The Abominable: A Novel

I didn’t know a damned thing about Zen meditation, if that’s what the Deacon really had been doing when he sat cross-legged and apparently lost in thought every morning before breakfast as Reggie recently suggested, and I certainly hadn’t had the time or interest on this insane climb to ask him about it. But I suspected then and I know now that mou

I said, “Yeah, it’ll be a veritable Alamo up there.” “What is this ‘Alamo’?” asked J.C. He seemed far too cheery for the circumstances. I was coughing again, so Reggie explained the history of the Alamo to him in three or four succinct sentences. “It sounds like a glorious battle,” said J.C. after Reggie had just sketched the outline of the fight w

“Perfect place for a camp,” said the Deacon. “You have to be kidding,” I said between gasping coughs, removing my oxygen mask at every paroxysm. “We’re above twenty-eight thousand feet here.” It was true that our hearts were swollen, our muscles were failing, our kidneys, stomachs, and other internal organs were not doing their jobs properly, our b

Pasang says, “Machig Labdrön once wrote, Unless all reality is made worse, one cannot attain liberation.…So wander in grisly places and mountain retreats…do not get distracted by doctrines and books…just get real experiences…in the horrid and desolate.”

During the descent stage, it’s usually more common for the climber to be facing outward, thus making it easier for the climber to see the tiny ledges and footholds in the yards and meters beneath and beside him; that way the climber’s back is against the rock, his face turned toward (and attention now on) the drop beneath him, much of the view now

The summit of the 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.

“We have a plan, Jake. I promise you. Remember, these are Germans. They’re arrogant people. They’re going to come at us straight-on sometime today—straight up the ladder we left for them, feeling safe in their near certainty that we don’t have any weapons that can really hurt them—and then we’re going to kill as many of them as we can. Only then wi

There were no solid footholds or handholds anywhere near that crack, of course—God wasn’t going to make it that easy—but friction and speed are God in such a free climb, and I prayed to, and used, both to get a few feet higher.

My fingers seek holds, even the slightest wrinkle in the rock, but this is an obscenely wrinkle-free rock face. I keep moving to the left, held against the near-vertical cliff just by friction and speed. If you’re fast enough, sometimes gravity doesn’t immediately notice you.