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

who reflexively ducked, resulting in the rock hitting Chatham square in the mouth. The man was immediately taken off of his feet. He rolled down the incline several yards and came to rest face down. He was moaning. When turned over by Yuudai, he was all gums and blood. “So much for your heroic teeth” yelled Hoyt down to him. He could not help himself. Wilde laughed out loud. He could not help himself either. Soon more of the Americans were laughing out of pure schadenfreude. Ferguson. Drake. Even Chatham himself, possibly in shock, began to laugh. “I was not laughing” Hoyt wrote. “I did not mean it as a joke but as a cutting remark. I am not what one might call ‘funny.’” The old nasty Hoyt was apparently still there even if he was given to moments of sentimentality heretofore unseen. He had also surrounded himself with an expedition of individuals who were either just as nasty as him or had taken on his nastiness due to proximity to him. The usual camaraderie one finds in an expedition was not present here. Not at all. The laughter continued in the dead whiteness. Yuudai and the Sherpa looked on.

Then the laughter was interrupted by a noise coming from higher up the mountain. This was a new sound. It was not an eruption at the top of the mountain. Nor was it another boulder bouncing its way toward them. It was indeed coming toward them, and it was massive, but the sound lacked the intermittent banging of a rolling rock. This sound had a loud, consistent, grumbling quality to it. Fumu, unstable and nastier than these men, was clearly ready to pull another one its tricks. Ravens in the sky above them scattered in response to the coming thing.

Out of the blizzard, a giant slab of the ice and snow from higher up the mountain – easily the size and shape of Big Ben moving roof-first - came sliding toward them, digging deep into the scree as it went. It was nothing short of a glacier moving at high speed. Had it not been caked with debris picked up from the scree, they would have never seen it coming until it was right on top of them. They ran laterally to avoid its path, some men going left, others going right. The monstrosity barreled by them, improbably high and long, all the while kicking up stones and emitting a deafening din.

And then it was gone. Hoyt and his team were fortunate because the slab reached the bottom of the scree without hitting Base Camp (nor did it hit Junk’s camp for that matter). It also did not hit any climbers despite its girth and speed. But now some of the team stood on one side of a freshly cut deformation – a valley running down the fall line of the mountain, and the others stood across the valley from them. Neither group could see the fellows across from them because of the snow. Yells could not be heard properly. “Follow the cut upward!” Hoyt yelled, hoping to be heard.

Hoyt looked down the line of men on his side of the valley when he heard moans. Apparently, there was another unfortunate effect of the landslide: Thornton, the young linguist, deft climber, and exceptional documenter of the expedition, was temporarily blinded. Rocks kicked up by the passing ice had hit him in the face. The man had now covered his eyes with one arm and was swinging the other arm in front of him making sure not to bump into anything. Hoyt then realized Thornton was walking dangerously close to the fresh valley as he moved up the scree toward him. He responded to the crisis with his failsafe emotion: anger. This response was likely reasonable in his mind because he was potentially going to lose his first climber and he needed every able-bodied man in order to defeat this hill. He yelled as quickly as he could ‘Damn it, Thornton, stay to the right!’ “

These words caused Thornton to immediately turn toward, and fall into the freshly-cut valley. He rolled head over heels into the whiteness until he could not be seen at the bottom.

In his tent at the top of the scree that evening, Hoyt wrote:

Dearest Journal,

The day’s events have taught me a cutting lesson about my nature. I care about myself more than anything else in my purview with the exception of God almighty. These people around me, from Drake to Chatham to the jap, all of them are but spheres orbiting the star that is me. When a meteor (in the form of, say, a stuck yak or a rolling boulder) sets them off the course I have dictated by gravity, I am enraged because they are not serving me as they should. What an unpleasant thing to be…an angry sun.

The cost of my self-centeredness came to a head today on the mountain. Thornton wandered blindly, moaning in pain from stinging dirt in his eyes. I yelled at him – quite angrily mind you - to stay to the right so he would not fall into the valley. We needed every climber we had. His hurt eyes may have been something we could remedy, but broken bones or death from a fall would make him unsalvageable as a climber. I told him to stay “to the right.”

And there is the problem. My right was his left. I was aiming down the mountain and he was aiming up it. I did not have the capacity to take his perspective, to see the world from another point of view, to remove myself even momentarily from what the German intellectuals would call my own ‘umwelt.’ And now Thornton has a shattered pelvis and a broken arm and is being carried down the mountain by the four Sherpa we had on our side of the ice slide.

The team had several problems since the ice slab incident.