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

each other. But sadly, neither one even made it to India. Everyone to the man on Hoyt’s steamer got food poisoning. Turning around in the Red Sea, the team vomited its way back to Toulon. It had nothing to do with Ovaltine, but the unlucky sponsors had to spend months proving as much. Only two days after Hoyt’s ship headed home, Junk’s ship was stopped by Burmese pirates who were nice enough not to kill the passengers, but only to loot them of everything on their ship save some tins of pemmican. “They were the most civilized men I had met since leaving London,” recalled Junk. “It turned out the lead pirate and I shared a favorite watering hole in Bermuda. They even shared a glass of brandy with the captain and me before demanding the removal of our clothing and shoving off.” The party returned home in their underwear, the taste of lost adventure bitter on their tongues.

Chapter Four: Fumu and the Dividing Engine

The mountains of the Himalayan chain tend to have origin stories, often based in Sanskrit literature, Indian dynasties, or colourful tales of Hindu gods. Nanda Devi got its name from a princess of the Chanda dynasty who narrowly escaped a murder attempt. The mountains that tightly ring Nanda Devi are guards protecting her from further attack. Annapurna is the Hindu goddess of food. Chomolungma, the local name for Mount Everest and its surrounding area, is a Bon god who can suffuse kindness and empathy at one moment and then turn angry due to the smallest slight. The peak of Harmukh is believed by Kashmiris to be the home of Shiva. If the peak can be seen from a nearby village, then it is believed the snakes of that village will be rendered harmless.

But no single mythology like these exists for Mount Fumu. Or more precisely, there are as many Fumu mythologies as there are people in Asia. One Sherpa will tell you the name Fumu did not come from his people but was the name of a Hindu god who slaughtered his own children to show allegiance to Vishnu. Another Sherpa will tell you Fumu was the name of Chomolungma’s daughter but who is also the mother of Lhotse. Ask a citizen of Darjeeling and they may tell you Fumu was the name of a European explorer who snuck into Nepal one hundred years earlier and crawled out of the woods one year later, bloody, screaming tales of a mountain haunted by spirits of strange women looking for their children in the night.

One gets the feeling after asking several hundred people for the story of Fumu that there is something intentional in the discrepancies, and that the variation in stories comes not from miscommunication, but from obfuscation. It is as if there is a true story to be told about the mountain and its moniker, and that everyone in India, Nepal, and Tibet know the story, but we who come from far away are not meant to know anything about it. It is not for us.

The only theme that seems to run through all of the stories, as barebones as it may be, is that of a strained relationship between a parent and a child. Anyone who has attempted to climb atop Fumu’s haunches and witnessed the horrors of her retaliations can understand from where this recurring idea may have come.

Once, the surface of the Earth was only comprised of ocean and a single, monolithic landmass called Pangea. As with all things, Pangea began to fall apart. Slabs of earth broke from one another and wandered in random directions. Then in an act that could be seen as tectonic separation anxiety, the slab that would later become modern-day India returned to Pangea about 150 million years ago. The reunion was not peaceful. To this day, the Indian plate and the Asian plate are in the process of colliding violently. Rock meets rock with nowhere to go but up. As this conflict plays out at an excruciatingly slow clip, the mountains we call the Himalaya continue to grow. The process has slowed down somewhat as time has passed, and what used to be a chain of active volcanoes have cooled and become snow-capped peaks. However, one peak remains volcanically active.

Fumu is a strange volcano. What is left of the enormous main vent has been dormant for eons and has become a dead, icy caldera. A caldera is formed when the magma chamber under the volcano has spent most of its contents and the ground above collapses downward. An unusually large crater, often more than a mile across, is formed. There is a small hole in the deep ice at the bottom of the Fumu’s dormant caldera, in the winter it is about the size of an obese man’s waist, and in the summer it becomes the size of an American football gridiron. The hole has been deemed “The Oculus” by explorers. A blasting sub-zero wind seems to rise out of the Oculus itself and blow up the walls of the caldera’s bowl on all sides. The wind has been known to throw equipment and unsuspecting humans off of their perch along the caldera’s lip. It is because of this ever-blowing arctic menace that the dead caldera – the four-mile-in-diameter bowl around the Oculus - has been given the nickname “The Icy Bellows.”

An Earth scientist from the University of Bedlam named Randy Felcher believes that Fumu was once three times her current size. According to Felcher’s theory, two-thirds of her width was blown off sideways about 50 million years ago by a pyroclastic event that plunged the Earth into a volcanic winter likely lasting for decades. That is why the lip of the Icy Bellows is not consistent in altitude all the way around; the eruption did not do a clean job of severing off the top of the mountain. The current summit of Fumu is actually the southernmost point