Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“What does the ‘L.-slash’ in this thing stand for?” asks Jean-Claude, who is retrieving and flattening out the crumpled telegram.

“‘Lord,’ I presume,” says the Deacon, biting down so hard on the stem of his unlighted pipe that I expect it to snap. “Lord Reginald K.-something Bromley-Montfort.”

“Why does he keep the Bromley in his name?” I ask. The ways of British near-royalty are still a mystery to me.

“How the hell should I know?” snaps the Deacon. He is rarely this short-tempered. Both Jean-Claude and I take a step backward, shocked by his tone. “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. This is his lousy country, his culture where bloody damn venal bribery is necessary everywhere to get the least bloody thing done, and where no one can keep a simple bloody appointment on time. So where is this ‘commander of the expedition’ when we actually need his fat arse?”

Jean-Claude and I look at each other and I think we are thinking the same thing. When George Mallory came this way a year earlier, he had no administrative responsibilities until they reached Tibet and the team leader, Geoffrey Bruce, fell ill during the five-week trek in to Everest Base Camp. Because of Bruce’s heart problems and trouble adapting to altitude even on the Tibetan passes long before Everest came into sight, the expedition’s doctor ordered the 58-year-old Bruce back to Darjeeling, and Colonel Norton, who had been the climbing leader, assumed overall command of the expedition with Mallory becoming climbing leader.

But even with the responsibility of planning the climbing logistics, Mallory had been free of the heavier administrative responsibilities of overseeing the entire expedition, renting mules and porters, handling all the Tibetan governmental and other requirements, and—most tiring—dealing with the personalities and sudden illnesses and weaknesses of the entire British climbing team and its mélange of more than a hundred porters.

Jean-Claude and I stare at each other after the Deacon’s sudden outburst—as I say, in the more than year and a half I’ve known Richard Davis Deacon, I’ve never heard anything like this from him (his usual response to logistical or climbing setbacks is a shrug and an ironic smile, followed by the lighting of his pipe)—and I know we’re both thinking that while Jean-Claude and I had been free to enjoy the ocean voyage here (or, for J.C., “enjoy” it between brief bouts of debilitating seasickness in the choppy parts), the Deacon had been dealing with thousands of unsettled money, administrative, logistical, and climbing details.

During the trip on the HMS Caledonia, although the Deacon did some daily exercising to stay in shape, he never had the time to go jogging miles around the pitching deck as I did each day. Usually he could be found at his tiny first-class stateroom desk, poring over topographic maps of Everest and its vicinity, photographs, and the private and public accounts of the three previous British expeditions—including a score of notebooks that the Deacon himself had filled during the ’21 and ’22 expeditions before he’d fallen out of grace with Mallory.

We are only on the first step of the trip—preparing for the train ride from Calcutta to Sealdah to the little town of Siliguri and then uphill to Darjeeling, where the real trek to Everest always begins—but the Deacon is exhausted.

And it’s even more than that, I also realize. The Deacon has been infuriated by this Lord Bromley-Montfort’s arrogant telegram. This “Cousin Reggie” was supposed to finance our expedition from Darjeeling on to Everest, not “take command of it.” I don’t blame the Deacon for his reaction—I’m seriously worried about what will happen when the two men actually meet sometime in the next forty-eight hours—and I have the sickening sense that our entire Mount Everest expedition may be in imminent danger of collapsing. It certainly wouldn’t be the first major mountaineering expedition that failed early because of conflict between two would-be leaders. (Nor, as I will notice over the next sixty-nine years, would it be the last.)

But then we’re leaving Sealdah Station in the loud, infernally hot, and eternally dusty first-class section of the equally loud, infernally hot, and eternally dusty first leg to Siliguri, and I find myself staring out at some of the most boring landscape I’ve ever traversed: endless rice paddies, interrupted only by plantations of various kinds of palm trees. It is also a chaotic train, with second- and third-class and nonpaying passengers hanging from every door and window and many more on the rooftop of every car except the first-class ones. As darkness falls, the number of villages we’re passing on this great, flat plain becomes obvious by the thousands of campfires and lantern lights we glimpse. A million people appear to be preparing their dinners at the same time, most over simple open fires in or near their open-doored homes, and—from the not totally unpleasant scent that fills the air even with our windows closed, the air moving only because of small electric fans set high on the walls turning slowly—it becomes obvious, and is confirmed by the Deacon, that most of the cooking fires we pass in the encroaching dusk are fueled by dried cow dung.

The Deacon does not apologize for his earlier outburst of temper at the Calcutta staging area, but as our Siliguri-bound night train moves deeper into the countryside and real darkness punctuated by hundreds or even thousands more fires in villages and isolated homes, his manner suggests both apology and embarrassment. After we dine on a basket of hotel-roasted chicken and a decent white wine in our small compartment where all three of us will be sleeping on fold-down cots, the smell of the Deacon’s pipe tobacco mixes with the cow dung scent of India’s humid air.

This is strangely calming. We say little to each other, all of us more interested in the tableaus glimpsed briefly as the now hurtling little train passes villages and homes lighted by open fires and the occasional lantern. We are climbing a little, but we know that narrow-gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway train tomorrow morning will have to pull itself and us from near sea level to Darjeeling—the town and the Bromley-Montfort tea plantation are set in the Mahabharat Mountain Range, also known as the Lesser Himalayas—at an average altitude of around 7,000 feet.

The heat eventually forces us to open the windows to allow more dust, smoke, and flying cinders in, but that thick, humid air becomes a tiny bit cooler as we roll through more coconut and banana plantations and the cooking-dinner scent of cow dung campfires is slowly balanced, if not replaced, by the thickly sensuous tropical funk of irrigated palm trees.

We are three or four hours out of Calcutta when the Darjeeling Mail express roars and clatters its way across the famous Sara Bridge which spans the Padma. After that, all is darkness, broken only by the dim constellations of the hundreds upon hundreds of distant villages across the plain.

All three of us are in our thinly cushioned fold-down beds by eleven p.m., and from the sounds my climbing partners are making, they are soon sleeping deeply. I’m plagued by thoughts and doubts for a while—the meeting with Lord Bromley-Montfort at the Mount Everest Hotel tomorrow night or Tuesday morning may be as disastrous as I fear—but then I also fall asleep to the swaying of the train and the soothing sound of its iron wheels on the Darjeeling Mail rails.