Dan Simmons: The Abominable: A Novel

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 endless 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.