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

up snow in cooking pots and threw it on the fire. Smoke and steam billowed up and out over the moraine, a small simulacrum of the gargantuan black cloud roiling 30,000 feet up. The team watched the tent burn and then walked back to their equipment.

Hoyt’s plans had placed his own Base Camp only seventy yards away from where they found Junk’s to be. He chose to keep that plan. They used most of the day’s remaining sunlight to construct the camp. Once the camp was complete, Hoyt left Drake and Chhiri Tendi while he and Thornton left the team behind and walked along the base of Fumu with Mano and the man-children. They walked slowly west toward the sun setting over Asha. Several tired man-children asked Mano if they were “there yet?” “Almost” Mano would reply with the patience of a saint.

As they walked, everyone could hear a low, rhythmic thud. It hit every twenty seconds or so and was strong enough to make the ground vibrate.

Torches were lit as the sky darkened. Within an hour they came to a small buttress in the mountain and hiked along it. The lights of Base Camp disappeared behind them as they passed the buttress and turned right to follow its base up Fumu. The ground was now entirely snow and ice making the uphill hike difficult for the ill-equipped man-children. They whined about the cold and the pain in their feet, but Mano told them not to be such babies. The intermittent thud was much louder now and quite jarring. The sound also took on more nuance as they approached; the popping of a massive cork pulled from a bottle preceded the thud and smaller concussions followed it. “I had no idea what to expect” wrote Thornton. “We would start our ascent the next day. I had no experience mountain climbing. My capacity for fear had reached saturation. Therefore, I did not have the ability to be scared of whatever cacophonous mystery we were now approaching.”

Just when the sound seemed to be upon them, Mano yelled for everyone to stop. There was just enough light left for Hoyt and Thornton to see. They were in a narrow gully between two cliffs sticking out of the side of Fumu. They were standing on the floor of the gully, which rose gradually with the fall line of the mountain, hiking tightly along the eastern cliff. Next to them - where the gully ended at the meeting of the two cliffs - was a bald patch in the snow and ice. There was also a vision few have ever seen, but those who have forget the Seven Natural Wonders immediately. About forty feet above them on the incline was a hole in the ground. The hole was easily thirty feet in diameter, ringed by nothing but wet rock. Steam carrying dirt and loose stones blasted incessantly out of it. After the debris’ journey skyward it showered down around the great absence. Another hole of comparable size lay forty feet below them on the slope. It was quiet; dormant. Hoyt wrote:

“We looked at the sight, confused. Why had the man-children come to these holes? Why had they hiked many miles from their monasteries to be here? And then we saw it. With a loud popping sound, a boulder the size of a tugboat shot up out of the higher hole. It came forth from the ground like the stone vomited from Saturn’s belly after he ate his children. It rose, vast and featureless, about thirty feet above the ground –looking for a moment like a negative sun in the dim sky above us. Then it landed on the lip of the hole with a crash; the crash we had heard countless times from afar (my ears were in pain). We watched as the boulder rolled down the incline past us, banging against smaller rocks with all the noise of Heaven crashing to Earth. And then without a noise it disappeared in the lower hole. A few loose stones rolled and fell in behind it, and then all was silence. I looked at Thornton and he at me. Moments later the same damned boulder appeared from the higher hole and repeated its sonorous journey. I must admit, dear Journal – my only confidante - that if I have ever doubted Jehovah and considered an alternative, that was the time and Fumu was it.

The man-children took the bundle first carried on the back of the yak, then on their own shoulders, and unveiled it. Freed from its cloth was a flat grey rock roughly the size of a manhole cover. On the rock, probably drawn with another rock, was a child-like depiction of the mountain. It consisted of little more than a triangle with some wavy line portraying smoke at the top.

Since the time when Hoyt and Thornton journeyed with the man-children to the boulder, few Westerners have seen this sight. All who have come back tell the same bizarre tale of the accompanying ceremony. They wait until the giant boulder has rolled past. As quickly as they can with their battered feet, several man-children carry the flat stone with the drawing out into harm’s way, right into the path of the boulder. The drawing is placed on the ground and then the man-children run back to safety. “Inevitably the boulder makes its grand appearance once again” wrote Paul Quackenbush, anthropologist and leader of a failed expedition in 1948. “The artwork of these odd devotees may survive a few passes, but sooner or later, it is smashed to pieces.”

The Hoyt expedition was no exception. In a little more than one minute, on the third pass of the boulder, the artwork was pulverized. The man-children wailed and comforted one another with hugs. “Rejection is inevitable” said Mano. “We know that going in every season. Nonetheless, it is sad every time it happens.” Everyone commenced in their dejected hike back down to Base Camp.