Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

The Deacon shakes his head. “That makes no sense. Let someone just follow the expedition into Tibet? Someone with no official clearance to be in Tibet? Even if Lord Percival were following a day behind the real expedition, as an Englishman, his arrest or detention might have put the entire expedition at risk with the dzongpens and Tibetan authorities. It makes no sense at all.”

“What are these dzongpens I’ve been hearing so much about?” asks Jean-Claude. “Just local headmen? Village chiefs? Tibetan warlords?”

“None of the above, really,” says Reggie. “Most Tibetan communities are run by dzongpens —usually two men—one an important lama and the other an important layperson from the village. But sometimes there’s a single dzongpen chieftain.” She turns back to the Deacon. “It’s getting late in the afternoon, Mr. Deacon. Have all your questions been answered to your satisfaction?”

“All save for why your cousin was trying to climb Everest after the Norton Expedition had left the area,” presses the Deacon.

Reggie laughs with no humor in her voice. “Percy never attempted to climb Mount Everest. Of that I am certain.”

“Sigl told both the Berliner Zeitung and The Times that he had been attempting precisely that,” says the Deacon. “Sigl says that when he and the other Germans arrived at Camp Two—just exploring out of an original intent to meet Mallory and then from sheer curiosity—he, Sigl, and the other Germans could see your cousin and Kurt Meyer staggering down the North Ridge. Obviously in some difficulty.”

Reggie shakes her head with absolute certainty. Her blue-black curls slide across her shoulders. “Bruno Sigl lied,” she says sharply. “Percy may have had a reason to go up onto the mountain, but I know for a certainty that he did not go into Tibet in order to attempt a climb of Mount Everest. Bruno Sigl is a common German thug who lies.”

“How do you know Sigl is a common German thug?” asks the Deacon. “Do you know him?”

“Of course not,” snaps Reggie. “But I had inquiries made in Germany and elsewhere. Sigl is a dangerous climber, dangerous to himself and anyone with him, and in his regular life in Munich he’s a fascist thug.”

“Do you think that Sigl was somehow complicit in your cousin’s and this Meyer’s death?” asks the Deacon.

Reggie fixes her ultramarine gaze on the Deacon but does not answer.

In the calmer part of the afternoon, we show Reggie J.C.’s modified 12-point crampons and the shorter ice axes for vertical travel. Then Jean-Claude demonstrates the jumar climbing mechanism and the caver’s rope ladders we’ve brought.

“Brilliant,” says Reggie. “It all should make getting onto the North Col infinitely easier—and safer for the porters with the fixed ropes and ladders. But I don’t have boots rigid enough for the pointed crampons, I fear.”

“You’d need them only if you were leading the climb,” says the Deacon. “And I guarantee you will not be doing that.”

“I brought an extra pair of rigid boots,” says Jean-Claude. “And I think they may fit you. I’ll run and get them and we’ll see.”

They did fit her. She made some practice swings with the short ice hammers. The Deacon did not roll his eyes, but I could see this took some effort.

“Now I have an innovation for all of you,” says Reggie. She goes into a storeroom and returns a few minutes later with four pairs of what look to be leather-strap football headgear, or perhaps leather bands that a coal miner might wear. But there are two insulated batteries in the back and an electric miner’s lamp on the front.

“I had these made up after I returned from Everest last September,” she says. “Lord Montfort had extensive mining operations in Wales. These are the newest thing—electric headlamps instead of carbide flames that might trigger an explosion. The batteries are a bit heavy, but they power the lamps for hours…and I have a lot of extra batteries.”

“What on earth for?” asks the Deacon, holding the leather straps and lamp and heavy batteries at arm’s length.

Reggie sighs. “According to Norton, Noel, and others I spoke to as their defeated party retreated through Darjeeling last year, Mallory and Irvine had planned to depart their high tent at six or six thirty a.m., but the slowness of everything—getting boots on properly, trying to melt snow on the stove for water for a hot drink and hot gruel before departing but overturning the cooker, getting their oxygen apparatus on and working, everything done so terribly slowly at that altitude—kept them in their camp until eight a.m. or later. That’s far too late to leave camp for a summit bid. Even if they reached the summit, there was no way they could have gotten back down to their Camp Five before nightfall. Probably not even back down to the Yellow Band.”

“How early do you suggest a summit team should leave camp with these…these… things on their heads?” asks the Deacon.

“No later than two a.m., Mr. Deacon. I would suggest closer to midnight the night before the actual summit attempt.”

The Deacon laughs at the thought of climbing at that altitude at night. “We’d freeze,” he says dismissively.

“No, no,” says Jean-Claude. “Remember, Ree-shard, that thanks to you, we have Monsieur Finch’s lovely warm goose down duvet jackets, enough for all of us and for our Tiger Sherpas. And I believe that Lady Brom…that Reggie has a good point here. There are fewer avalanches at night. The snow and ice are firmer. The new crampons would work better with the colder snow and more solid ice. And if these headlamps truly show the way…”

“They do for hundreds of modern Welsh miners,” interrupts Reggie. “At least the engineers and supervisors. And Welsh miners don’t have the advantage of starlight or moonlight in their dark holes.”

“Magnifique!” says Jean-Claude.

“Very interesting,” I say.

“Leave high camp at midnight for the summit,” says the Deacon. “Absolutely absurd.”

There are 40 mules allocated for the trek in to Everest, and each mule is capable of carrying a double pack weighing some 160 pounds. One Sherpa porter can handle two mules even while carrying his own heavy loads of our excess baggage.

Reggie has argued for more prepared food for the expedition. The Deacon is adamantly against it. As we’re eating a delicious dinner of pheasant under glass set off with a very fine white wine, the two erupt at each other again.

“I don’t believe you understand my theory behind this expedition, Lady Bromley-Montfort,” the Deacon says coolly.

“I understand it all too well, Mr. Deacon. You’re attempting an alpine assault on the tallest mountain in the world, dealing with it as if it were the Matterhorn. You plan to buy as much food as you can in the Tibetan villages along the way and hunt for more: wild goats, rabbits, goas —Tibetan gazelle—white deer, Himalayan blue sheep, whatever you can find and shoot.”

“That is the idea,” says the Deacon. “And since you claim to have climbed both in the Alps and here in the Himalayas, you know that such an alpine assault has never been tried against Everest.”

“For good reason, Mr. Deacon. Not only the size of the mountain, but the weather. Even in this pre-monsoon season, the weather on the mountain can change in a matter of minutes. The mountain creates its own weather, Mr. Deacon. And you simply don’t have enough portable food to last weeks on the mountain if weeks are called for. You can’t just keep running back from the Rongbuk Glacier over Pang La to Shekar Dzong to go shopping when you run low, you know. And the tiny village of Chōdzong on the Everest side of Pang La doesn’t have enough extra food this time of year anyway.”