The Abominable Read Online Free PDF Page B

Matterhorn offers very clear choices: a misstep to the left and you die in Italy; a wrong step to the right and you die in Switzerland.
    T he three of us learn about Mallory and Irvine’s disappearance on Mount Everest while we are eating lunch on the summit of the Matterhorn.
    It is a perfect day in late June of 1924, and the news lies folded in a three-day-old British newspaper that someone in the kitchen at the small inn at Breuil in Italy has wrapped around our cold beef and horseradish sandwiches on thick fresh bread. I’ve unwittingly carried this still-weightless news—soon to be a heavy stone in each of our chests—to the summit of the Matterhorn in my rucksack, tucked alongside a goatskin of wine, two water bottles, three oranges, 100 feet of climbing rope, and a bulky salami. We do not immediately notice the paper or read the news that will change the day for us. We are too full of the summit and its views.
    For six days we have done nothing but climb and re-climb the Matterhorn, always avoiding the summit for reasons known only to the Deacon.
    On the first day up from Zermatt we explored the Hornli Ridge—Whymper’s route in 1865—while avoiding the fixed ropes and cables that ran across the mountain’s skin like so many scars. The next day we traversed to do the same on the Zmutt Ridge. On the third day, a long day, we traversed the mountain, again climbing from the Swiss side via the Hornli Ridge, crossing the friable north face just below the summit that the Deacon had forbidden to us, and then descending along the Italian Ridge, at twilight reaching our tents on the high green fields facing south toward Breuil.
    I realized after the fifth day that we were following in the footsteps of those who’d made the Matterhorn so famed—the determined artist-climber 25-year-old Edward Whymper and his ad hoc party of three Englishmen: the Reverend Charles Hudson (“the clergyman from the Crimea”); Reverend Hudson’s 19-year-old protégé and novice climber Douglas Hadow; and the confident 18-year-old Lord Francis Douglas (who had just passed at the top of the British Army’s examination list, some 500 marks ahead of the next closest of his 118 competitors), the son of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry and a neophyte climber who’d been coming to the Alps for two years. Along with Whymper’s motley assortment of young British climbers with such wildly different levels of experience and ability were the three guides Whymper had hired: “Old Peter” Taugwalder (only 45, but considered an oldster), “Young Peter” Taugwalder (age 21), and the highly skilled Chamonix Guide, 35-year-old Michel Croz. In truth, they would have needed only Croz as a guide, but Whymper had earlier promised employment to the Taugwalders, and the English climber was always as good as his word, even when it made his climbing party unwieldy and two of the guides essentially redundant.
    It was on the Italian Ridge that I realized the Deacon was introducing us to the courage and efforts of Whymper’s friend, competitor, and former climbing partner Jean-Antoine Carrel. The difficult routes we were enjoying had been Carrel’s.
    We had our mountain tents—Whymper tents, they were still called, since the famous Golden Age climber had designed them for use on this very mountain—pitched on the grassy fields above the lower glaciers on both sides of the mountain, and we arrived on one side or the other just before dusk every evening, often after dark, there to eat lightly, to talk softly by the small fire, and to sleep soundly for a few hours before rising to climb again.
    We climbed the Matterhorn’s Furggen Ridge but bypassed the impressive overhangs near the top. This was not a defeat. For one full day we explored approaches to that never-climbed overhang, but we decided that we had neither the equipment nor the skill to climb it direct. (The overhang would eventually be climbed by Alfredo Perino and Louis Carrel, known as “the