Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“Is this the oxygen apparatus you brought with us?” I asked from where I gripped the front seat ahead of me like the restraining bar on a roller coaster.

“Non,” said Jean-Claude absently, chewing his lower lip while he tried to thread the needle with a twelve-foot-wide Vauxhall between an oncoming lorry and an impenetrable hedge and deep ditch to the left of our steeply crowned and snow-covered road.

The Deacon removed his pipe for a second. I’d just decided that I should lean closer and hold my hands out to it —his pipe—as a source of warmth rather than toward the car’s so-called “heater.”

“Can’t be the oxygen sets,” said the Deacon glumly. “You remember that Finch will be sending those straight from Zurich to the ship for loading.”

It grew dark. Our dinner had consisted of freezing—literally freezing; there were ice crystals in them—sandwiches we’d packed in a now mostly snow-filled hamper and a thermos flask of hot soup that had lost all of its heat somewhere around when we did, ten hours earlier in the northwest suburbs of London.

The snow continued to fall. The Vauxhall’s flickering headlights put out almost as much light as two sputtering candles. No matter; there was no one else idiotic enough to be out on these roads this night anyway. Perhaps the full moon that Jean-Claude wanted had risen while we drove on. We’d never know. The world was a whirling white mass through which Jean-Claude drove firmly ever onward, blinking unmelting snowflakes out of his eyes as he squinted into the white-darkness ahead.

“We’re going to Mount Snowdon,” said the Deacon. His pipe would no longer stay lit in the gale blowing through the flapping sides and roof and window panels.

“Non,” said Jean-Claude grimly. The last time I’d seen his smile had been somewhere just after Birmingham.

We didn’t get to his destination that night. The first of two tire punctures that we were to enjoy during the trip made sure of that. Luckily, Dick Summers had had the foresight to have two workable spares lashed to the Vauxhall’s left-rear running board. (I could get in and out of my rear seat only on the right side.) Less luckily, the jack and other tools needed to change the spare in the roaring blizzard—we had broken down in mid-road, so if a lorry or other vehicle came barreling out of the snowy darkness, it was all over for all of us (we didn’t even have a flashlight—or “torch,” as the Deacon called it—to carry down the road to warn other cars, nor even a candle, much less a road flare)—we finally realized must be buried in the tiny boot of the huge Vauxhall. And the boot was locked. And the ignition key would not open it.

We wove a tapestry of obscenities so thick that night I’m certain that it’s still floating somewhere near the England-Wales border.

Finally one of us thought of merely banging the hinged boot cover, hard, thinking that perhaps it was merely frozen closed rather than locked, and the tiny flap of metal swung up as easily as you please, revealing a jack, tire iron, and so forth that looked to have been made for an automobile a fifth the size of the hulking Vauxhall.

No matter. We had the tire changed in under ninety minutes.

We spent the night in an overpriced and not very clean local hostelry in a place called Cerrigydrudion. We arrived too late for the warm food they’d served earlier, and the owner wouldn’t open the kitchen to allow us to forage. The public room did have a fireplace, and although the owner, on his way to bed, stepped forward as if to tell us not to put any more coal on the fire, one glance at the glares from all three of us froze him in his tracks.

We stayed by the tiny fire until midnight, trying to thaw out. Then we dragged ourselves to tiny, strange-smelling rooms that were almost as cold as the Vauxhall had been. We’d brought our best down sleeping bags—after J.C. had told us that we’d be camping out this Saturday night—but the cold and evil smell of the tiny cells was too much, and somewhere around three a.m. I pulled on more outer layers of clothing and trudged back out to see if I could get the fire relit.

There was no need. J.C. and the Deacon had got there before me, had the tiny coal fire burning brightly, and were both snoring as they lay in contorted positions sprawled in and across two wing chairs. There was a third ancient wing chair in the room. I dragged it over—the screech waking neither of my climbing partners—got it as close to the little fire as I could, pulled the down bag over me like a comforter, and slept soundly until the inn’s host rousted us out of our happy nests at six in the morning.

That Sunday, January 25, 1925, was one of the most beautiful days in my life, albeit at the tender age of 22, when so much of my life still lay ahead. But to be honest, none of my “most beautiful days” in the almost seven decades since have been shared with anyone quite the way I shared that day—and then more such days and moments during the following months—with my friends and brothers of the rope, Jean-Claude Clairoux and Richard Davis Deacon.

There was deep snow everywhere, but the day was blue-skied and sunny. Perhaps the sunniest day I remember during my time in England, with the possible exception of that perfect summer one when we visited Lady Bromley. It was still very cold—at least ten degrees below freezing—so the snow wasn’t melting, but the huge Vauxhall, with its powerful engine and gigantic, strangely knobbed tires, was in its element. Even on the provincial Welsh roads where no other vehicles had traveled that morning, we barreled along at a comfortable and safe thirty miles per hour.

After only a few miles, we all realized that we couldn’t stand being entombed in the top-up Vauxhall again, so we stopped the car in the middle of the empty, blindingly white road—our two tracks behind us disappearing over the last pass like black railroad tracks in a domed white world—and we deconstructed the ragtop’s rag top, storing pop-off windows, canvas sides, and the rest on the floor next to J.C.’s huge bags riding next to me.

We’d each pulled on our five layers of wool, then the personal-use eiderdown balloon-fabric parkas we’d brought back in our Gladstone bags from Mr. Finch’s Zurich, and finally the Shackleton-Burberry anoraks. J.C. and I also donned our leather flying or motorcycle helmets and face masks, complete with Crooke’s glass antiglare goggles.

I wish to this day that someone had been there to take a photo of us as we passed by all that Mount Snowdon–area emptiness. We must have looked like Mr. Wells’s Martian invaders.

But it turned out that our destination—Jean-Claude’s secret destination—was not the frequently-climbed-in-winter Mount Snowdon or George Mallory’s Pen-y-Pass slabs where we’d rock-climbed the previous autumn; our destination, reached mid-morning that January Sunday, was the lake Llyn Idwal and its surrounding moraines, roches moutonnées (Jean-Claude’s description but familiar to me from our many alpine climbs during the previous year), brilliant striations in the cliff sides, wild moraines and scree slopes, erratics (boulders brought there by long-gone glaciers and left sitting on the rocky flatlands like huge hurling stones forgotten by a race of giants), and exposed deep-rock strata on vertical faces and slabs and slopes everywhere around us. The Llyn—the lake, frozen then—was surrounded by hard-rock verticality. J.C. pointed out the high peaks of Y Glyder Fawr and Y Garn as we got out of the car and stretched our legs in the snow. Jean-Claude and I were wearing waxed-cotton gaiters to keep our high socks dry. The Deacon, also in knickerbockers, wore old-fashioned puttees—though of the finest cashmere—and looked like the rather fussy-looking British climbers in the photos of the ’21, ’22, and ’24 Everest expeditions. Also, with his khaki knickerbockers and khaki wool shirt visible through the opening of his unbuttoned balloon coat, the Deacon looked like the military man—Captain—he’d been during the Great War.