The Abominable: A Novel

Chapter 11

The monks have turned into quite the performing troupe, some dancing while others play drums and blow on thigh-bone trumpets. It’s been very popular with English cinema-going audiences.

T he maps are spread out all over the long reading table in the library at Reggie’s main plantation house. I’ve seen few libraries this extensive, either in the homes of rich Boston friends or in England. Even Lady Bromley’s library did not extend to so many multiple levels, mezzanines, iron circular staircases rising toward broad skylights, or movable ladders. The reading table is probably fourteen feet long and flanked by globes of the earth—one showing ancient geography, one showing quite current—that must be six feet across. We stand around one end of the table as more colored maps are set under and beside the map of our proposed route Reggie showed us in the hotel.

We traveled up to the plantation that morning in style. At least Reggie and two of us traveled in style. Three trucks, the lead one driven by Dr. Pasang, hauled our food and gear up into the hills, but J.C. and I rode with Reggie in the plush compartment of a 1920 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. The chauffeur’s front seat was open to the elements—and it had started to rain—but Jean-Claude was comfortable on the thick cushions of the rear seat next to Reggie under the black top, not crowding her, while I sat opposite J.C. on a little jump seat that was no more than a leather-wrapped panel that folded down from the firewall separating us from the driver’s front seat. Every time we hit a deep pothole or serious bump—and the dirt road was all potholes and bumps—I’d fly up in the air off my little springboard, my bare head contacting the hard canvas of the roof, and come crashing down again. My long legs were all but intertwined with J.C.’s shorter ones, and I kept apologizing after every bounce.

The Deacon had chosen to sit up front, to the left of the chauffeur—a silent, short Indian man named Edward, so short that I wondered how he could see over the Silver Ghost’s endless hood. It was called the“Silver Ghost” but it was more a pale cream color than silver, except for the gleaming radiator, headlight mounts, five chrome stripes running down from the radiator to the equally gleaming bumper, windshield frame, and a few other shiny odds and ends, including the gleaming chrome spokes of the enclosed spare tires riding forward of the front doors on the low parts of the fenders.

The sliding panel that allowed Reggie to talk to the chauffeur opened only on the right side, the driver’s side. Between the roar of the engine and the roar of the sudden downpour on the thick roof, any of us would have had to shout for the Deacon to hear us. The glass on the panel behind the Deacon was frosted and etched with the same Bromley crest of a gryphon holding a jousting pike that I’d seen on the flag flying at Lady Bromley’s estate in Lincolnshire.

“How large is your plantation, Lady…Reggie?” asked Jean-Claude over the drumbeat of the sudden squall.

“This primary plantation, closer to Darjeeling, is around twenty-six thousand acres,” said Reggie. “We have a larger and higher plantation to the northwest, but the small train from Darjeeling doesn’t run to its fields the way it does here at the main plantation, so it costs more to get the tea leaves to market.”

More than fifty thousand acres, I’d thought. That’s a hell of a lot of tea. Then I remembered how Brits both in England and here in India drank the stuff morning, noon, and night, not to mention the hundreds of millions of Indian people who’d taken up the habit.

The steep hills were terraced here and there and green with rows of plants grown about as far apart as in a good vineyard, but much shorter. I caught glimpses of men and women in wet cotton saris and shirts working along the endless green rows that followed the curves of the hills like curving parallel lines on a topographic map. The shades of green were almost overwhelming.

After about twenty minutes, we turned off the steep dirt-rut road onto a long, rising lane of white gravel. I’m not sure what I expected at the end of that long driveway—perhaps another stone estate like Lady Bromley’s in Lincolnshire—but while Reggie’s home was appropriately large and surrounded by stables and other well-constructed outbuildings, it was more in keeping with the colors and style of a large Victorian-era farmhouse. The trucks followed us to the broad driveway but turned off toward the stables and garage before the Silver Ghost reached a wide gravel circle in front of the house, its center and fringes green with wet tropical plantings of all sorts. We stopped, and Edward rushed to open the door on Reggie’s side.

To this day, that remains my only ride in anyone’s Rolls-Royce.

The tropical darkness has fallen, we’ve eaten an excellent meal of veal along a dining room table even longer than the fourteen-foot reading table where we’d left the maps, and by the time all four of us—five if one counts the tall, silent form of Dr. Pasang—retire to that same library with brandy for everyone and cigars for J.C. and me, the Deacon is puffing away on his pipe and obviously still silently attempting to come up with some argument or reasons why Reggie cannot accompany us when we leave in 36 hours or so. Rather than gather around the map table again, we’re sitting at the hearth of a giant fireplace where the servants have lit a fire. It’s chilly above 8,000 feet here at the plantation.

“It’s simply out of the question, taking a woman on to Everest,” the Deacon is saying.

Reggie looks up from rocking the brandy in her snifter. “There is no question involved, Mr. Deacon. I am going. You need my money and you need my Sherpas and my ponies and my saddles and Pasang’s medical skills and my permission from the Tibetan prime minister—and you would need me to gain access to Tibet this year even if there weren’t the crisis of the lice and the dancing lamas.”

The Deacon shows a sour expression. At least she’s no longer calling him “Dickie,” I think.

“Crisis of the lice and dancing lamas?” inquires Jean-Claude between sips and puffs.

I’ve almost forgotten that J.C. hadn’t spent the autumn and winter in London as the Deacon and I had. I look to the Deacon to explain, but he shrugs and gestures for me to speak.

“You remember,” I say to Jean-Claude, “that the Deacon’s friend we met at the Royal Geographical Society, the photographer and filmmaker John Noel, paid the Everest Committee eight thousand pounds for all cinema and still photo rights to last year’s expedition.”

“I remember because I thought it was an extraordinary amount of money,” says J.C.

I nod. “Well, Noel was sure he could make a profit if the expedition were successful last year, but he couldn’t really make a dramatic film showing Mallory’s and Irvine’s disappearance since there was only one photograph taken of them before they left Camp Four, and clouds got in the way of Noel’s long twenty-inch telephoto cinema lens, so Noel made one of the cinema releases more of a travelogue—The Roof of the World, he called it. The Deacon and I saw it in January before you returned from France.”

“So?”

“So there were things in the film—including a scene where an old man is finding fleas in a beggar child’s hair and then crushing them between his teeth—that the Tibetan government evidently objected to. Others objected to a bit where Mallory’s widow is quoted in titles as saying that she regretted the whole enterprise. But mostly the Tibetans have been objecting to the dancing lamas.”

“Dancing lamas?” repeats Jean-Claude. “Noel filmed them at Rongbuk Monastery?”

“Worse than that,” says Reggie. “John Noel paid a group of lamas to leave the Gyantse Monastery and to perform—live in cinemas in London and other British cities—what Noel in the film calls a ‘devil dance.’ The monks have turned into quite the performing troupe, some dancing while others play drums and blow on thigh-bone trumpets. It’s been very popular with English cinema-going audiences. Quite different from the usual fare. At the same time, the lamas were introduced as ‘holy men’ to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The uproar between Tibet and His Majesty’s Government has been ample enough for the Everest Committee to be turned down, by Tibet, for its proposed 1926 Everest expedition. It may be a decade or more before the British Alpine Club and Everest Committee receive another climbing permission.”

“Ahh,” says J.C. “I can see why the Tibetans feel humiliated. But how did the Tibetans learn what was happening in English cinema houses?”

Reggie smiles as the Deacon irritably repacks his pipe. “It isn’t really the Tibetans who are causing this moratorium on British expeditions to Everest,” she says. “It is Major Frederick Marshman Bailey.”

“Who the devil is Major Frederick Marshman Bailey?” I ask. This is the first I’ve heard of either the man’s name or the fact that it was he, not the Tibetans, who were throwing a spanner into the Everest Committee’s efforts to get a future climbing permission.

“He’s Political Officer for Sikkim,” says the Deacon from around his pipe stem. He sounds very angry. “Remember our maps? The easternmost province of the Raj in India, the one we have to trek through to get to Tibet? It’s a quasi-independent kingdom called Sikkim. Bailey got the Dalai Lama at Lhasa to back him on all this ‘the Tibetans are outraged’ nonsense, but in truth, it’s Bailey who’s stopping all British climbing permits except ours. He’s stopping German and Swiss permit attempts as well.”

“Why would he want to do that, Ree-shard?” asks Jean-Claude. “I mean, I see why a British Political Officer would try to head off the Germans and Swiss, to keep Everest an English hill, but why on earth is he stopping permission for English expeditions?”

The Deacon seems too angry to speak. He nods to Lady Bromley-Montfort.

“Bailey is a former climber, having achieved some lower summits here in the Himalayas,” Reggie says. “He’s far past his prime—and he never got close to Mount Everest even in his prime—but many of us believe that he’s stirring up and exaggerating the Tibetan anger over the dancing lamas as a pretext to save the mountain for himself.”

I have to blink rapidly at this news. “Will he try this spring or summer?”

“He’ll never try,” says the Deacon through gritted teeth. “He just wants to spoil it for the others.”

“Then how did Lady…Reggie’s…request get approved by the Tibetan prime minister and the Dalai Lama at Lhasa?” asks Jean-Claude.

Reggie smiles again. “I went straight to the Dalai Lama and the prime minister for personal permission,” she says. “And ignored Bailey completely. He hates me for it. We shall have to transit Sikkim as quickly and quietly as we can, before Bailey finds some way to block us. He is a malevolent man. Our only advantage is that I’ve done several things by way of misdirection to make him believe that our expedition will be attempting transit to Chomolungma in August, post-monsoon, rather than now during the pre-monsoon months, and that we would be using the direct northern route—over Tangu Plain and up over the Serpo La—rather than the traditional route farther east.”

“Why would Bailey be so foolish as to believe that someone would attempt Everest in August again?” asks the Deacon. His 1921 recon expedition had done just that, only to find how deep the snow could be in August. But then again, it had been June 5 when Mallory, Somervell, and the others—minus the Deacon, who thought the snow conditions too dangerous—had lost seven Sherpas and Bhotias in an avalanche during Mallory’s stubborn attempt to return to Camp III on the North Col after heavy early monsoon snows.

“Because Pasang and six others and I did just that in August a year ago,” says Reggie.

All three of us turn to gaze at her in silence. Dr. Pasang’s presence is only half-registered in the flickering firelight as he stands behind the wingchair in which Reggie leans forward over her brandy. Finally, the Deacon says, “Did what?”

“Went to Everest,” Reggie replies, with an edge to her voice. “In an attempt to find Cousin Percy’s body. I would have gone earlier in the summer, but the monsoon was at its worst right after Colonel Norton, Geoffrey Bruce, and the others in Mallory’s former party beat their retreat back this way. Pasang and I had to wait until the worst of the rains—and the snows on Chomolungma—stopped before we trekked in with six Sherpas.”

“How far did you get?” says the Deacon, sounding dubious. “As far as Shekar Dzong? Further? Rongbuk Monastery?”

Reggie looks up from her brandy, and her ultramarine eyes seem much darker in her anger at the tone of the question. But her voice remains firm and under control. “Pasang and two of the other Sherpas and I spent eight days above twenty-three thousand feet at Mallory’s Camp Four. But the snow kept falling. Pasang and I did press on to Mallory’s Camp Five one day, but there were no supplies left there, and the storm grew worse. We were lucky to get back down to the North Col and were trapped there for four more of the eight days, with no food for the last three.”

“Mallory’s Camp Five was at twenty-five thousand two hundred feet,” Jean-Claude says in a very small voice.

Reggie only nods. “I lost more than thirty pounds during those eight days on the North Col at Camp Four. One of the Sherpas, Nawang Bura—you shall meet him tomorrow morning—almost died from altitude sickness and dehydration. We finally had a break in the weather on eighteen August, and we retreated all the way back to Mallory’s Camp One—the four Sherpas who’d remained at Camp Three below the Col all but carried Nawang down the glacier—where we regrouped before trekking out. The snows never stopped. The downpour continued as we clumped back through the steaming Sikkim jungles in mid-September. I thought I would never get dry.”

The Deacon, Jean-Claude, and I exchange glances in the firelight. I am sure my thoughts are being echoed. This woman and that tall Sherpa climbed to above 25,000 feet on Everest at the height of the monsoon season? Spent eight consecutive days above 23,000 feet? Almost no one in the three previous Everest expedition spent so much time so high.

“Where did you learn to climb?” the Deacon asks. The brandy seems to be affecting him, which is something I’ve never seen before. Perhaps it’s the altitude here.

Reggie gestures with her empty glass, Pasang nods toward the darkness, and a servant moves into the light to refill all of our brandy snifters.

“I’ve climbed in the Alps since I was a girl,” she says simply. “I’ve climbed with Cousin Percy, with guides, and solo. My trips back to Europe from India were more often to the Alps than to England. And I’ve climbed here.”

“Do you remember the names of your alpine guides?” asks Jean-Claude. There is no sound of challenge in his voice, only curiosity.

Reggie gives the names of five older Chamonix Guides so famous that even I know them well. Lady Bromley had named three of those guides as having climbed with her son Percival in years past. Once again, as he’d done when Lady Bromley had given three of these five names, Jean-Claude whistles softly.

“What summits did you do solo?” asks the Deacon. His tone has changed.

Reggie shrugs slightly. “Pevous, the Ailefroides, the Meiji, the north face of the Grandes Jorasses, the north east face of Piz Badille, the north face of the Drus, then Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. And some peaks around here—only one eight-thousand-meter summit.”

“Alone,” says the Deacon. His expression is strange.

Reggie shrugs again. “Believe it or don’t, it makes no difference to me, Mr. Deacon. What you need to understand is that when my aunt, Lady Bromley, wrote me last autumn asking me to seek permission for access to Chomolungma, for your expedition to—and I quote—‘find Percival,’ I had already been to Lhasa to receive permission from the Dalai Lama and the prime minister…for another attempt this spring. My own second attempt—with Pasang and more Sherpas this time.”

“But the permission refers to ‘other Sahibs,’” says the Deacon.

“I expected to find some on my own, Mr. Deacon. Indeed, I had contacted them and invited them to join me on the recovery expedition this spring. I would have paid them, of course. But when Aunt Elizabeth sent me your names, I did some research and found you…adequate. Plus, you had been a friend of my cousin Charles and you’d met Percy. I thought it best to give you a chance.”

I suddenly realize that the tables have been turned, that we are now supplicants to her for this trip, not the other way around. I can see in the Deacon’s somewhat glassy gaze that he has accepted that fact as well.

“How is your cousin Charles?” he asks, as much to change the subject, it seems, as to receive an answer.

“I received a cable from Aunt Elizabeth only a week ago,” says Reggie. “Charles finally died from the progressive lung failure while you were in transit to Calcutta.”

All three of us express our condolences. The Deacon seems especially disturbed by the news. There follows a long silence broken only by the crackling of the log fire.

J.C. and I finish our cigars and I follow his example of tossing the cigar butt into the fire. We set empty glasses on tables.

“We have to make some changes to the route and your plans for provisions,” says Reggie, “but we can do that in the afternoon, after you’ve chosen your Sherpas and ponies. The Sherpas will be here at first light—they’re camping less than a mile from here tonight—and I want to be outside to greet them. I’ll have Pasang knock you up in case anyone sleeps late. Good night, gentlemen.”

We rise as Reggie stands and leaves the circle of firelight. A few minutes later, still silent, we follow one of the male servants to our rooms on the second floor. I notice that the Deacon seems to be having trouble lifting his feet as we climb the wide, winding stairway.