The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  The Deacon said quickly, “Did Bromley tell you why he was interested in this yeti story?”

  Finch merely shook his head. Then he stepped forward, bowed slightly, clicked his heels together in a formal manner that was almost Prussian, shook each of us by the hand, and said, “Good-bye, gentlemen. I somehow feel that I will never see any of you again, but I wish you all good fortune in your travels, in your adventure on Everest, and in your…search.”

  Chapter 8

  Seek out Messrs. Burberry, Haymarket

  (“ask for Mr. Pink”).

  T he Deacon had informed us the previous November that for the 1921 through 1924 expeditions, the Alpine Club and Everest Committee had allocated £50 per man for his full “kit.” He also told us that most of these upper-class gentlemen had spent additional money of their own for their outfitting, so he had taken it upon himself to allocate £100 of Lady Bromley’s budget for each of us in our outfitting and would add to that if necessary.

  Even with the Deacon’s personal checklist from his ’21 and ’22 expeditions, as well as the updated 1924 gear list given to him to by his friend the filmmaker-climber Captain John B. L. Noel, finding and purchasing our clothing and specialized climbing gear for Mount Everest was almost the precise equivalent of preparing for a trip to the South Pole. But then, of course, the entire British effort to climb Everest to this date—up to and including the final disappearance of Irvine and Mallory the previous year—had used South Polar expeditions as their template: i.e., using porters to set a series of food and matériel caches in stages along the way to the Pole—or, in our case, at different altitudes on the mountain—and then shifting backward and forward through these camps until a smaller, select group, given a window of good weather, could make their dash for the summit, as Robert Falcon Scott had toward the South Pole thirteen years earlier, just him and his handpicked group of four good men planning to sledge their 1,600-mile round trip to the Pole and back. Since Scott and all four of his men had died during that ill-advised and bad-luck-plagued attempt, it was an analogy I tried not to dwell on.

  Still, the clothing and materials we were buying now were very similar—with a few wonderful modern improvements—to what Scott and his men had worn to their cold deaths in the Antarctic.

  The first item on the sacred List was windproof clothing, and for that, the List said, we should “Seek out Messrs. Burberry, Haymarket (‘ask for Mr. Pink’).” Jean-Claude and I were a little intimidated by what was reputed to be one of the ritziest of all London haberdashers—“outfitters to Ernest Shackleton” and all that. So J.C. and I went together on a day when the Deacon was busy with other expedition preparation business.

  “Mr. Pink,” it turned out, was indisposed and not at the Messrs. Burberry establishment on Haymarket that particular day, but a formally dressed and impeccably polite “Mr. White” spent nearly three hours helping us choose clothing and sizes before we left with a receipt for our purchases and a promise that they would be delivered to our hotel that very afternoon. It turned out that the parcels beat us back to the hotel, and we’d only stopped for a single post-Burberry pint on the way.

  The majority of what we purchased at Messrs. Burberry was in the Shackleton line of windproof knickerbockers, smocks, and gloves. We purchased fingerless woolen mitts that went inside larger mitts made of Shackleton gabardine. We added thick woolen mufflers to our Burberry-buying list.

  We also needed protection for our heads and faces at Everest altitudes—or even at the 17,000-foot and higher altitudes of the many passes on the 350-mile hike through Tibet to the mountain—and, rather amazingly I thought, Messrs. Burberry sold leather flying, or perhaps motorcycle, helmets with rabbit or fox fur linings and earflaps that tied under one’s chin. Also available—and we each bought one—were face masks made of a thin, soft, breathable, leather-lined chamois. This awe-inspiring combination of leather flaps and straps and fur and brass toggles was topped off with massive goggles made of Crooke’s glass which could be sewn into the leather face mask and helmet if we so chose. The thick glass darkened our view and would shield our eyes from the terrible sunlight at high altitudes. Every climber knew the story of Edward Norton, who’d left his goggles off during his and Somervell’s daring 1922 traverse across the North Face and their failed attempt to climb up the snow-filled great gully that runs down the face of the mountain from the summit. The climbing was so technical that Norton removed his goggles for hours to make sure he could see where he was setting his hands and feet. He’d assumed that since he was climbing on bare rock more than on reflective snow or ice, the sunlight wouldn’t hurt his eyes.

  They didn’t succeed in climbing the treacherous couloir, but that night upon descending to Camp IV, Norton was hit with blinding pain in both eyes. He’d given himself ophthalmia—snow blindness with an accompanying infection—and the pain and blindness afflicted him for sixty straight hours after that. They had to help the blinded man down to Advanced Base Camp and put him in a tent covered with sleeping bags to hold out the painful light. Norton’s suffering in that tent was said to have been terrible.

  The Shackleton jackets—they were waxed-cotton anoraks, really—had helped keep the wool clothing from earlier expeditions from getting soaked through, but they did very little to hold in warmth, despite their theoretical resistance to wind. The Deacon had this wild idea that a climber—at least the three of us climbers—might be able to survive in the open after dark on Everest with the combination of Finch’s goose down jackets and our waterproof Shackleton jackets. Perhaps—not probably, but just perhaps—we would have clothing warm enough to keep us alive all night in an open bivouac above 25,000 feet.

  The few layers that Irvine and Mallory had been wearing when they disappeared, said the Deacon, wouldn’t keep them alive for an hour of sitting still after sunset on the North East Ridge. “I can’t guarantee that Mr. Finch’s eiderdown coats will make the difference between life and death up there,” the Deacon had said when we’d been deciding on outerwear (actually, when he had been deciding), “but I know Finch was warmer than all the rest of us in ’twenty-two, plus the eiderdown is lighter than more layers of wool, and the Shackleton overjackets should keep the down loft dry, so it’s worth the wager.”

  I never liked the word “wager” used when it applied to our lives on the highest mountain on earth.

  The day after our visit to Messrs. Burberry, Jean-Claude and I joined the Deacon on a boot-purchasing trip to Fagg Bros. on Jermyn Street. There all three of us were fitted for a recently designed—for polar exploration, of course—leather-soled felt boot that was intentionally made oversized to accommodate at least three pairs of thick wool socks. Few of the 1924 climbers had chosen to wear the felt boots once they were above the lower glacier, which meant that no one knew for sure how the boots performed for rock and ice climbing at real altitude.

  “Why can’t I use my own climbing boots?” asked Jean-Claude. “They have served me well for years. They only need re-soling from time to time.”

  “All of us in the first two expeditions, even Finch, and all of the high-climbers on last year’s expedition, wore our own hobnailed boots,” said the Deacon. “And we all suffered from cold feet, several had frostbite, and some lost toes. Sandy Irvine told John Noel last year that the reason is that these specialized alpine climbing boots not only have the hobnails—in whatever pattern you choose, and Mallory and everyone chose different ones—but also have little metal plates driven between the inner and outer soles to give extra grip. And some of the ‘nails’ on the hobnails are serrated.”

  “So?” I said, impatient at last with our team leader. “Did these expensive hobnailed boots give better grip? If so, the metal plates are a good idea, right? They can’t weigh that much.”

  The Deacon shook his head in that way that always meant No, you don’t understand.

  “Irvine did suggest we use fewer hobnails, for lightness’s sake,” he said. “In the army, we were told that every pound of
weight on our feet was equal to ten on our back. Our leather boots during the War were substantial, but designed to be light—for maximum marching. But it’s not the weight that Sandy Irvine was warning Noel about, it was the transmission of cold.”

  “Transmission of cold?” repeated Jean-Claude as if not sure of the English phrase.

  “Leather soles and thick socks insulate against the terrible cold of the rock and ice high on the mountain to some extent,” said the Deacon. “But Irvine had a theory that the hobnailed boots everyone was wearing were conducting heat from the body through the feet via those metal plates and the hobnails themselves. Heat always flows to cold, of course, and that, according to Irvine’s theory, is why there were so many cases of near-frostbitten toes and some of the real thing. On our expedition, Henry Morshead had to have a toe and several fingertips amputated when we got back to India. He applied to the nineteen twenty-four expedition, but was turned down because of those injuries. So I agree with Sandy Irvine that the hobnailed boots lose body heat to the rock or ice.”

  “Then why are we here?” I said. “I might as well wear my trusty old climbing boots if these more expensive hobnailed things are just going to get my feet colder sooner.” That sentence sounded childishly petulant even to my own ears.

  The Deacon unfolded several papers from his jacket pocket. On each sheet were carefully diagramed pencil or ink drawings, with columns of handwritten text to either side. The spelling was terrible, but the instructions were clear—Sandy Irvine had made his own revision of the standard alpine climbing boot design, showing where layers of felt should be added between the welt and the nailed sole. Irvine’s summary (the Deacon confirmed that these were his actual notes, given to Captain Noel during the last days before Irvine disappeared with Mallory) concluded in precise handwriting but in terrible spelling, Boots shulde be spareingly naild for liteness—everry ouns counts!

  “This spelling,” I said to the Deacon, holding up the folded note as if it were evidence. Everyone knew after the months of newspaper accounts and funeral oratory that Andrew “Sandy” Comyn Irvine had gone to Merton College, Oxford. “The result of high-altitude oxygen deprivation?”

  The Deacon shook his head. “Noel said that Irvine was one of the cleverest young men he’d ever met…a near-genius at engineering and in-the-field tinkering…but there was some problem that never allowed the boy to learn to spell correctly. It didn’t seem to hold him back in any way. He rowed crew for the OUBC—Oxford University Boat Club—and was a member of the rather infamous Myrmidon dining club at Merton.”

  “Infamous?” said Jean-Claude. He’d been carefully examining Irvine’s diagrams for the special boots and looked up in surprise. “Irvine was part of something…infamous?”

  “A dining club of rich boys, most of them excellent athletes, who specialized in breaking university rules and windows,” said the Deacon. He took back the folded sheets of paper and handed them to the attentive Fagg Brother who had been discussing boots with us. “Now our decision is whether to go with Irvine’s design for the newer, possibly warmer alpine climbing boots, or stick to the new felt ones, or get the super-rigid types of boots that Jean-Claude has asked us to use with his newly designed crampons, or just bring our own.”

  “Can we not do all four things?” asked Jean-Claude. “Soon I will show you why the very rigid boots I requested may be necessary on Everest. So the four types of boots—high felt for cold, extra-rigid for my new crampon design, Irvine’s felt and hobnail boots, and our own old boots, perhaps resoled, for backup. If Lady Bromley’s money allows?”

  “It allows,” said the Deacon. He pointed to the diagrams and said to Mr. Fagg, “Two pairs of these specialized boots with the extra felt layer and metal-plates-not-touching-metal-nails for each of us. Two pairs of the extra-rigid boots—Jean-Claude has a page with the specifications. And two pairs each of the Laplander Antarctic felt boots. We have time to be measured now.”

  But it was not Finch’s balloon coat or the Irvine-designed new boots that were the largest change made in outfitting our tiny new expedition in 1925.

  As soon as J.C. had rejoined us after his last trip to France, he asked urgently for two days of our time before the end of January. The Deacon replied that it was impossible; he simply didn’t have two days to waste between January and late February, when we were destined to sail for India.

  “It’s important, Ree-shard,” said Jean-Claude. At this point J.C. used the Deacon’s first name only on rare occasions, and I was always amused when he used the French pronunciation. “Très important.”

  “Important enough that the success or failure of the entire expedition may depend upon it?” The Deacon’s tone was not friendly.

  “Oui. Yes.” J.C. looked at both of us. “I think that, yes, these two days may be so important that the success or failure of our entire expedition may depend upon it.”

  The Deacon sighed and pulled out a tiny notebook-diary with calendar that he kept in his jacket pocket. “The last weekend in the month,” he said at last. “The twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of January. I have several important things…I’ll move them. That’s a full-moon weekend…will that make any difference?”

  “It might,” said Jean-Claude. He flashed his sudden, wide, boy-like grin. “The full moon may well make some difference. Yes. Merci, mon ami.”

  We left at sunrise—or what passed for sunrise on that freezing, gray, foggy, snow-spitting late January day—on Saturday the twenty-fourth. None of us owned an automobile, so the Deacon had arranged to borrow one from a friend of his named Dick Summers. It was a Vauxhall, and in my memory the vehicle was about thirty feet long—it had three rows of seats with plenty of legroom and tires that came up almost to my chest. (The mild irony, explained the Deacon, was that Dick Summers had used this same Vauxhall less than two years before to make the first-ever automotive crossing of the rough gravel road—little more than a trail, said the Deacon—in both directions over the difficult Wrynose and Hardknot passes in the Lake District. When I commented that I didn’t see much irony in this, the Deacon lit his pipe and said, “True. I forgot to add that while Summers did the driving on that adventure, Sandy Irvine rode in the third-row seat with two attractive young ladies.”)

  We learned within moments of leaving Summers’s storage garage that the huge Vauxhall was better suited to summer expeditions over high passes than it was to winter driving. It was a convertible—what the Brits called “a ragtop” or “topless”—and although it had taken the three of us only thirty minutes of swearing and smashed fingers to get the impossibly complex roof apparatus properly raised and locked, and then another half hour to get the soft side and rear windows buttoned and snapped in properly, as soon as we were on a London street heading northwest out of the city, we realized that the damned machine had more gaps in its superstructure than a cheap colander. Within ten minutes of getting the huge auto onto the streets, snow was blowing in our faces and piling up along the wooden floorboards, on our feet, and in our laps.

  “How long a drive did you say this is?” the Deacon asked Jean-Claude, who was at the wheel. J.C. hadn’t yet revealed our destination, which irritated the Deacon all the more. (Not that he seemed to need many reasons those days for being irritated; the amount of logistical work he was doing for our limited little “recovery expedition” was leaving him no time for sleep or food, much less relaxation or exercise, and was visibly wearing him down.)

  “Less than a six-hour drive, I am told, on a nice summer day,” replied J.C. happily, both wool-gloved hands firmly on the giant steering wheel, and spluttering a bit of snow off his lips. “Perhaps a little longer today.”

  “Ten hours?” The Deacon’s voice was a growl as he tried to light his pipe. It was difficult for him since he was wearing our new fingerless gloves under our new wool and then Shackleton-cloth mittens. At least we had dressed for the South Pole for the drive to this outing.

  “May be lucky if we get there in twelve hours,” chirpe
d Jean-Claude. “Please sit back, as you say, and relax.”

  No chance of that for two good reasons: first, the Vauxhall had a theoretical heater in the dash, and all three of us were huddled forward toward it, me from the second-row seat, even though the thing blew out only cold air; and second, Jean-Claude was not used to driving any automobile, but especially not in England, so the trip on snow and ice was terrifying even between his lapses as to which side of the road to drive on.

  The snow fell harder. We continued on northwest—the only other vehicles foolhardy enough to be on the roads this day were lorries—through Hemel Hempsted, then Coventry, then the smoky-black city of Birmingham, then on toward Shrewsbury.

  “We’re going to northern Wales,” said the Deacon with a sigh, long before we got to Shrewsbury. Somehow he managed to make “Wales” rhyme with “Hells.”

  The wide third seat, and half of my second seat, were taken up with huge and heavy duffel bags which J.C. had needed our help to lift into the car. They were heavy. And the steel clank and heavy metal bangs coming from the bags as we slewed left and right in dizzying attempts to find a straight line down the road again over the snow and ice made me guess that there was a lot of serious equipment in those bags.

  “Is this the oxygen apparatus you brought with us?” I asked from where I gripped the front seat ahead of me like the restraining bar on a roller coaster.

  “Non,” said Jean-Claude absently, chewing his lower lip while he tried to thread the needle with a twelve-foot-wide Vauxhall between an oncoming lorry and an impenetrable hedge and deep ditch to the left of our steeply crowned and snow-covered road.

  The Deacon removed his pipe for a second. I’d just decided that I should lean closer and hold my hands out to it—his pipe—as a source of warmth rather than toward the car’s so-called “heater.”