The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  “This ice hammer, my father and I call it ‘straight drooped,’” said J.C., “is superb for cutting steps on a steep ice or snow slope. And one does not have to lean out of balance as one would with either of our old longer ice axes.”

  I just shook my head.

  “The shortest one is there,” said the Deacon, pointing to a large hammer-sized thing made entirely of steel with a pointed and sort of threaded base and a long, flat pick on one side and very short adze on the other.

  J.C. smiled and lifted it, then handed it to the Deacon, who took it in his free hand. “Light. Aluminum?”

  “No, steel. But hollow in the shaft. This is what Father and I called the ‘technically curved’ short ice axe. For use on steep ice slopes, perfect for carving steps. This slightly longer one with the wooden handle, the one which looks more like a shortened version of a regular ice axe but with this long, curved, serrated pick, we called the ‘reverse curved’ axe. It is used”—he turned to the impossibly vertical ice wall behind him—“for that.”

  The Deacon had handed the two short ice axes to me and was rubbing his stubbled cheeks and chin. He hadn’t bothered to shave that morning, though we’d finally procured some hot water at that execrable inn.

  “I’m beginning to see,” he said.

  I was making axe-weapon downward swings with both sharp-picked…things. I imagined the long, curved picks penetrating a French skull.

  “How did you find this place…Cwm Idwal?” asked the Deacon. He was craning backward to look up at the vertical ice cliff, now glistening wickedly in the late-morning sun. Its terrifying slab of rock and ice hung directly above us like a giant weight that could drop 200 feet onto us at any time. The overhang was just too broad and thick to free-climb—the width of rock twice Jean-Claude’s entire height, at least, and the slabs of ice extending another five or six feet. There would be no sane way to get to the vertical rock and ice above the overhang for the last icy pitch of eight feet or so.

  “I asked British ice climbers for the best place in England and Wales,” responded Jean-Claude.

  “There are British ice climbers?” asked the Deacon. I didn’t know if he was faking his tone of wonder and surprise. I’d always assumed that the Deacon personally knew all British climbers. And most of the French and German ones as well.

  “A very few,” said J.C. with a small smile.

  “What next?” asked the Deacon, pointing to the still mostly full bag, sounding eager to see the next weird thing to pop out.

  Jean-Claude Clairoux turned around, stepped back, shielded his eyes, and joined the Deacon in looking up at the sheer ice wall and terrifying overhang. “Next,” he said, his voice almost lost in the rising breeze, “…next, all three of us climb that wall today. All of it. Including the overhang. To the top.”

  All right, I’ll be honest. I would have pissed my silken underwear and new woolen knickerbockers at that moment if I hadn’t been sure it would have frozen into a long and very uncomfortable icicle.

  “You…can…not…be…fucking…serious,” I said to my diminutive French ex-friend. It was only the second time in my life that I’d ever used that word and certainly the first time in the presence of my two new climbing partners.

  J.C. smiled.

  From the largest bag, J.C. had pulled out three sturdy but light leather…“harnesses” is the word that comes to mind—although there were metal carabiners on the front of the belt, where straps met in the center of the chest, and more loops and carabiners around the wide belt—and while the Deacon and I were tugging our harnesses on, dubiously, Jean-Claude simply lifted his left leg as high as it would go, kicked his new forward crampons of the 12-point set into the wall of ice, hammered in the pick end of both of his short ice axes—connected to his wrists, I noticed now, by short leather straps and loops—and pulled himself up until he was supporting himself just on that rigid left foot. His harness jingled because he was carrying a variety of self-designed steel implements on it—an extra ice tool of some sort set in its holster, a mass of shiny carabiners, a large bag of ice screws, other bags of jangly things set around his belt. A huge coil of rope was slung over his shoulder and across his chest, and now he slowly let it out beneath him as he started to climb.

  He pulled the short ice axe in his right hand down, jiggled it, pulled it out of the ice, and hammered the pick head in deep another four feet up. Still holding his weight on that left foot—easily, I thought—J.C. kicked his right foot into position several feet higher, wiggled the forward crampons of his left foot out of the ice, and pulled himself upward with the strength of both arms. He banged the left ice axe deep in the wall higher than the right axe, lifted his left foot, and kicked it into the ice.

  Standing as casually and easily six feet up the ice wall as he might have on a city sidewalk, J.C. looked over his shoulder at the Deacon—who’d finally got the harness rigged right—and said, “If this were the ice wall below the North Col and we had to prepare it for other climbers and porters, how long do you think it would take to hack out the necessary steps?”

  The Deacon squinted upward. “It’s too steep for steps. And the overhang…it’s impossible. Porters wouldn’t do it, even with fixed ropes.”

  “All right, then,” said J.C., not even breathing hard as he stood on that vertical face, “we’ll bring something like the hundred-foot ladder that Sandy Irvine strung together for the porters last year. For the porters to use when they follow us.”

  “That was after Mallory had free-climbed the chimney—a fissure in the ice wall,” said the Deacon. “They also rigged a pulley to pull up loads.”

  “But assuming one could climb this wall just by cutting steps,” persisted Jean-Claude. “How long for the first ascent?”

  The Deacon looked upward again. The sunlight on the vertical ice was blinding. He tugged his goggles on. “Three hours,” said the Deacon. “Maybe four. Maybe five.”

  “Seven,” I said. “At least seven hours.”

  J.C. smiled and began kicking and hammering his way up the ice wall again. Every 30 feet or so he would stop, create a tiny hole in the ice above or in front of him by tapping with the pointed end of his pick, remove a 12- to 18-centimeter ice screw from the bag on his belt, and screw it in by hand, the screw always angled uphill—that is, downward into the ice—with an angle of what I judged to be 45 to 60 degrees against the direction of his weight and pull. Sometimes, when the ice was so hard that the screw would not go in fully, J.C. used the sharp point of his ice axe pick or some sort of ice tool from his belt inserted into the eye of the screw to gain greater leverage for screwing it in.

  Each time he finished fastening a deep ice screw, he would snap on a carabiner and test it with his weight, his boot crampons never leaving the ice.

  Even with the pauses to put in the ice screw protection every ten yards or so, Jean-Claude was scrambling up the ice wall like a spider. Sometimes he would bang both ice hammers into the ice—connected only by a bifurcated tether running from the carabiner set into the chest piece on his harness to the wrist loops—and use both hands to secure a tough ice screw.

  As he climbed higher and higher, it became harder and harder for me to watch these moves. Theoretically, his rope—which he’d run through a complicated series of knots on the chest and belly side of his harness—would break his fall if he came off the wall, but if he did come off at the high point of his next pitch, before he’d put in the next ice screw, it would be a 60-foot vertical fall before the rope would catch on the eye of the inset ice screw. Very few climbers, even given good footing and a possible belay point, could belay a man who’d fallen 60 vertical feet. Too much mass. Too much velocity after that long a fall.

  Besides, climbing ropes in 1925 almost always snapped when put under that much pressure.

  This was when I noticed that Jean-Claude’s huge coil of rope looked so large not only because he had more than 200 feet of it across his chest when he started, but also because the rope that now spid
erwebbed down the ice wall was thicker than the kind we always used.

  Jean-Claude continued scrambling vertically up the impossible ice wall, shifting a few feet or yards left and right when he had to avoid rotten ice or outcroppings, so that the fixed rope behind him did begin to look a little spiderwebby.

  The Deacon had taken his gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and was looking at it. I knew the watch was also a chronometer. He was timing our friend.

  When the now diminutive figure reached the 15-foot rock-and-ice overhang 180 or so feet up the vertical wall, he clipped his chest or waist harness carabiner (it was hard to tell which from this distance) to a thick strap attached to the last ice screw he’d just put in at the junction of wall and overhang, and shouted down (sounding only a little breathless), “How much time?”

  “Twenty-one minutes,” the Deacon shouted back, putting his watch away.

  I could see Jean-Claude shake his head. He was wearing a floppy red stocking cap, not quite a beret. “I could do it in half that time with more practice. And…,” he looked straight down through the V of his widened legs, “…fewer ice screws, I think.”

  “You’ve shown us, Jean-Claude,” shouted the Deacon. “You’ve proven your new hardware! It’s brilliant. Now come on down!”

  The figure leaning back in his harness straps almost 200 feet above us shook his head. He shouted something that neither the Deacon nor I could make out.

  “I said—‘to the top,’” he shouted again, looking straight down at us between his legs again.

  I was actually wringing my hands with anxiety, which made little sense since I was the sheer-face rock climber of the three of us. I was supposed to love this kind of vertical test—lots of exposure and fissured rock and even some modest overhangs for an extra challenge. But this…this was suicide.

  I realized then that I really hated ice. And the idea of going up Mount Everest with these stupid harnesses and all this clanking metal—“bloody ironmongers” was what the British climbers derisively called the Germans and the few French who were using metal carabiners, pitons, and such on tough rock faces and slopes—seemed suddenly obscene. Obscene and absurd.

  I also realized at that moment how nervous I was. I’d never felt this tense climbing on high alpine ledges, ridges, faces, summits, or slopes with these two men.

  I looked up expecting J.C. to begin his descent. He had enough rope left that he could rappel a good part of the way. If he trusted those damned ice screws.

  Instead of rappelling or scuttling down the way he’d gone up, Jean-Claude Clairoux then did something that to this day, more than sixty-five years later, I do not believe.

  First, a strap still connecting his chest harness to the ice screw he’d just put in at the topmost section of the vertical part of the wall, J.C. leaned back until it was just the tension of that five-foot leash holding him almost horizontally on the ice. He then drove both hammers into the overhang ice as far out as he could reach. Then J.C. raised his feet—I had to look away it was so appalling, then looked back to watch him fall—and planted his crampons and toe crampons firmly in the corner where vertical wall and horizontal overhang came together.

  Somehow he hung there horizontally with one arm supporting the weight of his entire body while he drove in a deep screw—he had to bang on it to get it in the last few centimeters, and I heard steel going into solid rock under the ice—then he clipped a carabiner and a sort of double tether leash to that and let himself down until he was hanging horizontally only from the ropes, perhaps seven feet beneath the overhang.

  Then, using his steel crampon tips against the vertical wall on each inward oscillation, he began to pendulum-swing back and forth, completely dependent upon that one ice screw and the rope, no point of his body in contact with the wall or overhang except when he kicked harder each time to pendulum out further.

  “Mother of God,” whispered the Deacon. Or perhaps I did. I really no longer remember.

  But I do remember Jean-Claude’s outer pendulum motion under that 20-foot-wide overhang stopping when he banged both ice axes into the ice ceiling above him. Only one held, but he pulled himself higher so that there was slack in the rope tether, from which he was dangling horizontally. He kicked until both sets of points at the front of his rigid-shank boots were attached to the ceiling again. Then he pounded in the other ice axe.

  All good climbers have to be strong. Look at our forearms and you will see bulk and muscles rare in any other athlete and missing from almost all “normal” people. But to hang there like that, suspending the full weight of his fully horizontal body—more than horizontal, since his head was lower than his boots cramponed into the ice—to hold on using only the strength of his hands on two short ice axes, the strength of those two forearms and upper arms. Impossible.

  But he did.

  Then he released one of the ice axes. His left hand fumbled on his harness belt for an ice screw from the dangling bag of hardware.

  It slipped out of fingers that must have been close to nerveless by then, and fell 200 feet. The Deacon and I stepped aside as the long screw bounced off a low boulder between us, sending up sparks against the snow all around.

  J.C. calmly reached for another screw, righting the carrying bag so no more hardware tumbled out. Shifting hands on the embedded ice axes so his weight was now supported by his left hand, Jean-Claude calmly screwed in that final ice anchor. He had to use the small steel ice tool from his belt to get it through the last of the ice, then pound it into the underlying rock. Why he didn’t come off the overhang when he did that work, I’ll never understand.

  His next move—after letting out another seven or eight feet of harnessed leash—was to dangle, head and feet lower than his supported torso, and swing wildly back and forth. The far point of his outer swing took him out further than the edge of the overhang. Back and forth he went, and I waited for the sight and sound of both of the screws set into the ice ceiling popping out, sending him hurtling 30 or 60 feet down and back into the ice wall, almost certainly rendering him unconscious. One of us would have to ice-climb the fixed rope to retrieve our unconscious or dead friend. I didn’t want it to be me.

  Instead of peeling off, Jean-Claude’s arc went beyond and above the edge of the overhang, and on the second swing at that distance, he banged in the curved picks of both ice hammers.

  Freeing one at a time, he pulled himself higher, again just with the strength of arms and forearms that must be shaking with tension and toxins by now.

  Seven feet up the 12-foot outside vertical wall of the ice overhang, he kicked the toes of his new-style ice-climbing crampons into the ice and calmly screwed in the last piece of steel protection he needed. The only sign of J.C.’s great fatigue—or perhaps the backwash of adrenaline that always gets a climber’s hands and fingers shaking after the fact in a truly terrifying situation—was that after he’d clipped in a carabiner and used Y tethers to tie into both his chest and belt harness, he leaned back from the short ice wall at about 40 degrees to rest a couple of minutes. His short ice axes dangled from his wrist straps. Even from more than 200 feet below, I could see him clenching and unclenching the fingers of both hands.

  Then he grasped both ice axes, straightened up, and began hacking and climbing again.

  The Deacon and I watched him lean over the top of the overhang, sink his right ice hammer point into something, and then he pulled himself up and out of sight over the edge.

  A minute later he was standing near that edge, taking the remnants of the coil of rope from over his shoulder, and shouting down at us.

  “I have about a hundred feet left,” came the echoing, triumphant shout. “I’ve tied both off—we’ll want two ropes for belay—so bring up around another hundred feet of rope, the thicker stuff, the Deacon’s Miracle Rope, that I brought, in the second bag, and you can tie it on halfway up. Who’s next?”

  The Deacon and I looked at each other.

  Again, I was the “big face” rock climb
er of the trio. I was the one who would be expected to free-climb rock on Everest, say, if we ever reached that battleship prow of the so-called Second Step near the summit along the North East Ridge above 28,000 feet.

  But for the moment, I was terrified.

  “I’m next,” said the Deacon and, shrugging on a 100-foot coil of J.C.’s “good rope,” walked up to the ice wall with both ice hammers raised.

  None of us wanted to stay in that pathetic inn again in Cerrigydrudion or anyplace close to Wales, so the Deacon drove us all the way back to London through the dusk and long, dark night. The Vauxhall’s headlights were still little more than useless, but once on the real highways again after dark, he tucked the Vauxhall in behind various lorries and we followed them closely, using their tiny little red taillights as our guide. We’d taken time to wrestle and button and snap the roof, windows, and side flaps back into place. Somehow the heater seemed to be working at last (or perhaps it was just our overheated bodies), and Jean-Claude was sprawled across the cushions and gear bags in the backseat, snoring all the way home. When the Deacon and I talked, it was in low, almost reverent voices. I kept thinking about the incredible day and the incredible revelations Jean-Claude had given us.

  My own climb, when my time came, wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. The ice hammers and 12-point crampons with the deep-digging front points gave one a feeling almost of invincibility. Also, the Deacon had brought up an extra 100 feet of what J.C. called “the Deacon’s Miracle Rope” and tied on to his second line, so—counting the first fixed rope—I was essentially under double belay the whole way up.

  This came in handy when twice I was a little too eager to remove my crampons before securing my next hold with three solid points and came unglued from the wall, but while it might have been a thrill to drop the 50 feet or so to arrest (or non-arrest) by the last ice screw below me, the second belay rope, tied to a massive tree somewhere out of sight above the overhang and physically belayed by the Deacon, caught me in five feet or so.