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

as quickly as their physical exhaustion would let them, but were also careful not to put themselves into a perilous situation. They stopped short of the edge. Junk stood a healthy fifteen feet back, unraveled the rope from over his shoulder and tied one end around his waist. He threw the other end to Pasang Dolma and then lay flat on his belly, digging his crampons and axe into the ice. Pasang Dolma wrapped the other end of the rope around his own waist until there was little slack. He moved slowly to the edge of the deep, echoing schrund. Removing his backpack and mitts with the utmost care, Pasang Dolma sidestepped down the edge of the schrund until the angle became too great for him to proceed. There he positioned himself roughly one yard above and to the side of Morrow. He rested his right hip against the ice and planted his crampons into the ice, one boot placed several feet in front of the other. Seen from the other side of the schrund he would have looked like an Egyptian illustration of a man walking. The American below him was frozen with terror. The fall had landed him in such a position his back was to the cliff, his front facing out over the chasm. An unpleasant vista. His trousers, attached to the ice axe, were riding up his undercarriage, supporting all of his weight. He was moaning now – a low, sad keening - and he was refusing to put out his arm despite Pasang Dolma’s firm commands he do so. The Sherpa did not ask for long. He took a calculated risk, bending his knees and back, moving his arms to full extension and swiping aggressively at Morrow’s jacket. His left hand found purchase and began to pull. Morrow screamed and flailed his legs. By a stroke of luck, one of Morrow’s crampons made a fruitful dig into the ice and he was able to rise several feet. With that, Pasang Dolma was able to grab the man with both hands and lift him up. Junk pulled on the rope while the other two men half fell and half stumbled backwards up the edge of the schrund. When they were up, all three fell into the snow and gasped for air.

Most of the team had caught up by now. They gathered around Morrow who remained on the ground for quite some time, crying. It was easily five minutes before his first word came, and when it came, it was garbled by chattering teeth and frozen lips.

“Craps.”

Their route was destroyed. The bergschrund was capacious, spanning the entire width of the glacier. Without that ice bridge, they would have to trek a half mile to the west in order to get to the other side. Climbing back down was not a better option; they were only five hundred vertical feet from Camp One and forty-five hundred from Base Camp. So they would press on, around the schrund and then up.

Morrow had gone quite barmy. He babbled, producing words that did not go together at all. “Take me to the warm crevasse! It’s time to be the troglodyte we all were! But no hieroglyphs or she’ll bleed.” He went on with these half-cackled ramblings while River Leaf and Zeigler helped him up. “The man was still shaking and looking around confused,” Zeigler wrote in his journal that night. “I couldn’t understand most of what he said because he was mumbling and chuckling madly. I would pick up the occasional word. ‘Forget’ came up a lot, as did ‘warm.’ But the rest sure seemed like gibberish to me.” Junk walked up and slapped Morrow. He told him he was sorry for the terrible experience he just went through. Junk said he even felt a little responsible because Morrow would not have been in that spot had not Junk invited him on the expedition and suggested the craps game. But damn it, Morrow would have to pull himself together. They could not walk him around the schrund and then up to Camp One. He would have to walk himself. When River Leaf and Zeigler let go of his arms, Morrow stayed upright, albeit still shaking and going on at the mouth. The team could proceed.

The thought of resuming must have been devastating for everyone given they had just lost a colleague. None could see the body of Fenimore. Some of the Sherpa hiked over to parts of the crevasse edge that were sharp enough to offer a view straight down, but still they could not see their fallen friend. There was no light down there, and the scarce light that did make it down suggested the whole schrund curved as it descended. The bottom was likely somewhere right under them. There would be no retrieval of the body. As usually happens on the ascent of a mountain, the body would remain where it had fallen.

They hiked west around the crevasse. The east had been a shorter route, but also uneven and blocked by seracs. The west was practically a snow field, albeit a long one. They hiked single file, at least ten yards down from the crevasse that had taken Fenimore. The team’s greatest mind – the one who was uncanny with routes and maps – had given way to some kind of insanity. Whether it was temporary or permanent, no one knew. Morrow himself would have been the most qualified to figure that out. The best they could do was help him along and hope he would recover with food and rest. River Leaf guided him. He still talked under his breath, but he did say some occasionally lucid if rather odd things. One specifically had to do with a need for “the medicinal qualities of warmth.” He pleaded with the River Leaf to steer him towards warmth. She reassured him a warm tent would comfort him for a short while at Camp One. He became frustrated and