The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  The overhang itself, which had so unnerved me while watching from below, was sort of fun. I was worried about my extra weight on the two ice screws that had held for the two lighter climbers before me, but the Deacon had taken time—while hanging horizontally under the ice-rock overhang—to secure a third and even longer screw in place, banging the hell out of it to get it the last five or six centimeters into the rock itself.

  So I actually enjoyed swinging out wide, nothing beneath me at the outer arc of my swing but 200 feet of empty air to the rock below, and I successfully smashed both ice hammer picks into the outer, vertical section of the overhang on my first try. Those years of serious rock climbing, it turned out, were not wasted on ice: I pulled myself the last ten feet to the top using only the strength of my arms fiercely gripping the ice hammers. Once I was on top—the view of Llyn Idwal and Cwm Idwal and the peaks and lakes beyond was fantastic—Jean-Claude reprimanded me for not using my crampons on that last bit, but all I could do was grin at him.

  We’d rappelled down one after the other, leaving the second belay rope in place, and then practiced for the rest of the day on the lower slopes. Only the Deacon’s new rope—a thicker-diameter blend of hemp, regular climbing rope, and some secret ingredient he wouldn’t reveal to us (but which gave the rope greater elasticity and a much higher breaking point)—gave us the confidence to rappel that way. In 1924–25, few alpine climbers trusted their ropes—what the Deacon now called “our old clothesline ropes”—for such long rappels.

  Trying to stay awake during the long drive back to London—just to keep the Deacon company as he drove, so he’d stay awake—my tired mind kept going over and over the French terms that J.C. had tried to drill into us about this new type of glacier and ice climbing.

  Pied marche—just marching across flat ice or a shallow slope up to 15 degrees, as if across a glacier—we’d all done that together on regular 10-point crampons many times before.

  Pied en canard—“duck walk”—a careful 12-point cramponing on slopes up to 30 degrees. It looked and felt as silly as it sounded, but we could use our old, longer ice axes for that.

  Pied à plat—literally “flat-footed,” with the bottom 10 points on each crampon holding your body upright on slopes up to 65 degrees or so, with your ice axe dug in uphill. A good way to rest.

  Then there were the regular ice axe moves themselves: piolet ramasse (cross-body) on slopes from 35 to 50 degrees (an elegant way to cut steps in a steep slope) and piolet ancre, the anchored way one could cut steps or do hand work (such as sinking ice screws with one’s free hand) on steep slopes, 45 to 60 degrees and steeper.

  The ice hammers had their own vocabularies—angle of pick entrance, whether to hold the tools high or low while climbing, etc.—and the ones I remember from that first day were piolet panne (low dagger) for steep slopes 45 to 55 degrees; piolet poignard (high dagger), which we used on steeper slopes of 50 to 60 degrees; and the most common one we used that day, piolet traction (traction), on 60 degrees to vertical to overhanging.

  Since these last techniques were all used with the “front-pointing” crampons, techniques which I was sure Jean-Claude had said he’d learned from the Germans and Austrians while ice climbing with them the previous December, I was a little confused as to why there weren’t any terms in German. The answer was simple: the Germans and Austrians had kept using the old French 10-point crampon and long ice axe terms and simply added more in French. Ahh, Europe.

  What we began learning on shallower—but still deadly slick—ice slopes around Llyn Idwal that Sunday afternoon is what I think of (to this day, after using them thousands of times since) as the “dance steps”: pied à plat–piolet ramasse, for instance—flat-footing upslope while simultaneously using the short ice axe in a graceful cross-body position to find the next anchor. J.C. did this so beautifully on a steep but less-than-vertical slope that it was a delight to watch—left leg bent inward until he was slightly knock-kneed, short ice axe held in both hands and pressing down higher up the slope, then the right leg crossing over the left as if in a tricky dance step, and then, when the tip of the ice axe and 10 of the 12-point crampon steel teeth on the right boot were all pressing down into the ice again, swinging the left leg higher upslope until 10 crampons on the bottom of that foot got a solid bite.

  And then starting the dance all over again.

  Jean-Claude showed us various ways to rest on such an exhaustingly steep slope, but my favorite was the simple pied assis—leaning back on the slope until your butt almost (but not quite) touched the ice, left leg bent and left foot under you with all crampons pressing down, right leg further outward with ankle turned so the right boot and its crampons were at almost a 90-degree angle from the direction one’s right knee was pointing. You didn’t need your ice axe or ice hammers to hold this position, and the result was that, as long as the muscles in your legs and thighs didn’t start cramping, you could hold this position for an extended time, ice axe in both hands, giving yourself plenty of time to look out over the slope and up and out at the landscape below.

  But the bulk of the afternoon into the lovely Welsh sunset was spent learning how to use the shortest ice axe and the ice hammers in basic low-dagger and high-dagger positions, front-pointing (using only the forward two crampons of the twelve) in anchor positions, front-pointing in traction positions, front-pointing in high-dagger position (the way we’d climbed the vertical ice wall), the three-o’clock position using both ice hammers ahead of you on a steep slope with the right leg curved and slammed down behind you, front-pointing on a terribly steep slope so that your weight was over the ice hammers with picks down in a low-dagger position (climbing with both at once, essentially under you), and so forth.

  Traverse and descent techniques on the ice—especially the rapid descent (I’d always loved glissading down a steep snowfield, using only my regular ice axe as a rudder and then for self-arrest near the bottom, and J.C. showed us how we could flat-foot down on crampons, using the cross-body position with the short axe or trailing the axe behind us in anchor position, almost as quickly and on much more dramatic inclines)—took most of the rest of the afternoon.

  Later that afternoon, on a steep snowy slope below a rock face, Jean-Claude showed us his last technological tour de force.

  It was a small and relatively light metal wedge-shaped device that had steel springs—released by hand pressure, tightening automatically when you exerted no pressure—that could slide along a fixed rope. J.C. had laboriously climbed the slope in his new 12-point crampons, attached the Deacon’s Miracle Rope to a long ice axe driven deep into the ice under the boulders some 150 meters above us, reinforced that belay with several ice screws, and then removed his crampons and expertly glissaded down the steep slope to us. The rope lay like a long black fault line on the blindingly white snow.

  Then J.C. showed that he had one of these hand clamps for the rope for each of us.

  “It is simple, non?” he said. “Release the hand pressure completely, and it locks tight to the rope. One could dangle if one chose. Squeeze ever so slightly with one hand, and the mechanism glides along the rope as if the rope were a guide. Squeeze hard, and the mechanism—and you—no longer has…how do you pronounce it? Friction? Friction on the rope.”

  “What do you suggest we use this gadget for?” I asked, but I saw that the Deacon had grasped the idea.

  “It would be best if it were attached to some light climbing harness,” said the Deacon. “So that one could have both hands free while staying attached to the fixed rope.”

  “Exactement!” cried Jean-Claude. “I am working on precisely such light leather and canvas harnesses. For today, though, we try the one hand, no?”

  And with that J.C. clamped his little device onto the fixed rope and began sliding it up as he climbed steadily, even without crampons. The Deacon went next, getting the hang of when to apply pressure, when to release it, within a few paces. It took me longer, but soon I realized the added secu
rity of climbing with this silly little spring-driven device gripping the fixed rope harder than one’s heavily mittened hand ever could. It would give even more assurance if it were attached, say, by a line and carabiner, to the climbing harness that he and the Deacon had been talking about.

  At the top of our 150-meter 50-degree slope, we huddled together as a cold wind rose. The sun was setting behind peaks to the west. The moon was rising in the east.

  “Now we use it for a controlled descent,” said Jean-Claude. “You will see, I believe, that one could use this device even on vertical fixed ropes. It is, how do you say it? Proof for fools?”

  “Foolproof,” said the Deacon. “Show us the fast descent.”

  So J.C. unclamped his device from the double line of fixed rope—double so we could retrieve the rope after our rappel down the slope—retrieved the ice axe so that only the deep screws held the doubled line on belay, re-clamped onto the line below me, and began a rapid, no-crampon glissade that he controlled only by the spring pressure of the device in his hand.

  “Incredible!” I gasped as the Deacon and I reached the bottom after one of the fastest glissades I’d ever experienced.

  “We shall practice more later before we leave and during the trek in to Everest,” said Jean-Claude.

  We were in twilight shadow now and it suddenly became very cold. J.C. was already pulling the rope free of its needle-eye ice screws and retrieving the long line.

  “Do you have a name for this device?” asked the Deacon.

  J.C. grinned as he expertly wrapped the long coil of Miracle Rope from his fist to his elbow, coil and coil again. “Jumar,” he said.

  “What does that mean in French?” I asked. “What does it stand for?”

  “Nothing,” says J.C. “It was the name of my dog when I was a boy. He could climb a tree after a squirrel if he chose. I have never seen a better dog-climber.”

  “Jumar,” I repeated. Odd word. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever get used to it.

  “I’ve been worrying about that last ice wall between the Rongbuk Glacier to the North Col on Everest for some months,” the Deacon said quietly as we approached London and the murky winter sunrise.

  I nodded awake. “Why?” I whispered. “In ’twenty-two, you and Finch and the others found snow slopes up to the Col and cut steps for the porters. Last June there weren’t any snow slopes, but there was that fissure—the ice chimney—that Mallory free-climbed and dropped fixed ropes and then Sandy Irvine’s jury-rigged rope ladder down.”

  The Deacon bobbed his head slightly. “But Rongbuk is a glacier, Jake. It rises, subsides, fissures, faults, moves, crumbles, creates its own crevasses. All we know for sure is that it won’t be as it was last year for Mallory—a chance to show off his climbing techniques—or for Finch and us the year before that. This spring that ice wall may have climbable fissures or new snow slopes—or it may be two hundred feet of vertical ice.”

  “Well, if it is sheer vertical ice,” I said, tiredly but with a new sense of bravado, “J.C. and his front-point crampons and silly little ice axes and the whatchamacallems—jumars—have given us a way to climb it.”

  The Deacon drove in silence for a moment. I could see the dome of Saint Paul’s coming over the horizon with the sun.

  “Then, Jake,” he said, “I shall have to assume that we are ready to go climb Mount Everest.”

  Chapter 9

  I just wish this Lord Bromley-Whatsis, his serene buggering Highness, had bloody well buggered himself down to Calcutta from the hills and helped us bandobast these buggering great heavy crates to the bloody freight depot a full buggering day earlier, is what I damn well wish.

  C alcutta is a terrifying city, with Kipling’s “sheeted dead” underfoot on an evening walk—not dead bodies, it turns out, but people wrapped in their sheets and sleeping on what passes for sidewalks—and everything smelling of incense, spices, human piss, cattle, the not unpleasant sweat-and-breath scent of multitudes, and fragrant smoke from burning cow dung. All the dark-skinned men’s stares are curious, dismissive, or outright angry, while the women’s stares—even the Mohammedan women’s eyes peering out from beneath and above the black cloth covering them from head to foot—are alluring, inviting, and, for me, filled with sexual promise.

  It is only the twenty-second of March, 1925, far from the terrible summer pre-monsoon heat and the downpours of the later-summer monsoon rains, but the air of Calcutta already feels like a wad of wet blankets wrapped around me head to toe.

  At least these have been my impressions so far during our two and a half days here.

  Everything is strange to me. Even though I’d crossed the Atlantic in a liner from Boston to Europe last year, the five weeks of travel on the HMS Caledonia from Liverpool to Calcutta seemed a thousand times more exotic. The first days were rough going—the tugs barely got us out of Liverpool harbor against the wind and waves—and I was surprised to find out that I was the only one of the three of us who did not succumb to seasickness at some point on the voyage. The pitching and rolling seemed like a fine game, a simple challenge in getting from Point A to Point B and then onward and upward to the wooden deck, where I ran my twelve miles daily and nightly in a pitching, rolling oval, and I never had a hint of the nausea that all but ruined the early part of the voyage for Jean-Paul and the Deacon.

  Except for the slow boredom of transiting the Suez Canal and the storm in the western Mediterranean that kept me belowdecks for a day, the voyage to Calcutta was a pleasant experience. At Colombo—a small white town seemingly being besieged by ferocious, impenetrable jungle on all sides—I bought some lace and mailed it to my mother and aunt in Boston. Everything was new and exciting. And I knew—but did not then fully appreciate—that everything was prelude.

  The 1921, ’22, and ’24 Everest expeditions all came through Calcutta on the way to their official starting point—Darjeeling—but funded and backed as they were by the Mount Everest Committee of the Alpine Club and that club’s parent, the Royal Geographical Society, there were always agents in Calcutta ready to sort out the crates of supplies and matériel, so that when the climbers arrived, everything they needed was either already loaded onto the train for Darjeeling or ready to be loaded.

  We, of course, being a secret and illicit expedition, have no agents waiting in Calcutta. The Deacon is in charge of spending Lady Bromley’s money—at least until “Cousin Reggie” takes over here in India—and the Deacon soon tells Jean-Claude and me the Hindi word bandobast, meaning “arrangements.” Evidently bandobast in Calcutta (where most of the people speak Bengali, not Hindi, but the word is still used here, it being, I assume, almost a universal concept in all of multilingual and multiethnic India) means the same as baksheesh in the Middle East—i.e., bribes necessary to get even the simplest thing done.

  But since the Deacon was on the two earliest Alpine Club expeditions with Mallory and others and was interested in all aspects of them, including this administrative greasing of the wheels to get things done in Calcutta (and, Jean-Claude and I can only hope, later in both Darjeeling and Tibet), our twelve heavy crates—amongst other things we had to bring from Europe, we’re bringing a lot of the Deacon’s new high-quality rope on this expedition for reasons I’ll explain later—have been moved from the docks to the train station freight depot by early this third afternoon of our stay in Calcutta.

  There is a night train from Sealdah Station just beyond Calcutta called the Darjeeling Mail that we’ll be taking in a few hours, but that train—a real train, as it were—only goes as far as Siliguri, a little trading station out in the middle of nowhere which we’re supposed to reach about 6:30 the next morning. There we’ll have to switch to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, by all accounts a narrow-gauge toy of a train that has to chug its way 7,000 feet up the mountain foothills of the southernmost Himalayas to Darjeeling, where the Bengali English government of the Raj spends its summers. The entire train voyage will be about 400 miles, and the Deacon informs us that it w
ill probably be too hot and dusty to get any sleep during the Darjeeling Mail part of it.

  No matter. I don’t plan to spend much of the time on the train sleeping at any rate.

  We receive a telegram from “Cousin Reggie” on our first morning here:

  MEET AT HOTEL MT EVEREST DARJEELING TUES. 24 MARCH. I WILL ASSUME COMMAND OF THE EXPEDITION AT THAT POINT.

  L./ R. K. BROMLEY-MONTFORT

  “‘Assume command of the expedition,’ my arse,” says the Deacon, crumpling the telegram flimsy in his long-fingered hand and throwing it on the ground.

  “What does the ‘L.-slash’ in this thing stand for?” asks Jean-Claude, who is retrieving and flattening out the crumpled telegram.

  “‘Lord,’ I presume,” says the Deacon, biting down so hard on the stem of his unlighted pipe that I expect it to snap. “Lord Reginald K.-something Bromley-Montfort.”

  “Why does he keep the Bromley in his name?” I ask. The ways of British near-royalty are still a mystery to me.

  “How the hell should I know?” snaps the Deacon. He is rarely this short-tempered. Both Jean-Claude and I take a step backward, shocked by his tone. “I just wish this Lord Bromley-Whatsis, his serene buggering Highness, had bloody well buggered himself down to Calcutta from the hills and helped us bandobast these buggering great heavy crates to the bloody freight depot a full buggering day earlier, is what I damn well wish. This is his lousy country, his culture where bloody damn venal bribery is necessary everywhere to get the least bloody thing done, and where no one can keep a simple bloody appointment on time. So where is this ‘commander of the expedition’ when we actually need his fat arse?”