaps he’s said something to upset her.

A few minutes later she’s back from her own tent, brushing snow out of her long black hair, her arms full of what we first think are extra Finch goose down duvet balloon jackets.

“You three have laughed at me bringing my treadle sewing machine on the trek,” she says. And before we can speak, she insists, “No, I’ve heard you complaining. Half a mule’s total load, you said. And I heard you sniggering in the evenings along the trek when I was in my Big Tent sewing and you heard the treadle going.”

None of us can deny that.

“Here’s what I was working on,” she says and hands out the bulky but light items.

Three pairs of sewn and hemmed goose down trousers. So that’s why she took our measurements back at the plantation, I think.

“I believe that Mr. Finch solved half of the problem,” she says. “There’s still too much body heat lost through the silk and cotton and wool of the climber’s underwear and trousers. I’ve made enough of these for all of us, Pasang, and eight of the Tiger Sherpas. I can’t promise that it will allow any of us to survive a night bivouac above twenty-eight thousand feet, but it gives us a fighting chance to keep moving before dawn and after sunset.”

“They’ll rip and tear,” says the Deacon. J.C. and I are busy shedding our boots and squirming into our new goose down trousers.

“They’re made of the same balloon cloth that Finch used on the parkas,” says Reggie. “Besides, I have a waxed-cotton outer shell for all the trousers. Not heavy. Tougher than the anoraks you wear over the Finch duvets. Notice that all of your trousers, inner and outer, have buttons for braces and a button fly. That last was extra work, I tell you.”

I blush at this.

“I’m also using the last of the balloon fabric to make buttoned-on goose-down-filled hoods for our Finch duvet jackets,” says Reggie. “And I must say that using that sewing machine treadle at this altitude is hard work.”

The Deacon clamps down on his cold pipe and scowls. “Where on earth did you get balloon fabric?”

“I sacrificed the plantation’s hot-air balloon,” says Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort.

Jean-Claude and I spend twenty minutes or so parading around Base Camp through the blowing snow and minus-fifteen-degree temperatures while wearing our three layers of mittens, Finch coat, Reggie trousers, Shackleton windproof anoraks, Reggie’s just-finished button-on goose down hoods, and our tough duck trouser shells. With our three layers of glove-mittens and our leather and wool aviator caps pulled down under our new hoods, balaclavas and goggles on, it’s a strange feeling to be so warm in such terrible conditions.

Reggie comes out in her full gear. She no longer looks like a woman, I think. In truth, she no longer looks quite human.

“I feel like the Michelin Man,” says Jean-Claude, laughing through the mouth flap in the wool-lined balaclava covering his face. Reggie and I also laugh. I’d seen the Michelin Man on posters and billboards, a pudgy shape made all out of tires advertising the brand, that had been on show in Paris since 1898.

“Add the oxygen gear,” says Reggie, “and we’ll feel like men from Mars.”

“We shall be men from Mars,” says J.C., laughing again.

It strikes me then that we might well feel very removed from the human act of climbing—of interacting with rock, snow, and the world—in the days and weeks to come.

The Deacon emerges from his tent. He has his long ice axe and is wearing his Finch duvet, full mittens, and headgear, but from the waist down he is still all stout English woolen knickers, puttees, and leather boots.

“Since we’re all outside anyway and the day’s promising to clear,” he says, “what do you say to the four of us hauling some Whymper tents up to Camp One and then taking a look at the glacier above there? We won’t need crampons or the short axes.”

“No Tigers?” says Reggie.

The Deacon shakes his head. “Let’s make this first recon a sahib-only outing.”

We go back to fetch our larger rucksacks, some ropes, and long ice axes. The Deacon supervises loading each of us with about forty or fifty pounds of tent parts, stakes, more ropes, loose oxygen tanks, Primus stoves, and some canned food; even Reggie gets her full load. Pasang—wearing only the cotton robes and scarves he had on in the Big Tent—stands outside with his arms crossed and a powerful scowl of disapproval on his face as the four of us sahibs lean into the wind and snow to stagger around our rocky ridge-barrier and then up the boulder- and-ice-strewn valley of the Rongbuk Glacier.

Saturday, May 2, 1925

It says something about the altitude and cold—and perhaps about the poor condition I’m in—that it takes a little under two hours for us to haul our loads three miles up the glacier bed to the site of Camp I.

The snow was letting up as we climbed, and I’m surprised to find only an inch or two on the moraine rocks beneath our boots, just enough to make footing treacherous. For this first stage of our “siege” of Everest—based more on South Polar expeditions’ cache-dump attempts than on our original plan for a quick alpine ascent, is my silent opinion—we don’t have to climb onto the glacier proper, but we do waste time winding our way through a bewildering series of 50- to 70-foot-high ice pinnacles that are called penitentes: they do look rather like giant religious pilgrims in white robes. In addition to the pinnacles that have turned the rocky moraine trough into an obstacle course, there are also innumerable ice-melt pools, frozen over but frequently so thinly frozen that we’d break through and soak our boots if we tried to cross the slippery surfaces.

This seems to make no sense, given the far-below-zero temperatures we’ve been suffering since we arrived at the mouth of the Rongbuk Glacier valley, but it is a part of the weirdness of Mount Everest and its environs; in places where the ridge walls and even ice walls shield the valley from the coldest winds, the early May sunlight can heat up sheltered places fifty degrees and more above the temperatures at Base Camp. The worst will be on the glacier itself, but on this first day we stay off the glacier, trudging along the rocky moraine bottom that previous expeditions have called the Trough.

My rucksack is heavier than any load I’ve carried for some time, and as we trudge uphill, I stay 50 feet behind the Deacon and Reggie so they won’t hear my labored breathing and occasional retching. But through my discomfort, I realize now why Mallory and Bullock missed this approach to the North Col for so many weeks and months during the late summer and early autumn of 1921. They found that the main avenue of the primary Rongbuk Glacier headed up to Lho La below the West Ridge of Everest and was impassable in its higher reaches. The broad Kharra Glacier comes down from the North East and North faces of the mountain, but careers off almost due east to the Lhakpa La Pass, where the Deacon had finally dragged Mallory and where the team had finally seen the true way to the North Col—this East Rongbuk Glacier.

But the East Rongbuk Glacier is a tricky, sneaky thing, converging with the main Rongbuk Glacier valley way down at Base Camp but snaking to the east, then northeast, and then sharply northwest—parallel to the Kharra