Dan Simmons - The Abominable - A Novel

I can barely hear him over the gale-force winds and the flapping of canvas. If my head weren’t pounding with pain and my insides weren’t busy turning themselves inside out, I would have found his invitation amusing. But rather than be amused now, I am almost too exhausted to crawl back into the wind-pounded tent we’re sharing. I can no longer see Reggie’s Big Tent with the four Sherpas huddling in it only eight or nine feet away, but I can hear its canvas fighting the wind. Between that tent and ours, it sounds like two infantry battalions exchanging fire. Then I’m back inside and J.C. is rubbing my frozen hands and helping me crawl back into my sleeping bag.

My teeth are chattering too hard for me to speak, but after a minute I get it out—“I’m d-d-d-dying and…wha…w…we’re…n…not even…o…on…the fucking mountain y-y-yet.”

Jean-Claude starts laughing. “I don’t believe you are dying, mon ami. You just have a healthy dose of this altitude sickness that I, too, have been fighting.”

I shake my head, try to speak, stutter, and finally get the word out. “Edema.”

I wouldn’t be the first man attempting Everest to die of a pulmonary or brain edema on the way up. I can imagine nothing else that would cause this level of headache pain and nausea.

J.C. sobers up at once, brings the electric torch out of his rucksack, and passes the light in front of my eyes several times.

“I think not,” he says at last. “I believe it is altitude sickness, Jake. Combined with the terrible sunburn you received in the Trough and on the glacier. But we shall get some hot soup and tea into you and see how you feel.”

Except we can’t heat any soup. The Primus stove—the larger type we’d brought up to cook for up to six people—simply will not light.

“Merde,” whispers J.C. “A few minutes more, my friend.” He begins expertly to disassemble the complex mechanism, blowing into tiny valves, checking small pieces, using the flashlight to look down narrow cylinder parts as my father used to peer down the gun barrel after cleaning his rifle.

“All pieces are present and accounted for and looking proper,” he announces at last. He reassembles the Primus as rapidly as a U.S. Marine would reassemble his rifle after fieldstripping it.

The damned thing still won’t light.

“Bad fuel?” I manage to suggest. I’ve curled up in my sleeping bag so my voice is muffled by folds of canvas and down. Even watching J.C. do such fine work with his bare hands in this terrible cold has made my head hurt worse. I desperately do not want to have to crawl outside to vomit again—not as long as I can lie absolutely still and just roll up and down these waves of headache pain and stomach cramps like a small dinghy on hurricane-driven waves.

“We used almost all the water in our bottles and canteens during the long trek up from Camp Two,” Jean-Claude says. “We can go days without warm food, but if we can’t melt snow for hot tea and drinking water, we may be in some trouble if we’re stuck here for several days.” He’s pulling on his outer layers.

“What do you mean stuck here for several days?” I manage to say through the frost-rimmed opening in my sleeping bag. “Reggie and her Tiger Team will be arriving tomorrow before noon and the Deacon and his Sherpas before nightfall. This place is going to look like Grand Central Station by this time tomorrow—we’ll have food and fuel and Primuses enough for an army.”

At that second a gust that must exceed a hundred miles per hour hits the north side of the tent, slides under the ground cloth, and is about to lift us into the air and carry us away when Jean-Claude throws himself spread-eagled across the tent floor. After half a moment when it seems undecided whether we are going to become airborne or not, we bounce once, hard, in the same spot, while the tent walls start whipping back and forth and cracking like renewed volleys of rifle fire. I guess that a couple of our carefully rigged tie-downs have ruptured or stakes have pulled out. Or perhaps the wind has just blown away the half-ton boulders we’d tied guy ropes onto for extra security.

“Perhaps they will not be arriving tomorrow after all,” Jean-Claude says loudly enough to be heard over the volley fire. “But we will need a way to melt snow for tea and drinking water before then. And we need to check on the Sherpas next door.”

It looks from the outside as if Reggie’s hemispherical Big Tent is handling the wind better than our A-shaped Whymper tent, but once we’re inside, we immediately see that the four Sherpa inmates in the Big Tent aren’t doing so well. Jean-Claude and I have brought some frozen tins of food as well as dragging the dead Primus along in the vague hope that one of the Sherpas will be able to repair it. Snow blows in behind us as we enter, and we hurry to lace the entrance back up.

The only light in the tent comes from the stubby little open-flame ghee-butter candle of the sort that Hindus use for their religious services. Ghee is clarified butter, and the stench from the tiny candle adds to my already adequate nausea. The four Sherpas look pathetic; Babu Rita, Norbu Chedi, Ang Chiri, and Lhakpa Yishay are all huddled together in a wet goose down Finch-jacket heap in the center of the tent space. Two of them have crawled half into their down sleeping bags—also damp—but the other two don’t even have their bags with them. There’s no gear or food from their loads in the tent—not even an extra blanket—and all four men, earlier thought to be some of our sure-to-be-named Tiger Sherpas, look at us the way the terminally lost look at possible rescuers.

“Where are your other two sleeping bags?” demands J.C.

“Lhakpa lightened the load in his pack at Camp Two,” says Norbu Chedi, his teeth chattering. “He left his and my bags and the extra ground cloth behind…by accident, Sahib.”

“Merde!” says Jean-Claude. “Sleeping bags were the lightest things in your loads. Do you have any water?”

“No, Sahib,” says my personal Sherpa, Babu Rita. “We drank it all from our bottles during the climb to this camp. We were hoping that you had already melted us some.”

J.C. plunks the recalcitrant Primus down in the middle of our crowded little huddle and explains the problem. Babu and Norbu translate for Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay.

“Where’s the food?” asks Jean-Claude. “The soup and the food tins?”

“We could not get to the pack loads,” says Norbu. “Buried too deep in snow.”

“Nonsense,” snaps J.C. “We dumped those loads just a few yards from here only hours ago. We need to go out now and bring in the food and packs, see what there is for us to use. Was there a second Primus packed, by any chance?”

“No,” Babu says in a hopeless tone. “But I carried many cans of Primus fuel up the glacier.”

Jean-Claude shakes his head. I would do the same but my head hurts too much. The small cans of kerosene are useless unless we can get the Primus working. “Get your gloves, mittens, and Shackleton overjackets on,” orders J.C. “It’s snowing too hard—and getting too dark—to sort through the loads out there, so we’re going to pull the packs and load bags into the tent.”

It is getting dark outside, and the blizzard still restricts our vision to only a couple of yards. I’m wondering whether we should have roped up for this effort when Jean-Claude shouts over the howling wind for Babu and Ang to hang on to each other and me, and for Norbu and Lhakpa to keep a grip on each other and him. We stagger and feel our way the few yards from the Big Tent to the general vicinity of where we think the Sherpas dumped their packs. J.C.’s rucksack and load bags, as well as mine, are weighted down by rocks right at the entrance to our tent. Of course they’re empty, since, with the exception of a few food tins, we hauled the two heavy tents, tent staves and poles, and the nonworking Primus stove up in our loads. So our lives now depend on what we find in the Sherpas’ loads. Camp III is supposed to be sheltered—compared to Camp IV up on the North Col, much less compared to any camps exposed up on the North or North East ridges higher up—but the wind whipping down the 1,000-foot slope of ice and snow is so strong that it literally knocks me over. Babu Rita and Ang Chiri dutifully fall into the snow with me. On all fours, I flail around trying to find their rucksacks and pack loads amidst the drifts, snow-covered boulders, and the growing heaps of snow on this side of the tents.