by Dan Simmons
So that leaves the five of us crowded into Reggie’s Big Tent, which had been pitched atop a tilted boulder but in the rockfall-proof lee of two larger boulders when the Deacon and Pasang carried loads to Camp V yesterday. (Sunday, I amend, when I again remember that it’s past midnight.) The Deacon and Pasang had not only weighted all the edges of the tent down with serious-sized stones and driven German steel pitons into solid rock for tent stakes, but also lashed the whole tent down with about twenty yards of the new high-tensile rope zigzagging back and forth over the apex of the dome and tied down to large boulders both lower than the tent and uphill.
Reggie’s tent is big enough for the five of us to gather in for a meal, everyone sitting up, but stretching out to sleep is going to be a difficult proposition.
Despite not having time to excavate frozen-in-place stones to bury Mallory, we’d spent a very cold hour huddled over his corpse on the North Face. Even though we’d found tags in his clothing reading “G. Mallory,” the Deacon wanted to be certain of the dead man’s identity. So at one point three of us used our knives to chip away at the gravel on the left side of his body where the corpse was frozen in place until we could leverage him up a little to get a glimpse of his front and face.
That process felt precisely like lifting a log that has been frozen in place in the soil through a long, hard winter.
In the end, it was the Deacon who’d scooted closer on his back and then lain supine under the stiff, suspended body long enough to look into the dead man’s face.
“It’s Mallory,” said the Deacon.
“What else do you see?” asked Pasang.
“His eyes are closed. There’s stubble on his cheeks and chin, but no real beard.” The Deacon’s voice sounded weary.
“I meant in terms of visible injuries,” said Pasang.
“There’s a terrible puncture wound on his right temple, over his eye,” said the Deacon. “Perhaps he struck a rock on the way down or the pick of his ice axe recoiled back against him as he tried to self-arrest.”
“Does the wound go all the way through the bone of the skull there?” asked Pasang.
“Yes.”
“Can we let him down now?” I asked, gasping for breath. We all had our oxygen masks lowered for this task. The exertion of simply lifting a partially hollowed-out frozen corpse was almost too much for me.
“Yes,” the Deacon said again, sliding out and away from the dead man. And then, almost whispering, he said, “Good-bye, George.”
We’d gone through Mallory’s pockets and poked through a canvas bag he’d had hanging against his chest. As I mentioned, the corpse wasn’t wearing the metal rig for oxygen tanks and had no rucksack—only that one small carrying bag pressed against his chest and under his arm, and a few things stuck in his pockets.
In the pocket of his Norfolk jacket there was an altimeter much like the ones we carried—specially calibrated for altitudes up to 30,000 feet—but the crystal had been broken in the fall and the altimeter’s hands were missing.
“Too bad,” said Reggie. “We’ll never know if he and Irvine made the summit.”
“There were several cameras with them, I believe,” said the Deacon. “Teddy Norton told me that Mallory himself was carrying a Vest Pocket Kodak.”
When we pulled the small pouch around where we could get into it, I felt, again wearing only my undergloves, something hard and metallic inside. “I believe we’ve found that camera,” I announced.
It wasn’t. The hard lump consisted of a large package of Swan Vesta matches and a metal tin of meat lozenges. We set them back in place. Other metal objects found in Mallory’s pockets included an almost casual variety of personal gear, as if Mallory had just stepped out for a winter walk in Hyde Park: a stub of a pencil, a pair of scissors, a safety pin, a little metal holster for the scissors, and a detachable leather strap that had connected his oxygen mask to his leather motorcycle helmet. I knew what the last item was because I had an almost identical strap under my chin at that moment.
We returned the lozenges, matches, and other things to his pouch and pockets, but kept turning up more items: a very used—as in snotty—plain handkerchief with a tube of petroleum jelly in it (the jelly was for his chapped lips, we knew, since we each also carried one of those—same brand), and a much nicer and rather elaborately monogrammed—G.L.M.—handkerchief in a blue, burgundy, and green foulard pattern. This handkerchief was wrapped around some papers. The Deacon looked through the papers, but they all appeared to be personal letters which he did not read beyond the salutations and whatever was written on the envelopes (one was addressed to George Leigh Mallory, Esq., c/o British Trade Agent, Yalung, Tibet). They were personal and basic expedition business letters, not interesting save for one strange series of numbers scrawled in pencil along the margins of a letter that had been sent to him from some lady not his wife.
“Those are oxygen pressure readings,” said Jean-Claude. “Perhaps notes on how far they could get on their tanks of air that last day.”
“Only five pressures given here,” said Reggie. “I thought they left Camp Four with more than five oxygen tanks.”
“They did,” said the Deacon.
“Nothing there to help us understand anything, then,” said Reggie.
“Perhaps not,” said the Deacon. He nodded and refolded each letter, set each back in its own envelope, wrapped all of them neatly in the monogrammed handkerchief, and set the handkerchief back in the dead man’s pocket.
Even though we had taken nothing, I still felt like a grave robber. I’d never gone through the pockets of a corpse before. The Deacon seemed rather used to doing so, and I realized he almost certainly had—perhaps hundreds of times—on the Western Front
In other pockets we found only Mallory’s folding pocketknife and his goggles.
“That could be important,” said Reggie. “His goggles being in his pocket.”
I didn’t understand at once—I was too busy coughing at the moment—but Jean-Claude said, “Yes. It was either twilight or after dark when they fell…Mallory started his climb the day after he saw Norton so snow-blinded. It’s all but certain that he would only take his goggles off after sunset.”
“But were they climbing upward or downward when one or both fell?” asked Pasang.
“Down-climbing, I would think,” said the Deacon.
“Did they have an electric torch with them?” asked Reggie.
“No,” said the Deacon. “Odell found it in their tent at Camp Six and brought it down. The fact that they’d not brought their only electric torch tells almost conclusively that they left Camp Six after sunrise. Also that George Mallory was quite the forgetful sort of chap.”
“Let’s not speak ill of the dead,” I said between coughs.
“Not ill,” said the Deacon. “Just factual. George was always losing or forgetting something or leaving something behind on the first two expeditions I spent with him—his socks, his shaving kit, his hat, his roll of toilet paper. It was just his way.”
“Still…,” I began, and found I had nothing else to say.
The Deacon shielded his eyes—we’d been doing the search without wearing our goggles since the clouds were so heavy above us now—and looked as far up the slope as he could in the swirling snow. “Those gullies below and this side of the First Step, below the Yellow Band, would have been very hard to down-climb in the dark, without an electric torch or any flares or lanterns or candles.”
We all peered up at the ridges and gullies of rocks far above this lower part of the face. “Based on how intact his body is—and the obvious fact that he was still conscious and trying to self-arrest when he came to a stop—it’s obvious that Mallory didn’t fall from as high up as the North East Ridge,” said the Deacon, confirming my earlier hunch. “Almost certainly not from as high up as the Yellow Band. More likely he fell from one of the gullies or minor rock bands further down, closer to us here.”
“So Sandy Irvine may be right up there
waiting for us,” said Reggie.
The Deacon shrugged. “Or it was Irvine who fell first, pulling Mallory off his footing. We’ll never know unless we find Irvine’s corpse as well.”
You mean we’re going to continue searching after this? was my exhausted thought.
That’s when the Deacon brusquely ordered us all back to Camp V before the howling wind rose higher and the already snow-diminished visibility grew worse.
“So nothing we found on George Mallory can tell us whether he and Sandy Irvine reached the summit or not,” Reggie is saying. “Both Mallory’s watch and altimeter are broken and missing their hands.”
“Perhaps it is what’s missing that gives us our best clue,” says the Deacon.
I rise a little from the depths of my filthy goose down sleeping bag. “The Kodak camera?”
“No,” says the Deacon. “A photograph of Mallory’s wife, Ruth. Norton and everyone else I spoke to said that Mallory had taken the photograph with him from Camp Four—certainly no one ever found it there or at either of the two higher camps—and he had promised Ruth that he would leave it on the summit for her.”
“Or just at his high point before turning back—God alone knows where,” says J.C.
The Deacon nods at that and chews on the stem of his cold pipe.
“The absence of a photo isn’t proof that he reached the summit,” says Reggie.
“No,” agrees the Deacon. “Only that he left it somewhere. Perhaps, as Jean-Claude suggested, at their highest point before turnaround…wherever that was.”
“The missing camera interests me,” says Dr. Pasang. His deep voice is as gentle and unhurried as ever.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because when does one relinquish a camera to someone else?” asks the tall Sherpa.
“When you ask him to take your picture,” says Reggie. “As Mallory might have—giving the Kodak to Irvine on the summit, after taking the younger man’s photograph.”
“Only conjecture,” says the Deacon. “What isn’t speculation or conjecture is the fact that if we’re to have any hope at all of searching more tomorrow, we all have to get some sleep.”
“Easy for you to say,” I get out between coughs. “I just can’t seem to sleep at these goddamned altitudes.”
“Watch your language, Jake,” says the Deacon. “There’s a lady present.”
Reggie rolls her eyes.
“I have sleeping pills with me,” says Pasang. “They should guarantee at least three or four hours’ sleep.”
There is a silence, and I imagine that everyone else is thinking what I am—So we’d all be snoring away when the winds blow our tent over the edge of the mountain.
I start to give my opinion, but Reggie holds up her palm, silencing me. “Ssshh, everyone,” she whispers. “I hear someone. Someone screaming.”
My forearms break out in goose bumps.
“In this wind?” says the Deacon. “Impossible. Camp Four is much too far below us and…”
“I hear it as well,” says Pasang. “Someone is out in the dark screaming.”
Part III
THE ABOMINABLE
1.
Note to Mr. Dan Simmons: Up to this part, I’ve written out my story mostly in present tense because I was working from daily journal entries and climbing notes I’d made at the time in the summer and autumn of 1924 and spring of 1925. Writing in present tense helped bring things alive and immediate for me again. I know that wasn’t very professional of me, in any writing sense, but this last section of my tale has been told to only one person, and never written down at all. Not even in my notes at the time. I write this part as I remember it now, in past tense never recorded at the time, but please understand that every word that I set down here is as true and precise as I can remember and tell it, and that you will be only the second person since 1925 to hear this part of the tale.
— Jake Perry
Within five minutes of Pasang’s confirming hearing the screaming, three of us—the Deacon, Pasang, and I—were outside in the swirling snow. It had been decided that someone should remain behind to hold the tent staves; Reggie had volunteered, J.C. and I had tossed a coin, and he lost.
“Do you still hear it?” shouted the Deacon to Pasang.
“No, but I see something,” said the Sherpa. He pointed downhill toward a point about 300 feet below us near what remained of the two tents that had been our original site for Camp V.
It took me a second because of the snow blowing in the cone of light from my Welsh miner’s headlamp, but then I saw it: a hellish red glow behind large boulders 100 feet or so downhill from us.
With three of us tied onto a single rope—we hadn’t taken time to put on our crampons—I led the descent down the steep boulder slope. Not much snow was sticking to the rocks because of the wind, but there was a thick enough ice sheen to make every rock more slippery than usual. It felt strange to be walking only in hobnailed boots again. Already, I lacked the sense of secure footing that the crampon blades had been giving me in recent days.
In fifteen minutes we reached our original Camp V site, the one tent destroyed by rockfall, the other collapsed, just in time to see a red flare sputter out. It obviously hadn’t been one of the short-lived Very flares but rather one of the handheld, longer-lasting railroad flares we’d brought along in both red and white varieties.
Ten feet from the flare a man in one of the expedition’s goose down duvet jackets lay unmoving on his back. He’d collapsed very near the tumbled opening of the intact but fallen Meade tent.
We leaned over him, our headlights playing across the man’s upturned face and staring eyes.
“It’s Lobsang Sherpa,” said the Deacon. “He’s dead.”
When we’d met at Camp VI on Monday morning, the Deacon had mentioned carrying up to Camp V the day before with only a few porters and Lobsang acting as sirdar. Now, barely eighteen hours later, Lobsang Sherpa, a small but determined high-climbing Tiger Sherpa who’d earned his acting-sirdar position through unbelievably hard work and long carries, did indeed look dead, his mouth gaping open, his pupils looking to be fixed and dilated.
“No one else dies up here this day,” said Pasang and set down his rucksack. He was the only one of us to bring a pack along. I saw in the dancing headlamps and swirling snow that his leather doctor’s bag was inside his already heavy rucksack. “Mr. Perry,” he added, “if you’d be so kind as to open Lobsang Sherpa’s jacket and shirt layers so that his chest is bare.”
I went to one knee on the steep slope, shucked off my clumsy outer mittens, and did what Pasang had ordered—not expecting any sort of resuscitation technique to do any good on a man who looked so dead, his body and exposed face already coated with a thin veneer of windblown ice crystals.
But Pasang pulled out the largest syringe I’ve seen since a medical-farce sketch done by Harvard’s Hasty Pudding group. The needle must have been six inches long; the whole thing looked more like something a veterinarian would use on cattle than anything that could conceivably be applied to a human being.
“Hold his arms down,” instructed Pasang and ran his fingers across Lobsang’s bare brown chest. The Sherpa’s unblinking eyes still stared up into eternity.
Why hold his arms? I remember thinking. Is the corpse going somewhere?
Pasang was busy counting ribs and finding the poor Sherpa’s bony breastbone under the skin, and then he used both his now bare hands to lift the ridiculous syringe three feet into the air and then plunge it down through Lobsang Sherpa’s skin and breastbone directly into the man’s heart. The point of the needle made a sound as it pierced Lobsang’s breastbone, a sickening clack audible even over the last hisses of the red flare and the howling of the wind. Pasang pushed down the plunger of the huge syringe.
Lobsang Sherpa’s body arched upward—he would have thrown himself off the mountain if the Deacon and I hadn’t been holding him down—and the little man began gasping in great gulps of air.
“Jesu
s Christ,” the Deacon whispered to himself. I agreed. It was the damnedest medical thing I’d ever seen—and continued to be so for another six decades and more.
“Adrenaline straight to his heart,” gasped Dr. Pasang. “If anything can bring him back, that will.”
Pasang put his foot next to Lobsang Sherpa and pulled the needle from the man’s chest the way I’d heard that soldiers were taught to remove a stuck bayonet from an enemy’s carcass. Lobsang gasped, blinked wildly, and tried to sit up. After a few moments, Pasang and I worked to help Lobsang to his thick-booted feet. To me it felt like I was helping Lazarus stand.
Amazingly, Lobsang was able to support some of his own weight. If he hadn’t, we would have been forced to abandon him; at that altitude, even three men couldn’t carry dead weight 100 feet up a steep slope. With the Deacon and me half-supporting the blinking, gasping man and Dr. Pasang following close behind with his rucksack, the four of us staggered uphill to Reggie’s Big Tent. If there’d been little hope of five of us sleeping in the domed tent earlier, there was no chance now with a sixth person joining us. I had mixed feelings about that sixth person being alive.
We’d used the Unna cooker to heat water and soup hours earlier, and now Reggie gave the gasping Lobsang some cocoa. He gulped it down. When it looked as if he might be able to answer questions, Reggie asked the first one—in English and then in rapid-fire Nepalese. “Why have you come up here in the dark, Lobsang Sherpa?”