by Dan Simmons
They argue over provisions, about the route, over alternate plans for the search for Percival Bromley’s corpse, about methods of climbing once we get to Everest, and—most central to all of the arguments—about who is in charge of the expedition.
In the middle of the arguing at lunchtime, the Deacon brings up a mystery that we haven’t been able to solve despite all of the Deacon’s contacts with the 1924 expedition: i.e., how on earth had Percival Bromley been allowed to tag along behind the expedition? Both General Charles Bruce, before he became ill and had to leave the expedition, and Colonel Norton, who took over general command of the expedition, were sticklers for staying with the plan they’d laid out. Even the addition of one more person to be responsible for would have fouled up their plans, and certainly young Percy wasn’t such a renowned climber that Mallory and the others wouldn’t have objected strongly to his nearby presence, even if he weren’t a member of the expedition. Even the Deacon’s good friends Noel Odell and the moviemaker who’d caused such controversy with his dancing lamas, Captain John Noel, had told the Deacon that they had no idea why Percy had been allowed to tag along. All they knew was that both General Bruce and Colonel Norton insisted that it was all right, against all logic—and each climber that the Deacon queried had said that Percy was such a nice and unassuming chap that as long as he simply followed the expedition, perhaps a half day’s march behind, he was tolerated.
But there had been no plans for young Lord Percival Bromley to go with them even as far as Everest Base Camp at the foot of the Rongbuk Glacier. Everyone had understood that.
In the middle of arguing over provisions, the Deacon returns to this issue of how and why Percival Bromley was allowed to tag along to Mount Everest.
Reggie is weary of the talk, and her tone is of the sort that ends most conversations. “Listen one last time, Mr. Deacon. Cousin Percival was visiting here when the ’twenty-four expedition leaders were invited to the plantation to have dinner with Lord and Lady Lytton, as well as Percy and me. Lord Lytton, as you may remember, was Governor-General of Bengal, and he and General Bruce and Colonel Norton met alone with Percy for the better part of an hour in the study. When they emerged, both Bruce and Norton announced that Percy would be allowed to follow the expedition—not travel with them, you understand, and never be on the official rolls, but strictly travel behind them—the condition being that Percy provide his own pony, tent, and foodstuffs. The last was no problem because Percy had been assembling his kit here at the plantation for two weeks before the expedition arrived in Calcutta.”
The Deacon shakes his head. “That makes no sense. Let someone just follow the expedition into Tibet? Someone with no official clearance to be in Tibet? Even if Lord Percival were following a day behind the real expedition, as an Englishman, his arrest or detention might have put the entire expedition at risk with the dzongpens and Tibetan authorities. It makes no sense at all.”
“What are these dzongpens I’ve been hearing so much about?” asks Jean-Claude. “Just local headmen? Village chiefs? Tibetan warlords?”
“None of the above, really,” says Reggie. “Most Tibetan communities are run by dzongpens—usually two men—one an important lama and the other an important layperson from the village. But sometimes there’s a single dzongpen chieftain.” She turns back to the Deacon. “It’s getting late in the afternoon, Mr. Deacon. Have all your questions been answered to your satisfaction?”
“All save for why your cousin was trying to climb Everest after the Norton Expedition had left the area,” presses the Deacon.
Reggie laughs with no humor in her voice. “Percy never attempted to climb Mount Everest. Of that I am certain.”
“Sigl told both the Berliner Zeitung and The Times that he had been attempting precisely that,” says the Deacon. “Sigl says that when he and the other Germans arrived at Camp Two—just exploring out of an original intent to meet Mallory and then from sheer curiosity—he, Sigl, and the other Germans could see your cousin and Kurt Meyer staggering down the North Ridge. Obviously in some difficulty.”
Reggie shakes her head with absolute certainty. Her blue-black curls slide across her shoulders. “Bruno Sigl lied,” she says sharply. “Percy may have had a reason to go up onto the mountain, but I know for a certainty that he did not go into Tibet in order to attempt a climb of Mount Everest. Bruno Sigl is a common German thug who lies.”
“How do you know Sigl is a common German thug?” asks the Deacon. “Do you know him?”
“Of course not,” snaps Reggie. “But I had inquiries made in Germany and elsewhere. Sigl is a dangerous climber, dangerous to himself and anyone with him, and in his regular life in Munich he’s a fascist thug.”
“Do you think that Sigl was somehow complicit in your cousin’s and this Meyer’s death?” asks the Deacon.
Reggie fixes her ultramarine gaze on the Deacon but does not answer.
In the calmer part of the afternoon, we show Reggie J.C.’s modified 12-point crampons and the shorter ice axes for vertical travel. Then Jean-Claude demonstrates the jumar climbing mechanism and the caver’s rope ladders we’ve brought.
“Brilliant,” says Reggie. “It all should make getting onto the North Col infinitely easier—and safer for the porters with the fixed ropes and ladders. But I don’t have boots rigid enough for the pointed crampons, I fear.”
“You’d need them only if you were leading the climb,” says the Deacon. “And I guarantee you will not be doing that.”
“I brought an extra pair of rigid boots,” says Jean-Claude. “And I think they may fit you. I’ll run and get them and we’ll see.”
They did fit her. She made some practice swings with the short ice hammers. The Deacon did not roll his eyes, but I could see this took some effort.
“Now I have an innovation for all of you,” says Reggie. She goes into a storeroom and returns a few minutes later with four pairs of what look to be leather-strap football headgear, or perhaps leather bands that a coal miner might wear. But there are two insulated batteries in the back and an electric miner’s lamp on the front.
“I had these made up after I returned from Everest last September,” she says. “Lord Montfort had extensive mining operations in Wales. These are the newest thing—electric headlamps instead of carbide flames that might trigger an explosion. The batteries are a bit heavy, but they power the lamps for hours…and I have a lot of extra batteries.”
“What on earth for?” asks the Deacon, holding the leather straps and lamp and heavy batteries at arm’s length.
Reggie sighs. “According to Norton, Noel, and others I spoke to as their defeated party retreated through Darjeeling last year, Mallory and Irvine had planned to depart their high tent at six or six thirty a.m., but the slowness of everything—getting boots on properly, trying to melt snow on the stove for water for a hot drink and hot gruel before departing but overturning the cooker, getting their oxygen apparatus on and working, everything done so terribly slowly at that altitude—kept them in their camp until eight a.m. or later. That’s far too late to leave camp for a summit bid. Even if they reached the summit, there was no way they could have gotten back down to their Camp Five before nightfall. Probably not even back down to the Yellow Band.”
“How early do you suggest a summit team should leave camp with these…these…things on their heads?” asks the Deacon.
“No later than two a.m., Mr. Deacon. I would suggest closer to midnight the night before the actual summit attempt.”
The Deacon laughs at the thought of climbing at that altitude at night. “We’d freeze,” he says dismissively.
“No, no,” says Jean-Claude. “Remember, Ree-shard, that thanks to you, we have Monsieur Finch’s lovely warm goose down duvet jackets, enough for all of us and for our Tiger Sherpas. And I believe that Lady Brom…that Reggie has a good point here. There are fewer avalanches at night. The snow and ice are firmer. The new crampons would work better with the colder snow and more solid ice. And if the
se headlamps truly show the way…”
“They do for hundreds of modern Welsh miners,” interrupts Reggie. “At least the engineers and supervisors. And Welsh miners don’t have the advantage of starlight or moonlight in their dark holes.”
“Magnifique!” says Jean-Claude.
“Very interesting,” I say.
“Leave high camp at midnight for the summit,” says the Deacon. “Absolutely absurd.”
There are 40 mules allocated for the trek in to Everest, and each mule is capable of carrying a double pack weighing some 160 pounds. One Sherpa porter can handle two mules even while carrying his own heavy loads of our excess baggage.
Reggie has argued for more prepared food for the expedition. The Deacon is adamantly against it. As we’re eating a delicious dinner of pheasant under glass set off with a very fine white wine, the two erupt at each other again.
“I don’t believe you understand my theory behind this expedition, Lady Bromley-Montfort,” the Deacon says coolly.
“I understand it all too well, Mr. Deacon. You’re attempting an alpine assault on the tallest mountain in the world, dealing with it as if it were the Matterhorn. You plan to buy as much food as you can in the Tibetan villages along the way and hunt for more: wild goats, rabbits, goas—Tibetan gazelle—white deer, Himalayan blue sheep, whatever you can find and shoot.”
“That is the idea,” says the Deacon. “And since you claim to have climbed both in the Alps and here in the Himalayas, you know that such an alpine assault has never been tried against Everest.”
“For good reason, Mr. Deacon. Not only the size of the mountain, but the weather. Even in this pre-monsoon season, the weather on the mountain can change in a matter of minutes. The mountain creates its own weather, Mr. Deacon. And you simply don’t have enough portable food to last weeks on the mountain if weeks are called for. You can’t just keep running back from the Rongbuk Glacier over Pang La to Shekar Dzong to go shopping when you run low, you know. And the tiny village of Chōdzong on the Everest side of Pang La doesn’t have enough extra food this time of year anyway.”
I’ve learned by now that La in Tibetan means “pass.” Pang La is the 17,000-foot pass south of Shekar Dzong: the last such high pass before one approaches the Rongbuk Monastery, the Rongbuk Glacier, and Mount Everest. Most expeditions take four days or more trekking from Shekar Dzong to Everest Base Camp at the opening of the Rongbuk Glacier valley…then many more days finding a way up the glacier and onto the North Col.
“We can buy extra food from villagers on the way in,” insists the Deacon.
Reggie laughs. “The average Tibetan villager will sell you his last chicken even if it means his own family will go hungry,” she says, showing her very white teeth. “But how do you keep a chicken carcass fresh over weeks if the snows hit you at Camp Three below the North Col, Mr. Deacon? Do you plan to carry ice with you? An electric refrigeration unit? And once you’re past Rongbuk, don’t plan to survive on what the party may shoot. Except for a few rare burrhel—mountain sheep—and even more rare yeti, there’s nothing up there. You’d spend your days hunting rather than climbing…and still likely starve.”
The Deacon ignores the yeti comment. “I’ve been there, please remember, Lady Bromley-Montfort. I’ve spent many more weeks exploring the north side of the Everest approaches than you could have.”
“You only spent so much time there in ’twenty-one because you and Mallory could not find the obvious way in via the East Rongbuk Glacier, Mr. Deacon.”
The Deacon’s face darkens.
“Listen,” says Reggie, turning to J.C. and me as well as toward the Deacon, “I am not suggesting that we provision ourselves the way Bruce, Norton, and Mallory did…Good Lord, I watched them leave Darjeeling. Seventy Sherpa porters—a hundred and forty porters by the time they added Tibetans across the border—and more than three hundred pack animals, carrying not just oxygen and tents and necessary supplies, but scores of cans of foie gras and smoked sausages and beef tongue.”
“Appetite wanes with altitude,” says the Deacon. “You need foods that stimulate the appetite.”
“Oh yes, I know.” Reggie smiles. “I lost more than thirty pounds on the North Col last August, you may remember my telling you. Above twenty-three thousand feet, the very idea of food becomes repugnant. And one does not have the energy to prepare it. That is why I’ve added the supplemental canned goods, simple staples, bags of noodles and rice that will warm up in the boiled water, in case we’re pinned down by weather.”
The Deacon looks at J.C. and me as if we should jump in to support him in this argument. We smile at him and wait.
“Instead of three hundred pack animals,” continues Reggie, “we’ll travel with only forty and buy replacements along the way if need be. Instead of seventy Sherpa porters, we’ll use only thirty. Instead of hiring another hundred and fifty porters in Shekar Dzong, I’ve arranged for us to trade the mules there for yaks and to continue with just our thirty Sherpas as porters. But we must have enough food. The search for Cousin Percy may take weeks. We simply can’t return without finding him because we’ve run out of food.”
The Deacon sighs. He can’t tell her the real reason that he, Jean-Claude, and I have signed up for this expedition. A wait for good weather and then an alpine dash for the summit and then…home.
Reggie looks at each of us in turn. “I know your real reason for coming on this expedition, gentlemen,” she says as if reading our guilty minds. “I know that you hope to climb Everest, that you’re using my aunt’s money and the excuse of searching for Percival’s remains only as a way to get yourselves onto the mountain and, with luck, to the summit.”
None of us replies. And none of us can meet her cool gaze.
“It doesn’t matter,” continues Reggie. “It’s more important to me to find Percival’s body than it is to you—perhaps for reasons you don’t yet understand—but I also want to climb Mount Everest.”
We all do look up at that. A woman on the summit of Everest? Ridiculous. Yet none of us speaks.
“It’s nine p.m.,” says Reggie as clocks throughout the great plantation house chime at the same second. “We should all get to bed. We’ll be leaving at dawn.”
J.C. and I rise with Reggie, but Deacon remains seated. “Not until we settle this issue of who is in command of the expedition, Lady Bromley-Montfort. An expedition cannot have two leaders. It simply won’t work.”
Reggie smiles at him. “It worked well enough last year when General Bruce grew ill with malaria, Mr. Deacon. Colonel Teddy Norton—who probably knew he would not end up on the summit team—took overall command of the expedition, while Mr. Mallory was in charge of the climbing plans and sorting out who would make the summit bid. Naturally that turned out to be himself and his healthy if inexperienced assistant Sandy Irvine…a nice boy. I enjoyed having him as a guest in my home. Now I suggest we use the same system. I shall be in charge of the expedition per se; you shall be climbing master on the mountain, answerable in terms of climbing decisions only to any sound suggestions I might have in the search for Cousin Percy’s remains.”
I can see the Deacon struggling to find the proper words to rebut this suggestion once and for all. But he is too slow.
Pasang…Dr. Pasang…pulls Reggie’s chair out of her way.
“Good night, gentlemen,” she says softly. “We leave for Mount Everest at dawn.”
Part II
THE MOUNTAIN
Saturday, April 25, 1925
Everest is still 40 miles away but already it dominates not only the skyline of white-shrouded Himalayan high peaks but the sky itself. I suspect that the Deacon has brought a British flag to plant at the summit, but I see now that the mountain already bears its own pennant—a mist of white cloud and spindrift roiling in the west-to-east wind for 20 miles or more, from right to left, a white plume swirling above all the lesser summits to the east of Everest’s snow massif.
“Mon Dieu,” whispers Jean-Claude.
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br /> The five of us, counting Pasang, have trekked ahead of the porter-Sherpas and yaks and climbed a low hill to the east of the pass, and while Pasang stands a few yards behind us and below the high point of the pass, holding the reins of J.C.’s little white pony, which is spooked by the winds here on Pang La—the last pass before Rongbuk and Everest—the four of us have to lie on the boulder-strewn ground or be blown away.
We lie unceremoniously on our right sides, like Romans on their couches at a feast, the Deacon furthest from me, propping himself on his right elbow as he attempts to hold his military binoculars steady with his left hand; then there is Reggie, who is lying prone, her boot soles looking like inverted exclamation marks, using both hands to prop a naval-type telescope against a low boulder in front of her; then Jean-Claude, sitting more upright than the rest of us and squinting southward through his snow goggles; finally me, reclining on my right elbow and somewhat behind the other three.
We’re all wearing wide-brimmed hats against the Tibetan sunlight, ferocious at this altitude—burning and peeling has been my bane the last weeks, as evidently it had been Sandy Irvine’s—and while the three of us men have simply jammed the hats as far down on our heads as we can in order to outwit the wind, Reggie is wearing a strange fedora—broad-brimmed on the left, front, and back, buttoned up on the right, which has an adjustable strap that goes under her chin and holds the hat tight. She said she had picked it up during a visit to Australia years ago.
We call out the names of mountains to one another like children exclaiming over Christmas presents: “Moving to the west, that tall one is Cho Oyu, twenty-six thousand nine hundred and six feet…” “Gyachung Kang, twenty-five thousand nine hundred ninety feet…” “That peak throwing its shadow on Everest is Lhotse, twenty-seven thousand and…I forget…” “Twenty-seven thousand eight hundred ninety feet.” “To the east there, Chomo Lonzo, twenty-five thousand six hundred and four feet…”