Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“Incredible!” I gasped as the Deacon and I reached the bottom after one of the fastest glissades I’d ever experienced.

“We shall practice more later before we leave and during the trek in to Everest,” said Jean-Claude.

We were in twilight shadow now and it suddenly became very cold. J.C. was already pulling the rope free of its needle-eye ice screws and retrieving the long line.

“Do you have a name for this device?” asked the Deacon.

J.C. grinned as he expertly wrapped the long coil of Miracle Rope from his fist to his elbow, coil and coil again. “Jumar,” he said.

“What does that mean in French?” I asked. “What does it stand for?”

“Nothing,” says J.C. “It was the name of my dog when I was a boy. He could climb a tree after a squirrel if he chose. I have never seen a better dog-climber.”

“Jumar,” I repeated. Odd word. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever get used to it.

“I’ve been worrying about that last ice wall between the Rongbuk Glacier to the North Col on Everest for some months,” the Deacon said quietly as we approached London and the murky winter sunrise.

I nodded awake. “Why?” I whispered. “In ’twenty-two, you and Finch and the others found snow slopes up to the Col and cut steps for the porters. Last June there weren’t any snow slopes, but there was that fissure—the ice chimney—that Mallory free-climbed and dropped fixed ropes and then Sandy Irvine’s jury-rigged rope ladder down.”

The Deacon bobbed his head slightly. “But Rongbuk is a glacier, Jake. It rises, subsides, fissures, faults, moves, crumbles, creates its own crevasses. All we know for sure is that it won’t be as it was last year for Mallory—a chance to show off his climbing techniques—or for Finch and us the year before that. This spring that ice wall may have climbable fissures or new snow slopes—or it may be two hundred feet of vertical ice.”

“Well, if it is sheer vertical ice,” I said, tiredly but with a new sense of bravado, “J.C. and his front-point crampons and silly little ice axes and the whatchamacallems—jumars—have given us a way to climb it.”

The Deacon drove in silence for a moment. I could see the dome of Saint Paul’s coming over the horizon with the sun.

“Then, Jake,” he said, “I shall have to assume that we are ready to go climb Mount Everest.”

Chapter 9

I just wish this Lord Bromley-Whatsis, his serene buggering Highness, had bloody well buggered himself down to Calcutta from the hills and helped us bandobast these buggering great heavy crates to the bloody freight depot a full buggering day earlier, is what I damn well wish.

C alcutta is a terrifying city, with Kipling’s “sheeted dead” underfoot on an evening walk—not dead bodies, it turns out, but people wrapped in their sheets and sleeping on what passes for sidewalks—and everything smelling of incense, spices, human piss, cattle, the not unpleasant sweat-and-breath scent of multitudes, and fragrant smoke from burning cow dung. All the dark-skinned men’s stares are curious, dismissive, or outright angry, while the women’s stares—even the Mohammedan women’s eyes peering out from beneath and above the black cloth covering them from head to foot—are alluring, inviting, and, for me, filled with sexual promise.

It is only the twenty-second of March, 1925, far from the terrible summer pre-monsoon heat and the downpours of the later-summer monsoon rains, but the air of Calcutta already feels like a wad of wet blankets wrapped around me head to toe.

At least these have been my impressions so far during our two and a half days here.

Everything is strange to me. Even though I’d crossed the Atlantic in a liner from Boston to Europe last year, the five weeks of travel on the HMS Caledonia from Liverpool to Calcutta seemed a thousand times more exotic. The first days were rough going—the tugs barely got us out of Liverpool harbor against the wind and waves—and I was surprised to find out that I was the only one of the three of us who did not succumb to seasickness at some point on the voyage. The pitching and rolling seemed like a fine game, a simple challenge in getting from Point A to Point B and then onward and upward to the wooden deck, where I ran my twelve miles daily and nightly in a pitching, rolling oval, and I never had a hint of the nausea that all but ruined the early part of the voyage for Jean-Paul and the Deacon.

Except for the slow boredom of transiting the Suez Canal and the storm in the western Mediterranean that kept me belowdecks for a day, the voyage to Calcutta was a pleasant experience. At Colombo—a small white town seemingly being besieged by ferocious, impenetrable jungle on all sides—I bought some lace and mailed it to my mother and aunt in Boston. Everything was new and exciting. And I knew—but did not then fully appreciate—that everything was prelude.

The 1921, ’22, and ’24 Everest expeditions all came through Calcutta on the way to their official starting point—Darjeeling—but funded and backed as they were by the Mount Everest Committee of the Alpine Club and that club’s parent, the Royal Geographical Society, there were always agents in Calcutta ready to sort out the crates of supplies and matériel, so that when the climbers arrived, everything they needed was either already loaded onto the train for Darjeeling or ready to be loaded.

We, of course, being a secret and illicit expedition, have no agents waiting in Calcutta. The Deacon is in charge of spending Lady Bromley’s money—at least until “Cousin Reggie” takes over here in India—and the Deacon soon tells Jean-Claude and me the Hindi word bandobast, meaning “arrangements.” Evidently bandobast in Calcutta (where most of the people speak Bengali, not Hindi, but the word is still used here, it being, I assume, almost a universal concept in all of multilingual and multiethnic India) means the same as baksheesh in the Middle East—i.e., bribes necessary to get even the simplest thing done.

But since the Deacon was on the two earliest Alpine Club expeditions with Mallory and others and was interested in all aspects of them, including this administrative greasing of the wheels to get things done in Calcutta (and, Jean-Claude and I can only hope, later in both Darjeeling and Tibet), our twelve heavy crates—amongst other things we had to bring from Europe, we’re bringing a lot of the Deacon’s new high-quality rope on this expedition for reasons I’ll explain later—have been moved from the docks to the train station freight depot by early this third afternoon of our stay in Calcutta.

There is a night train from Sealdah Station just beyond Calcutta called the Darjeeling Mail that we’ll be taking in a few hours, but that train—a real train, as it were—only goes as far as Siliguri, a little trading station out in the middle of nowhere which we’re supposed to reach about 6:30 the next morning. There we’ll have to switch to the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, by all accounts a narrow-gauge toy of a train that has to chug its way 7,000 feet up the mountain foothills of the southernmost Himalayas to Darjeeling, where the Bengali English government of the Raj spends its summers. The entire train voyage will be about 400 miles, and the Deacon informs us that it will probably be too hot and dusty to get any sleep during the Darjeeling Mail part of it.

No matter. I don’t plan to spend much of the time on the train sleeping at any rate.

We receive a telegram from “Cousin Reggie” on our first morning here:

MEET AT HOTEL MT EVEREST DARJEELING TUES. 24 MARCH. I WILL ASSUME COMMAND OF THE EXPEDITION AT THAT POINT.

L./ R. K. BROMLEY-MONTFORT

“‘Assume command of the expedition,’ my arse,” says the Deacon, crumpling the telegram flimsy in his long-fingered hand and throwing it on the ground.