The Abominable: A Novel

we can. I’ll go down when you three start climbing and come back up later today with Pasang and the strongest Tigers. We’ll use Jean-Claude’s bicycle apparatus to get heavy loads up to the North Col and then repack food, oxygen rigs, and at least one tent for the highest camp and get it to you tomorrow morning. Monday.”

“Today’s summit day,” I whisper. “The seventeenth.”

I can see the Deacon’s teeth gleam in the moonlight. “If it weren’t for this search, it could be. All four of us push straight on and make the bid for the summit, returning to Camp Five by dark.”

“But you’re not going to do that? I thought you—the three of us—were going to make a dash for the summit and search afterward. What made you change your mind?”

The thin shadow shakes its hooded head. “I could lie to Lady Bromley-Montfort and tell her that we’d look for her cousin’s remains on the way down from the summit, but I’ve been up above twenty-six thousand feet, Jake. She was right in Darjeeling. One shot at the highest ridges on Everest and this damned mountain just takes everything out of you. One day you’re filled with adrenaline and ready to go for the summit come hell or high water. The next day, Sherpas are helping you stagger down to Base Camp—your energy gone, your heart enlarged, your eyes half-blinded, and your toes and fingers frozen. I almost set the summit dash for today, but I promised the lady that we’d search for Percival, and we’ll spend a couple of days doing just that before we decide if we’re still strong enough for a summit attempt.”

I look up at the snow-to-black whaleback of the North Ridge rising steeply above us. I haven’t brought an oxygen rig out, and I find myself gasping for breath just to keep standing there. Part of me is relieved at this reprieve—I don’t want to disappear up on those heights the way Mallory and Irvine did last year—but a larger part of me is bitterly disappointed. This may be the end of our summit dreams. Why has the Deacon changed his mind at this late date? Our goal has always been to climb the damn mountain.

“That will mean a lot of time spent above eight thousand meters,” I finally say aloud.

“Probably too much.” He seems to be acknowledging that he’s decided to throw away our best chance at climbing Mount Everest, but he’s not telling me why he’s decided this. Especially so late in the game. I can see the North East Ridge gleaming like a highway of diamonds far above us. All the way to the summit. And no hint of the usual killer winds.

“Do you think there’s much chance of actually finding Lord Percival?” I manage at last.

“No,” says the Deacon. “Not one chance in a hundred would be my guess. But we promised we’d try. We took Lady Bromley’s money.”

I have nothing to say to that. I hand back my empty cup, and he screws it onto the top of the thermos.

“Go get some more sleep, Jake. Take a few whiffs of good old English air, stay warm, and sleep if you can. I’ll wake you when I get breakfast heating on the Unna cooker.”

Before crawling back into the tent, I take a final look around at the magical landscape: Everest and its lesser attendant peaks glowing in the starlight, clouds clustered below the level of the North Col, only the slightest visible streamer of spindrift coming off the summit of the ultimate peak we’re climbing toward in a few hours. For the first time since we’ve set out from England, part of me feels, with real assurance rather than abstract bravado— We could have climbed this damned mountain today. We still can climb it in the next couple of days if we don’t waste a lot of time hunting for a dead man. It’s possible.

Sunday, May 17, 1925

As it turns out, it’s just Reggie and me plodding up this granite-slabbed rib toward Camp V today.

Jean-Claude had admitted that he wasn’t feeling so well—“a bit seedy,” he’d said, borrowing the Deacon’s English phrase—and we all decided that he should go down with the Deacon to help organize the load carrying to the North Col and then come up to Camps V and VI the next day.

“It will give me a chance to use my bicycle,” says J.C.

I don’t believe I’ve taken the time to describe the contraption that Jean-Claude hauled all the way across Tibet in pieces and dutifully assembled our first day up on the North Col. The device did have bicycle parts—a bicycle seat, pedals, gears, bicycle chains—but it also had an upholstered backrest (since the person on the contraption would be pedaling it while lying almost on his back, knees higher than his head) and metal support struts that went out six feet in four directions, each anchored deeply into the ice shelf with ice screws, hammered pitons, and a spiderweb of ropes. That bicycle-doodad wasn’t going to fall off that narrow shelf unless the North Col glacier itself calved off a huge piece.

A meter or so above the pedals, a nine-foot metal arm—J.C. had brought the components in three-foot sections—had been bolted together to become a sturdy horizontal flange, also reinforced by multiple tie-downs, which held a third bicycle gear and pulley assembly.

We’d only had time to test it with two loads before the storm came in on Friday, but the bicycle worked well, in its own crude way. In the 1924 expedition, Sherpas had dropped ropes to haul loads up the chimney Mallory had climbed in the final 200-foot ice wall, but the loads had to be fairly light. Pedaling with one’s legs and feet, with leverage gained through reduction gears, was infinitely easier than using one’s back and arms, and the loads tied onto the continuously circulating 400-foot strand of Deacon’s Miracle Rope could weigh up to fifty or sixty pounds. The bicycle was serious exercise above 23,000 feet, there was no denying that, but we’d each tried it out, and with two men—one to pedal and the other to untie and dump the loads as they came up to the level of the ice shelf—moving entire tons of materiel up to the North Col was now a real possibility, without endless lines of load- hauling Sherpas gasping and wheezing and constantly resting on the rope ladder or fixed ropes.

“If I’d just been able to haul in a small petrol-powered generator,” said Jean-Claude.

But J.C. is ill and recovering lower today, so it is just Reggie and me working our way up the slabs toward sunrise and Camp V this fine Sunday morning. The last thing Jean-Claude whispered to me before we left camp, Reggie yards away and preoccupied with getting the flow valve working right on her hissing oxygen set, was —“Besides, mon ami, the Deacon, Tenzing, and Tejbir put only two small two-man tents up at Camp Five. With my luck, I’d end up sleeping alone.”

Reggie and I haven’t roped up and I’m not sure why. I suppose it is because the first few hundred yards up the snowfields from the North Col were just a kick-step exercise, and above that we’ve been on these damned black granite slabs that require little more than giant steps up very high curbs to ascend. The few aretes and serious rock outcroppings we’ve come up against on the ridgeline are easily avoided by traversing out onto the equally downward-tilting granite slabs of the North Face until we’ve climbed up and around the rock outcroppings and moved back left to the broad ridgeline.

This is not to say that a fall from this North Ridge—or what the Deacon sometimes calls the North East Shoulder (as opposed to the North East Ridge far above that leads to the summit)—would not be a serious problem.

The winds are intermittent this predawn morning, unlike the constant gales that the Deacon and his two Sherpas encountered on Friday. Those three had been forced to lean forward into the hurricane-force wind so far that their heads were lower than their knees and their noses almost touching the rock slabs in front of them. Reggie and I can walk hunched forward just slightly—like French and British infantry I’ve heard about at the Battle of the Somme leaning forward as if into a wind while walking into enemy machine gun fire—but the occasional gust rocks us back on our heels and makes us pinwheel our arms for balance. Of course, a backwards topple here will be one hell of a topple. At one place on the ridge, the winds suddenly seem to batter us from both directions at once, and Reggie has to fall forward, her mittened hands seeking a grip on the icy slab in front of her, rather than let the wind tumble her backward for a long, long, long fall.

We should be roped up. I know it—every bit of mountaineering sense and experience I have tells us that we should—but for some reason I can’t seem to suggest it to her or insist upon it. Maybe it seems like too personal a suggestion.

For the first time, I appreciate the problem that the Deacon and his two Sherpas—and both the high- climbing British expeditions before this—had dealt with in finding a place for tents. To our right, the west, the edges of the steep ridge and the North Face itself are exposed to the full force of the near-constant winds perpetually blowing from the northwest. A tent wouldn’t survive an hour there. But there is no flat place to pitch a tent, even a small tent, on the west side of the North Ridge at any rate.