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

extension, the magic rope becomes a thirty-foot long pipe.” Now Chhiri Tendi was interested. Wilde had a look on his face like he had heard this ten times already. The wind howled outside.

“So the climber holds onto the handles and is lifted up the difficult portion of the mountain?” Chhiri Tendi asked?

Drake responded “Precisely. And not only that, but I have added a small device in the middle detecting pressure in the air surrounding the outermost band. Using this, it can detect within a small margin of error whether it has reached the top of a ledge. Or at least, it can tell when it has reached a large enough space for a person to find purchase.”

“But how can it stay balanced? You have a grown man thirty feet up in the air holding onto a pole that is not planted into the ground below.”

“Fair question. I have not solved that issue. People will have to hold the ‘rope’ at its base while someone is ascending. And then when the penultimate man has reached the ledge above, he and the others on the ledge can hold onto the rope and the last man can be pulled up by the retracting rope held by the people above!” Drake said this last part with his arms gesturing toward the device on his lap, like a magician’s assistant pointing to the bouquet of flowers just taken out of what seemed like an empty hat.

“Let me tell you the first problem of three with that device” Wilde chimed in. “Even if it does work, it is notmountain climbing. It is taking an elevator at a department store. My wife can do it. We might as well have taken our spouses with us on this trip.” Drake rolled his eyes.

“Secondly, it will not work. And thirdly, Mr. Drake took…”

“That’s Doctor Drake thank you very much!”

“Thirdly, Doctor Drake took apart all of our compasses in order to make this magic rope contraption work. He convinced the group that the benefit of this Mary Shelley monstrosity was greater than the cost of no compasses. He argued that the odds of us getting lost before we stumble across you, Hoyt, and Yuudai – who would still have compasses - were slim to none. So much for that.”

Drake bowed his head in defeat.

There was silence for a spell and then Chhiri Tendi tried to break the tension. “Well, we need to get in touch with Hoyt and Yuudai right away and let them know our situation. They will want to find us.” Chhiri Tendi took out the radio. It was an early model handie-talkie, standard United States army issue, turned on by extending the antenna. But that was a problem. Chhiri Tendi saw that the radio seemed to be missing its antenna. He was utterly perplexed.

“My fault again” Drake said sheepishly. “I needed the antenna too. I took it off the radio before the team became separated.”

The dreams of a mountain climber are laced with panic. He will picture toast and jam in his kitchen far away, steam rising from a cup of tea, a kiss on the head from a yawning, awakening spouse - her somnambulant feet shuffling along the floor - and perhaps a pet licking his hand. The sun is shining outside. His newspaper shows a headline unreadable in the world of dreams. But as all headlines are, it is tragic. Man’s aggression against Man. A border violated. The ire of a population unhinged. This is all it takes to make the dream change. Everything in the room succumbs to instant freezing. The dog’s tongue is stuck like cold metal to his palm. His wife’s kiss stings on his thinning locks. The coffee no longer evaporates but instead cracks along with the mug. His toast and jam are now grey slabs of till. Fear sets in. Then, like the coffee, the entire scene cracks and the climber is awake in his frigid tent.

There was no wind outside when Hoyt and Yuudai got up on September fourth at six in the morning. Everything had died down. The temperature was colder than usual, as if Phaethon had again misguided father Apollo’s sun-chariot off to the farthest reaches of the universe. But other than the temperature, the horrid weather had passed. They got dressed, ate a small breakfast, broke camp, and struck out eastward along the top of the scree.

Along the way, they saw the place where the mammoth chunk of ice had likely cut loose. It seemed to have broken off all the way up at the Eastern Ridge, thousands of feet up. Where the ridge met the sweeping snowfields at its base, there were snow drifts literally one hundred feet deep. A section of one of the snow drifts seems to have collapsed under its own weight and carried with it the super-compressed snow in its belly. So compressed was that snow, it had become ice. The rest of the snow drift fell several hundred feet down the mountain, but the ice had gone farther and faster, blasting away snow and earth as it came down. Even though hours of snow had continued to fall in the blizzard after the incident, the trail of damage it left was still evident.

The sun shone down, truly one of the treasures of the southern route. The temperature became much warmer. Visibility was endless. After only an hour of hiking perpendicular to the fall line, Hoyt and Yuudai came to a point in their route where they could see several miles ahead of them. It was clear from that vantage point they were not going to come across the rest of their team if they continued to move in that direction. Wherever they were, it was not east. Hoyt told Yuudai they were going to continue ascending. The risk was obvious to both of them, but Hoyt was desperate and willing to face almost Certain Death. He also did not much care