Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

“Who is that?” I asked Reggie when she finally strolled over to see if we wanted some more coffee.

“K. T. Owings,” she said.

I couldn’t have been more dumbstruck if she had announced that the stranger was the Second Coming of Christ.

Kenneth Terrence Owings had been one of my literary idols from the time I was twelve years old. The so-called “climber-poet” had been one of the top five living British alpinists before the Great War, but also one of England’s more celebrated free-verse poets, easily ranking with Rupert Brooke and even the other great poets who’d died in the War—Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Charles Sorley—or those few who’d survived to write about it, including Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney.

K. T. Owings had survived the War, after being promoted all the way from lieutenant to major, but he’d never written a word about the fighting. In fact, as far as I knew, Owings had never written another word of poetry since the War. In that sense he was very much like the Deacon, who’d been rather famous for his verse before the War but hadn’t published—or evidently written—a word since the fighting began. Nor had Owings returned to the Alps, where, like George Mallory and the Deacon (and often in the company of the Deacon), he’d become so famous as a climber before the War. K. T. Owings had simply disappeared. Some newspapers and literary journals reported that Owings had gone to Africa, where he’d climbed Mount Kilimanjaro by himself and simply refused to come back down. Others were certain that he’d gone to China to climb unnamed mountains and been killed by bandits there. The most recent authoritative word was that K. T. Owings—to cleanse himself of his experiences in the Great War—had built a small sailing ship, attempted to sail around the world, and drowned in a terrible storm in the South Atlantic.

I looked through the branches again. There was K. T. Owings, dressed in something like clean rags, black beard with swatches of gray in it, squatting on his haunches and chatting away a mile a minute with the Deacon. It was hard to believe.

I stood, took my metal water bottle, and began walking toward the stream.

“Mr. Deacon wanted to be left alone with him,” said Reggie.

“I’m just going to get some water,” I said. “I shan’t bother them.”

“Make sure you boil it before drinking,” said Reggie.

I all but tiptoed down to the stream, keeping a thick screen of branches between me and the two men. Leaning to my left toward the screen of branches, the better to eavesdrop as I filled my large metal water bottle, I realized that the Deacon was speaking too softly to be heard but Owings’s voice was a deep rasp.

“…and I’ve reconnoitered high enough to see that there’s a serious step in the ridge, a rock face about forty feet high, just below the summit ridge…I can see it from the valley with binoculars and caught another glimpse climbing above the Cwm…”

What was this? Owings seemed to be warning the Deacon about the First or Second Step…probably the Second Step, since the summit ridge lay just beyond…on the North East Ridge of Everest. But we all knew about the First and Second Steps, although no one—with the possible exception of Mallory and Irvine on the day they disappeared—had yet gone high enough on the ridges to tackle them (especially the larger, steeper-looking Second Step). The two Steps had been visible in photographs taken since the 1921 expedition. Why would Owings be cautioning the Deacon about such an obvious thing now? And for some reason he’d used the term “Cwm” rather than Col for the North Col. Perhaps the poet-climber had his own names for various features that had been named since the 1921 recon expedition. Had Owings tried to climb Mount Everest on his own and been turned back by these formidable rock-step obstacles high on the North East Ridge? The Steps were a main reason—along with the terrible winds along the ridgeline—why Norton and others had moved onto the North Face to try ascending the near-vertical Great Couloir.

“…with fixed rope perhaps…” was all I could hear of the Deacon’s hushed reply.

“Yes, yes, that might work,” Owings concluded. “But I can’t promise a camp or cache right below that…”

The Deacon said something in low tones. He might have warned Owings to keep his voice down, since the famous poet-climber’s words were barely audible when the conversation resumed.

“…the worst part of all is almost certainly the Ice Fall…,” Owings was saying urgently.

Ice Fall? I thought. Was he talking about the near-vertical snow and ice face below the North Col at the head of the East Rongbuk Glacier? That was difficult, certainly—seven Sherpa porters had died in the avalanche there in ’22—but how could it be the “worst part” of an Everest expedition? Two expeditions had already climbed high above it, even transporting heavy loads up the ice face daily. Scores of trips. Last year Sandy Irvine had jury-rigged that rope and wood ladder to make the climb easier and safer for the porters. Even Pasang and Reggie, if she was to be believed—and I believed her—had free-climbed it, laboriously cutting steps into the ice face, and had been able to get to the North Col campsite and briefly above before bad weather pinned them down. We’d brought caving ladders and J.C.’s new 12-point crampons and his jumar doohickey to make the porters’ climb to the North Col easier and safer.

“I have the sequence,” Owings said, his voice a rasp. “White, green, then red. Make sure…keep them high, very high, and…”

This made no sense to me at all. Suddenly my boot slipped on a stone as I squatted by the stream, my bottle already full, and I heard the Deacon say, “Shhh, someone’s nearby.”

Red-faced, faking nonchalance, I capped my bottle, stood, and strolled as innocently as I could back up to the campsite, not sure if the Deacon and his famous friend could see me through the leafy branches or not.

The two moved a bit downstream, further out of sight and into a clearing where no one could crouch nearby unseen, and their intense exchange continued for another thirty minutes. Then the Deacon came back to camp alone.

“Isn’t Mr. Owings going to join us for dinner?” asked Reggie.

“No, he’s headed back this evening. Hopes to reach Darjeeling by tomorrow night,” replied the Deacon and looked sharply at me where I sat with my incriminating water bottle still in my hands. I looked down before I started blushing.

“Ree-shard,” said Jean-Claude, “you never told us that you knew K. T. Owings.”

“It never came up,” said the Deacon, taking his ease on one of the packing crates and resting his elbows on his wool-covered knees.

“I would very much have liked to meet Monsieur Owings,” continued J.C., his tone a shade accusing, I thought.

The Deacon shrugged. “Ken is a rather solitary fellow. He wanted to talk to me about something he did, and then he needed to get back.”

“Where does he live?” I managed to ask.

“In Nepal.” It was Reggie who answered. “Near Thyangboche, I believe. In the Khumbu Valley.”

“I didn’t think that white men—Englishmen—were allowed in Nepal,” I said.

“They aren’t,” said the Deacon.

“Mr. Owings went there after the War,” Reggie said. “I believe he has a Nepalese wife and several children. He’s been accepted there. He rarely crosses into India or Sikkim.”

The Deacon said nothing.

What’s the white-green-red sequence stuff all about? I wanted to ask the Deacon. Why is the ice face, or Ice Fall, as Owings called it, supposed to be the most dangerous part of the climb? Why was he talking about camping sites and caches? Has he found or left something on the north side of the mountain that the three previous English expeditions hadn’t stumbled upon?