
The Abominable: A Novel

“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
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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.”
Dan Simmons • The Abominable: A Novel
“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
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Our valley is in darkness, but Everest blazes far beyond and above us in a cold, powerful, self-contained isolation. That strikes me as terrifying.
Dan Simmons • The Abominable: A Novel
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.
Dan Simmons • The Abominable: A Novel
The Deacon nodded and then nodded some more but then shook his head. Then he looked up, over the top of my head to the west, and said, “I want to climb the mountain. But I’ve never abandoned a fellow climber in need and I won’t start now, Jake.” I was stunned at this. “If you want to keep climbing, I’m fit to come with you,” I lied. It felt like
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Dr. Pasang turned around and took three quick strides to my side. He went to one knee, and I was distantly—irrelevantly, with real death this close—aware of the other three also surrounding me now, the men looking down at me in confusion, Reggie kneeling next to me but obviously not knowing what to do. It’s true, I thought and learned forever in
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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
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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
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