The Abominable
Page 75
I’ve also mentioned my work with the OSS during World War II and shan’t bore you with more details of that, other than to say that I used some classified channels to hunt for any mention of Reggie and Richard Davis Deacon—or even of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer and Bruno Sigl—but nothing new came to light.
In 1953, at the advanced and decrepit age of 51 years, I accompanied my friend Charlie on my last Himalayan adventure—acting as support climber on their second attempt on K2. No one reached the summit that year either—K2 is an even harsher mistress than Everest and holds her secrets dear—but I did have the unique opportunity to watch one man, Peter Schoening, belay four of his fellow climbers (including my friend Dr. Charlie) who’d slipped and fallen on a fatally steep ice slope. To my knowledge, a four-man-belay save at such an altitude has never been done before or since.
Unfortunately, one of the men with us—Art Gilkey—had been injured on the descent, and during our group’s attempt to get Gilkey off the mountain, the other members of what Charlie later called his “Brotherhood of the Rope” had securely tied Gilkey off—wrapped in his sleeping bag—on a steep slope while we crossed a dangerous spot by chopping steps, when either an unheard avalanche or Gilkey himself (for unknown reasons) slipped the secure anchors we’d left him tied to, and he slid to his death.
I’ve mentioned before that such falls in the mountains are not antiseptic—they almost invariably leave behind a trail of blood, torn flesh, ripped clothing, rent limbs, brain matter, and more—and Charlie never really recovered from our down-climbing for hours past the blood and torn remains of his close friend. Years later, Charlie would have severe bouts of depression and hallucinations of the highway ahead of his car filling with blood, almost certainly a result of what doctors are calling, now in the implausible future of 1992, “post-traumatic stress disorder.”
After that second K2 adventure and Art Gilkey’s death, I was done with the Himalayas forever.
But I’ve neglected the most important event during those decades. Some epilogue writer I am.
In 1948 I was in Berlin as part of an OSS Nazi officials debriefing mission and was reading a German newspaper—I’d picked up the language during the war—when I came upon an article that made me put down my beer and stare for several minutes.
Four crack German climbers had been trying a midwinter climb of the Eiger following Heinrich Harrer’s first successful route up the Eigerwand—the ferocious and climber-devouring North Face of the Eiger—when they came across the frozen body of a solo climber at the top of the so-called Spider, above that white web of deadly vertical snowfields and just below the Exit Cracks that lead to the final summit ridge of the 13,022-foot killer mountain.
The climber—who appeared to be far too old to be attempting the Eigerwand, a man in his mid- or late 50s at least—had obviously been stopped in the last pitches of his climb by a terrible storm that had swept across the North Face, trapped the man in his solo bivouac on a six-inch-wide ledge where he couldn’t climb or descend because of the weather, and frozen him to death. The man had no ID, wallet, or other forms of identification on him, and no one in the nearby village or the Kleine Scheidegg Hotel in the valley at the base of the Eiger’s North Face remembered seeing him pass through. The article also said that the German climbers reported there had been a slight smile on the frozen middle-aged climber’s face.
Richard Davis Deacon would have been 59 in the winter of 1948—an insane age to attempt any serious mountain face, much less while climbing solo, much less the Eigerwand. Although the body was never identified (or even seen again, since an avalanche had carried it away before the next summit attempt reached that height again in the late summer of that year), and the German climbers had no camera with them when they found the body, I can clearly imagine the Deacon’s face. I can even imagine his thoughts as the storm stopped his climb so very close to the summit as hypothermia began to set in. He would not have blamed the mountain.
He had always said that his destiny was to die on the North Face of the Eiger.
Whether this solo attempt by the Deacon—if it was the Deacon (no evidence other than my inner certainty says it was)—was something that happened after Reggie died or returned to India, or whether she was waiting for him to return to Nepal from the mountain, I can’t be certain. I can’t imagine her allowing him to attempt the Eigerwand solo, in winter, so soon after the war in Europe, but then neither can I imagine the Deacon being stopped if he’d set his mind to do something. The Germans had reported that the man had graying hair but that his frozen body looked to be in tip-top athletic shape—the body of a serious climber.
Finally, I kept in touch with Dr. Pasang for decades after we parted in 1925 and went to see him twice in India, once in 1931 and again in the summer of 1948. I made the second trip largely to show him the newspaper article about the solo climber who had died on the Eigerwand that winter.
Pasang was one of the richest non-maharajas in all of India, and he used his wealth well. Lady Bromley died in 1935, and the full wealth from the former Bromley Darjeeling tea plantations came to Pasang and his family—he had seven children, all of whom were successful later in life and three of whom, including a daughter, served in India’s parliament. Pasang passed much of his wealth along to the Indian people, endowing hospitals, hospices, clinics, scholarships, and grants for young Indian students with dreams of becoming doctors. The Lady Bromley-Montfort Research Hospital—specializing in treating and finding new ways to treat war wounds such as those from the land mine explosions in the Third World that have crippled so many children—is famous and thriving to this day.
Pasang died in 1973. His name and legacy are still revered not just in Darjeeling but across India.
Our correspondence over the decades was intermittent but rich with memory and emotion, and I’ve left word that our letters are to be sent to you, Dan, along with these notebooks and the Kodak Vest Pocket camera.
Ah, yes, the camera. George Mallory’s camera. I brought two important things back from the 1925 Everest trip—the Deacon’s Webley revolver, which I used in the Greek isles and elsewhere during World War II, and Mallory’s little Vest Pocket Kodak that we found on Sandy Irvine’s body above 27,000 feet on that May day in 1925.
I never developed the film in the camera—indeed, never removed the film from the camera—but years ago, in 1975, I believe, I was talking to a researcher from the Kodak Company who was doing some basic climbing with me in the mountains around Aspen, Colorado, and I asked him if film from such a camera left in the Himalayas (“at a high altitude” was my only other description) might still be developed…might still have images on it.
“Almost certainly,” said the expert. “Especially if it spent a good part of that time in the cold, dry air of the Himalayas.” Then he squinted at me almost slyly and said, “I bet you’re talking about the Kodak Vest Pocket camera that George Mallory had when he disappeared and which has never been found, aren’t you? I know even though you don’t talk about it that you once went to the Himalayas—K2, wasn’t it? You’re wondering if that camera were ever found, whether we could recover prints of Mallory and Irvine on the summit…come on, Jake, fess up. You were thinking of that camera, weren’t you?”
Sheepishly, I confessed that I had been. I didn’t mention that it was in my small apartment in Aspen just a mile or two from where we were scrambling at the time.
So I bequeath George Mallory’s Vest Pocket camera to you, Dan Simmons, with apologies for not letting it remain in the film-healthier conditions below zero at nearly 28,000 feet. I admit that I’m curious what the photographs will show, but not curious enough to develop them while I’m alive. I have my own opinions about whether Mallory and Irvine made it to the summit or not, just as I have my opinion on whether the Deacon and Lady Bromley-Montfort summited one year after Mallory and Irvine attempted it. I always hate to confound quite solid opinions with mere facts.
I apologize for the length of this endl
ess manuscript—all these dozens of scribbled-in notebooks for you to strain your eyes reading—but I’ve found in the last six or eight months that a death sentence, by cancer or any other means, tends to focus one’s mind wonderfully on who and what have been important in one’s life and what has been dross. I’ve been blessed with many experiences and with knowing many people—some of the experiences were terribly painful at the time, since they entailed losing the people, but none were ever dross.
The three men and one woman I’ve written about in these scrawled pages were important, as were the brave Sherpas whose names I remember to this day.
I confess that I hurt too much to write any more of this amateurishly sentimental “epilogue” letter to you, so I’ll close now with these simple words—
Your friend,
Jacob (Jake) Perry
April 28, 1992
Dan Simmons’s Afterword
Even before finishing Jake Perry’s last handwritten notebook last year, I put in a shamefully desperate call to Mr. Richard A. Durbage (Jr.) in Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland—the son of the lady to whom the package with the notebooks and camera had mistakenly been mailed almost twenty years earlier in 1992.
Mr. Durbage Jr. was very pleasant and tried to be helpful on the phone, although I sensed that I was taking him away from something important on TV—a football game, I thought I heard in the background. Did Mr. Durbage Jr. know of such a camera in the package accidentally mailed to his mother, Lydia, Jake Perry’s grandniece? I asked, my voice almost shaking. It should have been with the notebooks. It had also been meant for me, I added, hearing the possessive—almost obsessive—tone in my own voice. I didn’t tell the gentleman in Maryland that the camera mailed to his mother almost certainly would tell the world whether Mallory and Irvine made it to the summit of Mount Everest in June of 1924.
Mr. Durbage Jr. did remember the camera lying in that box in the basement with Mr. Perry’s scribbled notebooks—it was an old thing, he said, like some sort of camera from the 1800s—but he was sure he no longer had it. He’d moved from that house just that year, 2011, and his daughter and son-in-law had pitched away a lot of junk in preparation for his move to “a smaller place.” But mostly Mr. Durbage Jr. was almost certain that his mother, Lydia Durbage, had sold that old camera at one of her weekly garage sales, perhaps shortly after she’d received the junk from Mr. Perry, probably back in the early 1990s. He distinctly remembered that there’d been a heavy old pistol in the box as well—not loaded, thank God—and his mother had personally taken it to the Lutherville-Timonium police department for them to get rid of the horrid thing.
But, yes, now that Mr. Durbage Jr. thought back on it, the more sure he was that his mother had sold the ancient camera at a yard sale, probably that same summer of 1992, when the package had arrived from the nursing home in Colorado. He had no idea who’d bought it during her yard sale, though he thought he remembered that she said she’d gotten two dollars for the old thing. Could he be of any other help?
“No,” I said. “Thank you.” And I hung up.
A little bit of research on the dates of the Alaska, Nanda Devi, and K2 climbs quickly showed me that Jake’s climbing friend, the doctor he called “Charlie,” must have been Dr. Charles Houston, a famous American mountaineer, eleven years younger than Jake Perry, who had died in September of 2009. Houston had been one of the four fallen men held onto the slopes of K2 by the now legendary belay hold by Pete Schoening in 1953. This belay is beautifully described in Houston’s now classic 1954 book about that expedition, K2, the Savage Mountain, co-written by Houston’s expedition partner Robert H. Bates.
Most of Houston’s books written and published solo were scholarly medical works on the effects of hypoxia—high altitude—on the human body and brain.
Although I’m fairly good at getting information from the government through the Freedom of Information Act (much of the information I culled about Ernest Hemingway’s wartime Cuban exploits as a spy for my novel The Crook Factory had been classified until I liberated it through FOI requests), in the past year I haven’t been able to turn up a single page of redacted official reporting about Jake Perry’s years in the OSS during and just after World War II. I have no doubt, however, as hard as it is for me to imagine that old gentleman as an assassin, that he was where he said he was and had done what he said he did.
Finally, late this autumn of 2012, as I was working on typing and annotating Jake’s many notebooks for this oversized MS—possibly for publication, although few publishers would touch a book (by an amateur, no less) of this size, and I’m not even sure I can get my own literary agent to read it all—I decided to drive over to Delta to see Jake’s grave.
Jacob Perry had asked to be buried not at the cemetery in Delta but in a smaller, out-of-the-way cemetery some forty-eight miles down Highway 50 and 550 at the little Colorado town of Ridgway in Ouray County, population 924 people in the 2010 census. When I arrived there at this remote hilltop cemetery on a cold, clear, blue-sky Colorado late-autumn day, I realized why he’d chosen the place.
Visible from the cemetery that day was Mount Sneffels and the entire Sneffels Range of high peaks, Mears Peak looming up white against the blue sky, and behind the last few dulled aspen leaves still clinging, the dramatic San Juan Mountains, Uncompahgre Peak and the entire Uncompahgre Wilderness visible to the west, Owl Creek Pass Road with its dolomite vertical slabs and ridges not far away, Teakettle Mountain with its frighteningly sheer north face, dramatic Chimney Rock visible along with various white-topped “fourteeners” in addition to Uncompahgre and Mount Sneffels—Mount Wilson, El Diente, Mount Eolus, Windom Peak, Sunlight Peak, Redcloud Peak…Incredible.
I’m not a religious man, but I’d brought a bottle of the Macallan twenty-five-year-old single-malt Scotch and two small glasses that day. I filled both glasses, left one on the small headstone that said only JACOB WILLIAM PERRY April 2, 1902–May 28, 1992, and lifted the other.
Long ago, just for the hell of it, I’d memorized the English translation of some of Virgil’s lines from his Eclogues. Now, holding my Scotch glass high toward the San Juan Mountain peaks catching the last slanting rays of the fall day’s sunlight beyond little Ridgway, I recited some of those lines as best I could remember them—
“As long as rivers shall run down to the sea, or shadows touch the mountain slopes, or stars gaze in the vault of heaven, so long shall your honor, your name, your praise endure.”
And I drank my fine whisky in one swallow, left the bottle and the other glass on the headstone, turned my car north and east, and drove back out and away from the snow-topped high peaks toward home.
THE END
Colorado
May 2011–September 2012
About the Author
Dan Simmons is the award-winning author of several best-selling novels, including Olympos, The Terror, Drood, and Black Hills. He lives along the Front Range of Colorado and sometimes at Windwalker near Longs Peak on the Continental Divide.
dansimmons.com
Books by Dan Simmons
The Abominable
Darwin’s Blade
The Crook Factory
Flashback
Black Hills
Drood
The Terror
Olympos
Hard as Nails
Ilium
Worlds Enough & Time
Hard Freeze
Hardcase
A Winter Haunting
The Rise of Endymion
Endymion
Fires of Eden
Lovedeath
Summer Sketches
Children of the Night
The Hollow Man
Summer of Night
Prayers to Broken Stones
The Fall of Hyperion
Hyperion
Carrion Comfort
Phases of Gravity
Song of Kali
Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital.
To re
ceive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.
Sign Up
Or visit us at hachettebookgroup.com/newsletters
For more about this book and author, visit Bookish.com.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Introduction
Part I: THE CLIMBERS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Part II: THE MOUNTAIN
Saturday, April 25, 1925
Saturday, May 2, 1925
Tuesday, May 5, 1925
Thursday, May 7, 1925
Saturday, May 9, 1925
Monday, May 11, 1925
Tuesday, May 12, 1925
Thursday, May 14, 1925
Friday, May 15, 1925 I
Friday, May 15, 1925 II
Saturday, May 16, 1925
Sunday, May 17, 1925
Monday, May 18, 1925 I
Monday, May 18, 1925 II
Monday, May 18, 1925 III
Tuesday, May 19, 1925
Part III: THE ABOMINABLE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6