The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  “So you set up camp on the North Col?” says the Deacon, lighting and breathing his pipe alive.

  “We did not!” cried Sigl. “We had no camp on the North Col.”

  “Kami Chiring saw at least two tents on the same ledge on the Col that Norton and Mallory had used for their Camp Four,” says the Deacon. Again, his voice is more curious than challenging. A man simply trying to ascertain a few facts to help a grieving mother get over the confusing disappearance of her son.

  “The tents were Bromley’s,” says Sigl. “One was already in tatters from the high winds. The same winds that forced the retreating Bromley and Meyer off the ridgeline onto the unstable snow of the face just above Camp Five. I shouted at them in both English and German not to go onto the face—that the snow there was not stable—but either they did not hear me through the wind or they ignored me.”

  The Deacon’s heavy eyebrows rise slightly. “You were close enough to speak to them?”

  “To shout to them,” Sigl says in tones one would use with a slow child. “We were still thirty meters or more apart. Then the snow under them simply shifted and fell thousands of feet down the face in one roaring mass. They disappeared completely in the avalanche and I heard no more from them.”

  “You didn’t attempt to go lower to see if they might have survived?” There is no accusation in his voice, but Bruno Sigl still bridles and glowers as if he’s been insulted.

  “It was impossible to go lower on that face. There was no face left. All the snow on it had disappeared with the avalanche, and it was obvious that young Bromley and Kurt Meyer were dead—buried under tons of snow thousands of feet below—gone. Hinüber.”

  The Deacon nods as if he fully understands. I remember that he had seen—and warned George Mallory against trying to ascend—the long snow slope leading to the North Col, a slope that had killed seven of Mallory’s porters in the avalanche on Everest in 1922.

  “You wrote in your newspaper reports and in fact have just repeated that the wind on the ridge leading up to Camp Six was so terrible that both Lord Percival and Herr Meyer had to retreat to the rock bands and ice fields of the North Face for their descent to Camp Five,” says the Deacon.

  “Ja, that is accurate.”

  “Presumably, Herr Sigl, you were also forced off the ridge and onto the face during your ascent in searching for the two men. That means you met them, saw them, and shouted to them, and they to you, while on the face rather than the ridge. Which would explain the avalanche that would not have happened on the ridge itself.”

  “Yes,” says Sigl. His tone around the English word has a finality to it, as if the interview is now over.

  “And yet,” says the Deacon, steepling his long fingers, “you tell me that both you and the doomed men were able to shout and be heard at a distance of over thirty meters—a hundred feet apart—even with such a wind roaring over the ridge.”

  “What are you suggesting, Englander?”

  “I am suggesting nothing,” says the Deacon. “But I’m remembering that when I was on that ridge at that altitude in nineteen twenty-two and then forced off the ridge with two other climbers and onto the rocks of the North Face by the wind, we couldn’t hear each other’s shouts at five paces, much less at thirty meters.”

  “So you are calling me a liar?” Sigl’s tone is very low and very tight. He’s taken his hands and forearms off the table, and his right arm moves as if he is taking something—a small pistol, a knife—from his broad belt.

  The Deacon sets his pipe down carefully and lays both of his long-fingered, rock-scarred hands palm down on the table. “Herr Sigl, I am not calling you a liar. I am trying to understand Bromley’s—and his Austrian climbing partner’s—last minutes alive so that I can report in detail to Lady Bromley, who is beside herself with grieving. So much so that she has fantasies that her son is still alive on the mountain. I presume that once you left the ridgeline to continue climbing along the face, the force and roar of the wind died enough that you were able to shout thirty meters to Bromley.”

  “Ja,” says Sigl, his face still closed with anger. “That was precisely the situation.”

  “What,” asks the Deacon, “did you shout to them, especially to Bromley, and what did they say in return before the avalanche? And which of the two appeared to be snow-blind?”

  Sigl hesitates, as if any more participation in this interview will be too much of a surrender for him. But then he speaks. His friend with the strange eyebrows and haunted eyes, Herr Hess, appears to be following all the exchanges in English with absorbed comprehension, but I can’t be sure. Perhaps the thin man is merely straining to understand a word or two, or is waiting impatiently for Sigl to translate. At any rate, he seems quite interested in the exchange.

  I’m convinced, though I’m not sure why, that the man to my immediate right—the famous climber Karl Bachner—does understand the English being batted back and forth.

  “I called to Bromley, who seemed to be leading the snow-blinded and staggering Meyer, ‘Why are you two so high?’” says Sigl. “And then I shouted up at them, ‘Do you need help?’”

  “Were your six German explorer friends with you on the ridge then when you were shouting toward Bromley?” asks the Deacon.

  Sigl shakes his cropped and shaven head. “Nein, nein. My friends were more affected by the altitude than was I. They were either resting at Camp Three—as your English expedition had called it—or just come up onto the North Col. I had climbed the North Ridge to Camp Five and above alone. As I explained in my various newspaper and alpine journal reports, I was alone when I encountered Bromley and his snow-blind partner. Certainly you have read my statements before this?”

  “Of course.” The Deacon resumes smoking his pipe.

  Sigl sighs, seemingly at the perverse slowness of his English interlocutor.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what was your destination, Herr Sigl? Where were you originally headed with those Mongolian horses and mules and gear?”

  “To see if I could meet George Mallory and Colonel Norton and perhaps reconnoiter Mount Everest from a distance, Herr Deacon. Just as I explained earlier.”

  “And perhaps to climb it?” asks the Deacon.

  “Climb it?” repeats Bruno Sigl and laughs harshly. “My friends and I had only basic climbing equipment—nowhere near enough to lay siege to such a mountain. Also, the monsoon was already weeks overdue and might descend upon us at any minute. It was your Bromley who was foolish enough to think that he could climb Everest using the few leftover tins of food, fraying rope ladders, and snow-covered fixed ropes that Mallory’s expedition had left behind. Bromley was a fool. To his last steps onto the unstable snow, he was a total fool. He killed not only himself but a fellow countryman of mine.”

  Several of the German climbers to the right of me nod in agreement, as does the Rudolf Hess fellow. The big man with the shaved head next to Sigl, the fellow introduced as someone’s bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, continues to stare straight ahead through all this banter as if he is drugged. Or simply totally uninterested.

  “My dear Herr Deacon,” continues Sigl, “by all accounts Mount Everest is not the mountain for a solo ascent.” He looks at me hard. “Or even for two…or three…ambitious alpine-style climbers from different countries. Mount Everest will never be climbed alpine style. Or by solo ascent. No, I only wanted to see the mountain from a distance. Besides, it is a British hill, is it not?”

  “Not at all,” says the Deacon. “It belongs to whoever climbs it first, whatever the Royal Geographical Society’s Alpine Club might think about the matter.”

  Sigl grunts.

  “When you shouted at Bromley and Meyer on the face, that last day,” continues the Deacon. “Could you describe again what you said to them?”

  “As I said, it was very brief,” says Sigl. He looks impatient.

  The Deacon waits.

  “I asked them—shouted to them—‘Why are you so high?’” Sigl says again. “And
then I asked if they needed help…they obviously did. Meyer was obviously snow-blind and so exhausted that he could not stand without Bromley’s help. The British lord himself looked confused, lost…dazed.”

  Sigl pauses to drink more beer.

  “I warned them not to step out onto the snow slope, they did, the avalanche began, and that was the end of all conversation with them…forever,” says Sigl. It’s obvious he is not going to repeat the story again.

  “You said that you called to them in German as well as in English,” says the Deacon. “Did Meyer respond in German?”

  “Nein,” says Sigl. “The man the Tibetans in Tingri had called Kurt Meyer seemed too exhausted and in pain from his snow blindness to speak. He never said a word. Right up until the avalanche took him away, he never uttered a word.”

  “Did you say—shout—anything else to them?”

  Sigl shakes his head. “The snow shifted under them, the avalanche carried them off the face of Everest, and I made my way back to the more solid ridge—almost crawling in the howling winds—and retreated down to Camp Four and then the North Col and then away from the mountain.”

  “You couldn’t see any hint of their bodies below?” asks the Deacon.

  Sigl is angry now. His lips are thin and his voice is a bark. “The drop from that point on the North Face to the Rongbuk Glacier below is more than five of your verdammte English miles! And I was not looking for their corpses eight kilometers below, Herr Deacon, I was using my ice axe to get off my own loose slab of snow—which might join the rest of the avalanche any second—and back to the ice-covered slabs of the North Ridge so that I could descend to the North Col as quickly as possible.”

  The Deacon nods his understanding. “What do you think those two were up to, then?” The Deacon’s voice sounds sincerely curious.

  Bruno Sigl looks down the table toward Bachner and the other German climbers and I wonder again How many of them are following this conversation in English?

  “It’s obvious what the truth was,” says Sigl, a tone of audible contempt in his voice now. “I stated it a few minutes ago. Were you not listening, Herr Deacon? Do you not see it as obvious yourself, Herr Deacon?”

  “Tell me again, please.”

  “Your Bromley—veteran of a few guided climbs in the Alps—decided that he could use the remnants of ropes and camps left behind by Norton and Mallory’s group to climb Mount Everest on his own, with only the idiot Kurt Meyer as his porter and fellow climber. It was pure Arroganz…Stolz…what is the Greek word…hubris. Pure hubris.”

  The Deacon nods slowly and taps his lower lip with the pipe stem as if a serious mystery has been cleared up. He says, “How high do you think they got before turning around?”

  Sigl snorts a laugh. “Who on earth cares?”

  The Deacon waits patiently.

  Eventually Bruno Sigl says, “If you’re thinking that the two fools might have summited, put it out of your mind. They’d been gone from our sight far too few hours to have gone much further than Camp Five…perhaps Camp Six if they’d used some of the oxygen apparatus left at Camp Five, if there was oxygen apparatus left there. Which I doubt. Not as high as Camp Six, I am certain of that.”

  “Why are you certain?” asks the Deacon in a reasonable, interested voice. He is still tapping his lower lip with the pipe stem.

  “The wind,” says Sigl with total finality. “The cold and wind. It was unbearable on the ridgeline where I met them just above Camp Five. Up near Camp Six, above eight thousand meters and then out onto the exposed higher North East Ridge or bare face up there, it would have meant death to try to proceed. There is no chance they had got that far, Herr Deacon. No chance at all.”

  “You’ve answered my questions with great patience, Herr Sigl,” says the Deacon. “I thank you in all sincerity. This information might help Lady Bromley put her mind at rest.”

  Sigl only grunts at that. Then he looks at me. “What are you staring at, young man?”

  “Your red flags on that wall in that roped-off corner,” I admit, pointing behind Sigl. “And the symbol in the white circle on the red flags.”

  Sigl stares at me and his blue eyes are as cold as ice. “Do you know what that symbol is, Herr Jacob Perry from America?”

  “Yes,” I say. I’d studied a lot of Sanskrit and the Indus Valley cultures at Harvard. “It’s the symbol from India, Tibet, and some other Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cultures meaning ‘good luck,’ or sometimes ‘harmony.’ The Sanskrit word for it, I believe, is svastika. I’m told that one finds it everywhere on old temples in India.”

  Sigl is glaring at me now, as if I might be making fun of him or of something sacred to him. The Deacon lights his pipe and looks at me but says nothing.

  “In today’s Deutschland,” Sigl says at last, barely moving his thin lips, “it is the swastika.” He spells it for me using English-sounding letters. “It is the glorious symbol of the NSDAP—Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. It and the man in those photographs will be the salvation of Germany.”

  I have good vision, but I can’t make out the “man in those photographs.” There are two rather small framed photos on the wall under the red flags in that roped-off corner, plus another furled red flag directly in the corner, rising about six feet high on a staff. I assume it’s a flag similar to the two hanging on the wall.

  “Come,” orders Bruno Sigl.

  Everyone—the Germans, including Hess and the baldheaded man next to Sigl on the opposite side of the table and Bachner and all the climbers on our side, followed by the Deacon still puffing at his pipe—get up as I follow Sigl to the corner.

  The rope that sets off this little corner memorial area—it looks like an ad hoc shrine—is simply quarter-inch climbing rope painted gold and anchored on two of those little posts that maître d’s keep their short velvet ropes hooked to at the entrance to fancy restaurants.

  One man appears in both photos, so I have to assume that he—as well as this socialist party with the swastika flag—is the “salvation of Germany.” In the photo below the red flag on the wall to the right, it is just the one man. At a distance one might think it’s a photo of Charlie Chaplin because of the silly little mustache under his nose, but it’s not Chaplin. This man has dark hair parted severely in the middle, dark eyes, and an intense—one might say furious—gaze at the camera or photographer.

  The photograph on the left shows the same man standing in a doorway—the doorway of this beer hall, I realize—with two other men. The other two are in military uniforms, the Charlie Chaplin–mustached fellow in baggy civilian clothes. He’s the shortest and certainly least imposing of the three men in the photograph.

  “Adolf Hitler,” says Bruno Sigl and looks closely at me for my response.

  I have none. I think I’ve heard the name in reference to some of the constant unrest here in the Germany of November 1924, but it has made no real impression on me. Evidently he’s a Communist leader within his National Socialism workers’ party.

  Behind me, the great climber Karl Bachner says, “Der Mann, den wir nicht antasten lassen.”

  I look to Sigl for some translation, but the German climber says nothing.

  “The man we will not see impugned,” the Deacon translates, the pipe in his hand now.

  I see now that the red flag with the white circle and swastika on the staff has been torn—as if bullets had passed through it—and bloodied, if the dried brown spots are indeed blood. I lift my hand toward it to ask a question.

  The baldheaded, round-faced muscleman who sat silent next to Sigl through the entire discussion at the table now moves quickly to slap my hand down and away so that I don’t actually touch the torn fabric.

  Shocked, I lower my hand and stare at the glowering wrestler-type.

  “This is the Blutfahne—the Blood Flag—sacred to followers of Adolf Hitler and of Nationalsozialismus,” says Bruno Sigl. “It must not be touched by non-Aryan
s. Never by an Ausländer.”

  The Deacon does not translate the word for me, but I can guess the meaning from context.

  “Is that blood?” I ask stupidly. Everything I’ve done, said, or felt this evening feels stupid to me. And I’m starving to death.

  Sigl nods. “From the massacre of nine November of last year, when the Munich police brutally opened fire on us. The flag belonged to the Fifth SA Sturm—much of the blood on it is from our comrade, the martyr Andreas Bauriedl, who fell atop the fallen flag when he was murdered by the police.”

  “The unsuccessful Beer Hall Putsch,” the Deacon explains to me. “It started from this beer hall, as I remember.”

  Sigl glares at him through my friend’s pipe smoke. “We prefer the term Hitlerputsch or Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch,” snaps the German climber. “And it was not—as you say—‘unsuccessful.’”

  “Really?” says the Deacon. “The police put down the uprising, scattered the marching Nazis, and arrested its leaders, including your Herr Hitler. I believe he’s currently serving a five-year sentence for treason in the old fortress prison of Landsberg, on a cliff above the river Lech.”

  Sigl smiles strangely. “Adolf Hitler has become a hero of the German people. He will be out of prison before the end of this year. Even while there, he is treated like royalty by his so-called ‘guards.’ They know that he will someday lead this nation.”

  The Deacon taps out his pipe, sets it in his tweed jacket pocket, and nods appreciatively. “Thank you, Herr Sigl, for tonight’s information and for setting me straight, as they say in Jake’s America, about my misperceptions and faulty information regarding the Hitlerputsch and the current status of Herr Hitler.”

  “I will walk you to the door of the Bürgerbräukeller,” says Sigl.

  Our train to the border on the way to Zurich leaves the station promptly at ten p.m. Promptness, I’m learning, is a German trait.

  I’m glad that we have a private compartment in which we can stretch out on the padded benches and doze, if we choose, before we change rails and trains at the Swiss border later in the night. On the cab ride from the Bürgerbräukeller to the Munich train station, I realize that I’ve sweated through my undershirt, through my starched shirt, and into my thick wool suit jacket. My hands are trembling as I watch the lights of Munich recede into the relative darkness of the countryside. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see the lights of any city disappear behind me.