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

a difference of any more than, say, half a pound in weight. Should the Bushman find himself at the top of Fumu, he could expect his Congolese weight of one hundred pounds to diminish to ninety-nine and one half pounds. Hoyt, at roughly one hundred seventy pounds at the time of the ascent might expect to weigh one hundred sixty-nine and one half pounds. But that is where things become strange. Based on upcoming events reviewed in this book, geologists took a further look at Fumu and found that she is as bizarre below the Earth’s surface as she is above.

All volcanoes sit atop a magma chamber; a large pocket within the planet in which the molten lava roils and complains. The chamber is full to the hilt with lava, superheated by the high temperatures of the planet’s sub-cellars. The volcano then erupts due to the introduction of more melted mantle into the chamber – or angry gods – depending upon who you ask. The pressure in the chamber builds and then the magma makes an escape upward, where the pressure is less. After the eruption, the magma chamber is empty or close to empty. Fumu is different from most volcanoes in the size of its magma chamber. Two years before the writing of this book, world-renowned geologist Sir George Darling of Cambridge University journeyed to Fumu. Not mad enough to climb the beast, he set up a temporary lab at the southern base. Using myriad instruments and scientific methods over the course of seasons, Darling found something shocking. “Most volcanoes have a chamber housed in the Earth’s crust and some go even deeper, with the bottommost reaches of the chamber digging several miles into the Earth’s upper mantle. Fumu is like nothing we have ever seen. The chamber is not much wider than the usual chamber, but it seems bottomless.” It reaches past the upper mantle, down thousands of miles through the lower mantle and possibly touching Earth’s outer core. It is like a long, thin flaw in this diamond Earth, scarring it from surface to core. Why such an unusual volcano, so unique from its sisters? No one is sure. Several theories lie about, untested and otherwise ignored. Darling’s theory (the one that got him dismissed from Cambridge, branded from thereon in as a doctor of quackery) was that Fumu is the location where, millennia ago when the Earth was just beginning to cool, the still-wet moon pulled away from the soggy Earth. That separation, that rejection, that outright rebellion by the ungrateful rock never healed for our dear Mother. Fumu stands as the Earth’s scar over that wound. Trust me, the other theories are not any better.

If the lava chamber of Fumu is indeed that vast, then it follows logically that the eruption of Fumu eons before the Age of Man must have dispensed an absurd amount of lava from the Earth’s gut. The caldera we have been calling the Icy Bellows was formed when that eruption occurred. With the chamber’s contents spent, the land there collapsed, but not much. It could have theoretically fallen thousands of miles into the planet’s Inner Furnace. It did not. And therefore, the conclusion has to be that beneath the crumbly, airy crust of the Earth, at the spot where Fumu resides, for mile upon lonely mile, stretching downward into the Unknowable, there exists nothing at all. And with most of the mantle gone, Fumu is held in place by the gravitational force of something not much more impressive than an oversized cobblestone.

The effect of this situation upon gravity at the peak of Fumu should no longer be surprising to the reader…

Chapter Nineteen: The Locket

Inexplicably to them, Hoyt and Junk’s feet kept leaving the ground. The slightest tightening of a thigh muscle or twisting of the torso would send the men inches into the air. Even with the heavy oxygen tanks on their backs, they would float for fleeting moments. Perhaps if they had backpacks on like their Sherpa Chhiri Tendi, who was now lost to sight in the clouds and smoke, our heroes might have held their ground. But they were not afforded such a luxury. And their new predicament conspired to make their fighting tactics even more pathetic. Punches would miss one another entirely. A knee to the groin would cause the aggressor to stumble. In their exhaustion, they would often stop and collapse against each other like two spent boxers. Depending on how they started the collapse, they might hover above the ground, not touching down for seconds at a time, or they might spin. And when they did touch down, it was several feet lower on the mountainside. Due to the huge void beneath the mountain, the source of gravity was not straight below them, but off to the south a fraction. Should one or both of them continue to float without landing, they would slowly be pulled off the south side of the mountain.

But Hoyt and Junk continued to fight despite their exhaustion and these new laws of physics. They even found the energy to call each other names, like schoolchildren. They did this loudly enough to be heard through their masks by Chhiri Tendi off in the distance, over the din of the wind and lava eruptions.

“Rake!”

“Girl!”

“Street urchin!”

“Choir boy!”

“Peasant!”

“Dandy!”

Their fighting became weaker with each moment. The opponents mostly held each other for balance at this point, with a useless punch to the back coming every minute or so. Slight stumbles turned into brief, floating waltzes. They could no longer get enough breath from their oxygen tanks and their need for the precious gas was increasing with exertion. Their hearts were running out of steam. They were dying. That fact was of no concern to Hoyt or Junk. They had not enough energy to summit nor enough energy to descend. They would meet their end fighting and their bodies would be entwined in