Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“This spelling,” I said to the Deacon, holding up the folded note as if it were evidence. Everyone knew after the months of newspaper accounts and funeral oratory that Andrew “Sandy” Comyn Irvine had gone to Merton College, Oxford. “The result of high-altitude oxygen deprivation?”

The Deacon shook his head. “Noel said that Irvine was one of the cleverest young men he’d ever met…a near-genius at engineering and in-the-field tinkering…but there was some problem that never allowed the boy to learn to spell correctly. It didn’t seem to hold him back in any way. He rowed crew for the OUBC—Oxford University Boat Club—and was a member of the rather infamous Myrmidon dining club at Merton.”

“Infamous?” said Jean-Claude. He’d been carefully examining Irvine’s diagrams for the special boots and looked up in surprise. “Irvine was part of something…infamous?”

“A dining club of rich boys, most of them excellent athletes, who specialized in breaking university rules and windows,” said the Deacon. He took back the folded sheets of paper and handed them to the attentive Fagg Brother who had been discussing boots with us. “Now our decision is whether to go with Irvine’s design for the newer, possibly warmer alpine climbing boots, or stick to the new felt ones, or get the super-rigid types of boots that Jean-Claude has asked us to use with his newly designed crampons, or just bring our own.”

“Can we not do all four things?” asked Jean-Claude. “Soon I will show you why the very rigid boots I requested may be necessary on Everest. So the four types of boots—high felt for cold, extra-rigid for my new crampon design, Irvine’s felt and hobnail boots, and our own old boots, perhaps resoled, for backup. If Lady Bromley’s money allows?”

“It allows,” said the Deacon. He pointed to the diagrams and said to Mr. Fagg, “Two pairs of these specialized boots with the extra felt layer and metal-plates-not-touching-metal-nails for each of us. Two pairs of the extra-rigid boots—Jean-Claude has a page with the specifications. And two pairs each of the Laplander Antarctic felt boots. We have time to be measured now.”

But it was not Finch’s balloon coat or the Irvine-designed new boots that were the largest change made in outfitting our tiny new expedition in 1925.

As soon as J.C. had rejoined us after his last trip to France, he asked urgently for two days of our time before the end of January. The Deacon replied that it was impossible; he simply didn’t have two days to waste between January and late February, when we were destined to sail for India.

“It’s important, Ree-shard, ” said Jean-Claude. At this point J.C. used the Deacon’s first name only on rare occasions, and I was always amused when he used the French pronunciation. “Très important.”

“Important enough that the success or failure of the entire expedition may depend upon it?” The Deacon’s tone was not friendly.

“ Oui. Yes.” J.C. looked at both of us. “I think that, yes, these two days may be so important that the success or failure of our entire expedition may depend upon it.”

The Deacon sighed and pulled out a tiny notebook-diary with calendar that he kept in his jacket pocket. “The last weekend in the month,” he said at last. “The twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of January. I have several important things…I’ll move them. That’s a full-moon weekend…will that make any difference?”

“It might,” said Jean-Claude. He flashed his sudden, wide, boy-like grin. “The full moon may well make some difference. Yes. Merci, mon ami. ”

We left at sunrise—or what passed for sunrise on that freezing, gray, foggy, snow-spitting late January day—on Saturday the twenty-fourth. None of us owned an automobile, so the Deacon had arranged to borrow one from a friend of his named Dick Summers. It was a Vauxhall, and in my memory the vehicle was about thirty feet long—it had three rows of seats with plenty of legroom and tires that came up almost to my chest. (The mild irony, explained the Deacon, was that Dick Summers had used this same Vauxhall less than two years before to make the first-ever automotive crossing of the rough gravel road—little more than a trail, said the Deacon—in both directions over the difficult Wrynose and Hardknot passes in the Lake District. When I commented that I didn’t see much irony in this, the Deacon lit his pipe and said, “True. I forgot to add that while Summers did the driving on that adventure, Sandy Irvine rode in the third-row seat with two attractive young ladies.”)

We learned within moments of leaving Summers’s storage garage that the huge Vauxhall was better suited to summer expeditions over high passes than it was to winter driving. It was a convertible—what the Brits called “a ragtop” or “topless”—and although it had taken the three of us only thirty minutes of swearing and smashed fingers to get the impossibly complex roof apparatus properly raised and locked, and then another half hour to get the soft side and rear windows buttoned and snapped in properly, as soon as we were on a London street heading northwest out of the city, we realized that the damned machine had more gaps in its superstructure than a cheap colander. Within ten minutes of getting the huge auto onto the streets, snow was blowing in our faces and piling up along the wooden floorboards, on our feet, and in our laps.

“How long a drive did you say this is?” the Deacon asked Jean-Claude, who was at the wheel. J.C. hadn’t yet revealed our destination, which irritated the Deacon all the more. (Not that he seemed to need many reasons those days for being irritated; the amount of logistical work he was doing for our limited little “recovery expedition” was leaving him no time for sleep or food, much less relaxation or exercise, and was visibly wearing him down.)

“Less than a six-hour drive, I am told, on a nice summer day,” replied J.C. happily, both wool-gloved hands firmly on the giant steering wheel, and spluttering a bit of snow off his lips. “Perhaps a little longer today.”

“Ten hours?” The Deacon’s voice was a growl as he tried to light his pipe. It was difficult for him since he was wearing our new fingerless gloves under our new wool and then Shackleton-cloth mittens. At least we had dressed for the South Pole for the drive to this outing.

“May be lucky if we get there in twelve hours,” chirped Jean-Claude. “Please sit back, as you say, and relax.”

No chance of that for two good reasons: first, the Vauxhall had a theoretical heater in the dash, and all three of us were huddled forward toward it, me from the second-row seat, even though the thing blew out only cold air; and second, Jean-Claude was not used to driving any automobile, but especially not in England, so the trip on snow and ice was terrifying even between his lapses as to which side of the road to drive on.

The snow fell harder. We continued on northwest—the only other vehicles foolhardy enough to be on the roads this day were lorries—through Hemel Hempsted, then Coventry, then the smoky-black city of Birmingham, then on toward Shrewsbury.

“We’re going to northern Wales,” said the Deacon with a sigh, long before we got to Shrewsbury. Somehow he managed to make “Wales” rhyme with “Hells.”

The wide third seat, and half of my second seat, were taken up with huge and heavy duffel bags which J.C. had needed our help to lift into the car. They were heavy. And the steel clank and heavy metal bangs coming from the bags as we slewed left and right in dizzying attempts to find a straight line down the road again over the snow and ice made me guess that there was a lot of serious equipment in those bags.