The Abominable by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online

view; I’ve just celebrated my twenty-second birthday, two months before earning this view for myself. I feel very close to Whymper and to all the climbers—some of them hard-bitten cynics, but others romantics like myself—who have looked south at Italy from this very ridge, from this very throne of a low boulder.
    During the autumn, winter, and spring months that I’ve been climbing in the Alps with Jean-Claude and the Deacon, there has been a question-and-answer session after each summiting, a catechism, as it were, for each mountain. The tone of the questioning has never been condescending, and I’ve actually enjoyed the process, since I’ve learned so much from the two alpinists. I’d been a good climber when I came to Europe from the United States; under Jean-Claude’s and the Deacon’s gentle, sometimes bantering, but never pedantic guidance, I know that I’m becoming an excellent climber. A world-class climber. Part of a very small fraternity indeed. More than that, the Deacon’s and Jean-Claude’s tutelage—including these summiting catechisms—have helped me learn how to love the mountain I’ve just climbed. Love it even though she may have been a treacherous bitch during my intimate time with her: rotten rock, avalanches, traverses without so much as a fingerhold, deadly rockfall, forced bivouacs on ledges too narrow to hold a book upright yet we were forced to cling there in freezing weather, hailstorms or thunderstorms, nights when the metal pick in my ice axe glowed blue with its anticipatory electrical discharge, hot days without so much as a sip of water and more bivouac nights when, without pitons to tie oneself in, you held a lit candle under your chin to keep from falling asleep and tumbling off into the void. Yet through all that, the Deacon and especially Jean-Claude were teaching me how to love the mountain, love her for what she truly was, while loving even the hardest times spent engaged with her.
    The catechism for the Matterhorn is led by Jean-Claude and is briefer than most.
    You must love something about every good mountain. Matterhorn is a good mountain. Did you love the faces of this mountain?
    Non. The faces of the Matterhorn, especially the north face upon which we spent the most time, were not worth loving. They were rubble. They were constant rockfall and avalanche.
    But you love the rock itself?
    Non. The rock is treacherous. Friable. It lies. Drive in a piton with a hammer and you never hear the proper ring of steel against iron, of iron against rock, and a minute later you can easily pull the useless piton out with two fingers. The rock on the faces of the Matterhorn is terrible. Mountaineers know that all mountains are in a constant state of collapse—their verticality being inescapably and inevitably worn down every moment by wind, water, weather, and gravity—but the Matterhorn is more of an unstable pile of constantly crumbling rubble than most peaks. Love the rock here? Nowhere. Never.
    But you love the ridges?
    Non. The famous ridges of the Matterhorn—the Italian and the Swiss, the Furggen and the Zmutt—are either too dangerous, raked with rockfall and snow avalanche, or too tame, pocked with cables and fixed ropes for the lady climber and the seventy-year-old English gentleman. Love for this mountain’s ridges? There is none. At least not since Edward Whymper’s day, when all was new.
    But you love the mountain. You know you do. What do you love?
    Oui. The Matterhorn is a mountain that gives the climber numerous problems to solve, but—unlike the unclimbed north face of the Eiger and certain other peaks I’ve seen or heard about—the Matterhorn also gives a good climber a clean, clear solution to each problem.
    The Matterhorn is a heap of tumbling rubble, but the faces and ridges are beautiful to look upon from a distance. She is like an aging actress who, beneath the sadly obvious and peeling makeup, still boasts the cheeks and bone structure of her younger