Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (29 page)

Once bellies were filled and burns soothed, Hoyt gave the word to proceed. They crossed the moonscape of the moraine within two hours and came to the base of the mountain. There stood Junk’s Advanced Base Camp; a series of tan silk Mummery tents and prayer flags huddled together in a circle, attended to by a large team of porters. Two of the porters stood side by side and motionless watching the approach of Hoyt’s team. Hoyt wrote:

“
One was holding a lowball of scotch, the other a deck of cards. Their angle of loll suggested acute inebriation. I had no question in my mind as to whose camp this was.
The anger built in me as we neared the outpost. I began to hike faster as we approached the few Nepalese minding the camp. When I reached them, I did not waste a moment with formalities, nor did I ask if this was the camp of Junk. Who else’s could it be? No, I jumped right in to asking the two questions I cared about. First: ‘Did he go up or around?’ Thornton translated. The coolies pointed to the northeast. Just as I thought. Junk was gambling again, taking the time to go all the way around the base in order to take the “easier” route. Then I asked my second question: ‘Which tent is Junk’s?’ Thornton translated again. The men pointed to the tent furthest away from us. I wasted no time. Junk had been dogging me for years now and I had only returned the favor in little ways like slighting him on the Presidential hike money and having him professionally punched. I was ready to provide another small repayment (that is, until it was time for the enormous repayment of reaching the summit first). The wall in the cave could have killed several people. Junk had stepped over the limit. I calmly walked over to his tent, untied the lantern that had been attached to my pack, and spilled the remaining contents all over the place. Not much was needed, given the highly flammable material these tents are made of. The coolies began to run toward me followed by my own men – Chhiri Tendi, Thornton, Drake, Wilde, Ferguson, and the jap. They were too late to stop me. I had already struck the match I had held in my hand all the way across the moraine. I dropped it and the effect was instantaneous. Junk’s canvas tent went up in a fireball. I am a man usually drawn to cold, but at this moment, the heat on my face and the joy in my heart were turkey and stuffing on Thanksgiving.”

According to other people’s writings, no one said a word to Hoyt about the tent burning. They were deathly afraid of his temper and besides, there was nothing that could be said about it anyway. Junk’s porters scooped up snow in cooking pots and threw it on the fire. Smoke and steam billowed up and out over the moraine, a small simulacrum of the gargantuan black cloud roiling 30,000 feet up. The team watched the tent burn and then walked back to their equipment.

Hoyt’s plans had placed his own Base Camp only seventy yards away from where they found Junk’s to be. He chose to keep that plan. They used most of the day’s remaining sunlight to construct the camp. Once the camp was complete, Hoyt left Drake and Chhiri Tendi while he and Thornton left the team behind and walked along the base of Fumu with Mano and the man-children. They walked slowly west toward the sun setting over Asha. Several tired man-children asked Mano if they were “there yet?” “Almost” Mano would reply with the patience of a saint.

As they walked, everyone could hear a low, rhythmic thud. It hit every twenty seconds or so and was strong enough to make the ground vibrate.

Torches were lit as the sky darkened. Within an hour they came to a small buttress in the mountain and hiked along it. The lights of Base Camp disappeared behind them as they passed the buttress and turned right to follow its base up Fumu. The ground was now entirely snow and ice making the uphill hike difficult for the ill-equipped man-children. They whined about the cold and the pain in their feet, but Mano told them not to be such babies. The intermittent thud was much louder now and quite jarring. The sound also took on more nuance as they approached; the popping of a massive cork pulled from a bottle preceded the thud and smaller concussions followed it. “I had no idea what to expect” wrote Thornton. “We would start our ascent the next day. I had no experience mountain climbing. My capacity for fear had reached saturation. Therefore, I did not have the ability to be scared of whatever cacophonous mystery we were now approaching.”

Just when the sound seemed to be upon them, Mano yelled for everyone to stop. There was just enough light left for Hoyt and Thornton to see. They were in a narrow gully between two cliffs sticking out of the side of Fumu. They were standing on the floor of the gully, which rose gradually with the fall line of the mountain, hiking tightly along the eastern cliff. Next to them - where the gully ended at the meeting of the two cliffs - was a bald patch in the snow and ice. There was also a vision few have ever seen, but those who have forget the Seven Natural Wonders immediately. About forty feet above them on the incline was a hole in the ground. The hole was easily thirty feet in diameter, ringed by nothing but wet rock. Steam carrying dirt and loose stones blasted incessantly out of it. After the debris’ journey skyward it showered down around the great absence. Another hole of comparable size lay forty feet below them on the slope. It was quiet; dormant. Hoyt wrote:

“
We looked at the sight, confused. Why had the man-children come to these holes
?
Why had they hiked many miles from their monasteries to be here? And then we saw it. With a loud popping sound, a boulder the size of a tugboat shot up out of the higher hole. It came forth from the ground like the stone vomited from Saturn’s belly after he ate his children. It rose, vast and featureless, about thirty feet above the ground –looking for a moment like a negative sun in the dim sky above us. Then it landed on the lip of the hole with a crash; the crash we had heard countless times from afar (my ears were in pain). We watched as the boulder rolled down the incline past us, banging against smaller rocks with all the noise of Heaven crashing to Earth. And then without a noise it disappeared in the lower hole. A few loose stones rolled and fell in behind it, and then all was silence. I looked at Thornton and he at me. Moments later
the same damned boulder
appeared from the higher hole and repeated its sonorous journey. I must admit, dear Journal – my only confidante - that if I have ever doubted Jehovah and considered an alternative, that was the time and Fumu was it.

The man-children took the bundle first carried on the back of the yak, then on their own shoulders, and unveiled it. Freed from its cloth was a flat grey rock roughly the size of a manhole cover. On the rock, probably drawn with another rock, was a child-like depiction of the mountain. It consisted of little more than a triangle with some wavy line portraying smoke at the top.

Since the time when Hoyt and Thornton journeyed with the man-children to the boulder, few Westerners have seen this sight. All who have come back tell the same bizarre tale of the accompanying ceremony. They wait until the giant boulder has rolled past. As quickly as they can with their battered feet, several man-children carry the flat stone with the drawing out into harm’s way, right into the path of the boulder. The drawing is placed on the ground and then the man-children run back to safety. “Inevitably the boulder makes its grand appearance once again” wrote Paul Quackenbush, anthropologist and leader of a failed expedition in 1948. “The artwork of these odd devotees may survive a few passes, but sooner or later, it is smashed to pieces.”

The Hoyt expedition was no exception. In a little more than one minute, on the third pass of the boulder, the artwork was pulverized. The man-children wailed and comforted one another with hugs. “Rejection is inevitable” said Mano. “We know that going in every season. Nonetheless, it is sad every time it happens.” Everyone commenced in their dejected hike back down to Base Camp. After a quick meal, the man-children would continue on even after that, hiking in the night all the way through the cave and back to their prams.

Mano did not turn to leave the area of the boulder even though everyone else had begun down climbing. He was staring up at Fumu’s peak which lay above the cliffs. Hoyt asked him what he was waiting for. “Milk” was Mano’s response. “We do this journey over and over and we know rejection of our gift awaits us every time. But we do it anyway, to show our infinite love. And maybe, just maybe, one day, she will surprise us with a geyser of lactation, sating the world with pale nurturance.” He let out a sigh. “Not this time I suppose. Sergei, stop touching yourself!” One of the man-children who had been groping himself behind a boulder skulked down the slope. “Kids” Mano grumbled.

Back at camp, they ate dinner in the cold, clear night. Because they would not down climb the scree, this would be their last meal at the base. Come four in the morning, they would awake and begin going up.

The team fed Mano and the other man-children, filling them deeply with eggs and rashers of bacon so the return trip under the Qila Pass would not be too draining. Hoyt still did not like these “bent primitives and their pagan deity,” but they were God’s creatures and could not be sent off tired and starving. Before striking out across the moraine in the dark, Mano put his arm around Hoyt and took him aside. He then asked Hoyt to reconsider the plan to climb Fumu. He did not need to do this, he said. There were other ways to conquer the world, like for instance planting your seed. Mano cited Hoyt’s favorite book. Deuteronomy: “Be blessed in the fruit of your fields, and in the fruit of your cattle, and in the fruit of your body.” Nowhere, Mano pointed out, does it say “be fruitful in your conquests.” Stay at home, Mano said, and have more children. Walk away from his god, Fumu, and be at peace.

Hoyt did not even consider these words but instead asked how Mano knew The Bible. Mano explained that he picked up bits and pieces from other wayward travelers who had tried to convert them. In an interview a few years after the Fumu expedition, Mano recalled:

“
I pointed out to Hoyt that the Jacob and Isaac story seemed wrong to me. Shouldn’t the ‘right’ answer have been ‘Sorry God, I want to do your bidding, but I love this child and cannot bring harm to him.’ That seems to be the moral response, more so than ‘Okay! I’ll kill him! Now where’s my sharpest knife?’ Also, can you imagine how uncomfortable things were between father and son after Yahweh said Jacob didn’t have to go through with it? ‘So, son, how about those Washington Senators?’ Ha! Not a good moment in their relationship. Hoyt did not seem interested in discussing theology with me. He shook my hand and wished me luck.”

Mano finished by saying “Have more children…and I guess be a better father than Jacob.” With that, the man-children turned their backs to the Hoyt expedition. Many were whining about their exhaustion. Mano shushed them. They walked off into the darkness across the vast expanse of stones, their torches disappearing under the Qila Pass.

Hoyt turned now to Fumu, looking up at the sporadic orange explosions coming from within the clouds at the summit. Each time they flashed, the mountain underneath would light up. In those flashes, Hoyt could see the route they were to take starting the next morning: up to the right at first over the scree and Southeast Face, then a sharp turn to the left along the bottom of the Eastern Ridge, crossing Rauff’s Maw, and then a final push up into the history books.

The mountain continued to spit fire and ash in the darkness. Hoyt writes:

“
I looked at my team members and said ‘Gentlemen, Hell is above us!’ No one seemed to hear me, perhaps because they were too busy cleaning up dinner and preparing themselves for sleep. At least no one responded as if they had heard. I decided to repeat myself because it seemed like a poetic sentiment worth sharing. This time I said it louder. ‘Gentlemen, Hell is above us!’ Many turned to me upon the second pronouncement but looked confused. Perhaps they did hear me this first time and could not figure out why I had repeated myself? In the end, my words had far less impact than I had hoped.”

Chapter Eleven
:
The Rakhiot Glacier

In the pre-dawn hours of September the first, Junk’s team consumed a hearty breakfast of beans, sardines, and coffee. So exceptionally frigid and dry was the morning many of them donned layers originally intended only for the summit. Gabardine coats were worn over wool jumpers and trousers, flannel shirts, and silk underwear. Hareskin mitts and puttees over boots protected extremities. Junk wore four pairs of socks! Sun goggles, wool hats, and scarves protected heads from cold and sun. Pitons, carabiners, ice pegs, ice axes, and ropes were placed on belts and slung over shoulders. The Sherpa also carried tents, food, sleeping bags, and other supplies. The cumulative effect of breakfast, clothing, and equipment made everyone feel like battleship anchors. And it was in this heavy state that Junk’s team began to climb Fumu.

Junk’s route up the mountain started out much like it had on Everest with the scaling of an icefall. The Rakhiot Glacier pushes its way down the northern side of the mountain, providing the only interruption in the scree ringing the bottom of Fumu. It is like the steep, stretched staircase of a Mayan temple, and it leads up to the lip of the Icy Bellows from the rocky moraine below. These “stairs” move and break away without warning. Loud snapping can be heard at random intervals followed by seracs the size of city buildings falling into the hidden depths of the glacier. The force generated by these large objects hitting one another leads to the physical process of
sublimation
; ice is converted directly from a solid to a gas, skipping the liquid stage entirely. As a result, steam rises all around. Atop the glacier at Camp One that night, Morrow would write: “The icefall offers a visual paradox, what the Europeans call an “impossible object.” You hike atop the glacier, but you are also not ‘atop’ it because there are seracs above you and below you. There is no reliable horizontal plane, no reliable horizon, no floor.” The goal was to make it up this impossible object on the first day and establish Camp One near the lip of the Icy Bellows. They would then climb down and back up twice more in order to acclimate. On the fourth day, September the fourth, they would strike out from Camp One and make their way along the eastern lip of the Icy Bellows. Halfway to the Eastern Ridge, they would establish Camp Two, further taming the unruly mountain.