Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“You must remember in ’twenty-two,” continued Finch, “the day we reached Pang La Pass—at seventeen thousand two hundred feet—and caught our first glimpse of Everest.”

“I remember,” grunted the Deacon.

“The wind was so strong at Pang La that we had to lie down, gasping for air and clinging to rocks to keep from being blown away,” continued Finch. “But suddenly there was that view of a hundred miles of the Himalayan range. Mount Everest was still forty bloody miles to the south, but that monstrous hill dominated everything. You remember the cloud trailing from it, Richard? You remember the snow plume stretching out for miles to the west? That bloody mountain creates its own weather. ”

“I was there with you, George,” the Deacon said. We turned right onto a narrower street of closed-front warehouses and bleak old apartment buildings— Seefeldstrasse, read the ice-encrusted street sign.

“Then you know that an alpine-style assault is impossible,” said the alpinist, removing a fat, heavy key ring from his overcoat pocket and finding the right key for a warehouse door. “Climbers sick, porters sick, terrible winds, sudden heavy snows, the monsoon season arriving early, injuries, avalanches, rockfalls, tents torn, oxygen apparatuses not working properly, dysentery, altitude sickness, frostbite, stoves malfunctioning…any single setback, and there will be many, Richard, you know that as well as I do…any setback will destroy the entire alpine-style effort. And cost some or all of you your lives. Here we are.”

Finch entered the black maw and fumbled for a light switch.

The first floor—first floor by my American way of thinking—of this warehouse wasn’t the huge storage space I’d expected. Or, rather, it was, but it had been partitioned. Nine-foot walls without ceilings had created dozens of such storage areas, each entrance with a metal-grill door and heavy padlock. We followed Finch halfway down the echoing space, he produced yet another long key from his key ring, and then he held the iron-grill door open as we entered his storage space, which was perhaps 25 feet by 20 feet.

Inside, a long workbench along the far wall was stacked with oxygen tanks.

To our left was a wall with more than a dozen different-sized ice axes hanging. Shelves held a myriad of hobnailed and felt-lined boots, and a long rack showed varieties of wool climbing jackets, arctic anoraks, and a whole line of distinctive long padded jackets or overcoats. I counted ten there on the rack, and I was surprised that Finch needed so many.

Finch had closed the door when I walked over, lifted the eiderdown-filled fabric of the closest long coat on the rack, and said, “Is this your famous balloon jacket?”

Finch glowered at me. It was obvious that he’d endured too much teasing about that particular article of clothing. “It’s the goose-down-filled outer jacket I devised for Everest,” he snapped. “Yes, it’s balloon fabric—the only material I could find that wouldn’t tear or rip and which could be easily sewn for the compartments of eiderdown. It kept me warm at almost twenty-four thousand feet below the North East Ridge.”

The Deacon chuckled. “I can vouch for that. The three of us—George, Geoffrey Bruce, and I, and Bruce was a neophyte climber then—used ‘English air,’ George’s oxygen apparatus, to press through the Yellow Band to a point just below the North East Ridge. We would have made the ridge had Bruce’s oxygen outfit not quit working. There was a broken glass tube in Bruce’s set. Luckily, George carried a spare glass piece, but he had to stop and tinker with his own oxygen rig to allow it to feed oxygen to both Geoffrey and himself while he repaired Bruce’s rig. All that at twenty-seven thousand three hundred feet…at the time, the highest point humans had ever reached on foot.”

“And then we had to turn back,” growled Finch. “Surrendering our summit attempt because of Bruce’s temporary trauma at not getting oxygen. And he’d been one of the adamant ones about reaching the summit without ‘artificial air.’ Had he been an experienced climber…” The growl trailed off, but the sadness and anger etched on George Ingle Finch’s face remained.

The Deacon nodded acknowledgment of Finch’s frustration. I realized then, fully for the first time, what an insult and disappointment it had been for these two men, each having climbed higher than Mallory or anyone else on the 1922 expedition, not to have been given another chance in 1924. What fury they must have felt when they were informed that they had not been chosen for the 1924 Everest attempt. While holding Finch’s balloon coat in one hand, I suddenly imagined the bile that must have brought a constant taste of rejection to these two proud men.

The Deacon said, “My point was only that when we returned to Camp Four that evening, Geoffrey Bruce and I were frozen to the bone, but George had stayed warm climbing in his eiderdown jacket. This is why I asked each of you to bring two empty Gladstone bags. I’ve paid George to make up nine of these coats for us.”

“Nine?” said Jean-Claude. He looked at the coat rack with its line of bulging down jackets. “Why so many? Are they that fragile that they wear out so soon?”

“No,” said the Deacon. “I figure that we’ll each have two high-climbing porters with us to get to the high camp for our summit attempt. I’ve ordered the extra oxygen sets and eiderdown coats for them as well. Nine in all. They compress nicely. We’ll pack them in our Gladstones today and take them back ourselves so that nothing gets lost in shipping.”

Finch grunted. “Mallory listed a copy of my eiderdown coat as possible outerwear for the climbers in last year’s expedition,” he said. “But no one ordered one. They chose to climb—and die—in silk, wool, cotton, wool, wool, and more wool.”

“Wool is warm in layers,” Jean-Claude said tentatively. “It has kept me alive through high bivouacs many nights.”

Instead of arguing, Finch only nodded and touched two of his worn wool outer jackets and then one of the Shackleton windproof gabardine anoraks hanging there. “Wool is wonderful, until it gets wet. Wet from our sweat as well as from snow or rain. And then you’re carrying another forty pounds of sodden wool with you when you climb, in addition to the forty or fifty pounds in your rucksack and thirty-some pounds of your oxygen apparatus. And then, when you pause in the high winds, your sweat freezes on the lower layers…” He shook his head.

“Doesn’t your eiderdown jacket absorb sweat and lose its loft when wet?” I asked.

Finch shook his head again. “I wear the usual wool underlayers, but the sweat buildup is less because of the breathing capabilities of the eiderdown. The eiderdown would lose its insulating qualities when soaked—it’s the pockets of air it creates that kept the goose, and now me in the jacket of the goose’s down, warm—but the balloon fabric I chose resists water short of a full immersion in a lake.” He managed a small smile. “There aren’t many lakes above twenty thousand feet on Everest…unless one slips.”

“I wasn’t aware that there were lakes or standing water on the upper reaches of the Rongbuk Glacier,” said Jean-Claude, still looking hard at Finch. “Just melt pools down at the entrance to the glacial valley.”

George Finch sighed at my French friend’s apparent literalism and shrugged ever so slightly. “If you fall two vertical miles from the North East Ridge or Everest summit ridge, your impact velocity might be enough to melt some ice and create a serious puddle.”

Finch knew better than we did—but all alpinists know from experience—that a falling climber almost never falls the full distance off any mountain. The body hits many rocks, boulders, ice slags, ridges, and other protuberances on the way down…enough that whatever remains make it to the glacier below are in many small, naked pieces and barely recognizable as having once been human.