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

a ship or mastering the concept of ‘Self’, the Auxesis began to take swells from the side. Several sailors were lost overboard as walls of water passed across the deck. Randolph and his men banged on the windows of the bridge, trying to get this Jack Meacham – or person playing Jack Meacham - to come to his senses and open the door, but he would not. He had instead tied himself to the wheel.

William Hoyt could not stay still for long and made the decision to help his brother in any way he could. He left the other climbers, took the stairs to the deck and then climbed the stairs to the bridge.

Randolph could not afford to lose any more of his crew, lest they end up at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. He, William, and two first officers went below and came back with the first thing they could find that would end this problem. It was a movie studio light and its stand - long, heavy and made of metal. A film director saw the sailors coming up from below with the equipment and raced after them, begging them to reconsider. The light and stand were expensive and “would set Paramount back hundreds.” The men ignored him. Now outside of the bridge again, William and the sailors positioned the light-stand horizontally and distributed themselves evenly along its length. On the count of three, they ran forward, and the lighting became a battering ram. Glass shattered; Randolph reached his arm through and opened the door of the bridge. Meacham, who was still lashed to the wheel, could not untie himself in time to stop the intruders. He began swinging his free arm wildly at those who were stealing his moment. William held the studio light high in the air and brought it down on Meacham’s head. The actor fell to the ground and his tied arm caused the wheel to turn. Randolph untied the unconscious man and took back control of the ship.

The storm died down in an instant. The sun shone down. The subsequent halting of the rain was so sudden as to be jarring. The wind seemed to go elsewhere. The swells took a little longer to go away; it would be several minutes before their peaks stayed lower than the deck. All was then calm.

However, the damage was done. The Auxesis was off course and the compass broken. Randolph used the setting sun to steer west, but he had no idea how far north or south he was. They would simply need to hope the waves and wind had not blown them too far, and that the evening stars were visible to help them find their way.

It was two days later they arrived in Japan. Arrested immediately by ships off the coast of Miyazaki, all crew and passengers of the Auxesis were quickly rounded up and driven to a military prison miles away in Osaka. They were there for three days, given nothing to eat but water and rice, which for the actors was a banquet.

On the fourth day, things moved quickly. Randolph and a few actors who claimed to be “in charge” were taken to meet Major-General Tatsuya Ubugai of the Japanese army. Ubugai had a stern countenance with unmoving facial features save the slightest variation in lip placement when he spoke. He was tall; as tall as the Hoyt brothers who were both well over six feet. Ubugai looked to be approaching sixty-years-old, with white mustache and sagging jaw, but he stood like a man half that age. He spoke perfect English and demanded to know who they were and what they were doing off the coast of Japan. Randolph spoke for the group. He claimed they were an acting troupe, traveling to India to perform a musical. They had been blown off course by a storm, provable by the damage to the ship, and simply wished to go on their way to Bombay.

“Which musical?” asked Ubugai. Randolph, who could not care less about musical theatre, was stumped. Luckily for him, the actors had been most impressed with his deception and one of them quickly joined in the ruse. They were performing ‘The Mikado’by Gilbert and Sullivan. Ubugai seemed skeptical, but he had also heard of the opera and wished to see it for himself. He demanded the company perform the show for him that night, sung a cappella and without costumes.

They had three hours to prepare. Directors and actors scurried to get the show ready, teaching songs, dance numbers, and choreography to one another. Randolph sat with his brother William, watching the chaos, the two of them trying to figure out if there was some way to escape. No options came to mind. The predicament was absurd and impossible. Their only hope was the actors would pull off the performance of a lifetime.

Apparently, that is exactly what happened. One of the stage directors on the journey named Arthur Spelke wrote in his autobiography many years later:

The audience sat on the floor of a large room that must have been a cafeteria of some sort. When the lights went down, everyone to the man – from the sailors to the Flightless Tiger folks to the Japanese soldiers – was transported to Titipu. When Nanki-Poo came on stage, we all imagined it was centuries ago and we were wandering minstrels in love. I looked around the room and saw American and Japanese laugh at the antics of the Lord High Executioner (even though the Japanese soldiers probably couldn’t understand most of it). I saw tears in a soldier’s eyes when he learned Yum-Yum had to be buried alive. It was a show like no other. The audience was temporarily forgetful of their lot in life and brought together in some kind of strange union. For a short time there, we were all Japs.

The entire audience stood and cheered for a long while. The actors and directors patted one another