Read Online The Abominable by Dan Simmons - Free Book Online

broke the back of the camel that was their friendship.”
    I admit it is not the finest sentence I’ve ever constructed, but Jean-Claude looks at me as if I’ve suddenly begun babbling in Aramaic.
    “In ’twenty-two they all felt that they had a strong chance for the summit,” begins Jean-Claude, as the Deacon starts to stroll back in our direction. “They climbed the imposing ice wall onto the North Col, traversed it to the North Ridge, climbed that ridge to the North East Ridge, and headed for the summit—but terrible winds drove them off the ridge onto the North Face itself, and there progress was slow and dangerous. They had to retreat to base camp. But on the seventh of June, Mallory insisted on another effort up the North Col—still imagining, despite day after day of deep monsoon snow, that they might still make the summit.
    “The Deacon argued against taking porters and climbers up the North Col again. He pointed out that the weather had turned and the summit was lost to them this year. More importantly, the Deacon knew much more about snow and ice conditions than Mallory—whose expedition time on glaciers and in the Alps was very limited—and the Deacon said that the conditions were perfect for avalanches. Just the day before, returning from a reconnoiter of the North Col, some of the climbers, upon descending toward the rope ladder they’d left on the ice wall, found a fifty-meter-wide area where a slide had wiped out their tracks during the past two hours. The Deacon refused to go.”
    That same Deacon is less than 50 feet away now, and we would have to cease the conversation if not for the wind howling and certainly drowning our words. But still Jean-Claude hurries with the last sentences.
    “Mallory called the Deacon a coward. That morning, seven June, Mallory led a party of seventeen men up to the North Col, all the Sherpas roped together. The avalanche hit them about two hundred meters below the North Col on exactly the type of slope the Deacon had warned them about. Nine of the porters were swept away together. Mallory missed being carried away by only a few meters, but even he was caught up in the tidal wave. Two of the porters were later dug out, but seven died and their remains were buried in the crevasse to which they had almost been carried by the avalanche. It had been, as the Deacon had tried to explain, madness to attempt to cross those loose snow-slab slopes under such conditions.”
    “My God,” I whisper.
    “Exactly,” Jean-Claude agrees. “The two old friends have not spoken since that June day two years ago. And the Deacon was not invited on this year’s expedition.”
    I say nothing. I’m stunned that the Deacon might —had it not been for this “falling-down” between Mallory and him—have been invited on such an important adventure. Perhaps the adventure of the century. Certainly the heroic tragedy of the century, if the newspapers are to be believed. I think about immortality, such as it is, how it seems to come for Brits only after a hard death, and how it is being crafted for George Leigh Mallory now by words in the London Times, the New York Times, and a thousand other newspapers.
    We’ve missed all this the past four days—concentrating only on our climbing, our descending, our sleeping, and our climbing again.
    “How did…,” I begin, but immediately fall silent. The Deacon has almost reached us. The rising wind tugs at his wool jacket and tie. I can hear his hobnailed boots—almost certainly nearly identical to the ones worn this past week by Mallory and Irvine—crunching and see them leaving new prints in the shallow snow of the Matterhorn’s summit ridge.
    His hands still in the pockets of his woolen trousers, his pipe cold in his upper-right pocket, the Deacon gives Jean-Claude an intense look and says softly, “ Mon ami, if you had a chance to try to climb Mount Everest, would you take it?”
    I expect Jean-Claude to make some joke—it would be in his