Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (46 page)

But in the moments when the cloud eased its grip on Chhiri Tendi’s vision, the items that truly captured his attention were the fumaroles. Conical towers rose up in impossible angles. Most were narrow, tall, and black. Some easily reached a height of twenty feet. They presented like sinister, giant ant hills. Ones that had been spawned by recent eruptions continued to belch black smoke from their tops. Older formations did nothing but erode at an imperceptible pace. Chhiri Tendi would catch an eruption out of the corner of his eye and witness lava pour down the steep slopes of Fumu. But again, the liquid would only make it a short distance before solidifying into black rock, and then snow would land on it, sticking in colder sections and melting in others. The surface of a distant planet would be more welcoming. Hostility and Volatility ruled here, utterly uncontested.

The pack weighed Chhiri Tendi down, yet he felt a lightness of step he could not explain. In no way should this lightness be confused with joy. He was
in agony
; much closer to dead than to vibrant. But he felt this lightness nonetheless, making his steps slightly easier even though his body was doing battle with other sorrows.

Clouds blocked his sight entirely. He had no idea where to go. He could not simply follow the ridge back down because the ridge no longer existed. The clouded top of the mountain did not have the luxury of such obvious features as ridges by which to judge location. The top was vague, impossible to map, visible but then disappearing too quickly to estimate coordinates. Even if you could get your bearings between cloudy gusts, the lava flow would change the shape of the landscape around you moment by moment. So really, in the cloud, there was no state for a living organism to be in other than lost.

“
All I kept thinking was I was in the deepest of shit” Chhiri Tendi recalls. “This was really ridiculous. No money or sense of loyalty was worth this. Why did I continue to drag myself forward? I could have turned and at least tried to find my way out. I was pretty sure I would be dead from exposure to chaos within a few hours.”

But then all thoughts of that sort went away as the clouds cleared for a moment and he took in what was happening roughly forty feet ahead of him. In the short period of time Chhiri Tendi had to focus his eyes and survey his surroundings before the clouds obscured his sight again, he saw Junk had caught up with Hoyt. The two colossi were fighting at a pace hampered by their pains. Punches and kicks came painstakingly slowly. Kicks resulted in the kicker losing his balance and stumbling backward. Punches landed like sacks of potatoes placed gently on a kitchen counter by the lady of the house just returned from market.

But the brief sighting of the two men fighting was not the most fascinating thing to Chhiri Tendi. No, what was most fascinating was the two men’s odd relationship with the ground below them…

Chapter Eighteen: The Oculus Part II

During the day the cave was a deep, haunting blue and in fact quite lovely. At night it became the darkest place on God’s Earth. It seemed haunted. Wind blowing up from the massive hole in the middle of the cave made whistling sounds that were communications from the Dead who had shared a common Doom long ago.

River Leaf had set up her tent and shared it with McGee, the latter remaining mindful and respectful of her gender at all times. McGee spent his waking hours despondent, waiting for the end. River Leaf spent hers thinking, looking up at the Oculus, sizing up the walls, testing the integrity of the ice floor. She did not seem to have any plan, but she was not going to stop thinking until she did, or until death pre-empted her. “Why does she bother” McGee wrote. “With time thats [sic] left, she should do like me and think about good stuff from her life.” But McGee was probably not ruminating on the joys of his life as much as he claimed, for most of his entries from the cave are more of the “Oh my God, we are going to die” sort.

At one point during their imprisonment, McGee wondered aloud whether Junk might make it to the summit. River Leaf apparently did not even allow McGee to finish the thought before snapping “Who cares? He betrayed you.” McGee became angry. Just as he could not claim to understand her culture and her take on the world, so should she refrain from judging his relationship with Junk. He completely approved of his friend’s decision to press on to the top, so why shouldn’t she?

River Leaf may have intended to answer, but the answer was interrupted by four men falling through the Oculus one by one. The first tried to grip the edge of the Oculus while passing through it. That failed and he fell past McGee and River Leaf, screaming into the volcano’s dead mouth. The scream disappeared into the distance as the other three men individually landed in their turn on the lip of the mouth, only feet away from where McGee was sitting. One kept sliding right past McGee and made it far enough to slam into a wall of the cave. A shower of ice chunks and snow fell in after them. By the angle and location at which they landed, it seemed they had been moving at a very high speed when they hit the Oculus and dropped through it. Had they, like McGee, slid down the Icy Bellows from a great height and not arrested their fall? That scenario was rather likely.

All was quiet for several minutes. The three fallers moaned, thereby ensuring our heroes they were not dead. According to McGee’s notes, the one near the wall sat up first, but did not dare stand up too quickly. After a few more minutes the other two sat up as well, arms wrapped around bent legs. McGee and River Leaf recognized each one as they sat up. They were the dyspeptic Sherpa. But McGee and River Leaf could not understand why the Sherpa were wearing stuffed cobras around their necks.

From a sitting position, in a slurred voice clearly experimenting with English for the first time, one of the fallers began to announce, “We are Nepalese Co-…” but another one interrupted him with a short utterance in Nepali. The interrupter gestured toward the hole that had swallowed their cohort moments earlier. McGee wrote “He shrugged his shoulders and made a look on his face that seemed to say ‘Eh…forget it.’” At that, the person who had initiated the introduction started anew. “We fell.”

The Sherpa were all bruised from their falls, but they also seemed to heal quite well and were hobbling about within a few hours. They had some food among them in their packs and shared it willingly with the Irishman and the Indian. Their bilious dispositions seemed to be gone. Camaraderie now came easier to them. To our heroes, it must have seemed the change in nature came from the precarious situation which they now faced. But as you the reader know from previous chapters, there was likely another reason. These ruffians had lost their leader down the hole, and so the “weapons division” of the Nepalese Cobras was no more. Kill the head and the body will die.

This odd collection of people spent several days in the cave. Several plans of escape were hatched and then quickly thwarted. A tent canvas was tied to one of the smaller Sherpa who was to use it like a parachute over the volcano’s windy mouth. He was also secured to the rest of the team by a second rope so he would not plummet to his death. Instead of floating upward on the winds, the tent went flat and dropped downward. Ice axes were used to pick away at the cave walls in an attempt to make a pile of ice high enough to allow for escape. The ice in the walls proved too firmly packed after centuries of downward pressure to allow for chunks any larger than a man’s cufflink.

As each plan failed and each morsel of food was consumed and the chill began to permeate to bone, hopes diminished. McGee wrote: “Boston…the cheers of Fenway…the sissys [sic] with the skinny boats on the Charles yeling [sic] ‘stroke’…the ladies gigling [sic] in the Beekin [sic] Hill Tavern…I see it all rising up like one loud ball of stuff, leaving us behind and exiting by the hole above us. I’d wave bye to it if anyone else could see it.”

On September 15
^th
, McGee and River Leaf had been in the cave for five days and the Sherpa for three. The group had become quieter. There was no longer much to say. Attempts to escape had ended and now everyone mostly rested in their bags or sat on the ground looking empty. McGee was still writing once in a while, an amazing feat considering who we are discussing. “I hope Junk makes it” he wrote that day.

As sun set over the western lip of the Icy Bellows and the light dimmed in the cave, weeping could be heard, not from McGee, but from some of the Sherpa. McGee wrote “Hope is gone. This is our grave.” For the first time, River Leaf showed signs of weakness. Like the others, she sat and stared at nothing. Her mouth hung open. Her brain was undoubtedly still trying to generate plans of escape, but the gears of thought were locking up, and dreamy irrelevances were taking hold.

A conversation broke out in the dark that night. It was no longer the type of exchange that focused on the future, planning and problem-solving and otherwise seeking to improve one’s place in the world – the type of conversation that came most naturally to the breed of person trapped in this cave. Rather, it was a conversation focused on the past. Such conversations too have a purpose, but it is quite different. Its purpose is to provide a blanket against the cold. It is the embracing of a child after she has skinned her knee. It is the fire in the hearth lit by the old woman, awaiting the shepherd returned from the fields in February. This conversation was not for bettering lives, it was a palliative before death.

McGee had started it, talking about how much he loved gambling. He loved the way his heart raced when the first roll came out in craps and the joy he felt when it was a seven, especially if he had a lot of money on the line. One of the Sherpa – the one who had a tenuous grasp of English - understood this just enough to say he agreed. He loved to gamble as well. But even better, he liked dancing with young women. There was apparently one woman he especially liked who was taller than him but he did not care. He became very happy when she was around. When she left his presence, his life was just a place to wait until she returned. “And you, River Leaf?” the Sherpa asked to the darkness. He wanted to know what made her happy and what she missed about the world they had left behind. She did not respond. Perhaps she was asleep? McGee wrote:

“
I decided to help with the question cuz [sic] I was curius [sic] about her to [sic]. I asked wether [sic] she missed Boston. Nothing. ‘Do you miss the Dakotas.’ Nothing. She was mute. ‘Teepees [sic]? Riding horses? Totem poles?’ That got her. She said ‘What’s a totem pole?’”

Our dear, culturally-illiterate McGee did not know that constructing totem poles is a ritual of Indians of the American Northwest, not the Midwest. River Leaf would know as much about constructing totem poles as would a Lord Chancellor. With nothing else to discuss and a surfeit of hours to kill, McGee explained the concept to her, or at least explained what he had seen in picture shows and newsreels. And it was in this telling that McGee had his epiphany.

As soon as the slightest hint of light touched the cave in the morning, the captives were at work. McGee walked to one of the far walls of the cave. The biggest of the Sherpa climbed up McGee’s back and then onto his shoulders where he took a seat. The Sherpa pressed his gloved hands against the low ceiling of the cave to secure his position on the Irishman’s back. Then McGee began to walk, ever so slowly, toward the center of the cave. The ceiling height increased gradually above them as they moved. Once the ceiling became too high for the Sherpa to touch with his hands, he called out and McGee stopped walking. The next Sherpa, the one who knew some English then ran up to the men and began to slowly and gently climb up McGee’s back. With his feet now planted on McGee’s shoulders and resting his hands on the first Sherpa’s shoulders, McGee began the challenging task of walking forward slightly without the first Sherpa’s hands available to secure them by holding the ceiling. With space above him now, the English-speaking Sherpa scrambled up the back of the first Sherpa, mounted his shoulders and pressed against the roof. Three men now formed an object roughly twelve feet tall. They also stood halfway between the wall of the cave and the Oculus. The last Sherpa began to climb, but the human totem pole collapsed.

They didn’t wait a heartbeat before trying again. Within moments, the three men were again one. McGee apparently did not falter. The weight above him meant nothing when compared to the hope of escape, of another glass of whiskey, of another spring day on the streets of the South End. The third Sherpa began his climb and the group fell once more.

Again they tried.

And again.

And again.

Then it worked. The four men were balanced on one another. McGee probably strained but not enough to be of any concern. He would not break. The Sherpa at the top held the roof for dear life with the Oculus only about two yards away and six feet above his head. River Leaf was next and last. Our fair lady hero was not what she used to be. Her demeanor, which most would describe as taciturn, was now being replaced with another kind of silence altogether. It was a flowering idiocy, and that did not become her in the slightest. River Leaf seemed “punch drunk” to use McGee’s words. Her mouth hung open and she moved slowly. But she moved nonetheless. She began to climb up the backs of these friends and strangers and the light shining down on them grew brighter as the sun rose. The burden of her body on the others was negligible, starvation and other deprivations having diminished her weight to at most six stone. Her weakened mind did not hinder her progress. Drooling and gurgling like a simpleton, she reached the top of the human totem pole and took her place astride the shoulders of the highest of the three reformed Sherpa. The five of them stood as one, erect in the cave.