Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“How long…,” she begins.

“We should have the expedition completed and our complete report back to you by midsummer of next year,” says the Deacon. “I’m bringing a small camera, but I promise that we’ll retrieve anything that we can…Lord Percival’s personal possessions, clothing, letters…”

“If he is dead,” Lady Bromley interrupts in a totally flat tone, “I believe he would have preferred to be buried there on the mountain. But I would so much appreciate a few of the tokens of remembrance you’ve mentioned and…as hard as it will be to look at them…photographs.”

We all nod. I feel absurdly close to weeping myself. I also feel very guilty. And exhilarated.

“If my Percy is alive,” says Lady Bromley, standing straighter and taller than ever, “I want you to bring him home to me.”

And without another word, she turns and leaves the room through the secret door in the library wall.

It takes a few seconds to realize that we’ve been dismissed and also that the Deacon got us exactly what he’d promised—a funded three-man (and one accountant now) alpine-style expedition to climb Mount Everest. If we find poor Percy’s body, all the better. If not, the tallest mountain on Planet Earth may well be ours to summit.

There’s a quiet cough, and we turn to find old Harrison, the butler, standing near the far door, ready to lead us back through the hallways and then the impossibly huge library and then more hallways and the Heaven Room and the foyers and God knows what else to the front door and freedom.

The carriage ride to the entrance of the estate seems endless. Benson, the walrus-mustachioed driver, says nothing, and we three in the carriage do not speak. But our emotions surge around us.

Benson drops us off at the white gravel chauffeured-car park, empty except for our coupe parked under nearby trees, and still we do not speak.

Suddenly Jean-Claude runs at the endless expanse of trimmed grass beyond the gravel, whoops loudly, and does a perfect four-circle cartwheel. The Deacon and I laugh and grin at each other like the pleased idiots we are at this moment.

But as we drive away, one thought keeps seeping through my joy and anticipation of this impossible expedition: there at the center of perhaps the most beautiful 9,400 acres in the world resides a permanently broken heart and an eternally damaged mind.

Can we bring some peace to her? It is the first time in all our planning—our “conniving,” as I’ve thought of it—that this question has entered my mind. I realize it should have been the first thing I’d thought of when we started discussing this impossible-to-believe-in three-man Everest expedition.

Can we bring Lady Bromley some peace of mind?

Riding in the open air in a beautiful English summer afternoon, with the shadows just beginning to lengthen across the fields and empty highway, I decide that perhaps we can—can do this climb the right way, can find the remains of Percy Bromley, and can bring back something, anything, from that mountain of death that will…will what? Not heal Lady Bromley’s broken heart, for she’s soon to lose her older son to the endless effects of mustard gas dropped on him eight years ago by British shells, and her younger son is lost forever on Mount Everest, but perhaps we can quiet her mind about the details, the reality, of Lord Percival Bromley’s senseless death on this particular mountain.

Perhaps.

The Deacon is grinning as he drives, and Jean-Claude is grinning as he rides in the front passenger seat, his head cocked to one side to catch the wind like a dog, and I decide to join them both in grinning.

We have absolutely no concept of what lies ahead for us.

Chapter 3

If we can find the remains of Lord Percival, we can certainly find Mallory or Irvine…or both of them.

T here are many memorial services for Mallory and Irvine in that late summer and autumn of 1924, but perhaps the most important one is held at Saint Paul’s Cathedral on October 17. It is essentially an invitation-only memorial service, and from our group, only the Deacon is invited to attend. He does so and says little about it to us afterward, but the London newspapers are filled with the eulogy by the Bishop of Chester. The bishop ends with an adaptation of King David’s lament from the Bible—“Delightful and very pleasant were George Mallory and Andrew Irvine; in life, in death, they were not parted.”

Jean-Claude points out to me the next day that if—as was probably the case—one of them fell first on their way up or down the mountain, they were certainly parted in their last minutes or hours.

The deaths of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer are mentioned only in the abstract during the bishop’s eulogy for Mallory and Irvine—“as we remember others who also perished on the mountain that month”—and Lady Bromley holds no memorial service for her son that summer or autumn (perhaps because she still believes he is alive somewhere on Mount Everest or the Rongbuk Glacier below and truly does believe that the three of us will find and rescue him a year after he disappeared). Lady Bromley has urged the Deacon to start the expedition this very autumn of 1924 and to attempt the Everest “rescue” in winter, but he assured her that both the mountain and access routes to the mountain are impassable and unclimbable in the Himalayan winter. Deep within her, Lady Bromley—even through her shock and temporary mental instability—knows that our expedition the next spring and summer of 1925 will be, at best, a recovery attempt, not a rescue effort.

That same evening of October 17 there is held an assembly related to Mallory and Irvine which the Deacon does get J.C. and me into, despite its being so crowded that the group has to rent the Royal Albert Hall for the occasion. The Royal Geographical Society and its Alpine Club are holding their joint meeting “to Receive the Reports from the Mount Everest Expedition of 1924.” To say that the crowd—mostly of climbers and a mob of reporters—is enthusiastically interested would be an understatement.

The finale of the program is the reading of the report from the photographer-climber-geologist Noel Odell—who many believe should have been Mallory’s partner in that final summit attempt rather than young Andrew Irvine—and it tells of Odell’s efforts to wait for the missing climbers at their high camp and his final sighting of them from his point between Camps IV and V when the clouds parted briefly, although Odell seems confused at times as to whether he saw the “two, moving black dots” on a snowfield above the First Step along the North East Ridge, above the Second Step, or even possibly above the lesser Third Step and on the “pyramid of snowfields” approaching the summit itself.

“The question remains,” Odell wrote in his report, “has Mount Everest been climbed? It must be left Unanswered, for there is no direct evidence. But bearing in mind all the circumstances…and considering their position when last seen, I think there is a strong probability that Mallory and Irvine succeeded. At that I must leave it.”

This causes a low murmuring and susurration in the crowd of England’s best climbers. Many of the men—even some of Mallory’s and Irvine’s other climbing partners on the expedition—do not believe the evidence suggests that the two men had summited. Even if Odell’s sighting was real and Mallory and Irvine had somehow climbed the ominous Second Step, it was too late in the day for a successful summit attempt—they would have had to descend in the dark—and their oxygen canisters must have been on or near empty at such a late hour. So it is the opinion of most of the world-class climbers in the Albert Hall this night that Mallory and Irvine had pressed on too far, too late, had attempted to descend in the dark—probably well before getting anywhere near the summit—and both had fallen to their deaths on the North Face in the dark and windy lunar-cold night somewhere there above 27,000 feet, and possibly in the unbreathable Martian-thin air around 28,000 feet.