Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain
Read Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain Online
Authors: Jonathan Bloom
Hell Is Above Us
The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World’s Tallest Mountain
By Lord Kenneth Tersely
With foreword by Jonathan Bloom, Ph.D.
Hell Is Above Us
By Lord Kenneth Tersely
With Foreword by Jonathan Bloom, Ph.D.
Copyright 2011 Jonathan Bloom
Kindle Edition
Cover art by Heather Kern
Kindle Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.
This book is dedicated to Tricia, Ruby, and Jesse.
Thank you for being patient while my mind passed this rather large and oddly-shaped stone.
Table of Contents
Chapter Two: The Presidentials
Chapter Three: The Stakes Keep Climbing
Chapter Four: Fumu and the Dividing Engine
Chapter Six: The Sins of the Father
Chapter Seven: “Souls at Sea” with Gary Cooper
Chapter Eight: The Lord High Executioner
Chapter Ten: Naked, Silly, and Godless
Chapter Eleven: The Rakhiot Glacier
Chapter Twelve: A Team Divided
Chapter Thirteen: What Happened To McGee
Chapter Fifteen: The Oculus Part I
Chapter Seventeen: The Eastern Ridge
Chapter Eighteen: The Oculus Part II
PART THREE: THE DESCENT / ASCENSION
Chapter Twenty-One: The Tragedy
Chapter Twenty-Two: Return to “Civilization”
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Joy of the End
Foreword
Hell Is Above Us
wasn’t on the shelves of my local library in Maplewood, New Jersey. It was wedged in
between
the stacks, about two feet in and only inches from the floor. A well-aimed morning sunbeam lit up the book just as I wandered past looking for any printed material to read on my day off. I knelt down, made a reach and it came loose without a struggle. Brushing the dust and human hair from its green, jacketless binding, I reviewed the title and author. Both were unknown to me. A quick inspection of the inside back cover showed that no one had checked it out since 1962, almost fifty years before the writing of this foreword. How sad. Whoever Kenneth Tersely was, he had probably put his heart and soul into writing these pages and now here they were, forgotten and covered in mouse excrement. My curiosity was nothing more than a spark at that point but it was enough for me to take the book over to a nearby carrel for a quick review.
The next ten hours in that carrel proved to be a life-changing experience for me. By the time I was leaving the library that evening, my stomach was empty, my wife had left ten unrequited voicemails on my phone, and the sun which had exposed the book to me in the first place was already gone.
What was it about the book that had caused me to burn through it in one day? For one thing, it certainly was
not
the writing. Full of labored metaphors and dated, racist terms, I often found myself fighting through the language instead of being carried along by it. Tersely’s wielding of the Queen’s English reflected the pompous, defensive tone of an empire recently relieved of its dominance. The style may have worked in 1955 when it was published but it certainly doesn’t stand up to 2010 standards.
My intense experience also had nothing to do with the two men who are the focus of the book, William Hoyt and Aaron Junk. Certainly their actions were brave and their adventures breathtaking, but Hoyt and Junk seemed like horrible people; aggressively male and endlessly shadow-boxing their respective parent issues. If they were transported to the current year, I could easily see myself crossing the street to avoid them.
No. What stopped me cold was the sheer audacity of the book’s central conceit. Did Kenneth Tersely really expect us to believe there is a mountain – a
volcano
no less - taller than Everest? And yet, as I devoured the book - each page being more exciting than its predecessor - I was slowly won over. By the end I was convinced Fumu is the tallest mountain in the world, the truth about it had been kept secret by a circle of elite climbers who wanted the mountain as their personal playground, and two relatively unknown climbers had raced to be the first to reach its summit.
Believe me when I say I’m not a man easily swayed, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as this. There are some facts I almost refuse to question outright. For example, June follows May. Squares have four sides. Any number divided by itself equals one. These facts build our universe and are immovable. But recently, astronomers told us Pluto was, in fact, not a planet at all. How could that be? The nine heavenly bodies of our solar system are actually eight? The impact of this edict was incalculable to me. If such a basic building block of our universe could be wrong, then what else could be brought into question? Would the sun not rise over adult non-fiction at the library tomorrow but instead over the children’s section? Would George Washington turn out to have been the second President of the United States?
Now along comes Kenneth Tersely to tell us all Everest is not the “third pole.” Some volcano called Fumu is taller. As far as hard sells go, that had to be the hardest. But in the end, using the testimonials of mountaineers both living and dead, scientific data from respected sources, and the fruits of his own scholarly research, he convinced me.
Tersely did not fare as well convincing his contemporaries in 1955. Although he had already written and published two well-received accounts of his personal climbing experiences (
High Camp on Aconcagua
and
Dancing with The Ogre
) and written hundreds of excellent articles on mountain climbing for British and American papers, almost no one was willing to believe or support the obsessively investigated claims he put forward in his draft of
Hell Is Above Us
. There was also the fact that Tersely was in and out of hospitals during the writing of the book. Was the ailment physical or psychological? No one but his family knew and his family never spoke of it. This led to even more rumors that he was mentally unstable and Fumu was nothing more than a castle in the sky built by a lost dreamer.
The final blow to Tersely’s endeavor came from an unexpected source. In 1956, W.E. Bowman wrote the classic mountain climbing parody
The Ascent of Rumdoodle
. Some thought it was a spoof of Maurice Herzog’s canonical climbing book
Annapurna,
but it was in fact aimed directly at Tersely and Hell Is Above Us. After every back had been turned to him, from the climbing community to the publishing houses to the public at large, Tersely was brought down by the deadliest weapon of all: Wit. He finally turned to a family friend, William Parker, who owned a small publishing company in London called William Parker Books.
Hell Is Above Us
hit the shelves of a few British bookstores with an unnoticed thud. Tersely never wrote again. From then until his death from a heart attack in 1972, he stayed mostly in his London flat, rarely venturing out for a paper or tea. The experience of writing about Fumu had turned an adventurous man into a shut-in.
This new edition of
Hell Is Above Us
provides a fresh opportunity for the world to read and accept the truth. The evidence is here, in your hands. So please, sit back and enjoy the adventure. I think you may join Kenneth Tersely and me in our conviction. But there is an even more important reason for you to believe in Fumu. To reuse George Mallory’s famous quip: “Because it is there.”
Jonathan Bloom,
September 14, 2010
HELL IS ABOVE US
"I embrace hardship and privation with ecstatic delight; I want everything that the world holds; I would go to prison or to the scaffold for the sake of the experience. I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck."
-Aleister Crowley
Prelude
Highly regarded British academics, most notably those of the softer sciences, have recently theorized that humans require warmth, comforting sounds, and the nurturing smell of another’s body in order to thrive. Without such riches, humans and lower beasts tend to waste away. We have no reason to doubt such findings. For these academics are good Christian men of letters who have no reason to mislead us. Nonetheless, their hypothesis leaves us with a riddle: For how do we account for a mountain climber’s joy as he walks through empty cold space thousands of feet in the air and countless miles from family, home, and hearth? Is it masochism? Sociopathy? The query leaves me baffled, even though I myself have been known to don the Burberry, coil the rope, and leave the world for the lonely, icy shore between sky and earth that is the Himalaya.
Unable to answer, I posed the question to the legendary, retired Sherpa Chhiri Tendi as we sat sipping tea on the terrace of his humbly-appointed Phoenix, Arizona home.
“
How the hell should I know?” he responded, squinting into the desert. “You said on the phone you wanted me to tell you about my first experience climbing Fumu. I can do that, but if you’d rather I try to explain why some men enjoy being cold and distant, I can give it a try. But you’re the British one so you probably know a lot more about such things.”