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

top. Cox then shared the bad news that Hoyt’s trip was scheduled to start ten days before the British trip. Catching up would be futile. If Junk still wished to join the expedition knowing he could not compete with his nemesis, then Cox could convince the other committee members to let Junk tag along. Put another way, removing the personal competition would de-fang the American and make him more willing to play along with his fellow team members. And this knowledge would reassure the committee.

Surprisingly to Cox, Junk needed no time to deliberate. He accepted.

Aaron Junk had absolutely no intention of “tagging along” (and of course, he had no intention of making maps, a profession in which had had little interest). He intended to use his aggressive salesman skills to essentially hijack the expedition. He would work his way into a leadership position and convince the team to take Everest from the south. This had three important implications. First, the south side of Everest is in forbidden Nepal, so they would have to sneak through the Kingdom undetected and still have the strength to climb what was thought to be the world’s tallest mountain. Second, no one in the mountaineering community had a good idea what the south side of Everest held in store. People who had reached the upper ridges of Everest had looked down at its southern face and so could deduce some basic things. The glimpses from above confirmed that the southern face might offer an easier route to the top. But one could not really be sure until he or she was standing at the base, looking up. The third implication, the one most important to Junk, was that taking Everest from the south would easily shave ten days off of the trek, allowing him to catch up with Hoyt. Hoyt was a rule-follower and would unquestionably approach from Tibet in the north. Getting to Tibet from Calcutta takes a long time. Getting to Nepal takes far less time because one does not need to “loop around” the Himalaya. Perhaps the two expeditions would not start ascending from their respective base camps on the exact same day, but it would damned be close.

Cox could not have predicted how his decision to send untested climbers would help Junk’s cause. The leader of the team was a man named Percy Tersely, a disgraced banker from London, who had allegedly tried to embezzle one thousand dollars from his employers, the Bank of England. His plot failed when he deposited the embezzled money into a savings account under his name in the same bank. The barrister at his trial pointed out that the young bookworm was an avid reader of Edgar Allen Poe, and suggested Tersely was clearly trying to avoid suspicion by using a tactic learned from Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” But most people following the trial felt he was just an idiot. Tersely was ultimately let go on a technicality. As a mountaineer, he was unexceptional but sufficient, having led expeditions to K2 and Annapurna that had set height records, but had not reached the summits. His acceptable climbing abilities mixed with his status as a disgraced British old boy made him a perfect candidate for expedition leader of the 1939 “disposable” attempt on Everest.

Also along for the expedition was Elihu Twist, a farmer from the town of Woking; John Browning, a former soldier on the Indian front who was discharged for frotteurism; Andrew Witherspoon, a geologist from Vauxhall; Shaun McSorley, a noted climber from Dublin; and Bruce “Tosser” Oldhusband of Coventry. They were all decent climbers, but none of them went to good schools (McSorley did not go to any) and none were members of the British Armed Forces, which could often get a man in good with the aristocracy even if he was of ill breeding. Oldhusband came from a moneyed family, but he had been cut out of the family fortune because they did not approve of his chosen line of work, which was linguistics.

The Everest Committee would not spare its best men, but it would spare no expense getting this ignoble, baseborn team to the top. They would use brute force as a replacement for skill. Along for the trip would be one hundred and fifty porters, thirty more high-altitude Sherpa, three hundred and fifty pack animals, and enough food for two expeditions.

Junk’s plan was set. Perfect timing and substandard cohorts. He would climb Everest at the same time as Junk, but would beat him to the summit using the southern route.

Hoyt’s American team left The United States in early June and arrived at Base Camp almost three months later. The weather was gorgeous. The monsoon-driven storms were gone and the sun shone off of the mountain gloriously. Hoyt was especially hopeful because of the crack squad he had put together. Gil Taylor, Phillip Zeigler, Daniel Crimmins, William Webster, and Paul Fleming. All heroes in the pantheon of American mountaineering. In addition to their climbing expertise, they were also map-makers, geologists, naturalists, and comparative linguists. To prepare Tibet for their arrival, Hoyt asked Gil Taylor, an ethnographer from the University of Chicago, to act as liaison officer and write a letter to the Tibetan government. Hoyt believed Taylor could do the best job obtaining access to the Tibetan borders due to his occupation. Taylor wrote the following:

Sirs,

The sun slowly sets on the British Crown and, moving east, begins to rise on your new better, the United States of America. Repair to your homes and don your Sunday best, for a team of sahibs arrive from the Promised Land in three months’ time. We will have in tow myriad porters and countless pack mules. You will know us by the pride in our gaits. We expect every courtesy of you, anointing our feet with soothing balms and refreshing our vodka tonics with either a wedge of lemon, or a twist, depending upon our heart’s want. Choose to ignore these