Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“So you knew Percival…Lord Percival Bromley?” Jean-Claude was asking.

“The first time I met him was when he hired me as a guide some years ago,” said Finch in that rather pleasant educated-British tone with its slight German accent. “Bromley wanted to traverse the Douves Blanches…” He paused and looked at me for the first time. “The Douves Blanches is a spur, Mr. Perry—a sharp, spiky one all the way—off the main chain of the Grandes Dents on the east side of the Arolla Valley.”

“Yes, I’ve been there,” I said, my voice a shade impatient. I was no longer a novice at alpine climbing, after all. I’d done the Douves Blanches traverse the previous autumn with Jean-Claude and the Deacon.

Finch didn’t seem to have picked up on my tone. Or perhaps he had and didn’t care one way or the other. He nodded once and continued, “Young Percy was capable even then of doing the traverse, but he’d come to attempt what he called a ‘delectable’ series of rather impressive chimneys that split the two-thousand-foot rock wall above the upper Ferpècle Glacier, and he wanted someone on the rope with him.”

All three of us waited, but Finch seemed to have lost interest in Bromley and the conversation and returned his attention to his steak and wine.

“How did you find him?” asked the Deacon.

Finch looked up as if the Deacon had spoken in Swahili. (Which is a bad comparison, I realize, because it turned out that George Ingle Finch could speak some Swahili and understood more of it than he spoke.)

“I mean,” said the Deacon, “how did he handle himself?”

Finch shrugged noncommittally, and that might have been the frustrating end of the discussion, but perhaps he realized that we’d come a long way, and there was a real chance that we would soon be climbing very high on the shoulder of Mount Everest to find Percy Bromley’s corpse, and that we were, after all (or Lady Bromley was), paying for Finch’s meal in one of the most expensive restaurants in Switzerland. Perhaps in all of Europe.

“Bromley was all right,” said Finch. “Climbed very well, for an amateur. Never complained, even when we had to spend a long, cold night on a very narrow ledge, without food or proper equipment, on that steep south ridge just a short but difficult pitch below the summit. Not a good overcoat or bag between the two of us, nor a bump in the rock face to tie ourselves on to. The ledge was about the width of that bread tray…” Finch nodded toward the narrow silver tray. “We had no candles to hold lighted under our chins in case we dozed, so we took turns through the long night sitting watch, as it were, making sure the other didn’t fall asleep and pitch forward three thousand feet to the glacier.”

Perhaps to make sure that we got the point, Finch added, “I trusted the boy with my life.”

“So Lord Percival was a better climber than some others are saying now?” The Deacon was finishing his Tafelspitz— an excellent meal consisting of tips of choice beef simmered along with root vegetables and various spices in a rich broth and served with roasted slices of potato and a mix of minced apples and sour cream combined with horseradish. I always marveled at how the Brits could lift a fork with something like morsels of meat and sauce on the back of the utensil, and make it look not only easy but proper. Eating in England and Europe, I thought, must be like going to China and getting used to chopsticks.

“Depends on which ‘others’ you have in mind,” responded Finch after another significant pause. He was looking carefully at our team leader. “Anyone in particular?”

“Bruno Sigl?”

Finch laughed—a harsh bark of a sound. “That bully-boy Nazi fanatic friend of Herr Hitler?” he said. “Sigl’s an accomplished climber—I’ve never climbed with him but I’ve run into him on almost a dozen alpine ascents over the years. He’s a smooth, careful, competent man on rock or ice—but he’s also a lying Scheisskerl, one who tends to get his younger climbing partners killed.”

“What is this… Scheisskerl? ” asked Jean-Claude.

“Brainless, untrustworthy fellow,” said the Deacon quickly, glancing over his shoulder at the hovering waiters. To Finch he said, “So if Herr Sigl told you that Percival Bromley ventured out onto a risky Everest North Face, walking onto an obviously avalanche-prone slab of snow with an Austrian fellow in tow, you wouldn’t believe him?”

“I wouldn’t believe Bruno Sigl if the bastard told me that the sun would be coming up tomorrow,” said Finch, pouring himself the last of our wine.

“Richard, weren’t you one of the first to see the monster’s tracks on Lhakpa La when you led Mallory up to that pass in ’twenty-one?” asked George Ingle Finch between large bites of his crème-covered Apfelstrudel. Jean-Claude and the Deacon were having only thick, rich coffee for dessert. I’d tried a chocolate pudding.

“Monster?” said Jean-Claude, perking up. I’d watched as the heavy Bavarian meal, so unusual for the athletic French mountain guide, made him sleepy. “Monster?” he said again as if unsure of the English word.

“Ja,” replied Finch, “the tracks of some huge biped our friend Richard here and the late, overly lamented George Mallory found above twenty-two thousand feet on Lhakpa La, the high pass from where Richard had suggested to Mallory—correctly suggested, as it turned out—that they might be able to see a possible approach route to Everest. But on the way up—this is in late September nineteen twenty-one, I believe—they found the tracks of the monster instead of a view. True?” He turned toward the Deacon.

“Twenty September,” said the Deacon, setting down his coffee cup with great precision. “Deep into the monsoon season. The snow was pure powder and hip-deep.”

“But you made it to the summit of this little mountain—more a peak of its own than a pass, ja? —despite the snow,” said Finch. It was not a question.

The Deacon scratched his cheek. I could tell that he wanted to light up his pipe but was refraining from doing so while Finch was still enjoying his dessert. “Mallory and I cleared the icefall all right, but the deep snow slowed us down and made the porters with our tents turn back eight hundred feet below the summit. We all—Mallory, me, Wheeler, and Bullock, with Wollaston, Morshead, and Howard-Bury in reserve—made it to the top and set up camp on the twenty-second.”

“What about the tracks of a monster?” insisted Jean-Claude.

“Yeah, what about the monster? ” I asked. It was one of the first times I’d spoken, except to ask for something to be passed to me, during the entire meal.

“Above the icefall, on both the twentieth and twenty-second, where none of our climbers or porters had gone before, there were deep marks both in the loose snow and in the firmer, frozen-over parts of the ascent, where we could climb without fully breaking through the crust,” said the Deacon, his voice very soft. “They appeared to be from a two-legged creature.”

“Why say ‘appeared’?” demanded Finch. A slight smile was forming under his fuzz of a mustache. “Mallory, Wollaston, Howard-Bury, and all the others who made it up to the saddle summit of Lhakpa La swore that they were the giant clawed footprints of some mammal-like, two-legged living thing.”

The Deacon sipped the last of his coffee. The waiter bustled over, and we all accepted more coffee so we could keep the table longer.

“How large were the prints in the snow?” I asked.

“A paw print of a human-like foot fourteen to sixteen inches long?” said Finch, turning it into a question as he turned toward the Deacon.