Colonel Norton looks down at his glass, and the two pink circles high on his cheekbones seem to glow a darker red.
“But Shebbeare and I enjoyed every day of the geology survey together,” continues Odell. “We became even faster friends than before. And thanks to the ten days of recuperation the main party had taken at Rongshar Valley in the shadow of Gaurishankar, we caught up to the main party just as it arrived in Darjeeling, and just before Hazard got back with Hari Sing Thapa and the porters they’d taken to the West Rongbuk on the mapping expedition.”
The Deacon takes his watch out of his waistcoat pocket, glances at it, and says, “We have only a few minutes before you all have to go to the dinner, my friends. And I confess that I’ve completely lost track of Lord Percival, much less the Germans—Meyer and Sigl. The report of Lord Percival’s death on the mountain—of him and this Meyer person—was in The Times the same week as the full report about Mallory and Irvine. I believe you telegraphed that report from Darjeeling. If you never saw Bromley after twenty-four April, when your expedition went south toward Everest and Bromley continued on toward Tingri, then how….”
“We apologize, Richard,” says Colonel Norton. “It is a rather tangled narrative, but it was a tangled narrative that brought us news of Bromley’s death. Let me explain. Just as John Hazard and Hari Sing Thapa were approaching the West Rongbuk region to do their survey, religious pilgrims met them and told them, translated through Hari Sing Thapa, that two English sahibs in Tingri—one named Bromley, the other a ‘non-English-speaking English sahib’ named Meyer—had rented six yaks to take with them as they headed south and then east along the river to Chobuk, then south to the Rongbuk Glacier and Chomolungma.”
“The Tibetans definitely said that Bromley and this Meyer were traveling together toward Mount Everest?” The Deacon has finished his whiskey, and now he carefully sets the empty glass on a wicker table next to his chair.
“They did,” says Colonel Norton. “Two more pilgrims—all headed toward the Rongbuk Monastery—told Hazard and Hari Sing Thapa the same news as our two men were headed back to the northeast, toward Pang La Pass and Shekar Dzong on their way home. But they added that there were seven other ‘non-English-speaking English sahibs’ who’d arrived in Tingri the day after Bromley and Meyer left, but who’d immediately left the village again, to the southeast, as if following Bromley.”
“How odd,” says the Deacon.
“But more than that,” continues Norton, “Hazard and Hari actually saw Bromley and Meyer. And the seven men following them.”
“Where’s John Hazard now?” asks Jean-Claude.
John Noel makes a vague gesture with his left hand. “Oh, back to doing government map work somewhere in India, I believe.”
“And Hari Sing Thapa?” asks the Deacon.
“Also doing map work in India,” says Colonel Norton. “But not with John.”
“Could you tell us what Hazard saw?” says the Deacon.
Dr. Hingston is the first to speak. I can feel a tension in my neck and back grow worse as our few minutes with these men are ticking away before we get any solid information.
“Hazard and Hari were headed northeast and had just begun to climb the old trade route trail toward the Pang La when Hari—who has the sharper vision of the two—said he saw two sets of riders headed south. Many miles away, but the day was perfectly clear—Hazard said that they could see Mount Everest smoking worse than ever, the spindrift spread thirty miles or more above the summits to the east of our mountain. Hazard and Hari actually diverted to a nearby hillside so that John could use military field glasses to confirm what they were seeing. Furthest south were two men—John said that he could definitely identify Bromley’s pony and the mule he’d brought from Darjeeling, but now Bromley and his new partner also had six yaks in train—and many miles behind them, perhaps five to seven hours’ ride, were seven men on larger ponies. Either real horses or—as Hari identified them—those big, shaggy Mongolian ponies.”
“Did it seem like a pursuit?” asks the Deacon.
“It seemed merely damned strange to Hazard,” says Norton. “He told us when they caught up to us in Darjeeling that he thought later that he and Hari Sing Thapa should have headed back south to Rongbuk to see what the devil was going on—if Bromley and these other men following might be poaching on our mountain, as it were. But Hazard was already several days behind us due to the mapping. He wanted to catch up before we got to Calcutta, and in the end he and Hari turned north over the Pang La.”
“What was the date of this sighting?” asks the Deacon.
“Nineteen June,” replies Norton. “Just three days after we’d divided the party while leaving the Rongbuk Glacier valley.”
“This is all fascinating,” says the Deacon. “But it hardly supports announcing that Lord Percival died in an avalanche on Mount Everest. I presume you received more information through some other reliable source?”
“We did,” Odell confirms. “As Shebbeare and I were finishing up our rather enjoyable geology excursion and heading north to the main route east, we ran into three of the Sherpas who’d accompanied us to Mount Everest and who’d been very important in the high-altitude carries. Perhaps you remember the one Tiger from ’twenty-two, the one who spoke the best English…Pemba Chiring, but everyone called him ‘Kami’ for some reason.”
“I remember Kami well,” says the Deacon. “He carried heavy loads to Camp Five…without supplementary oxygen.”
“Exactly,” says Odell. “And he was just as reliable during this year’s sad expedition. But Shebbeare and I were surprised to see Kami and his two non-English-speaking cousins, Dasno and Nema, as we were turning northeast again. They were literally whipping their little Tibetan ponies in their haste…and you know that the Sherpas rarely do that. They’d returned to the Rongbuk Glacier and were now fleeing as if for their lives.”
“What date was this?” asks the Deacon.
“Twenty-two June,” says Odell.
Colonel Norton clears his throat. “Kami and his cousins had started back with us but requested permission to detach from the main body. I granted it, thinking they would be heading home on their own. Evidently they had it in mind to return to our Base Camp…perhaps even to the higher camps.”
“For looting purposes?” asks Jean-Claude. “Or perhaps I should say…scavenging?”
Norton frowns. “It would appear that way. Although there’s precious little of value that we left behind, unless one were to count the caches of barley and tinned food we left at various camps.”
“Kami later insisted to me that they’d left a religious talisman behind by accident,” says Odell. “He thought he’d left it at Base Camp or perhaps tucked in one of the sanga rock walls at Camp Two. He said they couldn’t return to their family and village without it. I believed him.”
“What did they say they’d seen?” asks the Deacon.
I surreptitiously glance at my own watch. We have only three minutes or less before these esteemed climbers are expected at yet another Royal Geographical Society formal banquet here in the RGS’s Lowther Lodge. A glance over my shoulder shows me that the electric lamps along Exhibition Road where it runs into Kensington Road are burning. The October night has fallen.
“Kami said that he and his cousins reached our old Base Camp on twenty June,” says Odell. “They searched, but the talisman wasn’t there. What they did find there shocked them…seven hobbled Mongolian ponies down below the memorial cairn, down where there’s a bit of that tough grass a few hundred yards below the melt pond.”
“No one tending the ponies?” asks the Deacon.
“Not a soul,” says Odell. “And a bit further up the valley, before one gets too deep into the penitente ice pinnacles, they came across what Kami immediately identified as Lord Percival Bromley’s Whymper tent—the same one he’d slept in every night we’d seen him during the trip in—and two dead Tibetan ponies. The ponies had been shot in the head.”
/> “Shot!” cries out Jean-Claude.
Odell nods. “Kami told us that he and his younger cousins were alarmed. Nema would go no further, nor stay near the murdered ponies, so Desno took Nema back down the valley to Base Camp, while Kami kept climbing up the glacier toward Camp Two. He had to find the talisman, he said. He was also curious and somewhat alarmed for Bromley, who had been kind to him during his few visits to our camps during the trek in.”
“Did he see Bromley again?” I ask.
“No,” says Odell. “Kami found his talisman—set into the stones in the sanga they’d set up at Camp Two, right where he thought he might find it.”
“What exactly is a sanga again?” asks Jean-Claude.
The Deacon responds. “The rock walls we and the porters build at Camp One and above. They enclose the tents we use and keep things from flying away when the winds rise. The porters often sleep within sangas that have only a ground cloth and a pole-supported tarp for a roof.” The Deacon turns back to Odell. “What did Kami see?”
Odell rubs his cheek. “Kami admitted to us that he should have turned back to his cousins as soon as he found his talisman, but instead, out of curiosity, he continued climbing toward Camp Three.”
“That must have been dangerous with the monsoon snows covering the crevasses,” says Jean-Claude.
“That’s the odd thing,” comments Colonel Norton. “We’d expected the monsoon to hit full force by the first week in June…indeed, there were some serious flurries during the last days before Mallory and Irvine’s final effort. But the monsoon hadn’t arrived at Rongbuk when we finally left on sixteen June, nor had it arrived when Kami says he was back there on the twentieth of June. Some snow, very strong winds, but no actual monsoon. It didn’t really strike until we were all back in Darjeeling. Very odd.”
“Kami said that when he was at Camp Two, long before he got the last four miles up the glacier and through the last field of high penitentes, he heard what sounded like thunder from higher on the mountain, above the North Col,” says Odell.
“Thunder?” asks the Deacon.
“Kami found it very odd,” says Odell, “since it was a totally clear day—bright blue sky, snow plume off Everest’s summit clearly visible—but he said that it sounded like thunder.”
“Avalanche?” suggests J.C.
“Or pistol or rifle shots with echoes?” says the Deacon.
Norton looks shocked at that suggestion, but Odell nods. “Kami spent the night bivouacked on the glacier and in the morning light saw new tents at our site for Camp Three and, he said, more tents up on the ledge on the North Col where we’d set Camp Four. He also said that he’d seen three figures high up on the mountain, above where the Northeastern Ridge runs into the North Ridge. Far to the west, he said, between Steps One and Two…where a boulder was, he said. A boulder that looked like a mushroom. Three tiny black figures stood near that rock and then, suddenly, only one figure. Hours later he watched men coming down the sheer ice face from the North Col, using the rope ladder Sandy Irvine had cobbled together. He thought there were four or five descending.”
“It wouldn’t have been possible for even a sharp-visioned Sherpa to see figures so high on the ridgeline without field glasses,” muses the Deacon.
“Oh, yes,” says Colonel Norton with a smile. “Kami admitted that he’d ‘borrowed’ a good pair of Zeiss binoculars from one of the Germans’ empty tents at Camp Three.”
“And you left Irvine’s rope ladder behind?” the Deacon asks Norton. “Still in place on the ice cliff to the North Col?”
“We considered taking it down because it was dangerous, frayed and overly used,” says the colonel. “But in the end it was too much trouble to take it down, and some thought it might even last till our next expedition, so we left it where it was. Partially as a memorial to Sandy, truth be told.”
The Deacon nods. “I know you all must go in a moment, but what did Kami tell you that made you report the death of Lord Percival as told by a certain Bruno Sigl from Germany?”
Odell clears his throat. “Kami was frightened at the thunder, but stayed near Camp Three that second day just to see who the down-climbing figures turned out to be—hoping it was Bromley—but just as he was about to give up and leave the Camp Three area, he was shouted at in heavily accented English to stop. The man who shouted at him was holding a black pistol. A Luger, Kami thought. He stopped.”
“A pistol on Mount Everest,” whispers Jean-Claude. I could hear the revulsion at the idea in his voice. I felt it myself.
“At least it answers the question of who shot Bromley’s and Meyer’s little ponies,” I suggest.
The Deacon shakes his head. “They might have gone lame. Bromley or Meyer may have put them down themselves, planning to walk back to Tingri or Shekar Dzong with the yaks.”
“At any rate, poor Kami thought he was going to be shot for trespassing and for the theft of the Zeiss glasses,” continues Odell, “and he told us that he’d only hoped that his cousins would be brave enough to find his body and to bury it there in a crevasse with the proper ceremonies. But instead the German man with the Luger demanded in English—Kami had spent enough time in Calcutta that he could hear the German accent—to know who Kami was. Kami told him that he was a Sherpa with the Norton-Mallory Expedition and that he’d returned with others to retrieve a few forgotten items and that he was expected back.
“‘How many others?’ the German demanded.
“‘Nine,’ lied Kami, ‘including two sahibs waiting at the Rongbuk Monastery.’”
“Clever man,” the Deacon says.
“At any rate,” says Odell, “the German put his pistol away, identified himself as a European explorer, Bruno Sigl, and said that he was there simply reconnoitering the area with two friends—a number Kami did not believe because he’d seen the seven riding Mongolian ponies and four or five figures still on Irvine’s rope ladder—and that he, Sigl, had seen Bromley and an Austrian with Bromley, Kurt Meyer, carried to their deaths by an avalanche just twenty hours earlier.
“Kami had the presence of mind to ask where Sahib Bromley had died, and Sigl said that it had been on the mountain, above Camp Four on the North Col. Kami said that he was very saddened by the news—indeed, he wept in front of Sigl, partially, Kami admitted, because he knew the German had lied to him about where Bromley had died, and Kami still thought the chances were great that he himself would be shot dead by the German; but then Sigl merely waved him away and told him to stay away from Rongbuk.
“Kami complied,” concludes Odell, “literally glissading down dangerous stretches of the glacier until he picked up Nema and Dasno. The three cousins whipped their little ponies away from there and rode all through the night before coming across Shebbeare and me headed north toward the trade routes.”
“So we telegraphed tentative word of Bromley’s fatal accident to The Times from Darjeeling in our first full report,” says Colonel Norton. “Less than two days after we all took the train to Calcutta, Sigl himself showed up in Darjeeling and telegraphed his version of Bromley’s death to the Völkischer Beobachter in Germany.”
“That is one of the right-wing fascist newspapers, is it not?” asks Jean-Claude.
“Yes,” says Somervell. “A National Socialist Party paper. But Sigl was a respected German mountain climber, and the story was picked up almost immediately by the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, then the Berliner Tageblatt, and then the Frankfurter Zeitung. Sigl’s story was repeated almost verbatim by The Times less than a day after our own sketchy first report—and folded within our report in a way I did not much care for, to be honest.”
Norton and the others nod at this.
“But you do have Hazard’s, Hari Sing Thapa’s, the Tibetan pilgrims’, and Kami’s reports to back up Sigl’s claim that Bromley had gone to Everest and started climbing,” responds the Deacon. “I can give little hope or comfort to Lady Bromley about the reports of his disappearance on the mountain somehow being a mistake
.”
“Perhaps not,” says Howard Somervell, “but it’s all deucedly strange. It leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth, no? And not just because young Percy was a nobleman.” Somervell slaps the leather arms of his deep chair. “Well, gentlemen, I believe it is time…”
We rise.
“One last thing,” asks the Deacon, after again thanking his former associates and climbing partners for their time. “We all know something about Bruno Sigl—he’s been a German alpine climber for years, but never an explorer to my knowledge. But what about Kurt Meyer? Why would Bromley have chosen to try to climb Everest, even a little way up, with this Austrian or German?”
Colonel Norton shrugs. “The Alpine Club has been in touch with the German and Austrian alpine and climbing clubs, but they say they have no record whatsoever of a Kurt Meyer as a registered climber. It’s strange.”
“It’s all very strange, if you ask me,” says Dr. Hingston as we all walk through the Map Room on the way to the banquet hall. “Damnably strange.”
And then there are all-around handshakes and farewells to us that are much warmer than the first greetings.
Outside, a north wind is blowing in from Kensington Gardens across the broad avenue. It’s scented with plants and flowers still blooming, but there’s also a stronger, sadder scent of leaves fallen and moldering. The not unpleasant smell of death in autumn. The clouds are low, and I can smell rain coming.
“We’d best find a cab,” says the Deacon.
None of us says a word during the entire ride back to the hotel.
Chapter 5
This is one hell of a stupid place to leave a pipe.
A fter the October memorial services and Alpine Club reports and our interview with Norton, Somervell, Noel, Odell, and Hingston, but before our November trip to Munich to meet Sigl, Jean-Claude and I want to start packing for Everest. The Deacon overrules us. He says that there are two things we have to do before we start planning the matériel and logistics for such an expedition.