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

and according to the man-children, Fumu itself has hidden strata of the precious metal. Granted, silver is the coin of the realm among Nepal’s local inhabitants; but gold by the pram-full could still keep a man in boundless comfort.

Perhaps it was because Hoyt came from money but he did not become crazed by the realization he was walking through an uncharted gold mine. His notes continue as if he had just learned a dull mathematics fact at school. No other expedition members mention the gold in their journals either. Hoyt must have kept it to himself to avoid a widespread outbreak of the Sin of Greed.

Mano explained that neighboring Nepalese people brought them whatever they needed thanks to Fumu’s allowance. Food, services, toys, games, books. Everything they required. There was no reason to farm or hunt. On this trip, Mano’s people would collect gold from the caves upon their return trip to the monasteries, after they had paid their respects to the mountain. They would stuff their buntings with gold, deposit the gold in their prams, and wheel it home. “We will sleep first at the base of the mountain before mining” he apparently said. “We will need to rest before we dig and scrape with our toys. Rock candy?”

Hoyt turned down the offer, but the topic of being tired must have triggered another question in Hoyt’s head, because according to his journal, he also asked Mano about the average age of the man-children. None of them seemed young. “Most of them slouched, had sagging bosoms, and wore thinning grey manes” Hoyt wrote. Mano’s explanation was minimal and far from satisfying. “We do not have children because sex is naughty. We have also stopped recruiting because the sibling rivalry is getting to be ridiculous. Fumu can only have so many children. He is not a Catholic after all.” Mano apparently laughed at his own joke. Hoyt did not.

Time passed slowly. Patience was tested. Tempers shortened. Stomachs growled for dinner. The yak bellowed. “Each expedition member looked at the feet of the man in front of them and waited for a cry from the front of the march announcing daylight” Thornton wrote. “No announcement would come. A man-child would occasionally cry out, confessing to fear of the dark, and a Sherpa would tell them to calm down.” The urge to get out was growing strong among everyone.

Like Hoyt and Mano, many of the men talked to pass the time. After getting over his reservations about Yuudai’s nationality, Drake discussed an idea for an invention he had had while sitting in his broken down automobile on the side of the road many years earlier. Thinking her husband was late because he had been out raising his wrist with other scientists, his wife had greeted him at the door with a skillet to the face. At that moment, he had realized how terribly he could have used a telephone on the way home. He told Yuudai of his idea for a “wireless” telephone, an impossible contraption that worked like a long-distance two-way radio. It required no overhead telephone lines and could be used almost anywhere provided there was a “tower” transmitting a signal nearby. Drake planned to patent the idea when he returned to the States. Yuudai was raised to be polite and did not respond to this silliness.

Just when conversations had run out of replenishing topics, Mano informed the team they were approaching the end. They had reached a narrow point preceding the cave mouth. The narrow point before exiting out to the Qila Sanctuary and Fumu is five feet in diameter and continues like that for no more than three feet, wide enough and short enough to allow for the men and their equipment to pass through without much effort. About fifty feet beyond this narrow point lay the cave mouth.

Mano noticed something was wrong immediately after passing through the narrow portion. They had neared the mouth no later than one in the afternoon, but upon approaching, they saw only darkness at the end. Mano approached the place where the mouth should have been and found it had been blocked. The barrier was created by flat rocks sitting atop one another reaching all of the way to the ceiling. “Hoyt had been happy as a schoolboy all day” Chhiri Tendi told me in our discussions many years later. “But when we reached that obstruction, goodness gracious. His face contorted into a scowl and his movements came in short, enraged bursts. He was audibly grumbling. It was like he’d suffered from a life-long curse of the limbs and muscles, experienced a momentary reprieve, only to have it return in a tragic instant.” He began yelling at Mano, calling him every terrible name he could think of. No one was happy at the moment, but Hoyt’s abuse seemed unnecessarily vicious. Being a “good child,” Mano did not fight back. He accepted his scolding. However, when the tempest of Hoyt’s rage had subsided, Mano did point out that the obstruction was not natural. A viewing by lantern light suggested the stones were too flat and stacked too carefully to be the result of a cave-in.

The men pushed against the blockade but it would not budge. A quick decision had to be made between two options. The first was to turn around and briskly make their way back to Base Camp. That option was unappealing because all progress from that day would evaporate. What’s more, returning to Base Camp was worse than simply “starting again at the beginning” – it meant starting again at a loss. Spirits had been compromised by the spelunking. Claustrophobia. Dangerously thin air. Emotional drain. Experiences like these sap the overall health of a team and dig into their chances of a successful ascent. Hoyt needed men who were well-rested and bubbling over with optimism. A futile jaunt in the darkness did nobody any good.

That left them with the other option which was to begin the potentially back-breaking task of