Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

I’d been dosing myself with lead opium for several days before the Deacon noticed my illness and referred me to Dr. Pasang. The tall Sherpa nodded when, embarrassed as I was, I admitted to my intestinal problems, and then gently suggested that the lead opium would have some effect on the dysentery but that the side effects from the nightly dosings might be worse than the disease. He gave me a bottle of sweet-tasting medicine that quieted my guts within a day.

At first I would walk ahead of my white pony, carrying almost 70 pounds of gear in my pack, but Reggie convinced me to ride when I could and to let the mules carry most of my load. “You’ll need your energy on Everest,” she said, and I soon realized that she was right.

Weakened some by the dysentery from which I was just beginning to recover, I became used to our expedition’s habit of stopping in early evening, the Whymper tents and larger cooking tarp tent already erected for us by advance Sherpas and our sleeping bags laid out, and accustomed also to awakening to the soft tones of “Good morning, Sahibs,” as Babu Rita and Norbu Chedi brought J.C. and me our coffee. Next door, the Deacon would be drinking his coffee, and Reggie, always up and dressed before any of us, would be having her morning tea and muffins with Pasang by the fire.

It wasn’t until we climbed 14,500-foot Jelep La that I realized how the illness in Sikkim had weakened me. In Colorado with Harvard climbing friends a few years earlier, I’d all but galloped up the 14,000-plus-foot Longs Peak and felt great at its broad summit, able to do handstands, but climbing the switchbacks and then the wet and slippery stones—a sort of endless natural staircase—toward the summit of Jelep La, I found myself taking three steps, then leaning on my long ice axe and gasping for breath. Then three more steps. Since the high point of the pass was less than half the altitude of the summit of Everest, this was not a good omen.

I could see that Jean-Claude was also breathing a little harder and moving a little slower than usual, although he’d been atop enough 14,000-foot summits. Only the Deacon from our original party seemed already acclimated to the altitude, and I noticed that he had some trouble keeping up with Reggie’s fast hiking and climbing pace.

We reached Yatung in Tibet, and the differences between Tibet and Sikkim could not have been much greater. It had snowed on us at the high point of Jelep La, and the snow and driving winds from the west continued as we headed out onto the high, dry Tibetan plain. From the jungle riot of colors in Sikkim—pinks and rich cream colors and colors I didn’t even have names for but which Reggie or the Deacon identified as mauve and cerise—we’d emerged into an essentially colorless world, gray clouds low above our heads, gray rocks to either side, and only the dull native red of the Tibetan soil to add a little color to the universe. Our faces were soon muddy with that windblown red soil, and when the cold wind made my eyes water—before I learned to wear my goggles even at that relatively low altitude—the tear streaks would run like bright blood down my mud-caked cheeks.

We spend our last night of the approach trek outside the small, windswept village of Chōdzong on Monday, April 27, then the next day we head down the eighteen-mile-long valley to the Rongbuk Monastery only some eleven miles from the entrance to the Rongbuk Glacier, the proposed site of our Base Camp.

“What does Rongbuk mean?” asks Jean-Claude.

The Deacon either doesn’t know or is too preoccupied to answer. Reggie replies, “Monastery of the Snows.”

We stop at the windswept monastery long enough to ask for an audience with and a ritual blessing from the Holy Lama, ngag-dwang-batem-hdsin-norbu, the high lama Dzatrul Rinpoche. “The Sherpas aren’t as superstitious about this as Tibetan porters would be,” Reggie explains as we wait, “but it’s still a good idea to get such a blessing before we proceed to Base Camp, much less attempt to climb the mountain.”

But we’re to be disappointed. The Holy Lama with the title sounding like a tin can tumbling down concrete steps sends word that it is “inauspicious” for him to meet with us now. Dzatrul Rinpoche will summon us back to the monastery, his lama representative says, if and when he, the Holy Lama, feels it is auspicious to grace us with his presence and blessing.

Reggie’s surprised at this. She’s always had a good relationship with the monks and chief Holy Lama at the Rongbuk Monastery, she says. But when she asks a priest she knows why the Dzatrul Rinpoche is refusing to see us, the bald old man answers—in Tibetan, which Reggie translates for us—“The auspices are bad. The demons in the mountain are awake and angry, and more are coming. The Metohkangmi on the mountain are active and angry, and…”

“Metohkangmi?” asks Jean-Claude.

“Yeti,” the Deacon reminds us. “Those ubiquitous hairy manlike monsters.”

“…your General Bruce assured us three years ago that all the British climbers belonged to one of England’s mountain-worshiping sects and that they were on a holy pilgrimage to Cho-mo-lung-ma, but we know now that General Bruce lied. You English do not worship the mountain.” Reggie is interpreting as fast as the old monk is speaking.

“Is this about the dancing lamas and Noel’s damned motion picture?” asks the Deacon.

Reggie ignores the question and does not translate it for the monk. She says something in singsong Tibetan, bows low, and all five of us, including Pasang, back out of the monk’s presumably holy presence. The old man returns to spinning a prayer wheel.

Outside in the wind again, she lets her breath out. “This is very bad, gentlemen. Our Sherpas—especially our chosen Tiger high-climbers—very much want and need this blessing. We’ll have to set up Base Camp and then I’ll return and try to convince the Holy Lama that we do deserve a blessing for the mountain.”

“To the Devil with him if the old man doesn’t want to grace us with his damned blessing,” growls the Deacon.

“No,” says Reggie, gracefully swinging herself aboard her tiny white pony. “It will be to the Devil with us if we don’t get that blessing for our Sherpas.”

It was back in late March when we were camped just past the first major Sikkim village of Kalimpong that the Deacon had his visit from the Mysterious Stranger.

I’d noticed the tall, thin man when Dr. Pasang led him into camp and Reggie started chatting with him, but between the traditional Sherpa-Nepalese clothing, the brown cap that was really more turban than cap, the brown skin and huge black beard of the stranger, I assumed that this was an unusually tall Sherpa, or perhaps a relative of Pasang’s, visiting us. I did note that he was wearing solid, if very worn, English hiking boots.

It turned out not only to be a white man, an Englishman, but a very famous Englishman.

Before a whisper of the stranger’s identity started buzzing around the camp, the Deacon’s personal Sherpa, Nyima Tsering, had come to fetch our friend. “A sahib is here to see you, Sahib,” said Nyima to the Deacon with his habitual giggle.

The Deacon and J.C. were both fiddling with the oxygen apparatus flow valve. When he looked up toward our visitor, the tall, bearded man in Nepalese peasant clothing but wearing solid English hiking boots, the Deacon leaped to his feet and jogged over to shake his hand. I assumed that the Deacon would bring the stranger over to the fire and introduce him to Jean-Claude and me, but instead the two men—rather rudely, I thought—walked away toward the nearby stream that flowed into the Tista River we’d just crossed. There we could just see through the screen of trees that the stranger squatted in a Sherpa-like manner, the Deacon sat on a small river boulder, and the two immediately became lost in conversation.