“I’ve been on that part of the ridge and face, Jake,” says the Deacon. “That section of the face rarely accumulates enough snow for the kind of massive slab-slide avalanche Sigl described. And if it did, my feeling is that Bromley had garnered enough avalanche-avoidance experience in the Alps to know better than to venture out onto such a slope.”
“If the avalanche didn’t kill Bromley and the Austrian, do you think they fell while climbing above Camp Six with Sigl?”
“There are other possibilities,” says the Deacon. “Especially since the little I remember about Percy Bromley would not include the possibility of his being bullied into an Everest summit attempt by a German political fanatic intent upon bagging Mount Everest for das Vaterland.”
The Deacon studies his pipe. ”I wish I’d known Lord Percival better. As I told you and Jean-Claude, I was brought to the estate—rather as nobility would send out for any other commodity to be delivered—to be an occasional playmate for Percy’s older brother, Charles, who was about my age, nine or ten at the time. Young Percival always wanted to tag along. He was—what is your American term, Jake?—a right pain in the arse.”
“You never saw Percival after that?”
“Oh, I’d bump into him from time to time at English garden parties or on the Continent,” the Deacon says vaguely.
“Was Percival really…inverted?” It’s hard for me to say the word aloud. “Did he really frequent European brothels where young men were the prostitutes?”
“So it’s rumored,” says the Deacon. “Is that important to you in some way, Jake?”
I think about that but can’t make up my mind. I’ve led a sheltered life, I realize. I’ve never had any inverted friends. Or at least none that I knew about.
“How else might Bromley and Kurt Meyer have died?” I ask, embarrassed and eager to change the subject.
“Bruno Sigl may have killed them both,” says the Deacon. There is a blue haze between us, but it hovers and then moves for the open window. The sound of steel wheels on metal rails is very loud.
I’m profoundly shocked at this. Is the Deacon saying this for effect? Just to shock me? If so, he’s succeeded beautifully.
My mother is Catholic—a former O’Riley and another stain on the escutcheon of the old-line Boston Brahmin Perry family—and I was raised to understand the difference between venial and mortal sins. Killing another climber on such a mountain as Everest would be, to me, somewhere beyond a major mortal sin. For a climber, it adds a sense of blasphemy to the mortal sin of murder. “Kill fellow climbers? Why?” I manage at last.
The Deacon tamps his pipe out in an ashtray set into the end of an armrest. “I rather imagine we shall just have to go climb Mount Everest and do what we’re supposed to be doing—that is, find the remains of Lord Percival Bromley—to find out.”
The Deacon pulls a tweed hat down over his eyes and goes to sleep in seconds. I sit upright in the clacking train compartment for a long time, thinking, trying to sort out things which simply defy sorting.
Eventually I shut the window. The air outside is getting colder.
Chapter 7
The ledge was about the width of that bread tray…
It is on another train, this one a narrow-gauge railway climbing 7,000 feet from miasmic Calcutta to the high hills of Darjeeling at the end of March 1925, that I finally take time to think back about the busy winter and spring months before our departure.
In early January of 1925, all three of us had traveled back to Zurich to visit George Ingle Finch, who, with the possible exception of Richard Davis Deacon, was the finest British alpinist still living.
And while Finch had been a fellow Everest expedition climber with Mallory and Deacon in 1922, he shared the Deacon’s bad fortune of falling out of favor with the Powers That Be—twice, in Finch’s case, not just running afoul of George Leigh Mallory’s sensibilities, but alienating the entire Mount Everest Committee, the Alpine Club, and two-thirds of the Royal Geographical Society.
Finch had studied medicine briefly at the École de Médecine in Paris and then switched to the physical sciences while studying at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich from 1906 to 1922, then served as a captain in the Royal Field Artillery in France, Egypt, and Macedonia during the Great War, and after the War had returned to mostly Swiss alpine climbing, in the process bagging more first ascents in the Alps than the rest of the chosen Everest expedition members combined. He was much more aware of German and other new European climbing techniques than any of the Everest Committee or other British climbers—but he’d been left off the 1921 roster, officially because of poor results on his physical. The real reason was that although he, Finch, was a British citizen and decorated Great War artillery officer, he’d spent so many years climbing and living in the German-Swiss-speaking part of Switzerland before and after the War that he was more comfortable speaking German than English. As Brigadier General Charles Bruce had described the selection committee’s choices, “If at all possible, they, we, wished to keep the Everest expeditions all an Old Boys’ Club, you see. ‘BAT’ we called it amongst ourselves—‘British All Through.’”
According to the Deacon, General Bruce, the same Everest Committee man and 1922 expedition leader who’d argued for a BAT climbing team, had once written to other potential committee and team members (including the Deacon) that George Finch was “a convincing raconteur of quite impossible qualifications. Cleans his teeth on February 1st and has a bath the same day if the water is very hot, otherwise puts it off until next year.”
But Finch’s primary sin in the various BAT-eyes of the committee, according to the Deacon, was, besides a frequently unkempt appearance and an odd German accent, the “impossible qualifications” part—that is, George Finch kept coming up with climbing innovations for conquering Mount Everest. Neither the Royal Geographical Society nor the Alpine Club (nor, for that matter, the Mount Everest Committee) liked “innovations.” The old ways were the good ways: hobnailed boots, nineteenth-century-style ice axes, and thin layers of wool between the climber and the almost-out-of-the-earth’s-atmosphere sub-zero-degrees-Fahrenheit temperatures at 28,000 feet and above.
One such absurd Finch innovation, said the Deacon, was an overcoat the successful alpinist had designed and had made—just for Mount Everest conditions—consisting of a goose-down-layered (rather than regular wool or cotton or silk) overcoat. Finch had experimented with many materials, finally settling on a thin but very strong balloon fabric, to create a long overcoat with many sewn compartments of goose down to trap air pockets of a person’s warmth much as the down had done for the goose in the Arctic.
The result, explained the Deacon, was that at altitudes of 20,000 feet and above on the 1922 expedition, Finch was the only man not freezing in the high-altitude winds and cold.
But the death knell for George Finch’s inclusion in the 1924 expedition, despite his excellent climbing record in the previous Everest attempt (he and young Geoffrey Bruce briefly set a high-altitude climbing record on their bold but unsuccessful May 27, 1922, summit bid), was that it had been Finch who proposed and adapted the Royal Flying Service oxygen equipment that members of the team had used—to very good effect—in 1922 and ’24. (Mallory and Irvine were wearing Finch’s oxygen apparatus, although much redesigned by the tinker-genius Sandy Irvine, when the two heroes disappeared in their summit attempt on that final 1924 expedition.)
Arthur Hinks, the Everest Committee man most in charge of spending (and hoarding) the expeditions’ funds, had written of Finch’s oxygen apparatus—long after it had been proven in altitude-chamber experiments, on the Eiger, and upon Mount Everest itself—with this much-repeated official comment: “I should be especially sorry if the oxygen outfit prevents them going as high as possible without it. If some of the party do not go to 25,000 ft to 26,000 ft without oxygen they will be rotters.”