Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (2 page)

It was a capital point (if I understood it correctly). I had traveled from my cottage in Kingsbridge, England to visit Chhiri Tendi for the sole purpose of filling in some rather murky spaces in the tale of Fumu before I shared it with the world. I know that few will believe me when I share the epic of the giant volcano that consumed more lives than Chronos himself, but this Sherpa Chhiri Tendi is respected by the climbing community and if I could get the old bloke to go on the record as saying that Fumu is the tallest mountain in the world, then by Jove it is! I turned on my tape recording device and asked Chhiri Tendi to begin. He lit a pipe, looked west, and began to speak. For a moment, I could have sworn that the desert air was dropping in temperature…

The rest of the team remains at lower camps as planned, leaving Zachary Hoover and me to summit Fumu together. My excitement is so great at this point it’s almost shameful to me, and I’m sure sahib Hoover’s spirits are in a similar state. Our ascent has been uneventful and rapid so far today. It’s September 1st, 1939 and the sky is cloudless across Nepal. The air is cold, dry, and like it usually is in the icy mountains, scentless. The weather has played along well since the beginning of the month, the cold has been tolerable, and the wind mild enough to avoid any tragic tumbles over cliff edges. The only unpleasant characteristic of the place is the noise coming from above us. Stampedes of sound shake the Earth, rumble the gut, and the send the testicles into hiding. It’s the sound of lava, steam, and smoke being wretched up by the mountain we plan to conquer this very day.

When he gets into a rhythm, this young daredevil Hoover is known not to break it. He is thrilled with the pace of our ascent and does not want to slow things down for any reason at all, not even to keep measurements like altitude and barometric pressure. Without these measurements, all the two of us know about our location is that we require supplemental oxygen and the peak – eternally hidden in a black cloud – is just above us.

I’m climbing in back, not because I’m slow, but because I take the safety of my Western customers seriously. I never want Hoover to be out of my sight. Whenever a customer is missing, even for a fraction of a moment, I get a stomach cramp and sweat starts to bead on my brow. Ask anyone; that sense of responsibility along with my disarming sense of humor makes me stand out. If these qualities weren’t enough to draw others near, I’m also physically impressive. I’m tall for my people in Thame, Nepal, and taller even than Hoover. Some would say that I’m handsome – so handsome, in fact, I have a knife wound in my lower-left back, put there by a man who feared the wives of our village, including his own, were too infatuated with me. Many of the wives are infatuated with me. But it has nothing to do with my looks. It has to do with my sense of humor and the fact that my dancing is so exceptional, it gets every woman in the room pregnant.

Getting back to the climb, I’m also falling behind Hoover because I’m busy telling him filthy jokes through my mask. Most Sherpa hum the folk music of places like Pangboche to relax. But I prefer cursing like a stevedore using the Queen’s English. I tell joke after joke to Hoover, most of them picked up from British, German, Swiss, and Swedish base camps, all of them involving some combination of priests, Irishmen, and cocktail waitresses. I know that the timing of the punch lines is horrible, broken up between huge inhalations of oxygen and eruptions from on high. But I am telling them as much to entertain myself as to entertain my sahib. Hoover is a polite man and gives out at least a brief guffaw in response to each gag.

Since breaking camp that morning, we had been hiking on a gradual rise that was surrounded by gentle inclines on both sides. It is completely safe, non-technical climbing. We are also hiking along a northeastern face so some morning sun reaches us.

At about 11am, Hoover rounds a corner that brings us to a due-north-facing wall of ice. Our wide path turns into an icy precipice slightly narrower than our backpacks. The sun disappears. The wall over our heads rises and disappears into the dark cloud above us and the same wall beneath our boots drops about eight hundred feet to the volcano’s vast, extinct throat. Using ice picks and moving very slowly, we proceed out into the shade of the monstrous cliff. My jokes stop immediately. The only sound is the high wind and the irregular rhythm of nearby eruptions.

Each step is calculated and then re-calculated. As footfalls come down, strength of the ice is tested. Body weight gradually shifts to favor crampons on the leading foot. Then the process starts again. Every other forward movement is accompanied by a piton driven into the wall next to us, a carabiner pulled through the piton’s eye hole, a rope pulled through the carabiner, and finally the rope secured to our respective belts. We move forward with the sluggishness of hour hands. Hoover may be a daredevil, but he is able to attain patience at moments like this and focus obsessively on details. He sees the possibility of death even through the rolling boil of his youth.

We agree to stop and take a break when the ledge takes a gentle turn to the left. The turn proves difficult because the icy wall slopes slightly outward as it rises over the ledge, forcing us to lean into the vast nothingness of space. When we finally stop, I am about four yards behind Hoover. I take off my mitts and oxygen mask for a moment and begin to eat a piece of frozen bread I have stored in my pocket. My stomach is grumbling and I devour the food quickly despite its unsavory state. It fights my teeth every step of the way and cracks into pieces too large to swallow. Finishing the morsel, I notice that the world around me is spinning. I also notice the sound of my own gasping. My chest feels as if it is full of mosquitoes all biting in time with my inhalations. If I don’t breathe canned air again soon, I will collapse. The mask is in my mitts when I notice an unusual look on Hoover’s face. His own mask temporarily resting on the top of his head, Hoover’s mouth is open, his icy brow is furrowed, and his eyes are squinting and gazing out at a point on the horizon. I look out to see the source of Hoover’s confusion.

It is Everest. We are staring at her southern face, reflecting the morning sun so brightly it looks as if the mountain is emitting light. I can make out the Khumbu Icefall just above Base Camp, the saddle of the South Kol, and the dreaded step just below the summit that would later be named for the Brit Edmund Hillary. I estimate Everest is roughly fifty miles away, which is a small distance when talking on a Himalayan scale. I feel like I can practically reach out and touch it.

But I can tell it is not Everest’s beauty or proximity that is holding my sahib’s attention. What is making our minds completely rearrange is the fact that we seem to be looking down at Everest. How could this be?

“
Im-ossible,” Hoover says (The letter p is difficult to pronounce when your lips are frozen). “A trick of the eye. We’re not even into the cloud of this -ountain yet. I think we just need to -ut our -asks -ack on.”

I agree and race to introduce oxygen back into my lungs. When the abundant air does pour down my throat, the uncertainty does not go away. Everest still looks to be slightly below us. On Hoover’s command, we decide to ignore what we have seen. The naked eye is not a reliable tool for such a task.

As if on cue, an American military plane flies at eye level over the ridge we have just ascended, likely on its way from India to China (“Over the hump” as the Brits would later call it when the war came). The roar of its engines could not be heard until it cleared the ridge and now it is all we can hear. The plane is not in good shape. Fumu has apparently spit a vast amount of lava at its left wing and now the entire aircraft is wobbling. Hoover and I watch as it pitches and rolls off into the distant blue, trailing black smoke and gradually losing altitude. We watch for several minutes, mute. Then we see the plane make contact with the Hillary Step on Everest and spin off behind the mountain, out of sight.

That plane had been losing altitude. And after many miles, it had hit a point near the top of Everest. There is now no question left in my mind about Fumu’s height.

Hoover speaks.

“
Chhiri. We’re…”

Those would be Hoover’s last words. The cliff next to him shoots out a high-pressured, horizontal geyser of black smoke and ash, which cleanly detaches and jettisons Hoover’s head far out into the rarefied Himalayan atmosphere. His corpse remains tied to the wall. I do not have time or breath to scream before the wall around the steam explodes into a flood of lava. The sound hurts my ears. It removes Hoover’s body from the ledge and creates a hole in the ice wall about the size of a train tunnel. As the ice evaporates, the hole grows larger, quickly. I have to backtrack to get away from the ever-growing danger, but now I have an additional handicap. Somehow, the hemp rope attaching me to Hoover manages not to break, which speaks well of the rope manufacturers, but puts me in an unpleasant situation. Hoover’s headless body is hanging four yards below me, on fire.

For a moment, I
feel myself give up. I stop moving and shut my eyes tightly. There is no way a person can live through such a scenario. Hoover’s corpse is pulling me off the ledge as if asking me to join the dead. I am attached to the wall, but the presence of the lava flow is causing the air to warm up and the ice screws in the wall to lose their purchase. I am suffocating, my hyperventilation being arrested by my regulated oxygen supply.

Raw emotion is tamed by reason. You see, I have a family, and I wish to return home to see my wife, son, and daughter. I decide that my only option is to cut the rope that attaches me to Hoover and the wall, discard my equipment except for some food and water, and run for safety.

Things become more complicated before I can execute my plan. Several yards down, the tank of compressed oxygen that is still attached to Hoover’s body explodes, obliterating what is left of Hoover, as well as the part of the ledge upon which I am standing. Now I am hanging by my waist, and the ice screws that hold me are popping out of the melting ice wall one by one, each dropping me down further. I look around helplessly at the scene of destruction. The lava flow has subsided somewhat, the hole now billowing black smoke and still growing larger. The ledge above me is gone. Hanging from my rope, I feel like an abandoned marionette.

Finally, I catch a lucky break. When Hoover’s oxygen tank exploded, it gouged out a man-sized part of the cliff right near me, complete with flat ledge and depth for a backpack. I patiently begin to swing over to the absence. Once I’ve gathered enough momentum, I’m able to land on the newly-formed shelf, gather my wits, and plan me next steps.

After about an hour of catching what little breath is available to me, I remove my backpack and stuff my pockets with food and water. I then manage to rappel down to a nearly horizontal couloir below me that leads back to the ridge where the day had begun. The rappel is treacherous because I’m low on oxygen, and the experience an hour previous has placed me in a state of shock.

Over the course of the day, I descend to the nearest camp, Camp Four, with almost no equipment. Each breath feels pointless. Just a lot of pain in my chest and no pay-off. Movement has to be slow, even though my mind keeps urging me to hurry before frostbite, hypothermia, or hypoxia finish me off. When I reach the camp, I collapse into my tent and sleep for an entire day. My dreams are full of death and fire. After eating a meal the next morning, I descend to Camp Three, where several more members of the expedition are waiting. I share with other expedition members the news of Hoover’s grim demise and the failure to reach the top. Camp after camp we descend, gathering more men and equipment. The team members at Base Camp are waiting as the miserable line of souls come down from the mountain. “A funeral march” as one climber put it.

Chhiri Tendi goes home to his village and basks in the presence of his wife and children. To this day, he has not shared the details of what happened on the mountain with them.

Chhiri Tendi is now 51-years-old. He is basking in the warmth of the Arizona sunset, looking down at the pipe he is tapping on the edge of his ashtray. He has been kind enough to share all of these recollections with me even though his countenance betrays a man who would prefer to remain in the present. Although his hair shows a dusting of white and his face is weathered by the elements, Chhiri Tendi looks about twenty years younger than he actually is. He explains his youthfulness thusly: “It’s because of all of the whoopee I’m getting.” He laughs at his own bawdiness, even though his wife, who is handing us tea, looks displeased.

As his laughter subsides, Chhiri Tendi stares down at the cup in his hand. It seems as if he is seeing something much grander – like Everest from the ledge, moments before the world went haywire.

“
To use the language of your country,” he says to me “it was a total
cock-up
at thirty-thousand feet. I’m lucky to be here telling you about it.”

But the Hoover expedition was only the beginning of the story. Chhiri Tendi was not done with Fumu after that. Nor was Fumu done with him.

With the beginning of the tale finally filled in, I bid the old Sherpa a good day and returned to my home in England. I now had a solid grasp on the
entire
story of all three players: Hoyt, Junk, and Chhiri Tendi. I was ready at last to put the final touches on the book that would bring into question some of the most sacrosanct scientific assumptions known to Man.