Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain, Jonathan Bloom [best ebook reader TXT] 📗

the Sherpa at Camp Two now, and he’ll likely go to Camp One tomorrow.” So this was the team. Junk, Cole, and five Sherpa. It would have to do. Junk wrote, “Looked into the Bellows to see if there was any sign of River Leaf or McGee. Nothing. Gone gone gone. Before she left, she had asked what’s wrong with my heart. Don’t know. Starting to wonder wether [sic] it has a flaw running through it, cutting through valves and dooming me to loneliness.” He was empty now. The personality that had once romanced the City of Boston was nowhere to be found. All that remained in this shell of a man was the naked instinct to go up.

They set off from Camp Two B on September 10th at seven in the morning on their way to Camp Three. That camp would reside on a saddle along the Eastern Ridge, protecting them somewhat from the wind that had plagued them all along the lip. They would be at 28,000 feet then; only one thousand vertical feet away from Camp Four and another one thousand feet from the summit.

The intensifying rate of suffocation had become too much at this point. Even standing still was now an ordeal. Junk and Cole put on their breathing apparatuses which sped up their ascent considerably. They had a surfeit of oxygen canisters at their disposal due to the slow attrition of fellow climbers as well as the fact the Sherpa did not feel they needed such assistance quite yet.

Clouds had rolled in and hidden the way in front and behind them. They could see only about fifty feet in any direction. No precipitation was coming down yet, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time. The thinned ranks walked up into the grayness, step by laboured step, straining ever closer to the neumenon that is Fumu’s summit.

Chapter Fourteen: Vespers

Minds and journal entries were failing on both sides of the mountain. The sources of information which allowed the writing of this book were drying up as elevation increased. Chhiri Tendi was able to fill in many of the blanks from the Hoyt expedition in the interviews he so kindly granted me years later, but many other finer details must be surmised. Some facts about the overall adventure are certain. Hoyt and Junk were in a dead heat almost all of the way up from their respective base camps. Both parties were approaching the Eastern Ridge at the same time but from different directions. Both teams were running low on supplies, but not dangerously so. And both parties were experiencing crises of leadership, one physical and the other spiritual.

In the case of the Hoyt expedition, things were going utterly pear-shaped. Their leader had not been seen since the scree. Fear was in surplus. The temperature seemed to drop with every step up. A gauze of clouds - streaked red with the blood of Fumu’s magma - now settled on everything. The team had begun using bottled oxygen, but a large percentage of the canisters had been lost in a small landslide the evening before. They would have to conserve and still possibly run out before the push for the summit. God could not have spoken louder or enunciated more eloquently: Misfortune was imminent.

Early morning on the seventh, they walked along the “happy side” of Rauff’s Maw which was to the west of it and therefore closer to the summit. Their confused wanderings on the scree had reaped the serendipitous benefit of depositing them onto a route initially more difficult than the planned one, but then led to a less strenuous hike along the Maw and then to the Eastern Ridge. Although progress was slow, it was steady. The knowledge that a storm could roll in at any moment was enough to move them along.

The only positive in their lives at the moment had to do with diet. Some of the team members had switched exclusively to food prepared by Ferguson. With each meal, they listened to his Seventh-Day Adventist prayers and then ate deeply of the cleansing, nourishing sustenance. Even if it did not stick to the ribs as much as, say, tins of pemmican, Ferguson’s meals did rekindle the men’s feelings of well-being and general optimism. Wilde, who seemed the least likely to be attracted to novel things of any sort, had converted the quickest and the most absolutely. “I eat as if eech [sic] bite adds a day of life.”

Wilde would need all of the health he could manage. He was leader of this motley team until Hoyt returned or to the very end, whichever came first. Everyone was respectful and supportive of their temporary leader, but even so, Wilde seemed out of his depth. His usual stern bearing showed signs of weakness. His eyes darted about as if perplexed, trying to make decisions about the route. Being too conscious of the pressure to make a good decision, he often did not. No one called him on such things because no one wanted him to give up.

Exhaustion had ended most conversations. Chhiri Tendi was the one exception, still producing quips and tawdry riddles. The now mentally-deficient Americans did not laugh at his humor – which contained an improbable ratio of curses to proper words - but the other Sherpa did, and that was enough to goad on Chhiri Tendi. He walked in the back, barking out his expletives at a rate seeming impossible given the lack of air. Those in earshot up the line, including Drake and Chatham, and the four other Sherpa, were exposed to Chhiri Tendi’s banter all day. Those further up – Wild and Ferguson - were spared. “I could not stop,” Chhiri Tendi recalls. “I was nervous. And as I told you before, that is what I do when I’m nervous.” The circumstances being what they were, any jitters on the part of the team were well justified.

Above and unseen, slightly off to their