The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  Instead of inspecting and coiling it immediately, as would be proper, we both walk over to the boulder where the Deacon still appears to be sleeping.

  I don’t believe it. I think he has been watching us during the hard parts of the climb and traverse.

  But I use my jagged, torn sneaker to kick him on the knee to get his attention.

  The Deacon shoves his cap up and opens his eyes.

  I hear my voice coming out as an actual growl. “Are you going to tell us what the fu—…what the hell…this has to do with Everest?”

  “Yes,” says the Deacon. “If you’ve brought my pipe back.”

  Not smiling, Jean-Claude retrieves the pipe from his pocket. I’m sort of sorry to see that it hasn’t been snapped in two during the rappels.

  The Deacon puts it in the chest pocket of his jacket, stands, and looks up at the face. All three of us are staring up at it.

  “I climbed this with George Mallory in nineteen nineteen,” he says. “Five years, for me at least, of no climbing—four during the War and one when I was trying to get a job after the War.”

  Jean-Claude and I wait, not happy. We don’t want old tales of heroism, whether about climbing or war. Our hearts and minds are aimed at Mount Everest now, a climb of snow, glaciers, crevasses, then ice walls, glazed rock slabs, windblown ridges, and a huge North Face that we won’t want to get very far out on.

  “Mallory had done the rappel recon down from the top and had stopped to smoke his pipe on the grassy ridge,” says the Deacon. “It was only Mallory, me, and Ruth—his wife—on this climb, and Ruth didn’t want to do the full ascent. To the left of the grassy ridge, Mallory found the only indentation in the overhang that we might be able to climb without pitons, rope ladders, and all the modern overhang equipment.

  “I went. But the move from the crack to the grassy ledge and then up again to and over the overhang took everything I had and more. We were roped together, but the belay points were as impossible as you just discovered them to be. Mallory and I had to do the same traverse across the same rock.”

  “What does this have to do with Everest other than telling us that George Mallory is…was…a good rock climber?” There’s a bit of a growl still in my voice.

  “When we came down the backside and around here to get our gear and hike out,” says the Deacon, looking back at the crag, “Mallory told his wife and me that he’d forgotten his pipe up on that grassy ledge, and before I had time to tell him that he had other pipes, that I’d buy him a new damned pipe, George is scrambling up the crack again, all the way to where you belayed, Jean-Claude, and then did that smooth rock traverse alone…by himself.”

  I tried to imagine it. All I could see was a big black spider scuttling across the rock. Alone? No hope of belay or help? Even in 1919, such solo climbs, without protection of some sort, were considered bad form, showing off, and anathema to the protocols of the Royal Geographical Society’s Alpine Club, to which Mallory belonged.

  “Then he took the sixty-foot coil of rope he’d climbed and traversed with, and rappelled down,” the Deacon continues. “With his pipe. And with Ruth furious at him for essentially doing the entire climb, except the overhang bit again, solo.”

  J.C. and I wait in silence. There’s something here that might yet make sense of the day.

  “On their last day, Mallory and Irvine left Camp Six at twenty-six thousand eight hundred feet about nine in the morning. They were slow to get started,” says the Deacon. “You’ve both seen the photos and maps of Everest, but you have to be on that ridge, in the high winds and bone-shattering cold, to understand it.”

  Jean-Claude and I keep listening.

  “Once you get on the North East Ridge,” the Deacon says, “and if the winds allow you to stay on it, it’s like climbing steep, ice-covered, downward-tilted slabs to the summit. Except for the Three Steps.”

  J.C. and I exchange glances. We’ve seen the Three Steps on the ridge maps of Everest, but on the map or in the photos taken from a great distance, they were just that—steps. Not a real barrier.

  “The First Step you can work around along the North Face, just below it, then scramble back up to the ridge again if you’re good,” says the Deacon. “The Third Step no one alive knows about. But the Second Step—I’ve reached it. The Second Step…”

  The Deacon’s expression is strange, almost pain-filled, as if he is telling some terrible tale from the Great War.

  “The Second Step you can’t work around. The Second Step comes at you out of the whirling clouds and blowing snow like the gray bow of a dreadnought. The Second Step Mallory and Irvine—and the three of us—would have to free-climb. And this at twenty-eight thousand three hundred feet or so, where to take one step makes you stop to gasp and wheeze for two minutes.

  “The Second Step, my friends, this bow-front gray hull of a battleship in our way on the North East Ridge route to the summit, is about a hundred feet high—much less than your scramble for the pipe today—but it is composed of steep, brittle, treacherous rock the whole way. The only possible route I could see before the wind and my climbing partner, Norton, growing ill, forced us down—the only possible climbing route I could see on the Second Step is a fifteen- or sixteen-foot perpendicular slab on the upper part of the free climb, which in turn is split vertically with three wide cracks running up towards the top of Step Two.

  “This climb you just did, if you’d also done the overhang to the summit, is rated ‘Very Severe.’ The technical free climb of the Second Step—above twenty-eight thousand feet, please recall, where even when one is hauling heavy oxygen equipment, your body and mind are dying every second you stay at that altitude or increase it—the rating of the Second Step is beyond the Alpine Club’s ‘Very Severe’ rating system. It may be impossible to climb such a rock face at such an altitude. And then there is the Third Step waiting for us higher on the ridge, the last real obstacle, I believe, except for a pyramid snow slope that one has to climb just below the last summit ridge—that Third Step may be even more impossible.”

  Jean-Claude just stares at the Deacon for a long silent moment.

  Then J.C. says, “So you had to see if we—or actually if Jake—could do such a comparable free climb. And then haul me up like a bag of laundry. And he did…so…I don’t understand. Does this mean you believe we can do the same sort of climbing above twenty-eight thousand feet?”

  The Deacon smiles in earnest now. “I believe we can try without it amounting to suicide,” he says. “I believe I can do the crux of the Second Step, and now I think that Jake can as well, and that you will be an able third partner, Jean-Claude. This doesn’t give us the summit of Everest—we simply don’t know what’s beyond the Second Step, save for perhaps Mallory’s and Irvine’s frozen corpses, which might also be at the base of the Second Step—but it means we have a fighting chance.”

  I coil the last of the rope, secure it over my shoulder and rucksack, and think about this. In my angry heart I forgive the Deacon somewhat for putting us through this go-get-my-pipe charade. Mallory had free-climbed that solo, after climbing it following the Deacon—the sporting thing to do, Mallory had said, according to the Deacon, since he, Mallory, had the advantage of the rappel recon.

  We head out toward the distant car, almost two hours of rough hiking after our climbing day, and I feel like my insides are flying. My heart—or soul, or whatever’s in there at the core of who each of us is—has taken happy flight and is soaring above us.

  The three of us are going to climb Mount Everest.

  Whatever the outcome is of finding the remains of Lord Percival Bromley—and I assign that a very low probability—the three of us are going to make our attempt, alpine style, at the summit of the tallest mountain in the world. And the Deacon now thinks that we can climb that dreadnought bow of the vertical face of the Second Step. Or at least that I can.

  From this moment on, a new fierce fire burns in me, and it continues to burn in the weeks and months ahead.
r />   We are going to climb that goddamned mountain. There is now no other choice or alternative.

  The three of us are going to stand on the summit of the world.

  Chapter 6

  Der Mann, den wir nicht antasten lassen.

  I haven’t been to Germany in the year I’ve spent in Europe, doing almost all of my climbing in France and Switzerland, although we met more than a few German climbers in Switzerland: some Germans were friendly; many more were not. When I first met Jean-Claude and the Deacon, the three of us staring at the North Face of the Eiger and agreeing that the face was simply beyond the climbing techniques and technology of our day, there was a team of five very intense, very self-serious, very unfriendly Germans nearby who were talking as if they were actually going to try to climb die Eigerwand—the wall of the North Face. They didn’t, of course. They barely got beyond the Bergschrund and scrambled around a bit on the first 100 feet or so of slope before abandoning their bold quest.

  For our trip to Germany, the Deacon and I first travel back to France, where he has to conclude some financial business, cross Switzerland to Zurich and then north to the border, where we change trains, since at the time railroad stock ran on different-gauge rails in Germany than in all the surrounding countries. This was a defensive military measure on the part of Germany’s neighbors, of course, even though the former land of the Kaiser had been defanged by the Versailles Treaty. The Deacon tells me in soft tones, even though we have a private compartment to ourselves (thanks to Lady Bromley’s expense account), that the current Weimar Republic government is a rather inefficient and mostly left-wing debating club.

  Then on to Munich in the morning.

  It is a rainy day, low gray clouds moving quickly westward, in the opposite direction of the train, and my first impressions of November 1924 Germany are a bit confused.

  The villages are tidy—overhanging eaves, some modern buildings mixed in with homes and public buildings that look like they were there in the Middle Ages. Cobblestones wet from the rain reflect what little daylight there is. Some of the men visible walking the village streets are dressed like peasant farmers or overall-clad factory workers, but I also catch glimpses of men in modern double-breasted gray business suits carrying leather briefcases. But everyone I see out the train windows—peasants, workers, and businessmen alike—looks…weighed down. As if the gravity here in Germany is greater than in England, France, and Switzerland. Even the young men in business suits hurrying under their rain-slicked umbrellas look slightly bent, slightly stooped, heads bowed, gazes lowered, as if each were carrying some invisible burden.

  Then we move through an industrial area that is all long, dirty brick and cinderblock buildings amidst mountains of slag. A few towers and industrial chimneys throw up great fingers of flame that seem to cast an orange spotlight on the scudding rain clouds. I see no human beings in this landscape as I watch mile after mile of these ugly industrial monoliths and their mountains of cinders, slag, sand, and sheer refuse slide past my train car windows in the rain.

  “In January of last year,” the Deacon says, “the German government fell behind on reparation payments that were part of the treaty. The mark dropped from seventy-five to the dollar in nineteen twenty-one to seven thousand to the dollar by the beginning of nineteen twenty-three. The German government asked the Allies to grant a moratorium in reparation payments, at least until the mark began to regain some value. The response of the Allies was given by the French. Former Premier, now Prime Minister Poincaré sent in French troops to occupy the Ruhr and other industrial sites throughout the heart of Germany. When those troops arrived last year, January of ’twenty-three, the mark dropped to eighteen thousand to the dollar and had reached one hundred sixty thousand to the dollar and then a clear one million marks to the dollar by August first last year.”

  I try to understand this. Economics always bored me, and while I’d read that French troops had gone into Germany to occupy the industrial area, I certainly hadn’t paid any attention to what effect such an occupation would have on Germany’s economy, such as it was after the Great War.

  “By November of last year,” says the Deacon, leaning close to speak in little more than a whisper, “it would have taken a German four billion marks to buy a dollar. With the Ruhr French troops overseeing all industrial production, river traffic, and steel exports, Germany was effectively cut in two. So the German industrial workers, essentially working while under armed guard and supervision of the occupying French troops in each of those factories we’re passing, declared a general strike last year—and in most of these factories, as in the Ruhr, real production of steel or anything else has come to a stop because of the German workers’ passive resistance, active sabotage, and even guerrilla warfare. The French keep arresting and deporting and even lining up and shooting the presumed leaders of this slowdown, but it makes no difference.”

  “My God,” I say.

  The Deacon nods toward the men and women in the street. “Last year those people knew that even if they had millions of marks in their bank account, it wouldn’t be enough to buy them a pound of flour or a few raggedy carrots. Forget being able to pay for several ounces of sugar or a pound of meat.”

  He took a deep breath and pointed through the rain-streaked window toward the suburbs of Munich we were entering. “There’s a lot of frustration and anger out there, Jake. Be careful when we go to meet Sigl. Americans, even though they helped win the War, are an oddity. But many, not all, hate the British and French on sight, and Jean-Claude might not have been physically safe here in Munich.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I say, without even being sure of what “careful” will demand or amount to in this strange and sad and angry country.

  The Deacon has not even booked us into a hotel. We have tickets for sleeping berths on a train leaving for Zurich at ten p.m. I’m curious about this, since it would have been easy to put the cost even of luxury hotel rooms in Munich on Lady Bromley’s advance money expense account. I know that unlike Jean-Claude, the Deacon doesn’t hate Germany or Germans—I’m also aware that he’s traveled here frequently since the War—so it isn’t anxiety or fear that is rushing us out of town tonight even before we can get a good night’s sleep. I sense that there is something about this simple interview with climber Bruno Sigl that bothers the Deacon on some level I don’t understand.

  In a curt telegram, Sigl has agreed to meet us—briefly, he says, for he is a very busy man (his phrase)—in Munich at a beer hall called the Bürgerbräukeller way out on the southeastern fringes of the city. The appointment is for seven p.m., and the Deacon and I have time to stow our luggage, such as it is, at the train station, freshen up there a bit in the first-class lounge lavatory, and wander the strangely shopless streets of downtown Munich for an hour or two under our dark umbrellas before taking a cab to the edge of town.

  Munich looks old but not picturesque or attractive to me. It is still raining hard against the slate-shingled rooftops, and the streets are as dark and chilly as on any November evening in Boston. All my conscious life I’ve thought my first real encounter with Germany would be strolling down the Unter den Linden in rich summer evening light, with hundreds of well-dressed and friendly Germans strolling along nodding “Guten Abend” to me.

  The rain pours down as the cab’s window wipers slap uselessly against the rivulets on glass. We cross a river on a broad, empty bridge, and a few minutes later the surly cab driver announces in broken English that we are “hier”—at die Bürgerbräukeller in den Haidhausen neighborhood on Rosenheimer Strasse—and demands what has to be three times the legal fare. The Deacon pays it without protest, counting out the huge stack of high-numbered marks as if it were play money.

  The stone entrance arch to the beer hall is huge and has the words

  Bürger-

  Bräu-

  Keller

  tacked one atop the other in the middle of a circular, heavy-handed wreath, a sort of lumpy stone oval with an arc
h key design at the bottom. All of it is dripping water running from a steep slate roof and from several overflowing gutters. Through that arch toward the actual doorway, and it’s like we are entering a train station rather than a bar or restaurant. But at least it’s not raining in the foyer.

  When we are actually inside the Bürgerbräukeller, both the Deacon and I stop in a kind of shock.

  Besides the fact of two or three thousand people—mostly men, guzzling beer out of huge stone mugs at tables so rough-hewn that they look as if they’d been carved in the forest that very afternoon—the place is gigantic, echoing, more a huge auditorium than any sort of restaurant or pub that I’ve ever seen. The noise of conversation and accordion music—unless that’s people screaming while being tortured—hits me like a physical shove. The next shove is the smell: three thousand partly or totally unbathed Germans, mostly working men, judging from their rough clothes, and mixed with that wall of sweat smell washing over us like a rogue wave, an accompanying stink of beer so strong that I feel like I’ve fallen into the actual beer vat.

  “Herr Deacon? Come here. Here!” It’s a shouted order, not a request, from a man standing at a crowded table about halfway across the crowded room.

  The standing man, who I assume to be Bruno Sigl, watches us approach through the bedlam with an unblinking, cold, blue-eyed stare. Sigl has a European reputation as a good climber—especially good, according to the alpine journals, at route finding on previously unclimbed faces in the Alps—but except for the massive forearms visible because his dark tan shirtsleeves are rolled up, he doesn’t look like a climber to me. Too self-consciously overmuscled, too top-heavy, too stocky, too blocky. Sigl’s blond hair is cut so short that it’s almost flat as a bristle brush on top and is actually shaved on the sides. Many of the larger men sitting along the table with him sport similar haircuts. For Sigl, it’s not a good look because of the jug ears that jut out from his granite block of a face.