Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (47 page)

Jubilation turned quickly to despair. With all of them atop one another, they still did not reach the Oculus. They were eighteen feet high now but the egress was roughly three feet out of reach. For the first time since anyone on the journey had met her, River Leaf gave out a cry of emotion; not of defeat, not of anger, and not of grief, but something employing all three. It was now definitely over. Their bodies would be interred along with Hoover’s head in this frigid, Godforsaken charnel house. For want of one more person, one extra body to reach the Oculus, their fate was sealed.

And that was when a man broke through the southernmost point in the cave wall. Steam poured out of the hole behind him. He was shirtless, bathed in sweat, and by the looks of him, Japanese.

The sweat on Yuudai’s body had dried and now he sat shivering. McGee initially approached the stranger with caution. But now he saw that the gentleman was too tired and traumatized to pose any sort of threat. McGee quickly changed tacks and placed a blanket around him. After all, should the relationship prove friendly, and should this man be nurtured back to stable condition, he would become a crucial asset to the group.

Yuudai introduced himself. McGee reciprocated. McGee then fed Yuudai tea and dried meat from Yuudai’s own pack. One of the Sherpa attended to a serious, weeping burn on Yuudai’s left shoulder blade. It was then Yuudai launched into a tale about how he arrived in the cave. As you already know, Yuudai was not a man one would consider partial to talking. But McGee’s description of that moment suggests Yuudai had changed in the course of the past several days.

The tale started back atop the Maw as Yuudai watched Hoyt parachute hundreds of feet down. After losing sight of his expedition leader, Yuudai had retired to the small snow cave he and Hoyt had constructed and shared for a time. The air entering the cave from a slit in the mountain’s granite made the cave air wet, but slightly warmer than outside and for the most part livable. Yuudai had gotten into his sleeping bag and prepared for it to become his death bag. The air in the cave and the potable ice drippings were a blessing but also a curse. They would keep him warm enough and hydrated enough to starve and suffer hypothermia over a period of days instead of freezing to death within hours.

The slit in the granite was now very long because the snow was melting near its bottom. And it was no longer a slit. As more of it was exposed, it widened. This sped up the rate at which warm air entered the cave and, in an ever-accelerating cycle, it also increased the rate at which the slit exposed itself. Within a few hours, Yuudai was geared up and staring at a hole in the granite wall large enough to allow a man passage. There was no light in it. What was in there? It could be anything or it could be nothing. It could lead to an escape or it could end just beyond the extent of his eyesight. Shaking from hunger, Yuudai lugged himself and his pack into the darkness.

So began his blind journey through the inside of Fumu. Terrified and practically guaranteed the death of a pharaoh’s wife, he stumbled forward. A catacomb of lava tubes presented themselves as alternatives for travel, but without sight, none of the options was preferable to the others. Decisions would have been superfluous. He just kept moving.

When light did appear, it appeared with a vengeance. The dead lava tubes he traveled often crossed live lava tubes and would illuminate the space, the atmosphere would become superheated, and the air would be replaced with poison. He had to cover his mouth with his shirt at such times and sidestep these obstacles. If he could not sidestep them, he would backtrack and try another route. After what he estimated was a day of wandering (he had no way of telling time so this was certainly was a loose estimate), panic set in. He had almost run out of the water he had collected in the snow cave, he had no food, and the lack of light brought on a kind of madness.

Several more days passed. He had stripped of all clothing save his undergarments. He moved forward with eyes closed because they were of no use to him anymore. Such a crucible would have stopped most men within an hour. Yuudai was not most men. Here he was, possibly days into his ordeal, eating crumbs, drinking nothing, and yet still moving forward.

On what he estimated was the second day, he heard water trickling. Yuudai found a vent carrying enough steam to form condensation on the walls. He drank deeply even though the water tasted of sediment. Unable to see where the droplets fell, he licked the walls in desperation. With this dire need sated, Yuudai collapsed in relief. He believes he slept for more than a day in the darkness. Or was it two? Upon awaking, he collected as many of the droplets as he could in the darkness, listening for liquid hitting metal and then holding his canteen steady for an hour. Then he started moving again toward God knows what. A cul-de-sac? A sudden eruption of lava through the walls roasting flesh and muscle? An unseen drop-off sending him thousands of feet down? Or perhaps freedom? Maybe he would see home again. Despite his rugged good looks and extensive travel, he had not yet met a woman with whom he would want to spend his life. Might he get the chance? Might he get the chance to see his father again and make him proud with his heroic return from Nepal and subsequent victories in battle? Yuudai could not know the answers to these questions. But he did know that he would do everything in his power to escape. He would keep moving. That then would leave the decision exclusively with Fumu.

Yuudai fell down a vertical lava tube. He fell very far, but only bumped his shins at the bottom. The feeling of descending was disheartening even though he knew he had started at a high altitude. When surrounded by darkness, the sense of going downward was smothering. It felt as if he had tripped into a graveyard plot. The end of the journey had come. He would never be found. He was destined to disintegrate over millennia and become one with this mute, eternal strata of granite.

His eyes had been closed because of their lack of utility. But by chance, he happened to open them now. And to his surprise, he could make out a light source only feet away from him; not direct sunlight but light nonetheless. It was a wall, not of rock but of ice. With little room for leverage and almost no strength left in his body, Yuudai used his ice axe to break through the obstruction, striking ice and crying out with each blow. It only took three swings for the ice to break, and that was when he met his present company.

Since watching Hoyt abandon him, Yuudai had burrowed through the heart of the world’s tallest mountain - perforating it from the Maw on the north side to the Icy Bellow on the south - and lived to see daylight again.

After Yuudai ate, drank, told his tale, gathered his energy, and digested the idea of the Human Totem Pole, the group went back to the work of escaping. Yuudai, who was slightly larger than the Sherpa, took his place on McGee’s shoulders. The three Sherpa came next. Then River Leaf. On the first attempt, with no moment of wavering, River Leaf reached up and out of the Oculus. She used her ice axe to hold fast to the blindingly bright outside world, slowly coming to
stand
on the Sherpa’s shoulders. With a small jump and a prayer of hope she had learned from her people, River Leaf was out. The totem pole below her fell, but fortunately they fell backwards and not into the mouth of the dead volcano. River Leaf dropped a rope down. She secured herself, making her body almost parallel with the ice on which she stood and pulled out McGee. And one by one, the people rose from the hole. The geysers responsible for killing Morrow a week earlier were a long but gentle climb away. The party moved south toward the towers of steam.

They were on their way home.

Interlude

A nurse on the ward here once told me to “get some rest” after I offered up the fact that the Earth is not round. But it is as true a fact as there is. The Earth is not round. To be sure, a child drawing a picture of the planet will trace around a teacup or toy roundabout. However, these children are only following the dictates of their begetters and schoolmarms. We adults are the ones making the unexamined claims. Ask anyone on the street if the world is round and unless they are cracked, they will concur. Why do they do this? Because it is true? No. Because they
believe
that it is true? Possibly. The cleanest explanation is this: We say the world is round in order to distinguish it from the alternative of being flat. The former is certainly closer to the truth and yet it is still untrue. The mistake we make is that, in fact, there is no either/or distinction. A vast continuum exists between round and flat.

Consider a man’s head. We say it is round, but is it? Certainly it is not flat. But the lower jaw protrudes out to form the severe ridge of the chin. The valleys of the orbital sockets compromise the mantle of the skull. The distance from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin is far greater than the distance between the ears. If anything, the head is closer to an oval. Round? Bah.

To use one more example, consider the cobblestone. It is not round, but we may refer to it as such in order to distinguish it from the flat slate in our gardens or the jagged gneiss of the Scottish Isles. But at best, the cobblestone does a shoddy burlesque of round. To be truly round, every point in an object’s surface must be equidistant from the center. In all three cases above - the Earth, the man’s head, and the cobblestone – we see nothing of the sort. Instead, we see the Language of Convenience smoothing over deep contemplation and hiding the richer, more fascinating truth.

The reader first came across the fact of the Earth’s odd bearing when we discussed the
Great Trigonometric Survey of India. We learned that the planet is an “oblate spheroid,” longer in circumference around the equator than around the poles. But that is only the beginning of the planet’s curious lineaments. The thickness of the Earth’s crust varies, from up to fifty miles thick in some locations such as the mountain ranges in the middle of a continent, to as little as three miles under the oceans. With this fluctuation in thickness comes fluctuation in the integrity of the planet’s surface. I believe I have made my point clearly enough. The nurse on my ward was the one who needed to “get some rest” – or at least – she needed a tutor in geology. The world is as oddly formed as her - an old bint with a dowager’s hump.

The shape of the world is a rather uninteresting fact until one considers its impact on Man. And even if the impact does not compare to that of a letter arriving in the mails from a rosy-cheeked admirer, the impact is there nonetheless. You see, gravity at each point on the Earth’s surface is quite dependent on the unique conditions of the Earth at that point. For example, because the equator is farther from the center of the Earth than are the poles, a bushman in the Congo is slightly lighter than the selfsame bushman should he decide to plant a flag at the South Pole. What’s more, because the equator is spinning much faster than the poles, the centrifugal force playing the foil to gravity is strengthened and the bushman’s lightness is only magnified in his homeland. Of course, the same considerations would be at play if he should climb a mountain anywhere in the world; his distance from the center of the earth would increase with the ascent, as would his speed of revolution. He would be lighter at the peak than he would be at the base. What’s more, because the air is thinner at the peak, the world’s grasp on him grows even weaker!

The thickness of the Earth’s crust at a specific location also has a hand in the weight of our bushman. If he should take a steamer to India on holiday, he will weigh more during his voyage at sea than he will at his ports of call. That is because the crust underneath him on the ship is relatively thin. Where there is less crust there is more mantle, and mantle is made of a much heavier, denser rock than the porous crust. The decrease in light material and increase in higher density material beneath his feet makes the bushman heavier.

This house of mirrors upon which we live becomes all the more perplexing when we consider that even the direction from which gravity pulls may change based on surface anomalies. Our poor bushman, wanting nothing more than a peaceful jaunt in his Congolese village, is now being bullied by the world’s esoteric and draconian rules of physics. He is made to be heavier, and then lighter, and now he does not know which way is up and which down because the plumb bob next to him suggests “down” is two degrees offset from his current stance. The obtuse globe and its porous crust are conspiring to redirect gravity ever-so-slightly away from the true center of the Earth’s core.

But what has all this to do with our current story? Quite a bit, I’m afraid. You see, Fumu is a gravitational anomaly. It is not on the equator, but it is close enough to make an American lighter than he is at home, and its height places those at her peak very far from the world’s core, spinning faster than any other human being on the planet. Unhindered by the thick atmosphere at sea level, the person is made lighter still.

Even with all of these variables in play, one should not expect a difference of any more than, say, half a pound in weight. Should the Bushman find himself at the top of Fumu, he could expect his Congolese weight of one hundred pounds to diminish to ninety-nine and one half pounds. Hoyt, at roughly one hundred seventy pounds at the time of the ascent might expect to weigh one hundred sixty-nine and one half pounds. But that is where things become strange. Based on upcoming events reviewed in this book, geologists took a further look at Fumu and found that she is as bizarre below the Earth’s surface as she is above.

All volcanoes sit atop a magma chamber; a large pocket within the planet in which the molten lava roils and complains. The chamber is full to the hilt with lava, superheated by the high temperatures of the planet’s sub-cellars. The volcano then erupts due to the introduction of more melted mantle into the chamber – or angry gods – depending upon who you ask. The pressure in the chamber builds and then the magma makes an escape upward, where the pressure is less. After the eruption, the magma chamber is empty or close to empty. Fumu is different from most volcanoes in the size of its magma chamber. Two years before the writing of this book, world-renowned geologist Sir George Darling of Cambridge University journeyed to Fumu. Not mad enough to climb the beast, he set up a temporary lab at the southern base. Using myriad instruments and scientific methods over the course of seasons, Darling found something shocking. “Most volcanoes have a chamber housed in the Earth’s crust and some go even deeper, with the bottommost reaches of the chamber digging several miles into the Earth’s upper mantle. Fumu is like nothing we have ever seen. The chamber is not much wider than the usual chamber, but it seems bottomless.” It reaches past the upper mantle, down thousands of miles through the lower mantle and possibly touching Earth’s outer core. It is like a long, thin flaw in this diamond Earth, scarring it from surface to core. Why such an unusual volcano, so unique from its sisters? No one is sure. Several theories lie about, untested and otherwise ignored. Darling’s theory (the one that got him dismissed from Cambridge, branded from thereon in as a doctor of quackery) was that Fumu is the location where, millennia ago when the Earth was just beginning to cool, the still-wet moon pulled away from the soggy Earth. That separation, that rejection, that outright rebellion by the ungrateful rock never healed for our dear Mother. Fumu stands as the Earth’s scar over that wound. Trust me, the other theories are not any better.