The Abominable: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

“You must remember in ’twenty-two,” continued Finch, “the day we reached Pang La Pass—at seventeen thousand two hundred feet—and caught our first glimpse of Everest.”

  “I remember,” grunted the Deacon.

  “The wind was so strong at Pang La that we had to lie down, gasping for air and clinging to rocks to keep from being blown away,” continued Finch. “But suddenly there was that view of a hundred miles of the Himalayan range. Mount Everest was still forty bloody miles to the south, but that monstrous hill dominated everything. You remember the cloud trailing from it, Richard? You remember the snow plume stretching out for miles to the west? That bloody mountain creates its own weather.”

  “I was there with you, George,” the Deacon said. We turned right onto a narrower street of closed-front warehouses and bleak old apartment buildings—Seefeldstrasse, read the ice-encrusted street sign.

  “Then you know that an alpine-style assault is impossible,” said the alpinist, removing a fat, heavy key ring from his overcoat pocket and finding the right key for a warehouse door. “Climbers sick, porters sick, terrible winds, sudden heavy snows, the monsoon season arriving early, injuries, avalanches, rockfalls, tents torn, oxygen apparatuses not working properly, dysentery, altitude sickness, frostbite, stoves malfunctioning…any single setback, and there will be many, Richard, you know that as well as I do…any setback will destroy the entire alpine-style effort. And cost some or all of you your lives. Here we are.”

  Finch entered the black maw and fumbled for a light switch.

  The first floor—first floor by my American way of thinking—of this warehouse wasn’t the huge storage space I’d expected. Or, rather, it was, but it had been partitioned. Nine-foot walls without ceilings had created dozens of such storage areas, each entrance with a metal-grill door and heavy padlock. We followed Finch halfway down the echoing space, he produced yet another long key from his key ring, and then he held the iron-grill door open as we entered his storage space, which was perhaps 25 feet by 20 feet.

  Inside, a long workbench along the far wall was stacked with oxygen tanks.

  To our left was a wall with more than a dozen different-sized ice axes hanging. Shelves held a myriad of hobnailed and felt-lined boots, and a long rack showed varieties of wool climbing jackets, arctic anoraks, and a whole line of distinctive long padded jackets or overcoats. I counted ten there on the rack, and I was surprised that Finch needed so many.

  Finch had closed the door when I walked over, lifted the eiderdown-filled fabric of the closest long coat on the rack, and said, “Is this your famous balloon jacket?”

  Finch glowered at me. It was obvious that he’d endured too much teasing about that particular article of clothing. “It’s the goose-down-filled outer jacket I devised for Everest,” he snapped. “Yes, it’s balloon fabric—the only material I could find that wouldn’t tear or rip and which could be easily sewn for the compartments of eiderdown. It kept me warm at almost twenty-four thousand feet below the North East Ridge.”

  The Deacon chuckled. “I can vouch for that. The three of us—George, Geoffrey Bruce, and I, and Bruce was a neophyte climber then—used ‘English air,’ George’s oxygen apparatus, to press through the Yellow Band to a point just below the North East Ridge. We would have made the ridge had Bruce’s oxygen outfit not quit working. There was a broken glass tube in Bruce’s set. Luckily, George carried a spare glass piece, but he had to stop and tinker with his own oxygen rig to allow it to feed oxygen to both Geoffrey and himself while he repaired Bruce’s rig. All that at twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet…at the time, the highest point humans had ever reached on foot.”

  “And then we had to turn back,” growled Finch. “Surrendering our summit attempt because of Bruce’s temporary trauma at not getting oxygen. And he’d been one of the adamant ones about reaching the summit without ‘artificial air.’ Had he been an experienced climber…” The growl trailed off, but the sadness and anger etched on George Ingle Finch’s face remained.

  The Deacon nodded acknowledgment of Finch’s frustration. I realized then, fully for the first time, what an insult and disappointment it had been for these two men, each having climbed higher than Mallory or anyone else on the 1922 expedition, not to have been given another chance in 1924. What fury they must have felt when they were informed that they had not been chosen for the 1924 Everest attempt. While holding Finch’s balloon coat in one hand, I suddenly imagined the bile that must have brought a constant taste of rejection to these two proud men.

  The Deacon said, “My point was only that when we returned to Camp Four that evening, Geoffrey Bruce and I were frozen to the bone, but George had stayed warm climbing in his eiderdown jacket. This is why I asked each of you to bring two empty Gladstone bags. I’ve paid George to make up nine of these coats for us.”

  “Nine?” said Jean-Claude. He looked at the coat rack with its line of bulging down jackets. “Why so many? Are they that fragile that they wear out so soon?”

  “No,” said the Deacon. “I figure that we’ll each have two high-climbing porters with us to get to the high camp for our summit attempt. I’ve ordered the extra oxygen sets and eiderdown coats for them as well. Nine in all. They compress nicely. We’ll pack them in our Gladstones today and take them back ourselves so that nothing gets lost in shipping.”

  Finch grunted. “Mallory listed a copy of my eiderdown coat as possible outerwear for the climbers in last year’s expedition,” he said. “But no one ordered one. They chose to climb—and die—in silk, wool, cotton, wool, wool, and more wool.”

  “Wool is warm in layers,” Jean-Claude said tentatively. “It has kept me alive through high bivouacs many nights.”

  Instead of arguing, Finch only nodded and touched two of his worn wool outer jackets and then one of the Shackleton windproof gabardine anoraks hanging there. “Wool is wonderful, until it gets wet. Wet from our sweat as well as from snow or rain. And then you’re carrying another forty pounds of sodden wool with you when you climb, in addition to the forty or fifty pounds in your rucksack and thirty-some pounds of your oxygen apparatus. And then, when you pause in the high winds, your sweat freezes on the lower layers…” He shook his head.

  “Doesn’t your eiderdown jacket absorb sweat and lose its loft when wet?” I asked.

  Finch shook his head again. “I wear the usual wool underlayers, but the sweat buildup is less because of the breathing capabilities of the eiderdown. The eiderdown would lose its insulating qualities when soaked—it’s the pockets of air it creates that kept the goose, and now me in the jacket of the goose’s down, warm—but the balloon fabric I chose resists water short of a full immersion in a lake.” He managed a small smile. “There aren’t many lakes above twenty thousand feet on Everest…unless one slips.”

  “I wasn’t aware that there were lakes or standing water on the upper reaches of the Rongbuk Glacier,” said Jean-Claude, still looking hard at Finch. “Just melt pools down at the entrance to the glacial valley.”

  George Finch sighed at my French friend’s apparent literalism and shrugged ever so slightly. “If you fall two vertical miles from the North East Ridge or Everest summit ridge, your impact velocity might be enough to melt some ice and create a serious puddle.”

  Finch knew better than we did—but all alpinists know from experience—that a falling climber almost never falls the full distance off any mountain. The body hits many rocks, boulders, ice slags, ridges, and other protuberances on the way down…enough that whatever remains make it to the glacier below are in many small, naked pieces and barely recognizable as having once been human.

  “Or not,” he added and gestured to the cluttered worktable. “Richard, the coats are indeed ready for you to take today. I also thought we might look over the oxygen apparatus that we used in ’twenty-two, then the rigs that Sandy Irvine changed for his and Mallory’s final attempt, and now the final version you and I decided on. I need your approval before I ship them to Liverpool for loading on whichever
ship you sail on next month.”

  February departure was just a month away. Jean-Claude and I had known since November, of course, that the Deacon had been ordering oxygen tanks and breathing equipment for our small-scale expedition. And we knew that he’d decided not to use Siebe Gorman in England for the equipment, even though—or actually, because—Siebe Gorman had done all the oxygen rigs for the ’21, ’22, and ’24 official expeditions. The Deacon had explained that the risk was too great that Siebe Gorman might leak out word of another expedition outfitting itself with oxygen for the Himalayas—and of that word getting back to the directors of the Royal Geographical Society, the Alpine Club, and the Mount Everest Committee. He said that he knew of no oxygen-supply company in England that could be entrusted with our secret. Instead he’d gone to a “source in Switzerland.”

  Now J.C. and I knew that the source was named George Ingle Finch.

  But when I said this aloud, Finch only chuckled and shook his head. “No, Mr. Perry, our friend Richard Davis Deacon has been sending Lady Bromley’s money to me, but I have been sending it on to Zürcher Werke für wissenschaftliche Präzisionsinstrumente und Geräte—a scientific instrument manufacturing firm I know here in Zurich.”

  I must have looked doubtful. Finch said, “I am a scientist by trade, Mr. Perry. A chemist. I do business with such firms for scientific instruments all the time. They are Swiss—which means that discretion is bred into their genes.”

  The long worktable was piled high with oxygen cylinders, frames for the tanks, valves, tubes, regulators, and a variety of face masks, while the wall above the worktable was pegged with tools both common and exotic.

  Finch dragged the one oxygen rig across the table toward us. To the Deacon he said, “Look familiar, Richard?”

  The Deacon only nodded.

  “We each hauled one of these to twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet, didn’t we, Richard?” said Finch. “And we would have gone higher if the glass tube in Bruce’s mask hadn’t shattered from the cold.”

  “Not so much higher,” the Deacon said. “We wouldn’t have made the summit that day, George. Just not possible.”

  Finch showed his strange, clenched smile. “You and I might have made the summit with these tanks if we’d left Bruce to get back to Camp Five on his own and we’d pressed on to the ridge and higher…and if we’d been willing to die up there. I think we would have reached the summit around sunset.”

  The Deacon shook his head again. I realized that he wasn’t denying that they might have done it—the two of them making the summit of Everest by sunset or just after sunset on that day in late May of 1922—only that he, the Deacon, hadn’t been willing to die doing so.

  I decided to ask the obvious question (but possibly insulting to Finch, who had championed the use of oxygen on Everest). “Does this oxygen stuff really help? Most of the English climbers I know are against using it on Everest.”

  Surprisingly, it was the Deacon who answered. “Most English climbers have never climbed as high as even the lower North Col of Everest. If they had, they would know the benefits of bringing oxygen along…it can be as necessary as bringing food along, or a stove to melt snow for hot water.”

  Perhaps Jean-Claude and I looked skeptical—I know that I did—because Finch then began talking specifics. He paused almost at once. “Are you gentlemen more comfortable in metric measurement or English feet?”

  “Either will work,” Jean-Claude said.

  I admitted that metric wouldn’t work as well for me. Despite the constant use of meters and kilometers in my French, Italian, and Swiss climbing, I still had trouble translating the figures into feet or miles.

  “I shall use both, then,” said Finch. “Just one illustration, perhaps. In the nineteen twenty-two expedition, there were two serious summit attempts from Advanced Base Camp, which that year was at five thousand one hundred and eighty meters—that’s seventeen thousand feet, Mr. Perry. George Mallory and Howard Somervell, in their attempt, climbed to eight thousand three hundred and twenty meters, approximately twenty-seven thousand feet, in fourteen and a half hours. This is without oxygen, remember. So Mallory and Somervell’s ascent rate was one hundred twenty meters—approximately three hundred and ninety-three feet—per hour. Is this clear so far?”

  J.C. and I both nodded, but I was lying with my nod. I’d lost the mathematical thread somewhere around the first altitude high point.

  “Then Richard here, Geoffrey Bruce, and I, also starting our summit attempt from Advanced Base Camp, climbed to eight thousand three hundred and twenty meters…the twenty-seven-thousand-three-hundred-foot level that I’ve mentioned before and will refer to again since it was the human high point on Everest until Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance last year. It took us twelve and a quarter hours with oxygen to reach that altitude. That gave the three of us, with the crude oxygen apparatus, an ascent rate of one hundred fifty-five meters…some five hundred seventeen feet…per hour. This is clearly a superior climbing rate to that of Mallory or Somervell, and Richard and I have agreed that the rate and final altitude would have been even higher had we not moved out on a slow traverse of the North Face because of the terribly high winds on the ridge.”

  Jean-Claude held up one finger as if he were a student begging to ask a question of his instructor. “But you had to turn back because of a valve failure in Bruce’s equipment. So in the end, the oxygen tanks ruined your chance of reaching the summit.”

  Finch smiled. “I’ll discuss the valve problem in detail when we get to it. But please remember, Monsieur Clairoux, that there was another advantage to carrying the oxygen tanks so high.” He looked at the Deacon. “It saved all three of our lives.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “On twenty-four May, Richard, Bruce, and I had sent our porters down and set up our tent on an exposed area at twenty-five thousand six hundred feet of altitude—seventy-eight hundred meters. We ended up being trapped there for more than thirty-six hours by high winds that literally lifted our tent off the ground. The tent had become a sail on the edge of a three-thousand-foot drop. Sleep was impossible as we spent day and night trying to hold the groundsheet down, now and then one of us venturing out into the hurricane gale to add another rope tie-down to a boulder. When the storm did begin to die down, we should have retreated to a lower altitude immediately, but none of us wanted to, even though we were short of food and our bodies were becoming numb from the cold. That night we were so weakened that all three of us were showing early signs of frostbite that would have been fatal by morning. None of us could have made the descent to a lower camp after another sleepless night of that insidious cold. Then I remembered the oxygen tanks we’d brought up.”

  We looked at the Deacon. His nod was almost imperceptible. “The oxygen saved our lives that night,” he said. “All through the night, when we felt the coldest, we passed the oxygen cylinder around, and even a few breaths of the richer air got us warmer…the effects were immediate. It allowed us to sleep and kept us warm and alive through the worst night I’ve ever spent on any mountain.”

  “The next morning was when we made our summit bid,” said Finch. “The three of us left the tent at six thirty a.m. and started climbing strongly. The oxygen sets had not only saved us from freezing to death in the night but restored our resolve to try to reach the summit—or at least the North East Ridge—the next day. And remember that this was after a record-setting forty-eight hours at an unprecedented altitude, and with almost no food or adequate water. The wind had blown so hard that for most of the time we could not even scoop a pan of snow from outside or light the stove. But the oxygen allowed us to climb toward the ridge that day anyway. At the ascent rate I mentioned earlier, we had climbed to twenty-five thousand five hundred feet, using bottled oxygen for many hours at a climbing rate of six hundred and sixty-six feet per hour, as compared to Mallory and Somervell’s three hundred sixty-three feet per hour. Almost twice their rate of ascent, gentlemen.”

 
“All right,” I said to both the Deacon and Finch. “That makes sense even to me. We climb with oxygen packs. How do they work, Mr. Finch?”

  Finch started to explain the equipment to Jean-Claude and me, speaking mostly to me, but then he paused. “Mr. Perry, you are the tinkerer-mechanic for this expedition, are you not?”

  “Not me!” I said, almost alarmed. “I can barely change sparkplugs. Jean-Claude’s our technical person.”

  Finch blinked. “That was stupid of me. Perhaps, Mr. Perry, I assumed you were the technical boffin because you so closely resemble Sandy Irvine, who did all the technical work for Mallory’s expedition last year, even rebuilding this oxygen apparatus. You are the same age, I believe. Twenty-two? Same height. Same weight. Same confident look. Same athletic college rower’s build. Same blond hair. Same smile.” He turned to J.C. “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. J’aurais bien vu que vous êtes l’ingénieur du groupe.”

  “Merci,” said Jean-Claude with a nod. “But I fear that I am a mere tinkerer, Mr. Finch. Not a brilliant young engineer as Monsieur Irvine showed himself to be. My father was a blacksmith much of his life and then opened a small steel fabrication company before the War. During the War, the company grew quickly and mon père began working on much more complicated metal fabrication for the army. I used to watch…and help sometimes…but I am no engineer.”

  “I imagine you will be for this group,” Finch said and propped up the heavy oxygen rig.

  He paused before beginning what I assumed would be a lecture on the equipment.

  “I know that Richard understands this,” Finch said. “But do both of you know the difference in the actual amount of oxygen and air between sea level and, say, twenty-eight thousand feet?”

  Again I felt like a schoolboy caught unawares by a surprise quiz. Desperately, I tried to remember the amount of O2 at sea level—no number came to mind—and even more desperately tried to find an equation that would give me the smaller number at 28,000 feet. Divide by 28, perhaps? But divide what? “There’s almost exactly the same amount of air and oxygen at twenty-eight thousand feet as there is at sea level,” Jean-Claude said confidently.