The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  “No,” Babu says in a hopeless tone. “But I carried many cans of Primus fuel up the glacier.”

  Jean-Claude shakes his head. I would do the same but my head hurts too much. The small cans of kerosene are useless unless we can get the Primus working. “Get your gloves, mittens, and Shackleton overjackets on,” orders J.C. “It’s snowing too hard—and getting too dark—to sort through the loads out there, so we’re going to pull the packs and load bags into the tent.”

  It is getting dark outside, and the blizzard still restricts our vision to only a couple of yards. I’m wondering whether we should have roped up for this effort when Jean-Claude shouts over the howling wind for Babu and Ang to hang on to each other and me, and for Norbu and Lhakpa to keep a grip on each other and him. We stagger and feel our way the few yards from the Big Tent to the general vicinity of where we think the Sherpas dumped their packs. J.C.’s rucksack and load bags, as well as mine, are weighted down by rocks right at the entrance to our tent. Of course they’re empty, since, with the exception of a few food tins, we hauled the two heavy tents, tent staves and poles, and the nonworking Primus stove up in our loads. So our lives now depend on what we find in the Sherpas’ loads. Camp III is supposed to be sheltered—compared to Camp IV up on the North Col, much less compared to any camps exposed up on the North or North East ridges higher up—but the wind whipping down the 1,000-foot slope of ice and snow is so strong that it literally knocks me over. Babu Rita and Ang Chiri dutifully fall into the snow with me. On all fours, I flail around trying to find their rucksacks and pack loads amidst the drifts, snow-covered boulders, and the growing heaps of snow on this side of the tents.

  “Here!” I can barely hear J.C.’s voice, but the two Sherpas and I crawl toward it.

  We all grab some part of the load masses now under ten inches or more of new snow and begin dragging them back to the Big Tent…but where is the Big Tent? Luckily, Lhakpa Yishay had left burning the one tiny ghee candle they had set on the floor—foolish to leave it unattended, since fire is always a danger in these canvas tents—and we all crawl and tug and grunt and swear in the direction of that tiny light.

  Inside—it was impossible to unload the packs and rucksacks and load bags outside in the wind and snow—things are a real mess.

  Enough snow has come in that our down jackets and trousers (the Sherpas chose not to wear the extra down trousers we had for them) and the two spread sleeping bags are covered with snow that body heat soon will melt into moisture. The wetter goose down gets, the less insulating property it has, until, when soaked enough, it will provide all the insulating warmth of a cold, wet washrag.

  Dizzy, trying hard not to be violently sick again, I curl up on the driest part of the tent floor I can find and shiver, my head hurting worse with each shiver and shake. The sudden, overpowering stench of the kerosene doesn’t help matters.

  Jean-Claude is going through the packs and load bags: several more tins of frozen food and sealed packs of what the Royal Navy has called “portable soup” since the early 1800s, but no water. Five more Primus-fuel-sized cans of kerosene.

  We now have enough kerosene to blow up a German pillbox or burn a hole in the wall of the North Col, but the damned Primus stove won’t ignite it.

  J.C. clears a space in the middle and lays down an extra wool shirt of his as a work area. He has brought a flashlight from his personal rucksack and adds the beam of its light to the ever-diminishing blue flicker of the tiny ghee-candle lamp.

  He sets up the Primus again. We have two big pots for boiling, and each of us has his tin cup for drinking. J.C. makes sure that the fuel tank is two-thirds filled with fresh kerosene as the instructions suggest, primes it with a bit of burning alcohol in the tiny spirit cup below the burners, pumps up the pressure, and tries again to ignite the burners.

  Nothing.

  J.C. allows himself a torrent of French so picturesque that I can pick up only one vulgarity in twenty. He begins disassembling the damned thing again, taking great care not to spill the kerosene or remaining alcohol.

  “How can it not work?” I manage to say from my fetal position and through my throbbing headache.

  “I…do…not…know,” Jean-Claude says through gritted teeth. Wind batters the wall of the Big Tent so hard that four of us grab the wooden ribs of the dome, trying to hold the tent down with our weight and waning strength. While outside, J.C. had swung his little steel-tubed instrument, and he whispered the results to me inside: the barometer was frighteningly low and still falling; the temperature at nightfall outside was minus thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. We had nothing but our bodies, tents, and fears with which to measure the velocity of the wind down here in the “sheltered” area at the base of the North Col, but these winds have to be hurricane velocity. Some must be a hundred miles per hour or more.

  I force myself to sit up and look at the disassembled brass pieces of the Primus now gleaming faintly in the weak light from the single flashlight and the dying ghee-candle dish.

  I’m thinking, There may be no more idiot-proof piece of machinery in the world than a Swedish-built Primus stove.

  The Deacon had bought mostly the new 1925 models, but except for being improved for high altitudes—some of the improvements suggested by a certain George Finch—they differed very little from earlier pressure stoves going back to 1892. We’d used Primuses from our stores for cooking all the way through Sikkim and across Tibet. None had ever failed to light.

  As J.C. holds the burner up to the light yet again, making sure there is no blockage, I dully paw through the other pieces.

  The simple little machine is a brass 1925 (O) Primus 210 model—the new kind with fixed legs. The procedure for lighting it is the same as for all the other Primuses I’ve used over my years of hiking and climbing. Primuses have always worked at any altitude I’ve been at.

  First, one uses the pumping mechanism set into the main fuel tank to pressurize that fuel tank. This rise in pressure forces the kerosene in the main tank up and along the tube that rises to the burners. To preheat those burner tubes, one lights a small amount of methylated spirits—alcohol—in the built-in spirit cup encircling the burner tube.

  We’ve done all that a dozen times this afternoon and now darkening evening with no luck.

  Once those burner tubes reach a high enough temperature, a fine, almost invisible spray of hot paraffin gas is emitted through the central jet in the burner. When air mixes with that gas—even the thin air of Mount Everest—the stove’s simple and sturdy little flame ring forces the gas into a circle. Technically, it’s not the kerosene burning in the blue-flame ring of a Primus stove, it’s the plasma paraffin gas generated from the spray of kerosene. The noise from those flame-ring burners has always been loud enough that many climbers and campers have called their Primuses “roarers.” Indeed, there are few sounds more reassuring to an exhausted mountain climber than the roar of a Primus stove as it melts snow for drinking water, heats soup or stew, and generally adds to the warmth of a cold tent pitched high in the snow and rock.

  Now…nothing.

  “We can make tea and maybe even some soup on the little spirit burner stove,” I say. “Heat up some sardines.” The small alcohol-burning stoves are meant for the high camps—mostly to make hot tea—but are supposed to be included as a backup stove for every camp.

  “There was no spirit burner in any of the packs,” says Jean-Claude. We exchange guilty glances, and I realize we’re sharing our sense of shame at having supervised our loads, Sherpas, and selves so poorly on this, our first real outing toward the mountain.

  “So it has to be the Primus,” I say.

  I stupidly move the brass tank in both hands but find no holes or leaks. Since kerosene would be spilling out if the circular tank had been breached, it isn’t the most clever troubleshooting I’ve ever done. As if hypnotized, I count eleven languages imprinted on the side of the metal tank. Only eight years after the Great War, and this Swedish company—B. A. Hjorth & C
o., Stockholm, as it says on the Primus as well as on an accompanying card advertising “Practical Accessories for the Primus” (e.g., a spirit can with a nozzle, part No. 1745; a cleaning needle case, No. 1050; and, of course, a Wind Shield, No. 1601)—is selling the stove in at least these eleven countries.

  This version of the Primus has only a triangular plate as a “wind shield,” but J.C. has blocked the wind with his body huddled over the stove each time he’s tried to light it, so the wind shield is not the problem. Technically, we’re supposed to use Primuses outside the tents, but there’s no hope at all of getting this thing lighted in the gale-force winds ripping at even the entrances to our tents.

  “Not at fault,” says Jean-Claude as he inspects each disassembled piece: the burner nipple for heat and quench, the reserve cap parking boss, the burner collector collar, the flame ring, the nitrile seals, the lead seal in the burner itself, or the leather for the pressurizing pump.

  He whispers under his breath, uses the few tools he’s brought with him—a screwdriver, small wrench, some wire probes—to reassemble the stove, and tries again to light it. Nothing.

  “It’s not building up pressure in the tank,” he says at last.

  “How can that be?” I force myself to say. One pumps a Primus and it builds up the pressure to force the kerosene up into the tiny pipes. It’s always worked for me.

  Jean-Claude shakes his head.

  Norbu Chedi speaks softly, almost apologetically: “On the Dongkha La, long before Kampa Dzong, Nawang Bura dropped his load down a steep incline. No sahib saw, since Nawang was back with the rear pack mules. There was a Primus that bounced free off large rocks for many yards downhill. Nawang Bura retrieved it and the other materials and repacked them without mentioning the accident to Dr. Pasang or Sahib Deacon or to Lady Bromley.”

  “That was weeks ago,” I say. “Surely we would have used that…this…Primus since then.”

  “Maybe not,” Jean-Claude says wearily. “We got into the habit of using the same Primuses at each camping spot. This one was taken out of reserve stores to go up the mountain. It’s one of the 1925 models adapted for higher altitudes.”

  “Can’t you fix it?”

  Our lives may depend upon his doing so if we’re trapped here many days. Hot soup and tea will be important, but melting the snow for drinking water is imperative.

  “The tank isn’t leaking,” says J.C. “I’ve taken the pressurizing pump apart and inspected it and the leather bits more than a dozen times. I can’t see anything wrong or broken anywhere. It just…won’t…fucking…work.”

  None of us says anything for a very long moment, but the silence is filled in with a wilder, louder howl of wind that makes all of us grab on to the floor cloth or tent walls to keep from flying away.

  “Sandy Irvine fixed dozens of things, built the rope ladder up to the Col, and repaired and redesigned the entire oxygen apparatus at Base Camp or above,” mutters J.C. “And I—a Chamonix Guide and the son of a blacksmith and inventor and steel industrialist—can’t even fix a putain Primus stove on our second night out above Base Camp.”

  “Without the Primus or spirit burner, what are our other options to get a controlled flame to melt some snow, heat some soup?” I ask. “We have the two pots. We have our tin cups. We have plenty of matches. We have some more alcohol. We have lots of kerosene.”

  “If you’re thinking of dumping some kerosene into a cup and lighting it to put our pots on, forget it, Jake,” says Jean-Claude. “Kerosene by itself doesn’t burn in the way we need to heat things. To get a good blue flame we need…” Suddenly J.C. falls silent and takes the brass tank from my hands. He’s already pulled off the pressure-pump mechanism, but now he tries the permanent screw that I’ve always used to turn the flame up at the beginning of a cooking session and then turned the other way to shut the Primus off after its use.

  “The damned vent screw,” says Jean-Claude. “It turned when I tried it each time, but it’s cross-threaded…it’s not opening to allow the pressurized kerosene jet to rise. In fact, the damned thing’s cross-threaded and bent enough that the tank won’t even hold pressure. The goddamned vent screw!”

  He sets his wrench and small pair of pliers to work on the screw, but it won’t thread properly. And now it is stuck. I see him using all of his massive arm and hand strength to get the screw to turn. It does not.

  “Let me try,” I say. I’m larger than Jean-Claude, my hands are much larger than Jean-Claude’s, and I’m probably stronger than the Chamonix Guide, but I can’t get the vent screw to turn either with my bare hands or with the wrench or pliers.

  “Totally cross-stripped, the tank unpressurized and not able to be pressurized with the vent screw broken,” says Jean-Claude. It sounds like our death sentence, but what’s left of the logical parts of my brain reminds me that we can do without water for a few days, without food for weeks if need be. But my guess is that lots of snow-melt water and some hot soup would have gone far to reduce this headache and the other altitude sickness symptoms I’m feeling.

  Meanwhile, the hemispherical tent walls are trying to rip themselves away from the curved wooden interior staves holding them in place. The thin ground cloth—the Sherpas hadn’t bothered with setting down the thicker one before raising the tent—is trying to rise up under us even with all six of us, and the heavy food loads and kerosene cans, spread about on it. I’ve never been in an earthquake, but it must feel like this. Only not as loud. We’re still shouting at each other to be heard.

  “Jake and I are going back to our own tent to sleep,” Jean-Claude tells Babu and Norbu. “It’d be a little too crowded in here with six men trying to stretch out. Get some sleep—tell Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay not to worry. This storm may break by morning and either Lady Bromley-Montfort will be here with her Sherpas and supplies, or we’ll just walk back down to Camp Two.”

  Since we’ve kept our boots and Shackleton jackets on, we just crawl out the door. But J.C. says, “Wait a minute, Jake,” and begins handing out the cans of kerosene to me. He also brings the reassembled but still unworkable Primus. “We’ll stack the cans just outside your tent,” he shouts to Babu Rita.

  But he doesn’t. J.C. motions to me to carry my armloads of miniature cans with him to the far side of our poor sagging tent. There he sets his behind a boulder and I do the same. He puts his mouth near my ear so that I can hear him over the wind. “Some of the worst injuries I’ve seen in the mountains came from tent fires. I don’t trust our friends to keep from experimenting with burning cans of kerosene when they’re thirsty enough.”

  I nod, understanding that on a calm day or night, such experiments—especially if done just outside the tent—might be worth the risk. But not in a tent that’s leaping and shaking under and around you.

  Our own small tent, seven feet by six, is sagging and pitiful-looking. J.C. holds up one finger, telling me to wait outside a moment, and then he crawls in just far enough to pull a coil of the Deacon’s Miracle Rope from his rucksack. He cuts different lengths and we use the heavier rope to add more tie-downs to the wind-whipped tent. The long stakes don’t work worth a damn here on the lateral moraine, so we’re adding to the already existing spiderweb of lines to rocks frozen into the moraine, boulders, and even to one ice pinnacle.

  By now I’m frozen through and relieved when we’re finished and can crawl into the low tent.

  We crawl deep into our still dry goose down sleeping bags, removing our boots but putting them in the bags with us so that they won’t be too frozen to get into in the morning. At this temperature, if a climber leaves his boots outside his bag, the laces tend to snap off when he tries to tie them in the morning. With George Finch’s goose down duvet still on under the sleeping bag down, plus Reggie’s hood and Michelin Man goose down trousers, what little body heat I have left builds up again quickly enough.

  “Here, Jake, put these in your bag as well.” J.C.’s left his bulky hand torch on, and I can see that he’s handing me a f
rozen tin of spaghetti, a smaller tin of meat lozenges, a solid brick of the rubber-protected “portable soup,” and the can of peaches (I can see the dent) that Reggie threw at the Deacon’s head the hundred years ago that was Saturday.

  “You’re kidding,” I say. How am I supposed to sleep with these freezing cans against me?

  “Not at all,” says Jean-Claude. “I have twice as many in my bag. Our body heat may melt—or at least soften—some of the food. The tin of peaches has syrup in it and we’ll share it with the other four in the morning to…how do you say it in English?…slake our thirst.”

  Let’s open it and drink it now, just the two of us, is my unworthy thought. But nobility wins out. That and my sure knowledge that the fluid in the peach can is frozen as solid as a brick at the moment.

  J.C. flicks off the hand torch to save the batteries but then says in an almost perfect imitation of the Deacon’s voice, “Well, what lessons have today’s events taught us, my friends?”

  The Deacon asks that after almost every climb and certainly after every problem we have with a climb, but J.C.’s mimicry of the vaguely tutorial Oxbridge accent is so dead-on that I laugh hard despite the pain it causes to my aching skull.

  “I suppose we should check the contents of our loads more carefully when carrying to any higher camp,” I say into the loud darkness.

  “Oui. What else?”

  “Double-check that none of the porters has tossed out something essential—such as his and his mate’s sleeping bag.”

  “Oui. What else?”

  “Probably have an Unna cooker in each camp as well as a roarer.” The Unna cookers we’ve brought to Everest, smaller and lighter than Primuses and using a solid fuel to burn, were generally used in higher camps when weight in the load had to be kept to a minimum. I’m fairly certain that Mallory and Irvine had an Unna cooker at their Camp VI.

  “Primuses almost always work,” is J.C.’s response. “Robert Falcon Scott hauled one nine hundred miles to the South Pole and most of the way back.”