The Abominable: A Novel

“These two will show us where we’ll sleep,” says our Sherpa. “And there will be a light repast of rice and more yogurt.”

The old priests—they have perhaps five teeth among them—lead us to a small, windowless (but terribly drafty) room where, according to Norbu, we are to spend the night before being wakened for Babu Rita’s sunrise funeral. There is a single candle for us to light, three bowls of rice, a communal bowl of yogurt, and some water. Three blankets have been spread out on the stone floor.

Before leaving, the two monks pause at a dark niche and hold their candles high so that we can see the wall mural there.

“Holy Christ,” I whisper.

A series of devils, complete with cloven hooves, are throwing climbers into a deep abyss. Instead of Dante’s fiery Hell, we are looking at a zone of damnation that is all snow, rock, and ice. The mural shows a whirling vortex, a sort of snow tornado, that is carrying the hapless climbers down, down, down. The mountain is obviously Everest, and to either side of it are growling, slathering guard dogs of immense proportions. But the most disturbing part of the mural is a single human figure lying at the base of the mountain the way a human offering would lie prostrate on an altar. The single body is white with dark hair—obviously a sahib. He has been speared, and one shaft still passes through him. Horned demons surround him, and J.C. and I step closer to see that the white man has been eviscerated. He is still alive, but his guts are spilling out onto the snow.

“Nice,” I say.

The two monks smile, nod, and depart with their candles.

We sit on the cold stone, wrap the blankets around ourselves, and try to eat our rice and yogurt. All through the temple, the rising wind howls with a woman’s terrified scream. It is very cold and growing colder.

“I wonder how old that mural is,” says Jean-Claude.

“It was painted only last autumn, Sahibs,” says Norbu Chedi. “I heard the other monks speak of it.”

“After Mallory and Irvine disappeared,” I say. “Why?”

Norbu Chedi pokes at his rice. “Word spread both at the monastery here and at Tingri and other villages that the sahibs had left much food behind at their higher camps—rice, oil, tsampa, much food.”

“What is tsampa?” I ask.

“It is barley flour, roasted,” says Norbu Chedi. “At any rate, when some of the villagers and some of the herders from the valley went up the East Rongbuk Glacier to claim this abandoned food, but about where you and Sahib Deacon have put our Camp Three, seven yetis leaped out of their hiding place in the caves in the ice and chased the young herders and villagers all the way off the glacier, all the way out of the valley. So Dzatrul Rinpoche had this mural painted as a warning to the greedy and foolish who would follow the foreign sahibs into such dangerous territory.”

“Wonderful,” I say.

We curl up in our respective blankets, but it is too cold to sleep. The monastery echoes to wind whistles, the distant slap of sandals on stone, the occasional dismal chanting, and the unceasing whir of prayer wheels spinning.

Without saying anything to one another, we decide to leave the candle burning between us and the mural.

Friday, May 15, 1925

The high priest comes for us—I can’t say “wakes us” because neither J.C. nor I has slept a minute all night—sometime around 4:30 a.m. Norbu Chedi has chosen to sleep outside in the cold and wind, and I can’t say I blame him. The candle the priest is holding, like so many others in the Rongbuk Monastery, consists of ghee butter in a tiny bowl. It smells terrible.

I’ve realized through the endless night that I hate the smell of everything in this supposedly sacred place. It’s not because of filth—Rongbuk Monastery is one of the cleanest places I’ve seen in all of Tibet—but rather because of some mixture of the underlying scent of unwashed bodies (Tibetans tend to bathe once a year, in the autumn), the reeking ghee lamps, a heavy musky odor of incense, and the very stones of the building, which seem to have a coppery smell, like freshly spilled blood. I chastise myself for this last thought, for the Tibetan Buddhists here are nothing if not nonviolent. In the beyuls nearby—the sacred valleys made loci of dharma energy by the white magic of Guru Rinpoche so many centuries ago—the animals have been left unmolested for so many generations, the Deacon has told us, that undomesticated mountain sheep will come into your tent, wild swans will come to eat out of your hand, and the white wolf of the Himalayas is said not to kill his prey there.

A monk appears in the dimness, and we follow him and his flickering ghee lamp through the labyrinth of rooms. Norbu Chedi is still knuckling his eyes as a second priest joins us.

I’d assumed that the funeral rites would be in the monastery proper, but the priests lead us out a back door and down a path worn into the very stone. Our silent procession passes through a maze of high boulders, and we begin climbing. Wherever this ceremony is going to be held, it’s at least half a mile from the monastery.

Finally we stop in an open area where four Tibetans—very poor by the look of their rags—wait near a strange flat stone. Behind the large altar stone (for so I think of it), higher boulders rise on edge and seem to have some sort of large gargoyles carved into them.

The first priest speaks, and Norbu Chedi translates: “The priest says that these four men are the grandfather, the two sons, and the grandson from the family of the Ngawang Tenzin, and they are the Breakers of the Dead for Babu Rita. The priest says that you may sit there during the ceremony.” Norbu Chedi gestures to a long, flat boulder and turns to leave.

“Wait!” says Jean-Claude. “Aren’t you going to stay for the ceremony?”

Norbu speaks over his shoulder. “I cannot. I am not of Babu Rita’s family. And I do not choose to see a sky burial.” He continues on into the dark maze of boulders, disappearing with the two acolytes who’d led us here.

It’s getting vaguely light in the east now, but it’s going to be a cloudy, cold day. I’ve brought an extra sweater which I’d tugged on during the night, but neither it nor my flannel shirt nor the thin Norfolk jacket keeps me warm. I wish to hell I’d brought my Finch duvet in my rucksack rather than just a few bars of chocolate and the sweater. I see that J.C. is also shivering.

We nod a greeting to the Ngawang Tenzins—an old man, presumably the grandfather, with white bristles sprouting everywhere on his wrinkled face, two overweight, middle-aged men with only two eyebrows between them, and a rail-thin boy who might be a teenager but who looks very young. None of the Ngawang Tenzins shows any response to our nods. We seem to be waiting for someone.

Eventually four other priests, obviously higher in the monkish hierarchy than the acolytes who led us here, appear from the boulder maze. The monastery itself is out of sight somewhere downhill behind us. For some reason, I’d expected Dzatrul Rinpoche himself to officiate at the sky burial. But evidently the mere Sherpa of white sahibs doesn’t rate funeral officiating by the Holy Lama and reincarnation of Padma Sambhava.

Behind these priests come four lower-caste acolytes carrying the body of Babu Rita, still on the improvised stretcher on which we’d brought him to the monastery. The priests have the four ends of the litter on their shoulders, and the white tent canvas that had served as a shroud for Babu has been replaced by a white gauze, perhaps silk.

They set the stretcher on the broad, low stone around which the Ngawang Tenzin family—whose title Norbu Chedi had interpreted as “Breakers of the Dead”—stand waiting.

Meanwhile, the predawn light has come up enough that I now see that what I thought were gargoyles carved into the tall boulders behind the altar stone are nothing of the kind. They’re living bearded vultures. Huge ones. They do not move. Their rapacious gazes remain fixed on the small form under the white gauze sheet.

J.C. and I stand there in a brief but freezing drizzle while the four priests and the four acolytes sing their harmony-free chants while two of the high priests circle the great stone holding Babu Rita’s shroud-wrapped body, occasionally sprinkling some white powder onto it.

Finally the priests quit chanting and step back into the shadows of the boulder maze where the stretcher-