“Let’s not speak ill of the dead,” I said between coughs.
“Not ill,” said the Deacon. “Just factual. George was always losing or forgetting something or leaving something behind on the first two expeditions I spent with him—his socks, his shaving kit, his hat, his roll of toilet paper. It was just his way.”
“Still…,” I began, and found I had nothing else to say.
The Deacon shielded his eyes—we’d been doing the search without wearing our goggles since the clouds were so heavy above us now—and looked as far up the slope as he could in the swirling snow. “Those gullies below and this side of the First Step, below the Yellow Band, would have been very hard to down-climb in the dark, without an electric torch or any flares or lanterns or candles.”
We all peered up at the ridges and gullies of rocks far above this lower part of the face. “Based on how intact his body is—and the obvious fact that he was still conscious and trying to self-arrest when he came to a stop—it’s obvious that Mallory didn’t fall from as high up as the North East Ridge,” said the Deacon, confirming my earlier hunch. “Almost certainly not from as high up as the Yellow Band. More likely he fell from one of the gullies or minor rock bands further down, closer to us here.”
“So Sandy Irvine may be right up there waiting for us,” said Reggie.
The Deacon shrugged. “Or it was Irvine who fell first, pulling Mallory off his footing. We’ll never know unless we find Irvine’s corpse as well.”
You mean we’re going to continue searching after this? was my exhausted thought.
That’s when the Deacon brusquely ordered us all back to Camp V before the howling wind rose higher and the already snow-diminished visibility grew worse.
“So nothing we found on George Mallory can tell us whether he and Sandy Irvine reached the summit or not,” Reggie is saying. “Both Mallory’s watch and altimeter are broken and missing their hands.”
“Perhaps it is what’s missing that gives us our best clue,” says the Deacon.
I rise a little from the depths of my filthy goose down sleeping bag. “The Kodak camera?”
“No,” says the Deacon. “A photograph of Mallory’s wife, Ruth. Norton and everyone else I spoke to said that Mallory had taken the photograph with him from Camp Four—certainly no one ever found it there or at either of the two higher camps—and he had promised Ruth that he would leave it on the summit for her.”
“Or just at his high point before turning back—God alone knows where,” says J.C.
The Deacon nods at that and chews on the stem of his cold pipe.
“The absence of a photo isn’t proof that he reached the summit,” says Reggie.
“No,” agrees the Deacon. “Only that he left it somewhere. Perhaps, as Jean-Claude suggested, at their highest point before turnaround…wherever that was.”
“The missing camera interests me,” says Dr. Pasang. His deep voice is as gentle and unhurried as ever.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because when does one relinquish a camera to someone else?” asks the tall Sherpa.
“When you ask him to take your picture,” says Reggie. “As Mallory might have—giving the Kodak to Irvine on the summit, after taking the younger man’s photograph.”
“Only conjecture,” says the Deacon. “What isn’t speculation or conjecture is the fact that if we’re to have any hope at all of searching more tomorrow, we all have to get some sleep.”
“Easy for you to say,” I get out between coughs. “I just can’t seem to sleep at these goddamned altitudes.”
“Watch your language, Jake,” says the Deacon. “There’s a lady present.”
Reggie rolls her eyes.
“I have sleeping pills with me,” says Pasang. “They should guarantee at least three or four hours’ sleep.”
There is a silence, and I imagine that everyone else is thinking what I am—So we’d all be snoring away when the winds blow our tent over the edge of the mountain.
I start to give my opinion, but Reggie holds up her palm, silencing me. “Ssshh, everyone,” she whispers. “I hear someone. Someone screaming.”
My forearms break out in goose bumps.
“In this wind?” says the Deacon. “Impossible. Camp Four is much too far below us and…”
“I hear it as well,” says Pasang. “Someone is out in the dark screaming.”
Part III
THE ABOMINABLE
1.
Note to Mr. Dan Simmons: Up to this part, I’ve written out my story mostly in present tense because I was working from daily journal entries and climbing notes I’d made at the time in the summer and autumn of 1924 and spring of 1925. Writing in present tense helped bring things alive and immediate for me again. I know that wasn’t very professional of me, in any writing sense, but this last section of my tale has been told to only one person, and never written down at all. Not even in my notes at the time. I write this part as I remember it now, in past tense never recorded at the time, but please understand that every word that I set down here is as true and precise as I can remember and tell it, and that you will be only the second person since 1925 to hear this part of the tale.
— Jake Perry
Within five minutes of Pasang’s confirming hearing the screaming, three of us—the Deacon, Pasang, and I—were outside in the swirling snow. It had been decided that someone should remain behind to hold the tent staves; Reggie had volunteered, J.C. and I had tossed a coin, and he lost.
“Do you still hear it?” shouted the Deacon to Pasang.
“No, but I see something,” said the Sherpa. He pointed downhill toward a point about 300 feet below us near what remained of the two tents that had been our original site for Camp V.
It took me a second because of the snow blowing in the cone of light from my Welsh miner’s headlamp, but then I saw it: a hellish red glow behind large boulders 100 feet or so downhill from us.
With three of us tied onto a single rope—we hadn’t taken time to put on our crampons—I led the descent down the steep boulder slope. Not much snow was sticking to the rocks because of the wind, but there was a thick enough ice sheen to make every rock more slippery than usual. It felt strange to be walking only in hobnailed boots again. Already, I lacked the sense of secure footing that the crampon blades had been giving me in recent days.
In fifteen minutes we reached our original Camp V site, the one tent destroyed by rockfall, the other collapsed, just in time to see a red flare sputter out. It obviously hadn’t been one of the short-lived Very flares but rather one of the handheld, longer-lasting railroad flares we’d brought along in both red and white varieties.
Ten feet from the flare a man in one of the expedition’s goose down duvet jackets lay unmoving on his back. He’d collapsed very near the tumbled opening of the intact but fallen Meade tent.
We leaned over him, our headlights playing across the man’s upturned face and staring eyes.
“It’s Lobsang Sherpa,” said the Deacon. “He’s dead.”
When we’d met at Camp VI on Monday morning, the Deacon had mentioned carrying up to Camp V the day before with only a few porters and Lobsang acting as sirdar. Now, barely eighteen hours later, Lobsang Sherpa, a small but determined high-climbing Tiger Sherpa who’d earned his acting-sirdar position through unbelievably hard work and long carries, did indeed look dead, his mouth gaping open, his pupils looking to be fixed and dilated.
“No one else dies up here this day,” said Pasang and set down his rucksack. He was the only one of us to bring a pack along. I saw in the dancing headlamps and swirling snow that his leather doctor’s bag was inside his already heavy rucksack. “Mr. Perry,” he added, “if you’d be so kind as to open Lobsang Sherpa’s jacket and shirt layers so that his chest is bare.”