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

Taylor panicked as the boards they were strapped to slowly revolved. He began to say the Lord’s name over and over interspersed with creative, homemade compound curses involving animals, excreta, and carnal acts. Each curse was followed by a distant snapping sound as another avalanche commenced down the mountain. It was as if the entire ridge from Abel to Asha were giving way.

They were hanging about fifteen feet above the ground, but the “ground” in this case was a steep slope. If they dropped and they landed on top of the wood, they would slide down the pass to their deaths. If they dropped and the wood landed on top of them, they would essentially become sled runners for the wood, and death would come even quicker. The wind began to pick up and they spun faster.

River Leaf was quiet. She looked around for some way out of the predicament. On the elevator with them were about five ice axes and two ropes. She made quick work using a length rope to tie two ice axes together (Taylor meanwhile continued to craft colourful hyphenated words capable of blushing the cheeks of a public house bartender). With this new pole, River Leaf was able to touch the cliff near them and stopping the elevator from revolving. At some point while they stood there in mid-air, the people at the top of the rope tried their luck at pulling them up. When they reached the overhanging lip of the cliff, part of the elevator got caught underneath the lip. They started flipping upward at an impossible angle. River Leaf and Taylor both started yelling for the men at the top to stop and lower them again. So the men at the top tried the opposite strategy, they attempted to lower the two. When the elevator dropped far enough to touch the amethyst surface, they were starting to come to rest face-down. Again River Leaf and Taylor yelled for them to stop. So they rose to midway up the cliff and stopped. River Leaf stuck the ice axe pole out to keep them from spinning. They were back where they started. The sun was beginning to set and the weather was turning much colder. River Leaf continued to look for an escape in the fading light. That was when they heard an awful snapping sound. This time, it was not an avalanche.

If the reader would permit the author a momentary digression dripping with impossible omnipotence, I would like to briefly recount the tale of a certain tree in the Terai region of the Himalaya, not far at all from Darjeeling. The author has never been in the presence of this tree nor has he traveled to the Terai, but the tree’s story does not take multiple sources to deduce. What’s more, I doubt the tree’s offspring will ever come after me claiming libelous misdeeds.

Many, many years ago, under dappled forest sunlight and heavy humidity, accompanied only by the din of woodpeckers, an oak sapling began to grow. It was small and beautiful. It had only two leaves at that point, and those leaves were large enough in relationship to the tree to bend the whole of it. This tree was lucky. Despite its diminutive bearing, it survived. Monsoon rains, rodents, and aggressive floral neighbors just happened to miss this fragile thing. It gathered nutrients from sun and soil and grew uninterrupted.

Indeed the tree grew, and grew at an impressive pace. However, if one was able to see inside its textured bark and concentric rings, one would see this tree had a flaw. It was a slight weakness in spacing of cells along a line running from sapwood to heartwood. With each passing year, cambium would manufacture a new band of wood, and each year, the flaw would be born anew in fresh wood and become solidified in dying wood near the core. The tree had inherited the flaw from its parent tree. The broken information dropped to the forest floor in the form of an acorn and then was absconded by a hungry squirrel that carried and buried it more than a mile from the parent tree. Perhaps one hundred years earlier, the parent tree had inherited the weakness from its parent tree. Now the sapling was growing into adolescence with the imperfect branding of its ascendancy. It was not a flaw so grave it would bring the tree down early in life, but if a northerly wind happened to hit it too hard or another tree fell against it, the oak may have seen an early death. Fortunately, it did not.

Seasons passed. The oak grew into a giant, with a trunk three feet in diameter, a drip-line covering thirty feet of forest floor, and a height of almost sixty feet. Several smaller plants and trees died from the oppressive shadow it cast. A metropolis of birds made their home in its branches, giving the tree its own loud, jubilant voice when morning arrived. Rains would seasonally tear at its limbs, pruning it back ever-so-slightly, but never enough to slow its progress toward magnificence. The flaw always lay within - an internal scar spanning decades – but the oak grew stronger around it and managed to stand as if immortal.

It was then that some men arrived in the forest. They carried axes, machetes, and saws. One of the men sat down against a tree and smoked a cigarette. Another was picking his teeth with a knife. Three others looked around for some time, speaking and pointing. Their voices would occasionally rise in disagreement. Sweat dripped from them as they spoke and so their talk was accompanied by dabs of rags to their foreheads. At last their talk died down, their fingers all pointing at the oak. The oak did nothing. Its topmost branches moved imperceptibly in the gentle breezes above the forest.

The men approached and