Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

I shook myself out of my reverie and took the few steps to the south lip of the ridge. We’d grown as accustomed as one can to climbing with a constant 8,000-foot exposure while clambering around on the North Face, but at least down there we’d had the illusion of a gradual slope before everything went vertical. But from the south edge of this disturbingly narrow North East Ridge, it was a straight vertical drop of more than 10,000 feet to the shark-toothed jumble of the Kangshung Glacier below. Absolutely nothing between us and the glacier almost two miles below us but howling wind.

“Holy shit,” I heard myself say as I peered over the south edge.

“I agree completely,” said Jean-Claude. He was standing by my right shoulder. I didn’t want him behind me right then, jostling me. I stepped back, looked up the North East Ridge at the rocky obstacle of the First Step, and considered it for a long moment of silence broken only by the rising wind. There was an ominous, whirling white cap of cirrus cloud forming over Everest’s summit.

“If we were just free-climbing this First Step the way Mallory and Irvine probably did,” I said, my voice sounding much more authoritative than I really felt, “I’d say stay to the left near the Kangshung Face. Easier climbing. More handholds. But we have good ropes and J.C.’s jumars. With the others able to use the jumars, I think it would be easier for one climber to shed his rucksack and oxygen, climb those tougher boulders to the right—up and over the top—get a good belay stance there, and fix ropes along the way for the rest to jumar up.”

I was certain that the Deacon was going to ask me to do the climbing—I was their rock man after all, it was why they’d brought me along here to the top of the world—but what they didn’t know was that a sharp-clawed lobster had taken up residence in my lower throat and upper breathing tract and was moving around from time to time. Every time it did, it blocked my breathing almost completely.

“I’ll lead this pitch and lay the rope,” the Deacon said at once. “We’ll save Jake for the Second Step. That’s where the real climbing will be called for.”

I didn’t argue. We’d moved to the base of the stacked boulders at the south side of the First Step and were laying out ropes, the Deacon had removed his rucksack and mittens, when suddenly I said, “Wait! What about looking for Bromley’s body on this north side of the First Step? I thought that was the plan.”

Reggie gripped my upper arm. “We did that already, Jake. We found Sandy Irvine instead. It would take hours, days, to search all of those gulleys—and you can see that he’s not dangling from the south face of this ridge. Besides, I think Kami was right—whatever he saw…three figures and then just one…happened on this ridge between this First Step and the higher Second Step, near a boulder that looks like a mushroom. That’s where we’ll look now. After we get past this First Step.”

“Besides, Herr Sigl and his friends are coming too quickly for us to tarry here longer,” said the Deacon.

“But…,” I began and had to stop to cough a minute.

Reggie touched my back. “Pasang,” she called out to the silent Sherpa, “can you give our friend something for his terrible cough?”

“Not more codeine,” said Dr. Pasang. “It would have too much of a soporific effect at this altitude. But I have an ancient Hindu cough remedy in my bag if you’d like to try that.”

“All right,” I said and held out my mitten as Pasang dug around in his rucksack and then in his small medical bag.

Pasang dropped a small box of Smith Brothers Cough Drops into my palm—the new menthol kind that had come out only two or three years earlier.

Reggie looked over her shoulder as she belayed and actually laughed, but I just opened the package and put three of the drops in my mouth.

“I’m ready to climb,” said the Deacon, tying onto a rope and coiling more rope over his shoulder. “Who wants to belay?”

“I will,” said Reggie and J.C. at the same time. Both passed the rope over their shoulders, and Jean-Claude tied it off around the thinnest vertical boulder. Both said “On belay!” at the same instant.

The Deacon shook his end of the belay rope loose, giving himself slack, looked at the ugly heap of steep boulders a moment, and started climbing in that gangly, electrified-spider form of his. His style wasn’t pretty, but it certainly worked well on most rock. He played out the longer rope behind him as he climbed from handhold to toehold to precarious handhold, always moving upward with the spread-eagled speed that climbers used to stay attached to vertical rock if only through sheer fleeting friction.

I turned around and lifted my binoculars. Less than eight hundred yards behind us, the Germans moved onto the North East Ridge—up to our altitude, level with us. I watched as they paused a long moment to catch their breath, and then the tall leader with the rifle slung over his chest said something, gestured, and all five began slogging west toward us.

“Hurry!” I called up to the Deacon.

17.

Climbing the First Step, even with the use of the Deacon’s fixed lines, was exhausting— every action was exhausting up there above 28,000 feet—but after we’d crossed over the top, we felt better about being out of the line of sight of the five German climbers who were following us. Then, just after we’d retrieved and coiled our fixed lines from the First Step, Reggie had to tug down her mask and go and spoil my newfound sense of relief.

“Of course,” she said, “if Sigl really did confront Cousin Percy and Kurt Meyer here on this section of the North East Ridge, as Kami Chiring thought he saw him doing, then that means that Sigl has already climbed to this height. He probably holds the record—for anyone living, that is—for reaching a high point on Everest before this. He may know a faster way around this First Step.”

“How high did Colonel Norton get in his climb up the Great Couloir?” asked Jean-Claude. “I thought it was about even with our ridge here…twenty-eight thousand feet.”

“Norton turned around at twenty-eight thousand one hundred and twenty-six feet, his high point in the steep Couloir itself,” said the Deacon. “Somervell reached twenty-eight thousand feet, below and behind Teddy Norton, just making the traverse across the North Face without climbing much in the Couloir.”

“High-climb records won’t count for much if Sigl and the other Germans really do know a faster way around this First Step,” I gasped out over my mask.

The Deacon ignored me and pointed out over the steep, snow-blown, and rocky North Face. The Great Couloir looked like a vertical white scar on that dark face. “Norton and Somervell were out there, several hundred yards west of us and almost directly below the summit before they turned around. We’ll beat Norton’s record if we keep climbing along this ridge to the base of the Second Step…it’s up around twenty-eight thousand two hundred and eighty feet.”

“Just seven hundred feet below the summit,” whispered Jean-Claude, his words almost lost under the rising wind that was making us lean toward the west, every loose rag or tag end of our clothing flapping like wash on the line in a mild hurricane.

“Seven hundred feet,” agreed the Deacon. “But still quite a distance to our west and about three to five hours of ridge climbing from here. Come on. I see the Mushroom Rock, do you?”

We all peered into the wind and blowing snow—it hurt when it struck the few exposed parts of our faces. About halfway between this First Step and the much more imposing and terrifying huge Second Step was a low boulder that did indeed appear to be shaped like a mushroom.