The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  “Jean-Claude,” I call down, “we’re going to have to go all the way to the top of this damned crack to have any chance of a traverse. All the way to the overhang.”

  “I know, Jake. You’ll have to half-free-climb swing, half-down-slide your way to the pipe ledge. But it has to be almost twenty meters across that bad patch of smooth, almost vertical rock. We’ll tie on an extra rope between us—if we can find a belay point for me up there—but if you want my opinion, I do not believe it can be done. When you slide off the dome, you’ll pluck me out of my belay point in the crack like a cork out of a wine bottle.”

  “Thanks for the image and the encouragement.” Then, in a louder tone, “Climbing!” I wedge my possibly broken left hand as deep as I can in a three-inch crack far above my head and let that support all my weight as I scramble for another fingerhold, or a crack spur for my tennis shoe.

  Pressing our bodies against the rock here just under the six-foot-wide overhang feels oppressive, as if that ceiling might force us out of our tenuous holds in the last skinny remnants, now almost horizontal, of this damned crack. The view from twenty-five stories up is fine, but neither of us can take the time or attention away from our tenuous and painful holds to appreciate it. Since we’re only 40 feet or so higher than the grassy ledge—which seems about half a mile away across the smooth curve of near-vertical rock—the friction-sliding I have in mind is going to be trickier than I’d hoped.

  Gingerly, only one hand free, I remove my until-now-useless ice axe from its rucksack loop and set the long, curved pick side of it as deep into the horizontal crack as I can. Luckily there’s a downward V to the crack. Then I release my handhold and put my full weight on it. There’s a downward-sloping camber in the slot that nicely matches the curve of the ice axe’s pick.

  It holds, but I wouldn’t bet the farm—well, I guess I already am, in truth—on its holding too long.

  “Here’s your belay point,” I say to Jean-Claude, who’s moved to my right along the dying crack, actually ahead of me, and eye to eye with me for the first time in the climb.

  “Hanging. From your ice axe,” says Jean-Claude in a flat tone.

  “Yes. And with your left boot in this part of the vertical crack that just tore up the front of my tennis shoe.”

  “My legs aren’t long enough to reach the crack while hanging from your axe,” J.C. says without unneeded emphasis. This climb has taken a lot out of us already. I know in my heart that Jean-Claude would prefer to try to free-climb this impossible overhang to reach the summit than try to help get me lower to that accursed pipe ledge.

  “Make one of your legs longer,” I say and hand him the end of the second 50-foot coil of rope I’ve hauled up the crag. J.C. is better at tying knots than I am.

  We get ready, and tied in to the new rope, I have 80 feet of tether between Jean-Claude and me. It’s necessary for the amount of naked rock I have to traverse, 60 feet to the ledge and some slack for up-and-down work, but it would mean that J.C. would have to arrest me after an 80-foot fall. I look at his belay stance. He’s made his left leg longer but only by hanging almost horizontally, one boot on a ridge higher in the crack than I’d been, his body hanging from his left hand gripping the ice axe and his right forearm holding much of his weight along a three-inch-wide ridge he’s found below the crack.

  I think of the image that Jean-Claude’s provided: if I fall, he’ll be plucked out of his tenuous hold like a cork out of a wine bottle—or in this case more violently, more like a champagne cork.

  But if I’m going to belay him over once I get to the pipe ridge, we need the connection. I think that if I were J.C., in my free right hand I’d have my knife unfolded and ready to cut the belay rope before it goes taut when I fall. Perhaps he does; I can’t see that hand well because of the rock and position of his body.

  “Okay,” I say. “Here goes nothing.”

  The Deacon and Jean-Claude usually enjoy my more American Americanisms, but this time it’s wasted: the Deacon looks like he’s dozing 250 feet below us, his back to a warm rock and his tweed hat pulled down over his eyes, and Jean-Claude is in no mood for my chirpy vernacular.

  I step out of the crack and onto the near-vertical smooth rock face.

  I slide only a foot or two before friction stops me, spread-eagled on the rock, shirt and face and belly and balls and thighs and very tensed lower legs begging for friction, most of which is being provided by the toes of my tennis sneakers, which are bent almost at right angles to the rest of my shoe and foot. This is a bit uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as falling 250 feet.

  I can’t stay there. I begin slipping and sliding to my left, toward the damned pipe ridge, which is about 25 feet lower than I am and perhaps 60 feet away.

  My fingers seek holds, even the slightest wrinkle in the rock, but this is an obscenely wrinkle-free rock face. I keep moving to the left, held against the near-vertical cliff just by friction and speed. If you’re fast enough, sometimes gravity doesn’t immediately notice you. My tennis shoes are doing 80 percent of the job of holding me onto the sow’s belly of curved rock.

  It’s tricky playing out the rope to Jean-Claude as I crab-shuffle to the left. Most of it is in my rucksack, which keeps trying to pull me back and off the face with just the weight of the extra rope and a few other small things in it, but some I’ve had to loop over my right shoulder to keep playing out to J.C. The coil of rope itself pushes me away from the arresting friction of the cliff, and every time I play out more to Jean-Claude, I slide down a little bit until I’m free to slap my palms and fingers and forearms against the rock again.

  I’ve made it a little more than halfway to the pipe ledge when I slip. My body just comes away from a glazed section of the great rock face.

  I try to self-arrest madly, my fingers clawing toward any grip, any ridge, any irregularity in the rock, but I keep sliding, slowly at first, and then picking up speed. I’m already below the level of the pipe ledge still far to my left and sliding toward a part of the face that curves in enough below to be called a drop-off. I go off that, I go all the way down to where the Deacon is napping. Dragging J.C. with me if he’s not smart enough to cut the rope with the knife. I think I should scream at him to do just that—he’s only about 40 feet away and shifting in his impossible position to put more weight on his right arm along the thin ridge—but I’m too busy to scream. If he cuts it, he cuts. If he doesn’t, he dies with me. It’ll be decided in seconds.

  The slide is cartwheeling to my left and within seconds I’m head down, still spread-eagled, upside down, my face and upper body being scraped bloody across suddenly rougher rock.

  Rougher rock.

  My bloody fingers become claws, trying to find a ridge big enough to grab and stop this quickening fall and swing me around. My claws lose a fingernail or two but don’t stop or slow me—the upside-down position doesn’t help matters.

  I’m already about 20 meters below the face I’d been traversing and I’m picking up speed—the rope hasn’t gone taut yet, the remnant is flying off my shoulder still slack for Jean-Claude, and when it gets to the extra 40 feet or so of tied-on rope in my rucksack, I’ll be over the edge only a few meters ahead of me and in freefall.

  Suddenly the toe of my right sneaker finds a deep part of one of these rough wrinkles in the stone just above the drop-off and I slam to a stop. “Ummphh!”

  The rucksack tries to keep going over my head but doesn’t pull me off.

  For long seconds—hours, maybe—I hang there upside down, still spread-eagled, blood from my hands and torn cheek rivuleting down the rock just below me, and then I begin the slow process of figuring out how to get right side up from that one tennis shoe toehold above me and then what to do next.

  The first part offers one real option, and I don’t like it much. Somehow keeping the one toehold, I have to bend the rest of my body into as tight a U as I can, arms and bloody fingers fully extended vertically, and before that ridiculous posture pulls my sne
aker out of the fault line and J.C. and me off the face, I have to get a hand jammed in there. It will be a curved-body flailing lunge as my foot comes out and I start sliding again.

  Not good alpine form, by anyone’s standards. I’m suddenly happy that the Deacon, still 200 feet below, isn’t watching what very well might be my last seconds.

  The upside-down position is just going to sap my energy, blur my thinking with blood rushing to my head, and make me weaker every second I think about this. The toe of the right sneaker may not continue its jammed hold for many more seconds.

  I twist myself as hard right across the rock as I can, using the roughness for fingerholds as I bend myself into the tight U. The toe of my sneaker comes out before I want it to and my legs slide free again, nothing to stop me now before the drop-off, but I’ve gained inertia in the U-turn and I scrabble and lunge upward toward the ridge my foot has found.

  Thanks be to God it’s not just one narrow ridge but an actual fissure, deep enough to accommodate both hands jammed into it, and as I hang head-up vertical again, my hands deep in the fissure, even my sneakers finding some toeholds on the rough rock below where my head had been a few seconds earlier, I see that this fissure—about six inches from top to bottom and eighteen inches or more deep—keeps running to the left all the way to a spot about 25 feet beneath the pipe ledge. The horizontal crack even accommodatingly climbs a bit toward the end, getting me closer to the pipe ledge.

  I hear Jean-Claude shouting down—the curve of the face is hiding me from him: “Jake! Jake?”

  “I’m fine!” I shout back as loudly as I can. An echo returns from surrounding crags.

  Am I fine? I can shinny my way left using my hands in this crack, but there’s a better alpine way.

  I carefully study the rock and find the ridges above the crack that could be sufficient for fingerholds. Keeping one hand in the crack for emergency arrest, I lunge at one of the wrinkles with my right hand. It’s more than arm’s length, so I have to push up toward it with knees and sneakers scrambling like a character in one of those new short Disney features from America where a live-action “Alice in Wonderland” interacts with clumsily drawn cartoon characters. In this instance I am the clumsy cartoon character, all rubbery legs and wildly pedaling feet.

  I find the handhold wrinkle, it’s adequate, I lunge up to my left—this one is less secure but it holds me as I pull and scramble my weight up above the fissure, using speed and friction again to temporarily defy gravity.

  It works. My feet are now in the fissure below, and moving to my left is just a matter of shuffling slowly. Even when there’s no fully secure cleft or ridge for either of my hands, upper-body contact with the curved stone works. I’m on a shuffle-fast highway now, and within a few minutes I’m at the high point of the crack, still about 15 bare-rock feet beneath the beginning of that goddamned pipe ridge.

  I look up at it. I don’t want to take my feet out of this life-saving fissure. I don’t want to go back to spread-eagle friction and a prayer. To my right, the long rope to Jean-Claude curves up and out of sight. There’s just enough bulge to the rock to hide my climbing partner from sight.

  Slowly confidence flows back into me. I learned to climb on rock scrambles—in Massachusetts and other climbing spots in New England, and then twice in the Rocky Mountains, and once on a summer expedition to Alaska. After two years with my climbing friends from Harvard, I was the rock man of our group.

  And this is a lousy 15 feet of smooth rock ascent. Come on, Jake, sheer vertical inertia, teeth, knees, sneaker toes, and then teeth again—if need be—can find enough three-second-type holds to get you up 15 feet.

  I lunge up, arms wide, fingers clawing, pull my feet from the safety of the wonderful fissure, and crawl and clamber and climb.

  I’m so tired when I reach the pipe ledge ridge that I have to pause, dangling a moment, before lifting myself up and over, onto grass.

  God damn the Deacon. He risked both Jean-Claude’s and my life for—what?

  His damned pipe is lying in the grass about ten feet to my right as I stand looking out at the truly impressive view that the Deacon enjoyed just by rappelling down here at my expense. There’s also a thin boulder curving up and back that will make a wonderful rappel anchor. I loop some of the rope around that, step back to my left, and wave at Jean-Claude, who has moved back to the vertical crack, my ice axe jammed in beneath his feet now. His new belay position, one arm deep in the crack, teetering atop the curved steel of the ice axe, might have stopped me if I’d gone over the edge.

  Maybe.

  Probably not.

  I catch my breath for another moment and shout, “Ready! On belay!” The echoes return.

  Jean-Claude waves his positive response. I’ve tightened the 60 or so feet of rope connecting us.

  J.C. has a very complicated moment getting off the skinny shelf of my ice axe, using the vertical crack to climb below it, retrieving the axe, and sliding it into the loop on his own rucksack.

  Then he waves again from that strangely great distance, shouts “Climbing!” and moves out onto the face.

  He falls after this third traverse pitch. He just begins sliding as I had, but at least the rope between us keeps Jean-Claude head up as he hurtles down toward the overhang and freefall.

  He’s not going to get there. There’s less than 40 feet of rope between us now, and I plant one foot on a boulder for extra leverage and easily hold him on the belay I’d worked around the short spire rock behind me. That will fray the rope as we pull Jean-Claude higher, but there’s nothing to be done about that. We’ll inspect it and use shorter rope on the rappels if we must.

  Jean-Claude gives up on trying to self-arrest—saving his fingers and nails and knees from much damage—and just swings beneath me in a wide arc, easily held by my belay, until he swings back directly beneath me.

  Then I do brace myself, even with the spire rock for backup, as J.C. pulls himself upright while holding the rope until his boot soles are on the rock face. He begins climbing that way—the tense and fraying rope his only hold—and I belay him up as quickly as I can, not wanting that rope to fray against the rock longer than it has to. It’s good Manila rope, the most expensive the Deacon could find, but it’s only a half-inch-thick lifeline.

  Then he’s up, pulling himself over the final ledge, and collapsing onto the grass.

  I coil the rope, inspecting it carefully.

  “Fuck the Deacon,” J.C. says in French, gasping out the words.

  I nod. That phrase is the second half of my tiny French vocabulary. And I agree with the sentiment.

  Jean-Claude disentangles himself from the last coil of rope and walks over and picks up the Deacon’s pipe. “This is one hell of a stupid place to leave a pipe,” he says in English. He puts the damned thing in his large buttoned shirt pocket, where it won’t fall out.

  “Shall we set up and start the rappel?” I ask.

  “Jake, give me about three minutes to enjoy the view,” he says. I see that his ascent has sapped all of his energy.

  “Good idea,” I say, and for five or ten minutes we just sit with our legs dangling over the drop, our butts on soft grass, and our backs against the sun-warmed curved spire stone that we plan to use as a rappel anchor.

  The view from almost 250 feet up this rock slab—like looking out a big window on the 25th floor of some skyscraper in New York—is beautiful. I see other crags that are taller, thinner, and more of a climber’s challenge, and idly wonder if George Mallory, Harold Porter, Siegfried Herford, and Richard Davis Deacon had climbed them as well in those years between the time Mallory and the Deacon graduated from Cambridge in 1909 and went to war in 1914.

  As for me, I’ve just done the only Welsh crag I’m going to climb this summer—perhaps this lifetime. Great fun, but just once, thank you.

  It feels good to be alive.

  After enjoying the view for a while and letting Jean-Claude get his wind back, we secure the ropes for the rappel. The
section I’d used to pull J.C. using the rock as belay anchor looked okay, but we set it apart in my rucksack, to be used only if absolutely necessary.

  The rappels down are fun. At the end of our first 80-foot descent, we swing our bodies right across the smooth rock—actually in a standing, boot-sole-running pendulum move—until Jean-Claude finally grips the edge of the vertical crack we’d climbed and stops his motion. A second later he is in the crack, with the really decent footholds and craggy bits we remember from the climb up—the one dependable platform in the whole vertical crack—and a few seconds later I swing up and join him.

  J.C. has tied a good knot for our two-rope rappel—a stuck and irretrievable rope can be a nightmare on such a long rappel, and we need that extra twice-80-feet-each 160 feet of rope for the final single-rope descent from the crack here.

  “Left rope to be pulled!” Jean-Claude and I shout out in unison. Pull the wrong rope, and J.C.’s beautiful knot will jam in the rappel sling we’d rigged, and we’re in trouble.

  I check the ends of the ropes and remove a couple of small twists and the safety knots we’d tied at the end of the strands. Then—taking the left rope we’d both just shouted about as a reminder—I give it a steady pull. As it starts to travel freely and fall, I shout “Rope!”—an old habit and a necessary one. Eighty feet of falling rope can knock a climber off even the best narrow platform.

  We pull the first strand and coil it as I shout “Rope!” once more and bring down the second length.

  There’s no jam. There’s no debris falling with it. We retrieve the second rope, coil it, and J.C. begins knotting the two together in that flawless Chamonix Guide knot he does when he unites ropes.

  Five minutes later we’re on the ground, retrieving the long rope and getting out of its way as the mass of it hits the ground, tossing up dust and pinecones.