The Abominable: A Novel

other materials and repacked them without mentioning the accident to Dr. Pasang or Sahib Deacon or to Lady Bromley.”

“That was weeks ago,” I say. “Surely we would have used that…this…Primus since then.”

“Maybe not,” Jean-Claude says wearily. “We got into the habit of using the same Primuses at each camping spot. This one was taken out of reserve stores to go up the mountain. It’s one of the 1925 models adapted for higher altitudes.”

“Can’t you fix it?”

Our lives may depend upon his doing so if we’re trapped here many days. Hot soup and tea will be important, but melting the snow for drinking water is imperative.

“The tank isn’t leaking,” says J.C. “I’ve taken the pressurizing pump apart and inspected it and the leather bits more than a dozen times. I can’t see anything wrong or broken anywhere. It just…won’t…fucking…work.”

None of us says anything for a very long moment, but the silence is filled in with a wilder, louder howl of wind that makes all of us grab on to the floor cloth or tent walls to keep from flying away.

“Sandy Irvine fixed dozens of things, built the rope ladder up to the Col, and repaired and redesigned the entire oxygen apparatus at Base Camp or above,” mutters J.C. “And I—a Chamonix Guide and the son of a blacksmith and inventor and steel industrialist—can’t even fix a putain Primus stove on our second night out above Base Camp.”

“Without the Primus or spirit burner, what are our other options to get a controlled flame to melt some snow, heat some soup?” I ask. “We have the two pots. We have our tin cups. We have plenty of matches. We have some more alcohol. We have lots of kerosene.”

“If you’re thinking of dumping some kerosene into a cup and lighting it to put our pots on, forget it, Jake,” says Jean-Claude. “Kerosene by itself doesn’t burn in the way we need to heat things. To get a good blue flame we need…” Suddenly J.C. falls silent and takes the brass tank from my hands. He’s already pulled off the pressure-pump mechanism, but now he tries the permanent screw that I’ve always used to turn the flame up at the beginning of a cooking session and then turned the other way to shut the Primus off after its use.

“The damned vent screw,” says Jean-Claude. “It turned when I tried it each time, but it’s cross-threaded… it’s not opening to allow the pressurized kerosene jet to rise. In fact, the damned thing’s cross-threaded and bent enough that the tank won’t even hold pressure. The goddamned vent screw!”

He sets his wrench and small pair of pliers to work on the screw, but it won’t thread properly. And now it is stuck. I see him using all of his massive arm and hand strength to get the screw to turn. It does not.

“Let me try,” I say. I’m larger than Jean-Claude, my hands are much larger than Jean-Claude’s, and I’m probably stronger than the Chamonix Guide, but I can’t get the vent screw to turn either with my bare hands or with the wrench or pliers.

“Totally cross-stripped, the tank unpressurized and not able to be pressurized with the vent screw broken,” says Jean-Claude. It sounds like our death sentence, but what’s left of the logical parts of my brain reminds me that we can do without water for a few days, without food for weeks if need be. But my guess is that lots of snow-melt water and some hot soup would have gone far to reduce this headache and the other altitude sickness symptoms I’m feeling.

Meanwhile, the hemispherical tent walls are trying to rip themselves away from the curved wooden interior staves holding them in place. The thin ground cloth—the Sherpas hadn’t bothered with setting down the thicker one before raising the tent—is trying to rise up under us even with all six of us, and the heavy food loads and kerosene cans, spread about on it. I’ve never been in an earthquake, but it must feel like this. Only not as loud. We’re still shouting at each other to be heard.

“Jake and I are going back to our own tent to sleep,” Jean-Claude tells Babu and Norbu. “It’d be a little too crowded in here with six men trying to stretch out. Get some sleep—tell Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay not to worry. This storm may break by morning and either Lady Bromley-Montfort will be here with her Sherpas and supplies, or we’ll just walk back down to Camp Two.”

Since we’ve kept our boots and Shackleton jackets on, we just crawl out the door. But J.C. says, “Wait a minute, Jake,” and begins handing out the cans of kerosene to me. He also brings the reassembled but still unworkable Primus. “We’ll stack the cans just outside your tent,” he shouts to Babu Rita.

But he doesn’t. J.C. motions to me to carry my armloads of miniature cans with him to the far side of our poor sagging tent. There he sets his behind a boulder and I do the same. He puts his mouth near my ear so that I can hear him over the wind. “Some of the worst injuries I’ve seen in the mountains came from tent fires. I don’t trust our friends to keep from experimenting with burning cans of kerosene when they’re thirsty enough.”

I nod, understanding that on a calm day or night, such experiments—especially if done just outside the tent—might be worth the risk. But not in a tent that’s leaping and shaking under and around you.

Our own small tent, seven feet by six, is sagging and pitiful-looking. J.C. holds up one finger, telling me to wait outside a moment, and then he crawls in just far enough to pull a coil of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope from his rucksack. He cuts different lengths and we use the heavier rope to add more tie-downs to the wind-whipped tent. The long stakes don’t work worth a damn here on the lateral moraine, so we’re adding to the already existing spiderweb of lines to rocks frozen into the moraine, boulders, and even to one ice pinnacle.

By now I’m frozen through and relieved when we’re finished and can crawl into the low tent.

We crawl deep into our still dry goose down sleeping bags, removing our boots but putting them in the bags with us so that they won’t be too frozen to get into in the morning. At this temperature, if a climber leaves his boots outside his bag, the laces tend to snap off when he tries to tie them in the morning. With George Finch’s goose down duvet still on under the sleeping bag down, plus Reggie’s hood and Michelin Man goose down trousers, what little body heat I have left builds up again quickly enough.

“Here, Jake, put these in your bag as well.” J.C.’s left his bulky hand torch on, and I can see that he’s handing me a frozen tin of spaghetti, a smaller tin of meat lozenges, a solid brick of the rubber-protected “portable soup,” and the can of peaches (I can see the dent) that Reggie threw at the Deacon’s head the hundred years ago that was Saturday.

“You’re kidding,” I say. How am I supposed to sleep with these freezing cans against me?

“Not at all,” says Jean-Claude. “I have twice as many in my bag. Our body heat may melt—or at least soften—some of the food. The tin of peaches has syrup in it and we’ll share it with the other four in the morning to…how do you say it in English?…slake our thirst.”

Let’s open it and drink it now, just the two of us, is my unworthy thought. But nobility wins out. That and my sure knowledge that the fluid in the peach can is frozen as solid as a brick at the moment.

J.C. flicks off the hand torch to save the batteries but then says in an almost perfect imitation of the Deacon’s voice, “Well, what lessons have today’s events taught us, my friends?”

The Deacon asks that after almost every climb and certainly after every problem we have with a climb, but J.C.’s mimicry of the vaguely tutorial Oxbridge accent is so dead-on that I laugh hard despite the pain it causes to my aching skull.

“I suppose we should check the contents of our loads more carefully when carrying to any higher camp,” I say into the loud darkness.

“Oui. What else?”

“Double-check that none of the porters has tossed out something essential—such as his and his mate’s sleeping bag.”

“Oui. What else?”

“Probably have an Unna cooker in each camp as well as a roarer.” The Unna cookers we’ve brought to Everest, smaller and lighter than Primuses and using a solid fuel to burn, were generally used in higher camps when weight in the load had to be kept to a minimum. I’m fairly certain that Mallory and Irvine had an Unna cooker at their Camp VI.

“Primuses almost always work,” is J.C.’s response. “Robert Falcon Scott hauled one nine hundred miles to the South Pole and most of the way back.”

“And look what happened to Scott and his men,” I say.

We both start laughing. As if in response, the wind off the North Col roars more loudly. I feel as if our little two-man tent is going to shake itself to death despite—or perhaps because of—the spiderweb of tie-downs we’ve