The Abominable: A Novel

cutting steps for them.

Now both ice chimney and ladder are gone, folded into the churnings of the ever-shifting ice wall and glacier. The last 200 vertical feet to the ledge on the North Col where both previous expeditions have set their tents is once again a slick, solid 90-degree ice wall. But the more than 800 feet of snow and ice below that look bad as well.

“The snowfields look deep headed up to the ice wall,” I say between ragged gulps for air. We’ve been climbing this last hard bit between Camps II and III without oxygen—the last such oxygen-tank-free climbing we’ll be doing if the Deacon sticks to his plan—and I understand why the Tiger Sherpas with us have all but collapsed where they sit, lying back against their loads, too tired to remove the bulging thirty- to forty-pound packs from their backs.

J.C. removes his Crooke’s-glass goggles and squints up at the wall.

“Don’t go snow-blind on me,” I say.

He shakes his head but continues studying the 1,000-foot snow and ice wall while holding his hand above his eyes and squinting. “More fresh snow there than on the glacier,” he says at last, pulling up his goggles. “It’s probably as bad as…”

Jean-Claude stops before finishing his thought, but I can read his mind well enough by now to hear the unspoken parts of that sentence: It’s probably as bad as the snow slope conditions in 1922 when the avalanche killed seven Sherpas. We won’t know that for sure until the Deacon finally gets up here to Camp III, but I suspect the worst.

“Let us get our friends back on their feet before we lie down beside them and we all take a cold final nap,” says Jean-Claude. He turns and starts coaxing the four exhausted Sherpas to their feet, the men sagging under their loads. “It is only a few hundred more yards and downhill from here,” he says to them in English, knowing that his Sherpa Norbu and my man Babu will translate for the other two.

As we stagger out onto the moraine from the forest of huge ice pinnacles at the base of the glacier, all of us wearing crampons today— 10-point for the Sherpas and full 12-point for J.C. and me—and keeping them on even though we’re now ready to cross moraine rocks, I point to the open spot just ahead of us and about 200 feet short of the campsite and say, “This must be about where Kami Chiring confronted Bruno Sigl a year ago.”

Jean-Claude only nods, and I sense how very tired he is.

The three miles of climbing between Rongbuk Base Camp and Camp I amounts to hiking uphill on lateral moraine beds and across fields of shallow ice between hundreds of the penitente ice pillars. The three uphill miles between Camp I and Camp II are a mixture of moraine and actual glacier crossing, but the majority of the way is along the Trough among and between the ice pinnacles at the bottom of the valley. But almost all of the almost five hard miles uphill from Camp II here to Camp III at the base of the wall is on the ever more steeply rising glacier.

And the glacier is filled with hundreds of crevasses covered over with new snow.

I’ve followed J.C. for two days now as he’s threaded our route through those invisible crevasses, leaving only our footsteps in the deep snow—much of the time Jean-Claude was breaking trail through snow up to his thighs or waist—but also marking that route with wands and fixed ropes for the steeper parts.

Both days have been sunny, and through my goggles the glacier snowfields are merely a maze of sastrugi drift-ripples and corresponding blue shadows everywhere. Some of those blue shadows are shadows. Many are crevasses under their thin coverings of snow—gaps that would drop a man (or woman) hundreds of feet into the heart of the glacier. Somehow Jean-Claude always seems to know which shadow means what.

Twice between Camps II and III we’ve had to detour around crevasses too extensive to flank. The first time, yesterday, J.C. finally found a snow bridge that he judged would hold our weight. Jean-Claude crossed first while I belayed, my ice axe sunk deep in the ice, and then we rigged two strong, waist-high guide ropes across along with jumars that would carabiner onto the Sherpas’ new climbing harnesses.

The second crevasse had no snow bridges, and trying to detour around it either way just led us into endless fields of more hidden crevasses. Finally I belayed J.C.—while the Sherpas belayed me—with an extra ice axe laid across the lip of the crevasse so the rope would not cut into the snow. Jean-Claude used his new, short ice axes and 12-point crampons to descend 60 or 70 feet into the terrible crack until he reached a point where the walls were close enough together that he could take one huge step (for a short man) and slam his right ice hammer and right crampon front blades into the opposing ice wall. Then he swung his left arm and leg across a widening abyss that dropped into absolute darkness, kicked both crampon fronts into the blue ice wall, and began climbing with his short axes smacking into ice, each one higher than the other, up the opposite wall.

Once J.C. climbed out and was standing on the other side of the crevasse, I threw a coil of strong rope across and then two of the long ice axes, which he used to anchor the ropes. Then I used two axes and several long ice screws to anchor the ropes on our side of the crevasse. J.C. was wearing one of the climbing harnesses that none of us had tried on the mountain yet, and now he clipped carabiners from the harness onto one of his jumar thingies, lifted his cramponed boots up and over the rope, and just scooted hand over hand, butt first, back toward us along the doubled rope across the bottomless drop as if he were a child on a playground.

“The Sherpas can’t do that with their loads,” I gasped out when he unclipped from the ropes and moved away from the treacherous edge.

Jean-Claude shook his head. He’d been doing all the climbing and work, and I was still the one gasping and panting. “We have our fine fellows dump their loads here for now and we go back to Camp Two. Reggie should have had her team of nine porters bring up the ladders to Two by now. We lash two of the ten-foot ladders together, provide guide ropes as we did on the snow bridge, and…voila!”

“Voila,” I repeated with less enthusiasm. It had been a long, hard, dangerous climb up the glacier to this point, we were less than two-thirds of the almost five miles to Camp III, and now we had to head back down to Camp II to start hauling up ladders and more rope. The Sherpas with us were grinning. They’d had enough of hauling loads for one day and were more than happy to dump their heavy loads and walk unencumbered back down the safely wand-marked glacier.

The Deacon had warned us that this was how all the previous expeditions’ planning and schedules, including Mallory’s the year before, ended up in disarray, with loads being dumped up and down the entire eleven-mile Trough and glacier trek up to Camp III and the North Col. All the military planning in the world, he said, can’t overcome the inherent chaos of crevasses and sheer human exhaustion.

“We need more wands anyway,” J.C. said. It was true. There were so many crevasses that Jean-Claude’s route up the glacier twisted this way and then that, rarely a simple straightforward route along the three and a half miles or so we’d covered. We’d underestimated the number of bamboo wands we’d need to mark the route accurately enough for porters following—especially in a snowstorm.

But by early afternoon of this Tuesday, the fifth of May, we have our loads safely delivered to Camp III. Crossing 15 feet or more of the lashed-together wooden ladders above the endless crevasse drop with only the waist-high guide ropes to steady us on our crampons had been an experience I didn’t look forward to having again (though I knew I would have to, many times). We’ve erected J.C.’s and my small Meade tents and Reggie’s hemispherical Big Tent in anticipation of the scheduled rush of men and materiel to come. For tonight, the four Sherpas can sleep in it.

The plan is for us to spend this one night here, waiting for Reggie’s Tiger Team Two with nine Sherpas and their loads, scheduled to arrive before noon tomorrow, and then some of us are to continue waiting—and acclimating—at Camp III until the Deacon comes up the next day, Thursday, May 7, with Tiger Team Three. Only then, according to the plan, and perhaps with even one more day of acclimation for some of us, can anyone attempt to tackle the 1,000-foot slope and wall up to the North Col. Mostly, I think to myself, because the Deacon doesn’t want anyone to climb onto the North Col until he’s present and—presumably—leading the climb.

The real headache hits me before darkness fully falls on this Tuesday night.

I’ve had a headache since we reached Base Camp far below, but suddenly it feels as if someone is driving an ice screw into my skull every thirty seconds or so. My vision flutters, dances with black dots, and begins to constrict into a tunnel. I’ve never had a migraine headache in my life—only two or three serious headaches of any sort that I remember—but this is terrible.

Not bothering to layer into my goose down or outer jackets or to pull on my gloves or overmittens, I crawl on all fours out of the flapping tent, turn away from where we’d staked out the other, larger tent, and vomit behind