Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (36 page)

“
No, we didn’t.” Wilde said this while giving Drake a rather nasty look.

“
That would be my fault” Drake responded. “You know I am a tinkerer. Well, I have completed work on a new invention that will help us with any technical sections of the mountain we may need to climb.” Drake pulled something out of his sleeping bag. It was circular, about eighteen inches in diameter, one inch thick, and wrapped in rags. Removing the rags, Drake now held a black disk that seemed rather heavy. It had two handles opposite each other along its circumference and one small knob halfway between the handles. The middle of the disk contained some dials and what appeared to be an antenna. Drake continued. “I call it ‘the magic rope.’”

Chhiri Tendi was confused and unimpressed. Why was this oversized dinner plate the reason for the party being off course? Drake did not help: “The magic rope is made of forty concentric bands of reinforced titanium, one of the sturdiest and lightest metals known to man. Each band is connected to its neighboring band by fifty hair-thin but powerful springs. With a turn of this small knob, each band of the rope will slide upward from the closest outside band. This means that, at full extension, the magic rope becomes a thirty-foot long pipe.” Now Chhiri Tendi was interested. Wilde had a look on his face like he had heard this ten times already. The wind howled outside.

“
So the climber holds onto the handles and is lifted up the difficult portion of the mountain?” Chhiri Tendi asked?

Drake responded “Precisely. And not only that, but I have added a small device in the middle detecting pressure in the air surrounding the outermost band. Using this, it can detect within a small margin of error whether it has reached the top of a ledge. Or at least, it can tell when it has reached a large enough space for a person to find purchase.”

“
But how can it stay balanced? You have a grown man thirty feet up in the air holding onto a pole that is not planted into the ground below.”

“
Fair question. I have not solved that issue. People will have to hold the ‘rope’ at its base while someone is ascending. And then when the penultimate man has reached the ledge above, he and the others on the ledge can hold onto the rope and the last man can be pulled up by the retracting rope held by the people above!” Drake said this last part with his arms gesturing toward the device on his lap, like a magician’s assistant pointing to the bouquet of flowers just taken out of what seemed like an empty hat.

“
Let me tell you the first problem of three with that device” Wilde chimed in. “Even if it does work,
it is not
mountain climbing
. It is taking an elevator at a department store. My wife can do it. We might as well have taken our spouses with us on this trip.” Drake rolled his eyes.

“
Secondly, it will not work. And thirdly, Mr. Drake took…”

“
That’s
Doctor
Drake thank you very much!”

“
Thirdly, Doctor Drake took apart all of our compasses in order to make this magic rope contraption work. He convinced the group that the benefit of this Mary Shelley monstrosity was greater than the cost of no compasses. He argued that the odds of us getting lost before we stumble across you, Hoyt, and Yuudai – who would still have compasses - were slim to none. So much for that.”

Drake bowed his head in defeat.

There was silence for a spell and then Chhiri Tendi tried to break the tension. “Well, we need to get in touch with Hoyt and Yuudai right away and let them know our situation. They will want to find us.” Chhiri Tendi took out the radio. It was an early model handie-talkie, standard United States army issue, turned on by extending the antenna. But that was a problem. Chhiri Tendi saw that the radio seemed to be missing its antenna. He was utterly perplexed.

“
My fault again” Drake said sheepishly. “I needed the antenna too. I took it off the radio before the team became separated.”

The dreams of a mountain climber are laced with panic. He will picture toast and jam in his kitchen far away, steam rising from a cup of tea, a kiss on the head from a yawning, awakening spouse - her somnambulant feet shuffling along the floor - and perhaps a pet licking his hand. The sun is shining outside. His newspaper shows a headline unreadable in the world of dreams. But as all headlines are, it is tragic. Man’s aggression against Man. A border violated. The ire of a population unhinged. This is all it takes to make the dream change. Everything in the room succumbs to instant freezing. The dog’s tongue is stuck like cold metal to his palm. His wife’s kiss stings on his thinning locks. The coffee no longer evaporates but instead cracks along with the mug. His toast and jam are now grey slabs of till. Fear sets in. Then, like the coffee, the entire scene cracks and the climber is awake in his frigid tent.

There was no wind outside when Hoyt and Yuudai got up on September fourth at six in the morning. Everything had died down. The temperature was colder than usual, as if Phaethon had again misguided father Apollo’s sun-chariot off to the farthest reaches of the universe. But other than the temperature, the horrid weather had passed. They got dressed, ate a small breakfast, broke camp, and struck out eastward along the top of the scree.

Along the way, they saw the place where the mammoth chunk of ice had likely cut loose. It seemed to have broken off all the way up at the Eastern Ridge, thousands of feet up. Where the ridge met the sweeping snowfields at its base, there were snow drifts literally one hundred feet deep. A section of one of the snow drifts seems to have collapsed under its own weight and carried with it the super-compressed snow in its belly. So compressed was that snow, it had become ice. The rest of the snow drift fell several hundred feet down the mountain, but the ice had gone farther and faster, blasting away snow and earth as it came down. Even though hours of snow had continued to fall in the blizzard after the incident, the trail of damage it left was still evident.

The sun shone down, truly one of the treasures of the southern route. The temperature became much warmer. Visibility was endless. After only an hour of hiking perpendicular to the fall line, Hoyt and Yuudai came to a point in their route where they could see several miles ahead of them. It was clear from that vantage point they were not going to come across the rest of their team if they continued to move in that direction. Wherever they were, it was not east. Hoyt told Yuudai they were going to continue ascending. The risk was obvious to both of them, but Hoyt was desperate and willing to face almost Certain Death. He also did not much care about putting Yuudai in harm’s way. What’s more, Yuudai did not seem to be the type to speak up. So up they went.

At the point they stopped moving east and started climbing up again, they were almost exactly on their originally planned route. They would follow the planned route as far as they could, up the snow fields to the base of the Eastern Ridge. Then they would turn west, crossing Rauff’s Maw and continuing until they rose high enough to mount the Eastern Ridge. Finally they would follow the ridge to the summit. They would take this route until they either ran out of food and fuel, or until they came across the rest of their party. “I hate to admit it” Hoyt wrote in his journal, “but I am gambling just like that adventurer manqué on the other side of the mountain. When it comes to Junk,
nomen est omen
.”

The ascent up the snowfields was technically easy, but it was physically challenging because they were hungry and gasping for air. They had not acclimated yet, and they both suffered from splitting headaches and nausea. The slight cases of frostbite they had suffered in the storm were not causing them too much discomfort, as they had tended to those spots with hot water immediately upon arriving at their Camp One. Unburdened by a massive team, they arrived at the base of the Northeast Ridge far ahead of schedule, and decided to down climb to

Camp One that same day. Tomorrow, they would do the same thing again. And the day after that, they would return to the base of the Northeast Ridge and set up Camp Two. From there, on the morning of the sixth, they would set off for Rauff’s Maw. They would be completely out of food and fuel by then. If they did not find the rest of their party at that point, they would have to make haste for Base Camp, or die trying.

The rest of the expedition decided to continue up the mountain even though they were far off course – too far west to leverage the easy passage of the snowfields. No, the route they would take was a snowfield harshly interrupted by a forty foot wall of granite. They would again have to forego acclimatization because such a technical climb could not safely be repeated again. The only good news was that if they succeeded in getting over that wall, they would be west of Rauff’s Maw, and therefore able to skip it. This could potentially shave days off of the ascent.

With Hoyt absent, Wilde took charge and mandated a day of rest. If they could not acclimate again, he felt holding their ground for a few more days was the next best thing. “Our numbers have dwindled too much. We cannot afford to lose a single man to hypoxia” he said. They set up camp at the foot of the granite wall on the evening of September fourth and remained there for two days.

Little did the team know Ferguson would take this opportunity to prosthelytize about healthy living. Ferguson cursed the canned meats, pipes, and alcohol they had on the expedition. He was surviving on a diet consisting almost exclusively of yams and almonds. “It keeps the intestinal flora verdant and the remainder of the bowels pristine.” Somehow he had managed to jam pamphlets into his backpack and now took this opportunity to pass then around. “I will take on this diet when I give up caring” wrote Wilde in his notes that evening. Ferguson offered to give a quinine suffusion to anyone who wanted it once they returned to the States, but the rest of the men politely refused. Realizing he was not winning over converts, Ferguson asked if he could at least prepare supper that evening. The team acquiesced and the Indian cook was given the night off. Yams, beans, and walnuts were cooked in a skillet and sweetened with a liberal helping of brown sugar. The team was surprised and pleased. Supper turned out refreshing and delicious. The next day he continued lecturing about a healthy diet. He infused the discussion on the second day with talk of abstinence from sexual relations. He alleged the right diet would dull those urges, bringing about psychological harmony. “Not me” Chhiri Tendi responded. “When I see a yam, I go crazy. If you’re alone on the trail, a well-cooked yam can be a respectable replacement for a lady.” Ferguson promptly lost his audience.

The team awoke on the sixth after two days of rest, ready to take on the wall. Drake was excited for this moment, for Wilde agreed the team could give his invention – the “magic rope” – a try. There was no denying it was designed for the sole purpose of surmounting obstacles just like this one. They came to the very base of the wall. Wilde wrote: “Drake took off his backpack and unzipped it with bare hands, steam pouring from his nostrils. Out of it he pulled the black disk. Its concentric rings looked like the grooves of an unusually thick musical recording, the knobs and dials in the middle being the recording’s label. Drake took the disk and placed it on a relatively flat area. I asked what would happen next.”

Drake said one person would lean down and grab the handles sticking out of the sides. Then Drake would turn the small switch next to one of the handles, thereby freeing the springs. The device would begin to expand. Once it was at the height of the climber, others were to stabilize it at its base and the climber with his hands on the handles would continue to rise. And rise. And rise. At some point, when they arrived at the top of the cliff, the magic rope would “sense” the top and stop expanding. Or it would expand to forty feet, whichever came first. At that point the climber could use whatever maneuvers or equipment they had at their disposal to reach a safe outcropping.

Chatham spoke up. “I’ll go first. I’m already damaged goods.” Everyone agreed with this idea, possibly because they felt Chatham getting hurt was too obvious. Lightning never strikes twice – or thrice as the case may be – in the same place.

Chatham squatted down and grabbed the handles of the contraption. Drake turned the knob. Lightning struck thrice. The contraption did not gracefully, gradually extend. It was at full extension – forty feet – instantaneously, the event ending with a loud
snap
. The force with which it bolted into the air was awe-inspiring. It hit Chatham’s face with such aggression he was sent airborne and back. The group was surprised he was not decapitated. He lay unconscious, face-up in the snow about fifteen feet from the black totem. Everyone was in shock, ergo no one went forward to balance it. And so it came down like a tree in a storm, and landed right on Chatham. This actually woke the man up. He was moaning and his face was bloody for the third time on this adventure. “Hot” he yelled, as the friction from the extending metal bands had heated up the device considerably. Wilde, Drake, and Ferguson rolled it off of Chatham. Drake turned the knob again and the device sprang shut. Wilde wrote “I went to pick it up and I felt the burn through my gloves. Closing it had heated it even more and condensed the space in which the heat existed. It was actually smoking and glowing red. I yelled bloody murder and threw the thing as far as I could. It landed and sank into the melting snow like the head of some small red trickster demon, returning to Hell until summoned again.”

Silence spread throughout the group. They were stuck at the bottom of the cliff with one man (again) badly hurt. Drake exclaimed, “I have another magic rope in my backpack!” Wilde slapped him with his still-smoking glove.