Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu the World's Tallest Mountain Read online

  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

  Foreword

  Prelude

  PART ONE: BEFORE THE ASCENT

  Chapter One: Hatred on Stilts

  Chapter Two: The Presidentials

  Interlude: August 23rd, 1937

  Chapter Three: The Stakes Keep Climbing

  Chapter Four: Fumu and the Dividing Engine

  Chapter Five: Mount Everest

  Interlude: July 14, 1881

  Chapter Six: The Sins of the Father

  Chapter Seven: “Souls at Sea” with Gary Cooper

  Chapter Eight: The Lord High Executioner

  PART TWO: THE ASCENT

  Chapter Nine: The Qila Pass

  Chapter Ten: Naked, Silly, and Godless

  Chapter Eleven: The Rakhiot Glacier

  Interlude: Winter, 1920

  Chapter Twelve: A Team Divided

  Chapter Thirteen: What Happened To McGee

  Chapter Fourteen: Vespers

  Chapter Fifteen: The Oculus Part I

  Chapter Sixteen: Cannibals!

  Chapter Seventeen: The Eastern Ridge

  Chapter Eighteen: The Oculus Part II

  Interlude

  Chapter Nineteen: The Locket

  Chapter Twenty: The Summit

  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.”

  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.