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

Above the overhang, the steepness slowly dissipated. Everything leveled off and became the wide, flat col at the top of the pass. They were almost there.

Morrow wrote, “As if by some miracle, all thirty Sherpa reached the top of the pass.” No miracle was necessary. These men got to the top by way of their strength and skill. Pasang Dolma had been climbing for more than half of his life and, by his estimation, had been the leader on more than half of those expeditions. If anyone could climb on vertical ice-smooth stone with no handholds, it was him and the men he chose to join him on this adventure. When the Sherpa reached the top, it was reason for loud cheers of respect. But no one could celebrate. They simply tied the dropped end of the rope to short rope on the Elevator once again and began to board.

Everyone but River Leaf and Gil Taylor were at the top within an hour’s time. The two were required to load the last of the equipment onto the Elevator before climbing aboard themselves. With everything and everyone else now at the top, River Leaf (who according to Morrow looked “quite the sight in men’s climbing attire about four sizes too big for her”) and Taylor climbed aboard the Elevator and tied themselves to the big board. Taylor gave the sign to the Sherpa above to begin pulling. They left the ledge that formed the bottom of pitch eight and began to rise. They rose quickly. The gradient of the pass was now so precipitous the Elevator did not drag as much along its surface. It dragged just enough to keep them from hanging in mid-air.

Five Sherpa stood at the top pulling the two passengers up. The Sherpa were all grunting now, winded and suffering from altitude sickness. Due to their almost obsessive obedience, they would not take shifts with the other Sherpa unless Junk told them to do so. Junk was not nearby to do so. He had gotten his first uninterrupted, sweeping view of Fumu on the far side of the col and had been lured in by her Majesty. He stood looking at the mountain, rapt. He took sips from a flask of bourbon and allowed his eyes to dart around, taking in every buttress, icefall, and ridge. The sheer size of what he was seeing was enough to make him feel like falling backward. If he did not crane his neck to look straight up or down, there was nothing in front of him that was not mountain. It took up his entire field of vision, off to the peripheries where Reality turns black and white. The atmosphere lingering between him and the mountain gave it a misty, otherworldly quality. The glaciers and scree at its wide base. The snowfields interrupted only by Rauff’s Maw. The massive cliff up to the Eastern Ridge petering out as it moved toward the summit. The treacherous Western and Eastern Ridges, climbing gradually but erratically to the top, their cornices sullied by ash. And the cloud at the top, growing, grumbling, endlessly sheered at its outer layers by high winds but still growing from within.

Junk lit a cigar and pulled deeply from a flask of bourbon. He was looking at the route his nemesis would likely take. After climbing down from the col on which he stood, Junk’s plan was to hike to the other side of the mountain, the northern side, and climb up to the rim of the Icy Bellows, and follow that rim as it became the Eastern Ridge. So the view in front of Junk right now could only give him a sense of the mountain he was taking on. The details were still obscured.

Behind him, Junk heard yelling followed by avalanches like some sinister form of call-response in a house of worship. It had been the Sherpa pulling the Elevator. When Junk got back to them and demanded to know what was happening, he was notified that River Leaf and Taylor were stuck, dangling over the edge of the overhang. The Sherpa had tried to pull them up the gentler slope on the eastern end of the pass, but several things had gone wrong at once. First, the sun had begun to lower in the sky in the southwest. The glare hitting the amethyst had all but blinded the Sherpa so they could not see the rope on which they were pulling. They did not see it was slowly tending to their right as they pulled it up. The Sherpa in the front might have asked for someone’s tinted goggles to help him see, but the second problem stopped that from happening. The Sherpa in front had gone mad from altitude sickness. He was yelling things in Nepali about being a baby and nursing from an icicle. Temporarily blind and insane, the Sherpa allowed the Elevator to tend right and dangle off the edge of the cliff. The third problem involved the weather. A powerful, icy wind had picked up as the afternoon progressed. Although the people pulling at the top could not see it, the Elevator was now spinning wildly. Whenever the large board was not parallel with the surface of the mountain, which was most of the time, it could not rise over the lip of the cliff without flipping and potentially removing its passengers. The Sherpa could not lower it and start again. If they lowered it, there was a fifty-fifty chance the board would come to rest upside down, and they would end up dragging the humans underneath along the surface of the mountain. They were at an impasse.

“It was clear from his heightened state of mania that Junk was loaded down with anger and guilt,” wrote Cranston Fenimore. “He had been lured away by the sight of Fumu and had not been around to oversee the Qila Pass ascent to the very end. He was at a loss for what to