The Abominable: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  I admit that I was bridling a bit as we all ordered our lunches (I simply said that I’d have whatever the Deacon had just ordered) and while Jean-Claude and Finch conversed animatedly about which kind of wine to order for the table. I was irritated because I wondered if Finch used that “this joint has good food” vernacular because I was so obviously an American and a not-very-successful-looking one at that. (I soon learned that this was not the case; George Ingle Finch spoke many languages and mixed their vernacular into his sentences, even Americanisms, with casual enjoyment. By the end of that day in Zurich, I would see that Finch, though a man of great personal dignity, probably took the fewest pains to impress others with his knowledge, prowess, and personal achievements than any climber I’d ever met.)

  The food was good. The wine, whatever it was (and to the limited extent I could judge wine when I was 22), was excellent. And the waiters whom I’d expected to be ostentatious, even Deutsch-Schweizer imperious toward our little group of foreigners, treated us with great courtesy and were all but invisible during their silent delivery and whisking away of courses and dishes. (This idea of capable-waiter invisibility equaling quality service was an opinion I’d picked up from my father: one of the few unsolicited opinions I ever heard him venture other than on the day he and Mother dropped me at Harvard and he took me aside and said sternly, “All right, Jake. You’re a man responsible for yourself from this point on. Try to keep your whiskey bottle out of the bedroom, your pecker in your pants as much as possible, and your head in your books until you get a degree. Any degree.”)

  I set down my wineglass and realized that Finch, Jean-Claude, and the Deacon were discussing our plans, such as they were at that point, for our upcoming “recovery expedition” to bring back Bromley’s personal possessions to his mother, or, since we all knew that the odds of that were close to nil, at least return with some clear report about how young Percival had died. The Deacon had assured us that Finch understood that news of our private expedition was not to be shared with anyone else. “And,” the Deacon had added, “there’s currently so little love lost between Finch and the Alpine Club, the Committee, and the entire Royal Geographical Society that he certainly won’t be eager to tell them anything…much less our secret.”

  “So you knew Percival…Lord Percival Bromley?” Jean-Claude was asking.

  “The first time I met him was when he hired me as a guide some years ago,” said Finch in that rather pleasant educated-British tone with its slight German accent. “Bromley wanted to traverse the Douves Blanches…” He paused and looked at me for the first time. “The Douves Blanches is a spur, Mr. Perry—a sharp, spiky one all the way—off the main chain of the Grandes Dents on the east side of the Arolla Valley.”

  “Yes, I’ve been there,” I said, my voice a shade impatient. I was no longer a novice at alpine climbing, after all. I’d done the Douves Blanches traverse the previous autumn with Jean-Claude and the Deacon.

  Finch didn’t seem to have picked up on my tone. Or perhaps he had and didn’t care one way or the other. He nodded once and continued, “Young Percy was capable even then of doing the traverse, but he’d come to attempt what he called a ‘delectable’ series of rather impressive chimneys that split the two-thousand-foot rock wall above the upper Ferpècle Glacier, and he wanted someone on the rope with him.”

  All three of us waited, but Finch seemed to have lost interest in Bromley and the conversation and returned his attention to his steak and wine.

  “How did you find him?” asked the Deacon.

  Finch looked up as if the Deacon had spoken in Swahili. (Which is a bad comparison, I realize, because it turned out that George Ingle Finch could speak some Swahili and understood more of it than he spoke.)

  “I mean,” said the Deacon, “how did he handle himself?”

  Finch shrugged noncommittally, and that might have been the frustrating end of the discussion, but perhaps he realized that we’d come a long way, and there was a real chance that we would soon be climbing very high on the shoulder of Mount Everest to find Percy Bromley’s corpse, and that we were, after all (or Lady Bromley was), paying for Finch’s meal in one of the most expensive restaurants in Switzerland. Perhaps in all of Europe.

  “Bromley was all right,” said Finch. “Climbed very well, for an amateur. Never complained, even when we had to spend a long, cold night on a very narrow ledge, without food or proper equipment, on that steep south ridge just a short but difficult pitch below the summit. Not a good overcoat or bag between the two of us, nor a bump in the rock face to tie ourselves on to. The ledge was about the width of that bread tray…” Finch nodded toward the narrow silver tray. “We had no candles to hold lighted under our chins in case we dozed, so we took turns through the long night sitting watch, as it were, making sure the other didn’t fall asleep and pitch forward three thousand feet to the glacier.”

  Perhaps to make sure that we got the point, Finch added, “I trusted the boy with my life.”

  “So Lord Percival was a better climber than some others are saying now?” The Deacon was finishing his Tafelspitz—an excellent meal consisting of tips of choice beef simmered along with root vegetables and various spices in a rich broth and served with roasted slices of potato and a mix of minced apples and sour cream combined with horseradish. I always marveled at how the Brits could lift a fork with something like morsels of meat and sauce on the back of the utensil, and make it look not only easy but proper. Eating in England and Europe, I thought, must be like going to China and getting used to chopsticks.

  “Depends on which ‘others’ you have in mind,” responded Finch after another significant pause. He was looking carefully at our team leader. “Anyone in particular?”

  “Bruno Sigl?”

  Finch laughed—a harsh bark of a sound. “That bully-boy Nazi fanatic friend of Herr Hitler?” he said. “Sigl’s an accomplished climber—I’ve never climbed with him but I’ve run into him on almost a dozen alpine ascents over the years. He’s a smooth, careful, competent man on rock or ice—but he’s also a lying Scheisskerl, one who tends to get his younger climbing partners killed.”

  “What is this…Scheisskerl?” asked Jean-Claude.

  “Brainless, untrustworthy fellow,” said the Deacon quickly, glancing over his shoulder at the hovering waiters. To Finch he said, “So if Herr Sigl told you that Percival Bromley ventured out onto a risky Everest North Face, walking onto an obviously avalanche-prone slab of snow with an Austrian fellow in tow, you wouldn’t believe him?”

  “I wouldn’t believe Bruno Sigl if the bastard told me that the sun would be coming up tomorrow,” said Finch, pouring himself the last of our wine.

  “Richard, weren’t you one of the first to see the monster’s tracks on Lhakpa La when you led Mallory up to that pass in ’twenty-one?” asked George Ingle Finch between large bites of his crème-covered Apfelstrudel. Jean-Claude and the Deacon were having only thick, rich coffee for dessert. I’d tried a chocolate pudding.

  “Monster?” said Jean-Claude, perking up. I’d watched as the heavy Bavarian meal, so unusual for the athletic French mountain guide, made him sleepy. “Monster?” he said again as if unsure of the English word.

  “Ja,” replied Finch, “the tracks of some huge biped our friend Richard here and the late, overly lamented George Mallory found above twenty-two thousand feet on Lhakpa La, the high pass from where Richard had suggested to Mallory—correctly suggested, as it turned out—that they might be able to see a possible approach route to Everest. But on the way up—this is in late September nineteen twenty-one, I believe—they found the tracks of the monster instead of a view. True?” He turned toward the Deacon.

  “Twenty September,” said the Deacon, setting down his coffee cup with great precision. “Deep into the monsoon season. The snow was pure powder and hip-deep.”

  “But you made it to the summit of this little mountain—more a peak of its own than a pass, ja?—despite the snow,” said Finch. It was not a questio
n.

  The Deacon scratched his cheek. I could tell that he wanted to light up his pipe but was refraining from doing so while Finch was still enjoying his dessert. “Mallory and I cleared the icefall all right, but the deep snow slowed us down and made the porters with our tents turn back eight hundred feet below the summit. We all—Mallory, me, Wheeler, and Bullock, with Wollaston, Morshead, and Howard-Bury in reserve—made it to the top and set up camp on the twenty-second.”

  “What about the tracks of a monster?” insisted Jean-Claude.

  “Yeah, what about the monster?” I asked. It was one of the first times I’d spoken, except to ask for something to be passed to me, during the entire meal.

  “Above the icefall, on both the twentieth and twenty-second, where none of our climbers or porters had gone before, there were deep marks both in the loose snow and in the firmer, frozen-over parts of the ascent, where we could climb without fully breaking through the crust,” said the Deacon, his voice very soft. “They appeared to be from a two-legged creature.”

  “Why say ‘appeared’?” demanded Finch. A slight smile was forming under his fuzz of a mustache. “Mallory, Wollaston, Howard-Bury, and all the others who made it up to the saddle summit of Lhakpa La swore that they were the giant clawed footprints of some mammal-like, two-legged living thing.”

  The Deacon sipped the last of his coffee. The waiter bustled over, and we all accepted more coffee so we could keep the table longer.

  “How large were the prints in the snow?” I asked.

  “A paw print of a human-like foot fourteen to sixteen inches long?” said Finch, turning it into a question as he turned toward the Deacon.

  Our friend only nodded. Finally, setting the coffee cup down again, he said, “By the time Wollaston and the others got up to the saddle of Lhakpa La, our porters—Mallory’s and mine, since we were leading that second attempt—had stomped all over the original tracks we saw. There was no way for any of the British climbers to be sure of what was what or the precise length of any track in the snow.”

  “But George Mallory took photographs,” said Finch.

  “Yes,” said the Deacon.

  “And those photos were almost identical to tracks reported and photographed on a high pass in Sikkim way back in eighteen eighty-nine,” said Finch.

  “So they tell me,” said the Deacon.

  Finch chuckled and turned toward Jean-Claude and me. I am sure I looked as goggle-eyed as Jean-Claude did.

  “The porters knew exactly what the tracks were and who or what had made them,” said Finch in his soft German accent. “They were made by Metohkangmi…a yeti.”

  “By whom?” I said, my cup of coffee still frozen in space as if I could neither drink from it nor set it back on its saucer. “By what?” said Jean-Claude almost in unison.

  “Yeti,” repeated Finch. “Not one of the many demons who the locals believe live in or on the mountain, but a real, living, breathing, blood-eating man-thing…a creature-monster, eight feet tall or larger. Huge feet. A gorilla-like or manlike monster that can survive at altitudes of twenty-two thousand feet and above near Everest.”

  Jean-Claude and I looked at each other.

  Finch ate strudel and smiled again. “I saw tracks myself the next year, in nineteen twenty-two, when Geoffrey Bruce and I climbed all the way to the North East Ridge for the first time. They were in an icy snowfield at about twenty-five thousand feet—a snowfield that none of our people had yet climbed to—clearly tracks of a biped like us, but with almost twice the stride of even the tallest man, and in the shallower parts of the snowfield where the tracks were embedded mostly in soft ice, we could see the actual outline of the foot—almost sixteen inches long, with what looked to be claws on the toes.” He looked at the Deacon. “You were there at the Rongbuk Monastery when we talked about the yetis in nineteen twenty-two, yes?”

  The Deacon nodded.

  Finch looked at Jean-Claude and me again. “Rongbuk Monastery is a very sacred place since it’s near the village of Chobuk, right across from the entrance to the valley that leads eventually to Chomolungma…”

  “Chomolungma?” interrupted Jean-Claude.

  Finch had turned back toward the Deacon and for some reason continued to look at him as he answered J.C. “The locals’ name for Mount Everest. It means something like ‘Goddess Mother of the World.’”

  “Ah, oui,” said Jean-Claude. “I had forgotten. Colonel Norton had mentioned that name when we spoke to the climbers at the Royal Geographical Society.”

  “So the monks at the Rongbuk Monastery knew about this…yeti creature?” I asked. I didn’t want to let the subject of the “monster” drop.

  Finch nodded and said to the Deacon, “You were there with me right at the end of April in nineteen twenty-two and you heard what the Rongbuk lama and his priests said about yetis on Everest. Was it four of the creatures that the lama said lived there?”

  “Five,” said the Deacon. “Bruce kept pressing them on the tracks and the creatures, and the head lama—Dzatrul Rinpoche—told us calmly that he and the monks had seen five yeti. He said that they lived in the upper reaches of the valley, up to the North Col and even above that. The Rinpoche said that the yeti were more feared than the mere mountain demons, which might or might not exist. He said that the yeti were manlike, but taller, larger, with huge chests and powerful long arms. He said that the yeti were covered with long hair and had yellowish eyes. The lama told Bruce and us—you were there, Finch, I know you remember—that sometimes the yeti raided the village of Chobuk, but never the Rongbuk Monastery itself, drinking the blood of yaks, killing men with one swipe of their clawed paw-hands, and—I believe Geoffrey Bruce found this most interesting—carrying off the Chobuk women.”

  “What would the monsters want with human women?” asked Jean-Claude in a small, almost childlike voice.

  The other three of us had to chuckle, and J.C. blushed a bright crimson.

  “The lama went on to say that when the village sent men up the glacier valley with weapons,” said Finch, his voice low so that none of the hovering waiters would hear, “they never found the yeti or the women, alive at least—always just the women’s gnawed skeletons and skulls. The women’s bones, said the lama, had always been sucked free of all their marrow. The eye sockets in the skulls looked, he said, as if they had been licked clean.”

  I finally had to set my coffee cup down into its saucer. They both rattled. The sound made me imagine Mount Everest winds blowing through gnawed ribcages and the hollowed-out eye sockets of a skull.

  The last of his coffee drunk, glancing to make sure that our silent trio had finished, George Ingle Finch gracefully waved over the waiter, his rock-ravaged fingers writing in air to signal for the bill. When the bill came, he gestured, with equal grace, for it to be presented to the Deacon.

  We came out the front door of Restaurant Kronenhalle and turned left onto Rämistrasse and into the full force of the freezing wind blowing in off the lake. A teeth-chattering block and a half later we reached the Quaibrücke bridge but turned left onto an empty avenue named Utoquai and trudged southeast along a frozen lakeside walkway. A low concrete railing to our right was guarded by fangs of icicles. A constant rumbling below reminded us that the ice—the lake was frozen solid near the shore, icy but liquid water starting a hundred yards or so out—was grinding up against the cement breakwater below that railing. The wind was roaring hard enough to raise whitecaps far out along the white-iced and white-watered expanse, and the same wind would have thrown me down had not the ever efficient Swiss cleared all the ice and snow along the Utoquai Boulevard sidewalk and sprinkled it liberally with salt. Finch had informed us that his storage warehouse was less than half a mile away, but as Jean-Claude and I plodded along behind the Deacon and Finch, trying to overhear their conversation through the freezing wind, half a mile seemed too far to walk.

  Jean-Claude and I walked faster to close the distance to the two men in front of us.

  “
I know what you’re trying to do,” George Finch was saying, “and it’s just not possible, Richard.”

  “What am I trying to do, George?”

  “Climb Mount Everest alpine style,” said the shorter man. “Instead of the Mallory-Bruce-Norton military-siege style of attack—one slow camp at a time, attack, retreat, attack again—you and your young friends want to take it in one swift alpine assault. But it won’t work, Richard. You’ll all die up there.”

  “We’ve been paid by Lady Bromley to carry out only a search and recovery operation—at least to find and bury her son’s body,” said the Deacon. “With luck, we’ll find some trace of him far lower than Bruno Sigl was talking about, way up high between Camps Four and Five—that made no sense. But I’ve mentioned nothing about the three of us trying to climb the mountain.”

  George Finch nodded. “But you will try, Richard. I know you. So I tremble for the fates of you and your two fine friends.”

  The Deacon did not reply to this. We passed the Opera House and turned left on a street called Falkenstrasse. At least the wind was at our backs now.