Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

I carefully study the rock and find the ridges above the crack that could be sufficient for fingerholds. Keeping one hand in the crack for emergency arrest, I lunge at one of the wrinkles with my right hand. It’s more than arm’s length, so I have to push up toward it with knees and sneakers scrambling like a character in one of those new short Disney features from America where a live-action “Alice in Wonderland” interacts with clumsily drawn cartoon characters. In this instance I am the clumsy cartoon character, all rubbery legs and wildly pedaling feet.

I find the handhold wrinkle, it’s adequate, I lunge up to my left—this one is less secure but it holds me as I pull and scramble my weight up above the fissure, using speed and friction again to temporarily defy gravity.

It works. My feet are now in the fissure below, and moving to my left is just a matter of shuffling slowly. Even when there’s no fully secure cleft or ridge for either of my hands, upper-body contact with the curved stone works. I’m on a shuffle-fast highway now, and within a few minutes I’m at the high point of the crack, still about 15 bare-rock feet beneath the beginning of that goddamned pipe ridge.

I look up at it. I don’t want to take my feet out of this life-saving fissure. I don’t want to go back to spread-eagle friction and a prayer. To my right, the long rope to Jean-Claude curves up and out of sight. There’s just enough bulge to the rock to hide my climbing partner from sight.

Slowly confidence flows back into me. I learned to climb on rock scrambles—in Massachusetts and other climbing spots in New England, and then twice in the Rocky Mountains, and once on a summer expedition to Alaska. After two years with my climbing friends from Harvard, I was the rock man of our group.

And this is a lousy 15 feet of smooth rock ascent. Come on, Jake, sheer vertical inertia, teeth, knees, sneaker toes, and then teeth again—if need be—can find enough three-second-type holds to get you up 15 feet.

I lunge up, arms wide, fingers clawing, pull my feet from the safety of the wonderful fissure, and crawl and clamber and climb.

I’m so tired when I reach the pipe ledge ridge that I have to pause, dangling a moment, before lifting myself up and over, onto grass.

God damn the Deacon. He risked both Jean-Claude’s and my life for—what?

His damned pipe is lying in the grass about ten feet to my right as I stand looking out at the truly impressive view that the Deacon enjoyed just by rappelling down here at my expense. There’s also a thin boulder curving up and back that will make a wonderful rappel anchor. I loop some of the rope around that, step back to my left, and wave at Jean-Claude, who has moved back to the vertical crack, my ice axe jammed in beneath his feet now. His new belay position, one arm deep in the crack, teetering atop the curved steel of the ice axe, might have stopped me if I’d gone over the edge.

Maybe.

Probably not.

I catch my breath for another moment and shout, “Ready! On belay!” The echoes return.

Jean-Claude waves his positive response. I’ve tightened the 60 or so feet of rope connecting us.

J.C. has a very complicated moment getting off the skinny shelf of my ice axe, using the vertical crack to climb below it, retrieving the axe, and sliding it into the loop on his own rucksack.

Then he waves again from that strangely great distance, shouts “Climbing!” and moves out onto the face.

He falls after this third traverse pitch. He just begins sliding as I had, but at least the rope between us keeps Jean-Claude head up as he hurtles down toward the overhang and freefall.

He’s not going to get there. There’s less than 40 feet of rope between us now, and I plant one foot on a boulder for extra leverage and easily hold him on the belay I’d worked around the short spire rock behind me. That will fray the rope as we pull Jean-Claude higher, but there’s nothing to be done about that. We’ll inspect it and use shorter rope on the rappels if we must.

Jean-Claude gives up on trying to self-arrest—saving his fingers and nails and knees from much damage—and just swings beneath me in a wide arc, easily held by my belay, until he swings back directly beneath me.

Then I do brace myself, even with the spire rock for backup, as J.C. pulls himself upright while holding the rope until his boot soles are on the rock face. He begins climbing that way—the tense and fraying rope his only hold—and I belay him up as quickly as I can, not wanting that rope to fray against the rock longer than it has to. It’s good Manila rope, the most expensive the Deacon could find, but it’s only a half-inch-thick lifeline.

Then he’s up, pulling himself over the final ledge, and collapsing onto the grass.

I coil the rope, inspecting it carefully.

“Fuck the Deacon,” J.C. says in French, gasping out the words.

I nod. That phrase is the second half of my tiny French vocabulary. And I agree with the sentiment.

Jean-Claude disentangles himself from the last coil of rope and walks over and picks up the Deacon’s pipe. “This is one hell of a stupid place to leave a pipe,” he says in English. He puts the damned thing in his large buttoned shirt pocket, where it won’t fall out.

“Shall we set up and start the rappel?” I ask.

“Jake, give me about three minutes to enjoy the view,” he says. I see that his ascent has sapped all of his energy.

“Good idea,” I say, and for five or ten minutes we just sit with our legs dangling over the drop, our butts on soft grass, and our backs against the sun-warmed curved spire stone that we plan to use as a rappel anchor.

The view from almost 250 feet up this rock slab—like looking out a big window on the 25th floor of some skyscraper in New York— is beautiful. I see other crags that are taller, thinner, and more of a climber’s challenge, and idly wonder if George Mallory, Harold Porter, Siegfried Herford, and Richard Davis Deacon had climbed them as well in those years between the time Mallory and the Deacon graduated from Cambridge in 1909 and went to war in 1914.

As for me, I’ve just done the only Welsh crag I’m going to climb this summer—perhaps this lifetime. Great fun, but just once, thank you.

It feels good to be alive.

After enjoying the view for a while and letting Jean-Claude get his wind back, we secure the ropes for the rappel. The section I’d used to pull J.C. using the rock as belay anchor looked okay, but we set it apart in my rucksack, to be used only if absolutely necessary.

The rappels down are fun. At the end of our first 80-foot descent, we swing our bodies right across the smooth rock—actually in a standing, boot-sole-running pendulum move—until Jean-Claude finally grips the edge of the vertical crack we’d climbed and stops his motion. A second later he is in the crack, with the really decent footholds and craggy bits we remember from the climb up—the one dependable platform in the whole vertical crack—and a few seconds later I swing up and join him.

J.C. has tied a good knot for our two-rope rappel—a stuck and irretrievable rope can be a nightmare on such a long rappel, and we need that extra twice-80-feet-each 160 feet of rope for the final single-rope descent from the crack here.

“Left rope to be pulled!” Jean-Claude and I shout out in unison. Pull the wrong rope, and J.C.’s beautiful knot will jam in the rappel sling we’d rigged, and we’re in trouble.

I check the ends of the ropes and remove a couple of small twists and the safety knots we’d tied at the end of the strands. Then—taking the left rope we’d both just shouted about as a reminder—I give it a steady pull. As it starts to travel freely and fall, I shout “Rope!”—an old habit and a necessary one. Eighty feet of falling rope can knock a climber off even the best narrow platform.