The Abominable: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  What? My French friend obviously had lost his mind.

  “Very good,” said Finch. He managed to avoid the pedant’s annoying whining sing-song and spoke normally. “But if the oxygen is roughly the same at both altitudes, then why,” he paused dramatically, “do you run easily along the beach for a mile at sea level but have to stop to pant and gasp like a fish after two steps at twenty-eight thousand feet?”

  “Air pressure,” said Jean-Claude.

  Finch nodded. “Scientifically, we know almost nothing about high-altitude physiology, and most of what we do know has come from a few studies by the British Air Ministry in the last few years—aeroplanes have been able to climb above ten thousand feet for only a very short time, obviously—and from tests in the nineteen twenty-one through ’twenty-four Everest expeditions. But we know that it’s the lack of pressure at altitudes above twenty thousand feet that kills us—literally kills our brain cells, literally kills our organs and metabolism, literally kills our ability to think rationally—and, as Monsieur Clairoux says, it is because that lack of pressure makes it harder to breathe, to pull the oxygen into our lungs, and harder for oxygen to be pushed into the lungs’ little capillaries and vessels to restore the red blood cells.”

  He held the heavy oxygen pack higher. “The oxygen in these bottles—what the Sherpas quaintly called ‘English air’ during our ’twenty-two expedition—is pressurized to an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. No breathing problems there for a fit alpinist.”

  I remembered that the summit of the Matterhorn we’d climbed the previous June was around 14,690 feet. Indeed, I hadn’t felt any problems breathing there. The air had felt a bit thinner and much colder in my lungs, but also rich enough to fuel any physical exertion the climb required.

  Finch moved the heavy-looking pack of oxygen tanks in front of him. “This was pretty much the design that the Air Ministry gave us along the lines of the designs that a Professor Dreyer gave them. Notice that the frame is a strong steel Bergen pack frame, and it holds four steel bottles of oxygen, each bottle of air at that fifteen-thousand-foot pressure I mentioned. Then there was this mass of tubes, some regulator valves—all that gabble went over the shoulder and down to the climber’s chest, where he could fiddle with it at the risk of losing all O-two feed—and, to top it off, no fewer than three different types of face masks, counting my own modification.”

  Finch shrugged into the straps of the four-tank rig. Tubes and valves and…things…hung in front of him like an uncut umbilical cord. “Each full bottle of oxygen weighs five and three-quarters pounds,” he said. “Would you prefer the data in English pounds, Monsieur Clairoux, or should I speak in kilograms?”

  “Pounds would be completely understandable,” Jean-Claude assured him. “And please call me by my Christian name.”

  “Oui, très bien,” said Finch. “Well, I’ve come to think in metric, so just for the record, each tank weighs a little more than two point six kilograms. The whole rig then weighs just a bit more than fourteen and a half kilograms…thirty-two pounds to you, Mr. Perry.”

  “Jake,” I said.

  “Oui, très bien,” he said again. “Here, Jake…Richard knows the weight of this version of the oxygen apparatus all too well. Why don’t you try it on and then give it to Jean-Claude.”

  I took the Bergen frame and oxygen tanks from Finch, slipped into the thick straps, and shrugged it on. I didn’t know what to do with the regulator stuff, tubes, and mask, so I let all that dangle in front of me.

  “Not too heavy,” I said. “I’ve carried almost twice this weight up serious mountains.”

  “Yes,” said Finch, smiling, “but remember, you still have to carry a rucksack or some sort of canvas carrying bag as well as the oxygen bottles and Bergen frame. Food, your clothing, extra climbing gear, tents for the high camps…how much does your regular three-man tent weigh, Jake?”

  “Sixty pounds.”

  Finch’s smile was starting to look smug to me. “Pretty soon, with these ’twenty-two-style tanks, you’re off balance backwards, and just imagine climbing a rock face with all of those valves, regulators, and tubes hanging in front of your chest! With this rig, you’re exhausted in ten paces above nineteen thousand feet.”

  Jean-Claude was running his hands over the oxygen canisters, flow tubes, and regulator doohickeys, as if he’d fathom more of the rig’s purpose just through feel. I stepped back to give him more room.

  “Try it on, both of you,” said the Deacon. “Please.”

  J.C. propped the apparatus up on the bench and easily slid into the straps. He hoisted it higher and secured a cross-strap over his chest. “Not too bad,” he said. “I often climb with more weight in a rucksack. But I think you may be right about the balance issue…” Then Jean-Claude surprised me by setting a foot on the bench’s stool and using just his arms to lift himself and the apparatus up to a kneeling position on the sturdy workbench. He set his hands on the wall to help himself get to his feet.

  Looming above us, J.C. said, “Yes, climbing sheer rock or ice would be trickier with this.” Then he jumped four feet to the floor as if he weren’t carrying thirty-two pounds of steel and pressurized oxygen on his back.

  When it was my turn, I loosened the straps for my greater size and girth, tugged them tight again, took a few steps around the workshop and grunted noncommittally. With J.C.’s help, I shrugged out of the pack and lowered it gently to the bench. I wasn’t sure whether such weight would hinder my climbing or not, but although I’d never say it out loud, I relied on my greater strength and fewer years to allow me to perform physical feats that might be beyond the 37-year-old Deacon and the much smaller and lighter Jean-Claude.

  “Then there are the sad tales of the multiple face masks,” said George Ingle Finch. He’d pulled three across the bench toward him. “This first thing was called the Economizer. It was designed to deal with the fact that at Mount Everest altitude, with the lower pressure, most of the oxygen you breathe in while struggling uphill is just breathed out again—without your body or red blood cells getting any benefit from it. So the Economizer here had two valves…”

  Finch turned the mask around and tapped the complicated interior. “They were there to allow carbon dioxide to pass through the mask but to store the unused oxygen for reuse. But the damned valves froze up more often than not, making the whole mask useless.”

  He held up a second, even heavier-looking face mask. “We tried to solve that problem with this backup mask—the Standard—made of pliable copper with chamois leather over it. The idea was that it could be bent easily to fit each climber’s face. And there were no valves, you see…” He tapped the empty interior. “You controlled breathing and re-breathing by biting on the end of the supply tube. Simplicity itself.”

  “Mallory hated that mask,” said the Deacon.

  Finch smiled. “Indeed he did. As much as he hated the emergency backup plan I taught everyone, which was simply ripping off the mask and sucking on the oxygen hose directly, as Royal Air Force pilots often do during their brief flights above ten thousand feet. And he hated both the mask and the bare tube for the same reason—the climber drools like a baby. Then the drool freezes. Or runs down your throat and collar and then freezes.”

  “So what’s the third mask?” I ask, pointing.

  “This was my answer to the Standard’s drooling problem,” said Finch. “T-shaped glass tubes, like small mouth bits, instead of rubber hoses. They minimized drool and worked far better for re-breathing the oxygen your body has just exhaled without using. There was one problem, though, as Geoffrey Bruce discovered during his, Richard’s, and my high-altitude-record ascent toward the North East Ridge in nineteen twenty-two…”

  “They break,” said Jean-Claude.

  “Indeed.” Finch sighed. “The glass becomes brittle in the extreme cold and can break…or clog…either way shutting off all oxygen to the climber. Before the ’twenty-one and ’twenty-two expeditions, a lot of atmospheric scientists th
ought that with a climber using bottled air pressurized to fifteen thousand feet, if that O-two flow suddenly stopped at altitude—say, at twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet, where Bruce, Richard, and I were when Bruce’s valve broke—the climber would die immediately.”

  “But no one died from such a failure,” said Jean-Claude, obviously aware of the oxygen rigs’ history in the Himalayas.

  “Not at all. At least two of our climbers and three porters climbed all the way to our Camp Five at twenty-five thousand feet on the East Ridge with oxygen rigs that weren’t working at all. But Bruce’s valve failure that day, as Richard and I discussed earlier, did cause all three of us to turn back before we reached the North East Ridge.”

  “So this version of the pack with the glass valves in the mask is what we’ll be using on Everest?” I asked, looking first at the Deacon and then at Finch.

  “No,” said both men at once.

  Finch dragged a third Bergen pack frame from the pile of rigs propped against the back of the bench. This one looked different somehow.

  “This is Sandy Irvine’s so-called Mark Five version,” said Finch, tapping the steel canisters. “You can see the difference.”

  It looked different to me but I was damned if I could see exactly how…wait, there were three oxygen tanks in the frame rather than four, I realized. I smiled at how perceptive I was.

  “Almost everything is different,” said Jean-Claude, again running his hands across frame and tanks and dials and tubes. “To start with, I can see that Irvine inverted the tanks so that their valves are at the bottom rather than on top…”

  Well, I’ll be damned, I thought. So he had.

  “Irvine got rid of almost all the pipe work,” continued Jean-Claude, “and radically simplified this flow meter, setting it right at the lower center of the pack so the rig’s balance would be better.”

  Without asking permission, J.C. tugged the Sandy Irvine version of the oxygen rig onto his back. “The hose goes over the shoulder now, rather than under the arm and through all those valves and tubes that used to be hanging in the front. Those are gone. The air feed should be better and the climbing should be easier. And it feels lighter.”

  “Yes,” said Finch, nodding. “The late Mr. Irvine’s Mark Five version is almost five full pounds lighter than its predecessors, while working much better and being infinitely less awkward.”

  Well, I’ll be damned, I thought again.

  “Mr. Irvine did most of this redesign while he was still at Oxford,” continued Finch. “He sent all the modification plans to the company manufacturing them—our proud Siebe Gorman—and in almost a year, they made none of the changes he had requested.”

  “None?” I repeated.

  “None,” said Finch. “They ignored his and the Everest Committee’s orders to make such modifications and shipped precisely the same clumsy, leaking, bulky kits that Richard, Mallory, Bruce, and I had used in nineteen twenty-two. My good friend Noel Odell, who was the last person to see Mallory and Irvine climbing high, told me that when the expedition’s ninety cylinders arrived in Calcutta, fifteen were empty and twenty-four had already leaked so badly that they were useless on the climb. Mr. Irvine told Odell that he, Sandy, had broken one kit just by carefully removing it from its packing case. It was the same thing I found when we reached Base Camp at Mount Everest in ’twenty-two—not one of the ten apparatuses shipped was usable. The soldered joints all leaked, washers had become so dry during the high-desert trip in to the mountain that joints could no longer be made gas-tight, and the majority of the gauges didn’t work. Some of it was fixable—and I fixed what I could—but essentially, the judgment on the Siebe Gorman apparatus is that they were all…junk.”

  Jean-Claude removed the Irvine Mark V version and set it on the workbench with a resounding thump. “Then how did Sandy Irvine get this improved version?”

  Finch showed his small smile. “He fiddled with it all during the three-hundred-and-fifty-mile march in, then at Base Camp, then at the higher camps, and didn’t quit fiddling and improving it—with the few tools and parts he had—until the morning he and Mallory left Camp Six and disappeared.”

  “So I assume we shall be receiving the Irvine Mark Five versions?” Jean-Claude said.

  “One further modified to my specifications, yes. And you will be getting them not from Siebe Gorman but, as I said, from Zürcher Werke für wissenschaftliche Präzisionsinstrumente und Geräte.” The smile widened almost imperceptibly. “And I guarantee, gentlemen, that they will be engineered properly and up to and exceeding the late Sandy Irvine’s standards.”

  The Deacon stepped forward and touched the Mark V tanks. “George, you said that you had a couple of final modifications of your own that you asked for.”

  Finch nodded again. “I asked the Zurich engineers to make the Bergen pack frame, the flow meters, and several other elements of the apparatus out of aluminum”—he pronounced it British style, “aluminium”—“a strong metal derived from bauxite ore. I wish I could have made the oxygen canisters out of this aluminum as well, but facilities did not exist for attaching the proper valves or pressuring aluminum tanks, so the oxygen is still carried in steel canisters. But with three tanks maximum, not four, and the new aluminum components, the overall weight will be significantly lower.”

  Finch pulled out yet another oxygen rig. This looked much like Sandy Irvine’s Mark V design but was somehow…different…at the same time.

  “How much lower is the weight?” asked the Deacon, running his hand over the aluminum frame.

  Finch shrugged, but his pride was obvious. “Down from Siebe Gorman’s thirty-two pounds to just over twenty pounds.”

  “And you also did something with the face mask valves,” said the Deacon.

  Finch lifted the mask of his Mark VI pack. The mask seemed simpler in design than all the others and more pliable in Finch’s scarred hand. “Instead of glass, I redesigned the breathing/re-breathing mouthpiece valves to be made out of a very high grade of rubber,” he said. “We’ve tested that rubber at altitudes up to and above thirty thousand feet—and in ultra-dry air—and the rubber does not become brittle or leak. I took the liberty of replacing all of the leaking Siebe Gorman gaskets and valves with this higher-quality rubber as well.” Finch looked down, and his voice sounded almost embarrassed or ashamed. “I had no time to test all the new components on a mountain, Richard. I wanted to…I had planned to…I had thought the ridges along the North Face of the Eiger might make for a good test…it is not right that you will find if everything works only once you’re high on Everest…but the fabrication of the new design took so long.…”

  The Deacon patted Finch on the back. “Thank you, my friend. I’m sure your tests here in Zurich have ensured that the tanks we ordered will work and not leak as the earlier ones did. Thank you for all your work and advice, George.”

  Finch showed his small smile, nodded, and put his hands in his pockets.

  The Deacon looked at his watch. “We’d better be off if we’re going to meet our train.”

  “I’ll walk with you to the Eisenbahn station,” said George Ingle Finch.

  The train was on time, which, of course, is redundant. It was a Swiss train.

  The Deacon and I were going back through France to Cherbourg and then to England to continue our preparations. Jean-Claude was returning to Chamonix briefly—mostly to say good-bye to the girl he was planning to marry, was my hunch—and would be joining us in London just before it was time to go to Liverpool and depart for India. On the train from Zurich, we each would be carrying our two leather Gladstone bags filled with the nine compressed eiderdown coats.

  As we were preparing to board, Finch—who had been silent during the cold walk to the station—suddenly said, “There is one other thing I should tell you about the reason you are going to Everest…about Lord Percival Bromley, that is.”

  We hesitated. The Deacon had one foot up on the lower step of the train car. There was no one b
ehind us. We stood there holding our light valises and listened as steam from the train wrapped us in shifting folds of warm vapor.

  “I did see Bromley one other time after I climbed with him years ago,” continued Finch. “He visited me here in Zurich—came to my home—in the spring of nineteen twenty-three. April. He said that he needed to ask me about one aspect of our ’twenty-two expedition…”

  Finch seemed to be hunting for words. We waited in silence. Down the platform, the final passengers were boarding the train.

  Letting out a breath in a small cloud that mixed with the steam, Finch went on, “It’s rather absurd, actually. Young Bromley wanted me to tell him everything I knew, everything we’d seen or heard, about…well…the Metohkangmi.”

  “The yeti critter?” I said, surprised.

  Finch managed a final smile. “Yes, Mr. Perry. Jake, I mean. The yeti critter. I told him about the tracks I’d seen high on the Rongbuk Glacier near the North Col, showed him photographs Mallory had taken the year before of the tracks he’d found on nearby Lhakpa La, and related what the lama at Rongbuk Monastery had said about the five yetis they were sure inhabited the upper reaches of the valley. That was all I had to show or tell young Bromley—hardly worth a trip to Zurich from Paris, where he was staying at the time—but he did not seem disappointed. Merely thanked me for my time and the information, finished his tea, and returned to Paris that same afternoon.” The conductor was waving his hands at us, pointing emphatically at his watch.

  The Deacon said quickly, “Did Bromley tell you why he was interested in this yeti story?”

  Finch merely shook his head. Then he stepped forward, bowed slightly, clicked his heels together in a formal manner that was almost Prussian, shook each of us by the hand, and said, “Good-bye, gentlemen. I somehow feel that I will never see any of you again, but I wish you all good fortune in your travels, in your adventure on Everest, and in your…search.”