The Abominable: A Novel

sounds so terrible—“like a barking jackal,” J.C. has called it. The second time he uses the phrase, I ask my friend directly if he’s ever actually heard a jackal bark. “All last night, Jake,” is his reply.

Jean-Claude and I have given Ang and Lhakpa our eiderdown sleeping bags this night while we sleep in our Finch duvet coats and Reggie goose down trousers, thin blankets pulled over us. I use my boots in a weatherproof sack as a pillow.

Both J.C. and I are exhausted, but we’re too cold and anxious even to pretend to sleep. We try to huddle closer, but the other’s shaking and chattering teeth just seem to make it worse for each of us. Perhaps our bodies have just quit putting out any heat.

That would mean that you’re both dead, Jake. I don’t like the tone of my own voice in my head. It sounds like it’s given up.

“In the m-m-morning,” whispers Jean-Claude as full darkness falls and the winds grow stronger, “I’ll cross on one of the fixed ropes, ankles and hands, and g-g-get down to Camp Two and bring everyone back with me early with ladders and food and hot b-b-beverages.”

“Sounds…okay,” I manage between teeth chattering. Then, “Or I could try it tonight, Jean-Claude. Take the hand torch with me and…”

“No,” whispers my friend. “I d-d-don’t believe the rope will h-h-hold your wuh-weight. I’m lighter. Too t-t- tired to b-belay tonight. In the m-morning.”

We curl closer, close our eyes, and pretend to sleep. The wind has grown in ferocity so the machine-gun battle sounds of the canvas slapping have returned with a vengeance. I imagine that I can feel the entire tent sliding south toward the crevasse, but I’m too exhausted and dehydrated to do anything about it and just remain curled where I am, the other bodies pressing close.

Jean-Claude’s slow breathing has the bad habit of just stopping for what seems like minutes on end—no sound, no inhaling or exhaling—until I shake him back into a semblance of breathing again. This goes on deep into the black night. It gives me a good reason for staying awake in the cold darkness. Every time I shake him back into life, he whispers, “Merci, Jake,” and then passes into his irregular, semiconscious breathing again. It’s like a deathbed watch with a dying man.

Suddenly I sit straight up in the darkness. Something terrible must have happened. I can hear J.C.’s and the other men’s gasping breaths, including my own, in the near-absolute darkness, but there’s something essential missing.

The wind has stopped. The noise is gone for the first time in more than forty-eight hours.

Jean-Claude is sitting up next to me, and we shake each other’s shoulders in some sort of mute celebration or simple hysteria. I fumble around until I find the boxy flashlight, turn its light onto my watch. Three-twenty a.m.

“I should try the rope now,” rasps J.C. “I won’t have the strength to cross come sunrise.”

Before I can answer, there come a scrabbling and tearing at our tent door—which we’ve learned to leave partially unlashed since totally closing off the tent adds to our inability to breathe—and I begin hallucinating bright lights shining in on us. Norbu Chedi’s cheeks are frostbitten pure white and black in the sudden glare of brilliance. Something large and powerful is clawing to get in.

The Deacon’s and Lady Bromley-Montfort’s heads poke into the tent. I can see the flashlights in their mittened hands and more lights behind them—lanterns, several of them. The two are also wearing Reggie’s Welsh miner headgear, and those lights also illuminate the tawdry, ice-dusted interior of our tent and our staring faces.

“How?” I manage to say.

The Deacon grins. “We were ready to set out as soon as the blizzard died down. I have to admit that these miner’s lamps work passably well…”

“Better than passably,” interrupts Reggie.

“But how did you cross…,” begins Jean-Claude.

“The glacier’s been busy,” says the Deacon. “About six hundred meters—a quarter of a mile—to the west, both sides collapsed a debris field to the shallow bottom there. About a hundred and fifty feet down and then back up, but ramps, really. No terribly serious climbing involved. We left some fixed ropes. Make room, gentlemen, we’re coming in.”

Besides the Deacon and Reggie crowding in to fill our tent to overflowing, Pasang comes in on his knees. He removes a medical bag from his rucksack.

The Sherpas outside crouch by the doorway, their own headlamps burning, at least three lanterns casting a wide light on their grins as they pass in thermoses of warm Bovril, tea, and soup. A larger thermos holds only water, and each of us takes a turn drinking deeply.

Dr. Pasang is already inspecting Norbu’s face, Lhakpa’s and Ang’s frostbitten feet. “These two will require carrying on Tejbir’s and Nyima Tsering’s backs,” says Pasang. He begins rubbing smelly whale oil on the two men’s bare, blackened feet and on Norbu’s face.

“We’re going now?” I manage to say. I’m not sure I can stand, but already the water has revived something that had been close to being extinguished in me.

“Now’s as good a time as any,” says the Deacon. “There’s a Sherpa to help each of you. We also have headlamps for all of you. Even with the—what’s your American word, Jake?—even with the detour down to the new route across the crevasse, we’ll be back to Camp Two in forty- five minutes or less. We’ve marked the way with wands.”

“Come, Jake, I’ll help you to your feet,” says Reggie and puts my arm over her shoulder. She lifts my two- hundred-plus pounds as if I were a child and all but carries me out into the night.

The stars are very bright. There is no hint of snow or cloud, other than the spindrift I can see hurling itself from the summits and ridges of Everest, a mere three miles and 10,000 feet above us.

Jean-Claude also looks up at Everest and blazing star fields as he’s helped out of the tent. “Nous y reviendrons,” he says to the mountain.

I may be wrong, but I think I’ve picked up enough French to translate that as “We shall return.”

Saturday, May 9, 1925

It’s unspeakably hot.

There’s not a breath of air in the two-man Meade tent that Jean-Claude and I slept in last night after being released from the Base Camp “infirmary,” and although the canvas doors to the tent are tied back and wide open, lying in here is like being buried in the Sahara in a shroud smelling of overheated canvas.

J.C. and I have stripped to our underwear but are still sweating profusely, and now we see the Deacon striding toward us across the uneven moraine-rock field.

Yesterday morning, Friday before dawn, when the Deacon, Reggie, Pasang, and the others had come to our rescue, they’d brought us down to Camp II, where both J.C. and I continued to drink cup after cup of cold water.

I’d assumed that they’d leave J.C. and me at Camp II while they helped carry Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay down to Base Camp to have Pasang deal with their frostbite in the medical tent “infirmary” he’d set up there, but the Deacon insisted that all of us—including Norbu Chedi, with his frostbitten cheeks now liberally smeared with whale oil and axle grease—go all the way back down to Base Camp. After drinking so much water and then some hot soup, Jean-Claude and I were perfectly able to hike down the Trough with Pasang and half a dozen other Sherpas, but Ang Chiri needed to be carried on a jury-rigged stretcher, and Lhakpa Yishay hobbled down with a Sherpa friend supporting him on either side. It was testimony to the severity of our earlier dehydration that, even after gulping down so many cups of water, neither of us had to stop to pee during the descent.

The air at Base Camp—at only 16,500 feet—seemed rich and thick enough to swim in after two days and nights at Camp III’s altitude of 21,500 feet. Besides that, Dr. Pasang had “prescribed” that all six of us take some “English air” from one of the oxygen rigs being carried up to Camp III by porters. After dismissing Jean-Claude and me from the infirmary on Friday afternoon, he’d sent one bottle rigged to two mask sets—the regulator timed to dispense only one liter of oxygen per hour—and told us in no uncertain terms to use it during the night whenever we woke gasping for air or feeling cold.