Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

Our friend only nodded. Finally, setting the coffee cup down again, he said, “By the time Wollaston and the others got up to the saddle of Lhakpa La, our porters—Mallory’s and mine, since we were leading that second attempt—had stomped all over the original tracks we saw. There was no way for any of the British climbers to be sure of what was what or the precise length of any track in the snow.”

“But George Mallory took photographs,” said Finch.

“Yes,” said the Deacon.

“And those photos were almost identical to tracks reported and photographed on a high pass in Sikkim way back in eighteen eighty-nine,” said Finch.

“So they tell me,” said the Deacon.

Finch chuckled and turned toward Jean-Claude and me. I am sure I looked as goggle-eyed as Jean-Claude did.

“The porters knew exactly what the tracks were and who or what had made them,” said Finch in his soft German accent. “They were made by Metohkangmi… a yeti. ”

“By whom?” I said, my cup of coffee still frozen in space as if I could neither drink from it nor set it back on its saucer. “By what?” said Jean-Claude almost in unison.

“Yeti,” repeated Finch. “Not one of the many demons who the locals believe live in or on the mountain, but a real, living, breathing, blood-eating man-thing…a creature-monster, eight feet tall or larger. Huge feet. A gorilla-like or manlike monster that can survive at altitudes of twenty-two thousand feet and above near Everest.”

Jean-Claude and I looked at each other.

Finch ate strudel and smiled again. “I saw tracks myself the next year, in nineteen twenty-two, when Geoffrey Bruce and I climbed all the way to the North East Ridge for the first time. They were in an icy snowfield at about twenty-five thousand feet—a snowfield that none of our people had yet climbed to—clearly tracks of a biped like us, but with almost twice the stride of even the tallest man, and in the shallower parts of the snowfield where the tracks were embedded mostly in soft ice, we could see the actual outline of the foot—almost sixteen inches long, with what looked to be claws on the toes.” He looked at the Deacon. “You were there at the Rongbuk Monastery when we talked about the yetis in nineteen twenty-two, yes?”

The Deacon nodded.

Finch looked at Jean-Claude and me again. “Rongbuk Monastery is a very sacred place since it’s near the village of Chobuk, right across from the entrance to the valley that leads eventually to Chomolungma…”

“Chomolungma?” interrupted Jean-Claude.

Finch had turned back toward the Deacon and for some reason continued to look at him as he answered J.C. “The locals’ name for Mount Everest. It means something like ‘Goddess Mother of the World.’”

“Ah, oui, ” said Jean-Claude. “I had forgotten. Colonel Norton had mentioned that name when we spoke to the climbers at the Royal Geographical Society.”

“So the monks at the Rongbuk Monastery knew about this… yeti creature?” I asked. I didn’t want to let the subject of the “monster” drop.

Finch nodded and said to the Deacon, “You were there with me right at the end of April in nineteen twenty-two and you heard what the Rongbuk lama and his priests said about yetis on Everest. Was it four of the creatures that the lama said lived there?”

“Five,” said the Deacon. “Bruce kept pressing them on the tracks and the creatures, and the head lama—Dzatrul Rinpoche—told us calmly that he and the monks had seen five yeti. He said that they lived in the upper reaches of the valley, up to the North Col and even above that. The Rinpoche said that the yeti were more feared than the mere mountain demons, which might or might not exist. He said that the yeti were manlike, but taller, larger, with huge chests and powerful long arms. He said that the yeti were covered with long hair and had yellowish eyes. The lama told Bruce and us—you were there, Finch, I know you remember—that sometimes the yeti raided the village of Chobuk, but never the Rongbuk Monastery itself, drinking the blood of yaks, killing men with one swipe of their clawed paw-hands, and—I believe Geoffrey Bruce found this most interesting—carrying off the Chobuk women.”

“What would the monsters want with human women?” asked Jean-Claude in a small, almost childlike voice.

The other three of us had to chuckle, and J.C. blushed a bright crimson.

“The lama went on to say that when the village sent men up the glacier valley with weapons,” said Finch, his voice low so that none of the hovering waiters would hear, “they never found the yeti or the women, alive at least—always just the women’s gnawed skeletons and skulls. The women’s bones, said the lama, had always been sucked free of all their marrow. The eye sockets in the skulls looked, he said, as if they had been licked clean.”

I finally had to set my coffee cup down into its saucer. They both rattled. The sound made me imagine Mount Everest winds blowing through gnawed ribcages and the hollowed-out eye sockets of a skull.

The last of his coffee drunk, glancing to make sure that our silent trio had finished, George Ingle Finch gracefully waved over the waiter, his rock-ravaged fingers writing in air to signal for the bill. When the bill came, he gestured, with equal grace, for it to be presented to the Deacon.

We came out the front door of Restaurant Kronenhalle and turned left onto Rämistrasse and into the full force of the freezing wind blowing in off the lake. A teeth-chattering block and a half later we reached the Quaibrücke bridge but turned left onto an empty avenue named Utoquai and trudged southeast along a frozen lakeside walkway. A low concrete railing to our right was guarded by fangs of icicles. A constant rumbling below reminded us that the ice—the lake was frozen solid near the shore, icy but liquid water starting a hundred yards or so out—was grinding up against the cement breakwater below that railing. The wind was roaring hard enough to raise whitecaps far out along the white-iced and white-watered expanse, and the same wind would have thrown me down had not the ever efficient Swiss cleared all the ice and snow along the Utoquai Boulevard sidewalk and sprinkled it liberally with salt. Finch had informed us that his storage warehouse was less than half a mile away, but as Jean-Claude and I plodded along behind the Deacon and Finch, trying to overhear their conversation through the freezing wind, half a mile seemed too far to walk.

Jean-Claude and I walked faster to close the distance to the two men in front of us.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” George Finch was saying, “and it’s just not possible, Richard.”

“What am I trying to do, George?”

“Climb Mount Everest alpine style,” said the shorter man. “Instead of the Mallory-Bruce-Norton military-siege style of attack—one slow camp at a time, attack, retreat, attack again—you and your young friends want to take it in one swift alpine assault. But it won’t work, Richard. You’ll all die up there.”

“We’ve been paid by Lady Bromley to carry out only a search and recovery operation—at least to find and bury her son’s body,” said the Deacon. “With luck, we’ll find some trace of him far lower than Bruno Sigl was talking about, way up high between Camps Four and Five—that made no sense. But I’ve mentioned nothing about the three of us trying to climb the mountain.”

George Finch nodded. “But you will try, Richard. I know you. So I tremble for the fates of you and your two fine friends.”

The Deacon did not reply to this. We passed the Opera House and turned left on a street called Falkenstrasse. At least the wind was at our backs now.