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

one-foot rulers to clocks six feet in diameter. Albright would then spend the day fabricating and hammering metal, running and re-running objects through the dividing engine, calibrating springs, oiling gears, and punctuating the whole process with sips of tea.

He was known throughout Europe for his precision. No matter what instrument he was building – clock, compass, yardstick – Albright was unrivaled. When it came to clocks for example, many people including the employs of the Greenwich Observatory felt Albright had surpassed even the Swiss. He received letters from railroad concerns in Russia asking for his services. Despite bad blood between England and France, Parisian builders and architects wrote to him for help. Albright had to turn down most of the offers because he was already too busy. Friends urged him to expand his business; hire employees, build a factory, and retire on his wealth. Other businesses in Coventry goaded him as well. Any successful business in Coventry could prove beneficial to other businesses in the area. But Albright refused. He truly did not care about wealth. He liked the peace and quiet of his workshop. All that mattered to him were the creation of his objects, the goal of precise measurement, and love of God. But even more than all of this, there was spending time with his daughter, Katherine.

At the age of six, Katherine Albright was tall for her age. Other girls in town called her “Giantess.” As awkward as she may have felt, she was also a beauty, with long black curls and big hazel eyes. “Her eyebrows were permanently fixed in a position of skepticism, one raised slightly higher than the other,” Albright once wrote. “This gave her a very hard but intelligent look.” She was an artist. She spent much time before bed painting still lifes and portraits of herself or her father. Her hands were constantly covered in oil paints which ultimately ended up all over the furniture and walls. Meriwether loved that kind of mess generated by creativity.

Katherine did not have much time for other children, favoring the company of her father, and Meriwether wouldn’t have it any other way. His wife had died giving birth to Katherine, and with the help of local friends, he had raised her to schooling age. Now he took care of Katherine by himself, and he reveled in it. If Meriwether was not in his workshop, then he and Katherine were strolling through town or taking hikes along the river or attending church together. She was only six, but Meriwether confided in her constantly. He also let her help him in the workshop when school was out. “I remember speaking to her very early on about the importance of what we do and the magnificence of His wonders.” Albright wrote in prison years later. “I told her the volume of a drop of dew, the seconds in a minute, the furlongs in a mile, each was a glimmering tile in a giant mosaic. If we can only quantify the tiles, and look at them from afar, the mosaic will show us the Face of God.”

Then Katherine became ill. No one is sure what illness she had, but all signs point to consumption. She could not get up in the morning. Already thin, she began to waste away. Her skin became pale and her breaths became short. The coughing fits were relentless. “The single raised eyebrow lowered, removing the unique character that was Katherine. Her eyelids were half-moons and she stared at nothing. Then she was dead.”

Meriwether was devastated. He stayed in his home for months, unable to even visit his workshop. He did not attend church. When he did start venturing outside, locals saw him ambling slowly, head down, mumbling to himself in a voice on the verge of tears.

A neighbor who had helped Albright raise Katherine finally visited him and begged him to return to work. She felt it would help him heal. “’Look again to God’s miracles’ she said to me. I took her advice. I went back to the workshop and began to tinker again.”

But something had snapped in Albright’s head. He could not see the reason for measuring the world anymore because the magic that used to cover every thing like gossamer was gone. He did work, but his production rate was dangerously slow. Customers complained. The world was growing, commerce was on the march, and the need for Albright’s instruments was greater than ever.

Then Albright came up with the solution to his problem. God’s miracles were still there to be understood, but the miracles were now severely lessened by the removal of Katherine. And so he would continue to build the tools that measure the world, but he would subtract out what was lost. He took his old dividing engine out back and destroyed it with endless blows from a mallet. Then he began building another one, with each notch on the wheel slightly further away from its neighbor than it should be. All measurements arising from the dividing engine would be smaller. The value of Katherine was removed from each inch, each second, and each degree.

It took only a few months before the effects of Albright’s deeds were felt. Every object that had been built using his tools was slightly off. In his home town of Coventry, the new church clock stroked midnight at eleven twenty-five in the evening, and then earlier on each subsequent night. The locals were bewildered. Then the effects escalated tragically. A train derailed near Kiev. The roof of a factory collapsed in Brussels. As far away as Santa Fe, a small battalion of the Armies of the West were overwhelmed by Navajo fighters because their guns jammed. All told, seventy-seven people had died as a direct result of Albright’s “recalibrations.” As Albright put it in his writings, “The removal of Katherine compounded, removing other souls from the Earth. If I had gone on in my profession, I would have had to continually make the increments on the