Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (25 page)

River Leaf was quiet. She looked around for some way out of the predicament. On the elevator with them were about five ice axes and two ropes. She made quick work using a length rope to tie two ice axes together (Taylor meanwhile continued to craft colourful hyphenated words capable of blushing the cheeks of a public house bartender). With this new pole, River Leaf was able to touch the cliff near them and stopping the elevator from revolving. At some point while they stood there in mid-air, the people at the top of the rope tried their luck at pulling them up. When they reached the overhanging lip of the cliff, part of the elevator got caught underneath the lip. They started flipping upward at an impossible angle. River Leaf and Taylor both started yelling for the men at the top to stop and lower them again. So the men at the top tried the opposite strategy, they attempted to lower the two. When the elevator dropped far enough to touch the amethyst surface, they were starting to come to rest face-down. Again River Leaf and Taylor yelled for them to stop. So they rose to midway up the cliff and stopped. River Leaf stuck the ice axe pole out to keep them from spinning. They were back where they started. The sun was beginning to set and the weather was turning much colder. River Leaf continued to look for an escape in the fading light. That was when they heard an awful snapping sound. This time, it was not an avalanche.

If the reader would permit the author a momentary digression dripping with impossible omnipotence, I would like to briefly recount the tale of a certain tree in the Terai region of the Himalaya, not far at all from Darjeeling. The author has never been in the presence of this tree nor has he traveled to the Terai, but the tree’s story does not take multiple sources to deduce. What’s more, I doubt the tree’s offspring will ever come after me claiming libelous misdeeds.

Many, many years ago, under dappled forest sunlight and heavy humidity, accompanied only by the din of woodpeckers, an oak sapling began to grow. It was small and beautiful. It had only two leaves at that point, and those leaves were large enough in relationship to the tree to bend the whole of it. This tree was lucky. Despite its diminutive bearing, it survived. Monsoon rains, rodents, and aggressive floral neighbors just happened to miss this fragile thing. It gathered nutrients from sun and soil and grew uninterrupted.

Indeed the tree grew, and grew at an impressive pace. However, if one was able to see inside its textured bark and concentric rings, one would see this tree had a flaw. It was a slight weakness in spacing of cells along a line running from sapwood to heartwood. With each passing year, cambium would manufacture a new band of wood, and each year, the flaw would be born anew in fresh wood and become solidified in dying wood near the core. The tree had inherited the flaw from its parent tree. The broken information dropped to the forest floor in the form of an acorn and then was absconded by a hungry squirrel that carried and buried it more than a mile from the parent tree. Perhaps one hundred years earlier, the parent tree had inherited the weakness from its parent tree. Now the sapling was growing into adolescence with the imperfect branding of its ascendancy. It was not a flaw so grave it would bring the tree down early in life, but if a northerly wind happened to hit it too hard or another tree fell against it, the oak may have seen an early death. Fortunately, it did not.

Seasons passed. The oak grew into a giant, with a trunk three feet in diameter, a drip-line covering thirty feet of forest floor, and a height of almost sixty feet. Several smaller plants and trees died from the oppressive shadow it cast. A metropolis of birds made their home in its branches, giving the tree its own loud, jubilant voice when morning arrived. Rains would seasonally tear at its limbs, pruning it back ever-so-slightly, but never enough to slow its progress toward magnificence. The flaw always lay within - an internal scar spanning decades – but the oak grew stronger around it and managed to stand as if immortal.

It was then that some men arrived in the forest. They carried axes, machetes, and saws. One of the men sat down against a tree and smoked a cigarette. Another was picking his teeth with a knife. Three others looked around for some time, speaking and pointing. Their voices would occasionally rise in disagreement. Sweat dripped from them as they spoke and so their talk was accompanied by dabs of rags to their foreheads. At last their talk died down, their fingers all pointing at the oak. The oak did nothing. Its topmost branches moved imperceptibly in the gentle breezes above the forest.

The men approached and put teeth to bark. The saws moved back and forth rhythmically. With a groan that issued throughout the forest – sound waves racing past the parent - the oak tree fell, taking several smaller trees with it. Other men arrived with chains and ropes, preparing to take the tree back to their city, where they would turn their bounty into snuff boxes, mirror frames, pages of Korans, cricket bats, church pews, letters to generals in the field, ship transoms, and myriad other objects that litter the senses of Man. In this way, the flaw made itself known to the world of Man.

The elevator’s wood was snapping near one of the holes where the short rope passed through. Taylor continued his obscene incantations while River Leaf looked for solutions to their predicament. She grabbed the cliff again using the pole of pickaxes, once more stopping their dizzying rotation. As the sun reached the western horizon, the amethyst around them lit up brilliantly. The sunlight reflecting off the amethyst in turn lit up other amethyst previously shaded. It was at that moment River Leaf noticed one part of the rock surface, immediately under the lip of the cliff that stubbornly did not light up.

Above the cliff, Junk had ordered the Sherpa to tie off the rope to a large boulder until they could come up with a solution to the situation. The idea of throwing down another rope was rejected outright because River Leaf did not have the expertise for such technical climbing and Taylor could not be expected to walk her through surmounting a cliff face of greater than ninety degrees. Nor could they be pulled over the lip on a separate rope because if done incorrectly, they would be tenderized against the rocks. After about a half-hour, they came to the conclusion the only way to get Taylor and River Leaf out of peril was to keep trying to pull the elevator over the lip. Sooner or later they would pull when the elevator was at just the right angle to the lip and would rise up smoothly.

Junk yelled down to the two people beyond the cliff, doubting they could hear him over the wind. “I do not know if you can hear me down there, but we are going to pull up again, and we will keep trying to pull up until it works. If you think you are going to flip, just yell and we will stop. Then we will try again until it works!”

At Junk’s command, the Sherpa pulled. Down below, the wood snapped, relieving the Elevator of one of its two connections to the rope. The Sherpa felt the sudden jerk, but the weight they were pulling thankfully did not lessen. The knot of the short rope stuck to the long rope, dropping River Leaf and Taylor a few feet, but still holding them in the air. The two stranded souls were now hanging diagonally, Taylor slightly lower than River Leaf. Her weight was upon him, likely making him twice as miserable as he was before. It was only moments before the extra strain on the one remaining eyehole began to snap the wood. River Leaf was motivated enough by this turn of events to stand on Taylor and take a leap of faith.

The Sherpa heard a loud crack followed by a nauseating slack in the rope and they were thrown back. The knotted long rope’s end came flying up over the lip devoid of anything. Junk ran to the east to gain visuals of the Pass all the way down. To his amazement, he saw Taylor, still tied to the Elevator, glissading at full speed down the entire length of the pass like some mad sleigh ride. The Elevator did not crack anymore. It held strong. Taylor bumped and jerked an infinite number of directions, but he remained strapped aboard the wood and descended at a terrifying pace. There was no sign of River Leaf.

Like a gift from the inspired god who built the Qila Pass, Taylor came to a peaceful stop in the sprawling basin at the bottom, right where Base Camp had been. There was a pause and then through his binoculars, Junk saw Taylor raise both fists to the Heavens in triumph. From over one thousand feet up, Junk heard Taylor give out a cry of victory. It was long and primal and filled the air like an exaltation of larks. Junk responded in kind and when the others saw Junk’s actions, they all assumed the best outcome and continued the chain of elation, whooping and hollering and jumping up and down. The mountain responded by dropping five simultaneous avalanches.

The team mourned the loss of their mate Taylor. However, the mourning was muted somewhat by the confusion about River Leaf. No one could discern what had happened to her. Calls down the Pass went unanswered. Junk told the Sherpa to hold the rope again as he grappled it and hand-over-hand made his way down to the cliff. He secured his feet, digging crampons into ice and leaned over. He saw no signs of any living thing. River Leaf had vanished.

After climbing back up, Junk told the somber group Taylor was dead and River Leaf was missing. A prayer should be said by anyone who was religious and then they would set up camp on the col, overlooking Fumu. Many were in tears. Others, like Cole and Zeigler, were in shock. Zeigler said some words. When the rituals were done the team looked for a flat area protected from the wind where they could set up camp, even though every one of them knew sleep was not going to come that night. Before the first tent pole was removed from a backpack, Pasang Dolma approached Junk and reminded him of the Sherpa who were suffering from altitude sickness, and the only cure for altitude sickness is to descend. He made a plea to Junk: Climb down the other side of the ridge immediately and set up Advanced Base Camp at the foot of Fumu. They would have to descend the ridge in the dark but he pointed out that the terrain was gradual and easy. Such an effort might save the sick Sherpas’ lives. Junk considered this and decided Pasang Dolma was right. They would climb down in the night and then rest until noon the next day at Base Camp. This would also allow the team to get as far from the traumatic experience as possible.

And so in the frigid night, lit up only by a smattering of torches and the light of Fumu’s eruptions, the exhausted team climbed down the other side of the ridge toward the base of Fumu. Healthy Sherpa aided ill Sherpa to the bottom. They had not yet started climbing Fumu itself and already a man was dead and several Sherpa were suffering from altitude sickness. Morrow wrote: “As we climbed down, Junk wore an expression I had not seen on him before: Defeat. In all of the years I had known him, I had become used to an upbeat, robust, hearty character. But on the climb down to the base of Fumu he looked beaten before the real climb had even begun and it deeply concerned me. It was too damned soon for this.”

It is quite possible Junk was not feeling defeat but rather guilt over the loss of River Leaf. He had convinced this poor woman to join him on a deadly voyage, even though by every stretch of the imagination she should have been safely in Boston right now or even better in the Dakotas with her family. Regardless of whether the feeling weighting down Junk was defeat or guilt, he was clearly distraught. He asked Cole to take the lead on the way down and allowed himself to lag. By the time they were reaching the bottom in the darkness, he was all the way in the back of the team with McGee.

Upon reaching the bottom, a yell came from the front of the line. At first it sounded like a cry of terror but then nuances in its wavering pitch betrayed a kind of joy. Junk ran to the spot where all torches were pointing. He could not see at what they were aimed, because a crowd had surrounded the object of interest. Junk pushed through and gave out a gasp as if he was looking at an apparition. Lit from all angles was River Leaf. According to Morrow, it was the first time the team had seen her smile. “The effect was potent. The men’s torches contributed only slightly to the brightness in front of us. The smile made her radiate energy as if lit from within by a thousand votive candles.” Junk could not contain himself. He apparently hugged her so hard her feet were off the ground. McGee also gave her a bear hug, probably elated to have the other non-climber back.

The obvious question followed: How? How did she survive the fall and how did she beat them to the base of Fumu? River Leaf did not answer with words. Instead she pointed up to the dark world behind them, the gradual slope they had just descended. The torches turned and aimed at the spot where she had pointed. About fifty feet up the slope and slightly to the west, between two large boulders stood the entrance to a massive cave.

Chapter Ten: Naked, Silly, and Godless

It was sunrise at the base of the Qila Pass, and no one was sleeping. The entire Hoyt expedition was worried that if they did not head up the Pass today, then they would have to head home by sunset. It had been nine days since they parachuted down and still there was no sign of the Sherpa. They were living off of rations given to them by the Japanese plus whatever they could salvage from Junk’s destroyed Base Camp, but everything was running low. If their Sherpa did not arrive today, August 29
^th
, then the expedition had to leave for Darjeeling immediately or risk running out of supplies and not making it out of the wilderness alive.

Yuudai the Japanese soldier smoked cigarettes and organized his backpack. Drake the inventor was experimenting with an oxygen mask attached to two tanks capable of detecting low oxygen in one tank and automatically switching to the other. The experiment was failing and Drake kept passing out. Chatham the dashing thrill-seeker spent hours on nothing but his morning ablutions. Wilde the prim and proper gentleman folded his clothing with a style so meticulous it bordered on insanity. Thornton the young linguist and athlete read a book about conversational Sherpa in preparation for the arrival of their porters. Ferguson the altitude sickness specialist and disciple of Kellogg ate figs, yams, and yogurt very slowly, chewing fifty times per bite with almost a full second between bites.