The Abominable: A Novel

Shackleton anorak shoulders. The two men obviously aren’t expecting company as they huddle over an Unna cooker, the Meta fuel boiling up a big pot of something—at the pathetically low temperature it takes to boil things at 23,500 feet. Water boils at somewhere around 170 degrees Fahrenheit at this altitude, as opposed to 212 degrees at sea level. Although 170 degrees may sound hot, by the time the cold air hits it, our “boiled” liquids are down to around body temperature.

When we reveal our faces, the Deacon says, “Just in time for dinner, gentlemen. Beef stew. And we’ve made plenty.”

J.C. and I are surprisingly ravenous. Evidently the nausea we shared after the morning’s sky burial has worked itself out during our hours of trekking and climbing.

I’ve expected a rebuke from the Deacon regarding Babu Rita’s death, but it never comes—not even a pointed question as to whether we enjoyed the sky burial or had an interesting time with the Breakers of the Dead. I know that the Deacon himself has attended such terrible rites, but he makes no mention of it, ironic or otherwise. My guess is that he sympathizes with our reaction to the horrors we’ve seen. I know that Richard Davis Deacon also liked Babu very much.

“What is the climbing plan, Ree-shard?” asks J.C. when we’ve finished the last of the stew and reheated biscuits and are sipping our tepid coffee.

“In the morning, unless the weather gets actively worse, we’ll try the North Ridge to Camp Five,” he says. “I managed to get the two Meades up there a few days ago…we can only hope they haven’t blown away or been carried all the way down to the glacier by an avalanche.” He points to where J.C. and I have dumped our oxygen rigs in the corner of the tent. “Did you use any of that on the way up?”

We shake our heads.

“Good,” says the Deacon. “But we have extra sets cached here at Camp Four, and I recommend that you have one tank between you during the night…use the double-breathing hookup. If you get cold or really start feeling bad, a little oxygen at the one-point-five-liter flow rate will help out. We’ll all need some sleep if we’re going to climb in the morning. Speaking of which, did you bring extra batteries for those miner lamps?”

I nod.

“Good,” he says again. “When I say ‘in the morning,’ I mean around three-thirty or four a.m.”

I’m tempted to say So you’re following Reggie’s advice after all, but I decide against it and ask only, “Where are Reggie and Tenzing Bothia?”

“In the RBT,” says the Deacon. Suddenly he grins. “Lady Bromley-Montfort challenged me at Camp Three this morning when she overheard me talking about the RBT with a couple of the Sherpas there. She demanded to know what this ‘RBT’ she’s been hearing from various men stood for. When I told her ‘Reggie’s Big Tent’ and apologized for the familiarity with her name, she just said ‘Oh’ and blushed like mad. I have to wonder what she thought we were talking about.”

I have to think about this for a minute before a possibility strikes me…“Reggie’s Big…,” and then it’s my turn to blush. I pour more coffee to hide my embarrassment.

The wind claws at the walls of the Whymper, but there’s no sense of imminent collapse as there’d been a week ago at Camp III. And even if this tent were to tear free, we have the two unused Meades and Reggie’s Big…Tent…as lifeboats in the storm.

Unless, of course, we don’t have time to get out of the tent when its tie-downs and stakes pull free in the gale. In that case we’ll just all try to claw through canvas as the Whymper slides over the edge into a bottomless crevasse or a thousand vertical feet down onto the glacier proper.

We’re settling into our sleeping bags and still sipping the last of our coffee when I take out the book I’d packed up with me. It’s the popular wartime anthology of English verse The Spirit of Man, and I begin reading a Tennyson poem aloud to everyone when the Deacon suddenly says, “Excuse me, Jake. May I see that book?”

“Of course.” I stop reading and hand it to him.

The Deacon stands, still in boots, tugs on his down jacket, furls up his sleeping bag, grabs his personal rucksack, and goes out the tent door into the maelstrom.

Confused, smiling to myself thinking it’s some joke—perhaps having to do with toilet paper, although we’ve all brought some with us—I stick my head and shoulders out of the Whymper tent just long enough to see the Deacon hurling The Spirit of Man into one of the deeper crevasses. Then he disappears through the swirling snow toward one of the gear-crowded Meade tents.

I close the tent flap and turn toward J.C. and Tejbir. Both men look as startled and confused as I feel.

I’m shaking my head, trying to think of something to say, wondering if the altitude has driven our older English friend temporarily mad, when the flaps are suddenly unlaced and Reggie steps through. She’s not wearing her down outer layers but is carrying them and her eiderdown sleeping bag and inflatable sleeping cushion.

“May I come in?” she asks after she’s already inside and re-lashing the door shut behind her.

“Please…yes…please do…of course,” J.C. and I are babbling. Tejbir continues staring and I remember that his grasp of English tends to slip when he’s upset or confused.

We make room as Reggie lays out her sleeping pad and bag, takes off her unlaced boots, and slithers down into her bag while still sitting up. She speaks to Tejbir in rapid-fire Nepalese and the Sherpa nods, gets into his boots, folds his sleeping bag, grabs his rucksack, and goes out into the storm.

“I just suggested to Tejbir that since I’d be sleeping in this tent tonight—if it’s all right with you fellows— Tenzing Bothia might be lonely in my dome tent. Tejbir took the hint. This will give us more room to spread out.”

Sleeping in here tonight, I think giddily. Then I realize the absurdity of my Victorian-era shock. Besides the mummy-style sleeping bags themselves, all three of us are still dressed in multiple layers of cotton, wool, and goose down. I’m reminded of a tale I’d heard in England about Sir Robert Falcon Scott at the South Pole. Evidently Scott was rather stuffy about rank and social class—he’s said to have hung a blanket between the enlisted men’s and the officers’ parts of the single room in the large shack they built near the coast—but during the early part of his push to the Pole, while there were others there who would return to the shack and survive the experience, someone deferentially asked Scott why he took more time than the others when he stepped out into the terrible cold at night to attend to the call of nature. “Basically,” Scott is reported to have said, “it’s the problem of getting two inches of business out of seven inches of clothing.”

In other words, Lady Bromley-Montfort was safe with us tonight. Of course, she would have been even if we’d all been sleeping naked.

“I was out going to the loo when I saw Mr. Deacon throw a book over the side of the cliff and then take himself off to make room in the Meade tent we half-filled with provisions for the upper camps,” she says.

This gives me pause. Going to the loo? For urinating in storms like this, we male climbers don’t leave the tent—we’re not as particular about such things as Scott was—but merely use what we politely call “a piss bottle.” We covertly—or not so covertly—dump it outside when conditions improve, but I’ve never thought about the problems a woman climber might have with even the simpler form of…“going to the loo.” I find myself wondering if she teeters on the edge of crevasses, and I also worry about her getting frostbite.

I won’t admit to blushing again, but I do look away until I regain my composure.

“What was the book?” asks Reggie. I realize that J.C. is waiting for me to answer.

“Oh, the Robert Bridges anthology of English verse, The Spirit of Man,” I say quickly. “I’d heard that George Leigh Mallory had read aloud from it to his tent mates here at Camp Four and thought it might be…appropriate…if…,” I trail off.

Reggie nods. “I understand why Mr. Deacon tossed the book off the Col.”

I look at J.C., but he looks as confused as I feel. Has the Deacon gone a bit mad because of the altitude? Are we supposed to believe that he’s still angry at Mallory—or jealous of him? Nothing seems to make sense.

Then Reggie asks something that takes me from the realm of the surreal directly to the impossible.

“Have either of you seen your friend Richard Davis Deacon naked?” she asks in a calm voice.

Jean-Claude and I look at each other again, but neither of us can muster more of an answer than a headshake toward her.

“I didn’t think so,” she says. “I have.”

My God, she and the Deacon have been lovers since we met her in Darjeeling, I think. All the irritable banter has been a smokescreen.