Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

He pulled the short ice axe in his right hand down, jiggled it, pulled it out of the ice, and hammered the pick head in deep another four feet up. Still holding his weight on that left foot—easily, I thought—J.C. kicked his right foot into position several feet higher, wiggled the forward crampons of his left foot out of the ice, and pulled himself upward with the strength of both arms. He banged the left ice axe deep in the wall higher than the right axe, lifted his left foot, and kicked it into the ice.

Standing as casually and easily six feet up the ice wall as he might have on a city sidewalk, J.C. looked over his shoulder at the Deacon—who’d finally got the harness rigged right—and said, “If this were the ice wall below the North Col and we had to prepare it for other climbers and porters, how long do you think it would take to hack out the necessary steps?”

The Deacon squinted upward. “It’s too steep for steps. And the overhang…it’s impossible. Porters wouldn’t do it, even with fixed ropes.”

“All right, then,” said J.C., not even breathing hard as he stood on that vertical face, “we’ll bring something like the hundred-foot ladder that Sandy Irvine strung together for the porters last year. For the porters to use when they follow us.”

“That was after Mallory had free-climbed the chimney—a fissure in the ice wall,” said the Deacon. “They also rigged a pulley to pull up loads.”

“But assuming one could climb this wall just by cutting steps,” persisted Jean-Claude. “How long for the first ascent?”

The Deacon looked upward again. The sunlight on the vertical ice was blinding. He tugged his goggles on. “Three hours,” said the Deacon. “Maybe four. Maybe five.”

“Seven,” I said. “At least seven hours.”

J.C. smiled and began kicking and hammering his way up the ice wall again. Every 30 feet or so he would stop, create a tiny hole in the ice above or in front of him by tapping with the pointed end of his pick, remove a 12- to 18-centimeter ice screw from the bag on his belt, and screw it in by hand, the screw always angled uphill—that is, downward into the ice—with an angle of what I judged to be 45 to 60 degrees against the direction of his weight and pull. Sometimes, when the ice was so hard that the screw would not go in fully, J.C. used the sharp point of his ice axe pick or some sort of ice tool from his belt inserted into the eye of the screw to gain greater leverage for screwing it in.

Each time he finished fastening a deep ice screw, he would snap on a carabiner and test it with his weight, his boot crampons never leaving the ice.

Even with the pauses to put in the ice screw protection every ten yards or so, Jean-Claude was scrambling up the ice wall like a spider. Sometimes he would bang both ice hammers into the ice—connected only by a bifurcated tether running from the carabiner set into the chest piece on his harness to the wrist loops—and use both hands to secure a tough ice screw.

As he climbed higher and higher, it became harder and harder for me to watch these moves. Theoretically, his rope—which he’d run through a complicated series of knots on the chest and belly side of his harness—would break his fall if he came off the wall, but if he did come off at the high point of his next pitch, before he’d put in the next ice screw, it would be a 60-foot vertical fall before the rope would catch on the eye of the inset ice screw. Very few climbers, even given good footing and a possible belay point, could belay a man who’d fallen 60 vertical feet. Too much mass. Too much velocity after that long a fall.

Besides, climbing ropes in 1925 almost always snapped when put under that much pressure.

This was when I noticed that Jean-Claude’s huge coil of rope looked so large not only because he had more than 200 feet of it across his chest when he started, but also because the rope that now spiderwebbed down the ice wall was thicker than the kind we always used.

Jean-Claude continued scrambling vertically up the impossible ice wall, shifting a few feet or yards left and right when he had to avoid rotten ice or outcroppings, so that the fixed rope behind him did begin to look a little spiderwebby.

The Deacon had taken his gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and was looking at it. I knew the watch was also a chronometer. He was timing our friend.

When the now diminutive figure reached the 15-foot rock-and-ice overhang 180 or so feet up the vertical wall, he clipped his chest or waist harness carabiner (it was hard to tell which from this distance) to a thick strap attached to the last ice screw he’d just put in at the junction of wall and overhang, and shouted down (sounding only a little breathless), “How much time?”

“Twenty-one minutes,” the Deacon shouted back, putting his watch away.

I could see Jean-Claude shake his head. He was wearing a floppy red stocking cap, not quite a beret. “I could do it in half that time with more practice. And…,” he looked straight down through the V of his widened legs, “…fewer ice screws, I think.”

“You’ve shown us, Jean-Claude,” shouted the Deacon. “You’ve proven your new hardware! It’s brilliant. Now come on down!”

The figure leaning back in his harness straps almost 200 feet above us shook his head. He shouted something that neither the Deacon nor I could make out.

“I said—‘to the top,’” he shouted again, looking straight down at us between his legs again.

I was actually wringing my hands with anxiety, which made little sense since I was the sheer-face rock climber of the three of us. I was supposed to love this kind of vertical test—lots of exposure and fissured rock and even some modest overhangs for an extra challenge. But this… this was suicide.

I realized then that I really hated ice. And the idea of going up Mount Everest with these stupid harnesses and all this clanking metal—“bloody ironmongers” was what the British climbers derisively called the Germans and the few French who were using metal carabiners, pitons, and such on tough rock faces and slopes—seemed suddenly obscene. Obscene and absurd.

I also realized at that moment how nervous I was. I’d never felt this tense climbing on high alpine ledges, ridges, faces, summits, or slopes with these two men.

I looked up expecting J.C. to begin his descent. He had enough rope left that he could rappel a good part of the way. If he trusted those damned ice screws.

Instead of rappelling or scuttling down the way he’d gone up, Jean-Claude Clairoux then did something that to this day, more than sixty-five years later, I do not believe.

First, a strap still connecting his chest harness to the ice screw he’d just put in at the topmost section of the vertical part of the wall, J.C. leaned back until it was just the tension of that five-foot leash holding him almost horizontally on the ice. He then drove both hammers into the overhang ice as far out as he could reach. Then J.C. raised his feet—I had to look away it was so appalling, then looked back to watch him fall—and planted his crampons and toe crampons firmly in the corner where vertical wall and horizontal overhang came together.

Somehow he hung there horizontally with one arm supporting the weight of his entire body while he drove in a deep screw—he had to bang on it to get it in the last few centimeters, and I heard steel going into solid rock under the ice—then he clipped a carabiner and a sort of double tether leash to that and let himself down until he was hanging horizontally only from the ropes, perhaps seven feet beneath the overhang.

Then, using his steel crampon tips against the vertical wall on each inward oscillation, he began to pendulum-swing back and forth, completely dependent upon that one ice screw and the rope, no point of his body in contact with the wall or overhang except when he kicked harder each time to pendulum out further.