Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (27 page)

“
What am I looking at?” Hoyt asked in an impatient tone. “Behind the stones.” Mano answered.

Just behind the top of the cracked boulder could be seen – but just barely – a darkness. It was then I understood what I was seeing and I suspect Hoyt understood at the same time. The boulders formed a massive arrow pointing to a cave. I prayed Mano was about tell us what we all hoped.

Indeed, Thornton, Hoyt, and the rest of the expedition were about to catch the luckiest of breaks. Mano informed them that the cave passes through the ridge, providing a passage right through to the base of Fumu. There were actually multiple lava tubes along the ridge, some at higher elevations than others and some further east and west along the ridge. All of them were dead, seeing as volcanic activity this far away from the summit had ceased eons ago. The caves inside connect and diverge haphazardly, creating a formidable catacomb. However, one large, main artery ran a straight line through the ridge, and that was the one they were looking at now.

By the accounts of all fellow climbers that day, Hoyt wore an expression of joy the likes of which no one had ever seen on him before. He actually laughed. Returning to where Mano was, he patted the man on the back, a display of affection Hoyt may have never carried out before.

Thornton was able to extract from Mano that the arrow was put there by his predecessors because “children need help remembering things.” The man-children returned to Fumu constantly and required indicators like the massive arrow to guide them so they would not get lost in the wilderness. The path from the monasteries to the mountain was apparently covered in arrows. The massive boulder arrow at which they were looking was merely one of many.

Mano and the man-children invited Hoyt and his expedition to follow them into the caves, an invitation which Hoyt gladly accepted. Hoyt wrote, “I was sincerely thrilled to go with them. However, my excitement suffered gradual source decay due to the oddness of our temporary guides. Out of the other prams rose men of varying height, girth, and ethnicity, each shedding their blankets and standing naked. They donned their own buntings and prepared for travel. I do not like these ridiculous harlequins. They are naked, silly, and godless. I can only hope they will stumble across Jesus somewhere in their travels. When they do, I hope for their sake they are wearing trousers.”

Led by Mano, the long line of people and equipment began to move toward the cave. All but one pack animal was left behind; a large yak lead by a large negro in a bunting. The animal carried a load on his back too heavy for a man, possibly 120 pounds. What the load was unclear to the mountaineers, Sherpa, and porters, but the man-children clearly felt it was important enough to risk an animal going through the caves.

Progress toward the cave was slow because the man-children wore only rudimentary sandals, completely inappropriate for such terrain. As the amethyst began to steepen and become too uneven, progress slowed further and prams were abandoned. After approximately one half hour of hiking, the line reached the top of the arrow and stood at the mouth of the cave.

“
Tunnel One,” as the main entrance is now known is roughly eight feet in diameter and ringed by nothing but granite and ice. Cool air, but not cold, blows out of it at all times. Moist and reeking of mildew, the atmosphere belching from the darkness is far from inviting. It is actually quite unnerving. The expedition and their new guides entered the cave, the Americans possibly questioning whether they might have been better off scaling the Pass overhead.

After only seven yards the cave narrows slightly to seven feet. It also grows dimmer. The walls become amethyst after three more yards. The mineral’s reflective nature multiplies natural light, keeping things bright for a while. Even after forty yards, one can see a point of light from the rear because of the bright walls and also because the cave is so straight. However, well before a furlong, without the help of lanterns or torches, travelers are completely shrouded in dark and mildew. It varies little in terms of altitude and direction, and so the walking is relatively painless. But as someone who has been through Tunnel One, the author can attest to its less than comforting impact on the psyche. The claustrophobia can get the better of you if you dwell too long on the facts you cannot stretch your arms out to full extension, and men block your exits in both directions. Breath already restricted by altitude is restricted further by the cave’s scarce oxygen, producing a feeling in the traveler of a belt tied around one’s chest and synched up several notches too far. Then there is the sound. Near the entrances and exits, one hears constant rushes of air whistling through the ears. As one moves toward the core of the ridge, one mile within the Earth, the rushing has ceased and is replaced by a pervasive, heavy Nothing. Air pressure on the ears increases and close quarters make for no echo at all. Man-made sounds seem muted. If the dark did not fulfill the sense of premature burial, then the dulled sound hammers in the final nail. The cave continues like this – straight, narrow, and evoking death - for almost two miles before spitting travelers out into the blinding daylight on the other side.

They walked single file, Sherpa, porters, expedition members, Man-Children, and one yak. Mano and Hoyt took the lead, the former before the latter. Chhiri Tendi was not far behind. The other expedition members were distributed quite randomly along the line; Chatham and Ferguson close behind Hoyt - separated only by the yak - Thornton and Wilde near the middle, and Drake and Yuudai in the rear (Yuudai may have walked all the way in the rear because he feared having an American travel behind him. Accounts suggest that any interaction with him up to that point had been extremely unpleasant).
The entire line of hundreds was spread out roughly one mile from fore to aft.

Progress up until the last portion of the cave was by all accounts smooth, albeit unpleasant on the nerves. The men walked comfortably. Only the yak complained at first. Although a sure-footed beast, the yak did not take to the dark nor did it appreciate the enclosed space. It snorted and reared back its head. The man-child guiding the yak needed to fight with the animal repeatedly. With that exception, the journey through the cave started peacefully.

Hoyt wrote: “As we grew more accustomed to the darkness and the monotony, my mind began to wander. I thought about these large infants who guided us. I understood they came from all corners of the Earth and that they worshipped the mountain, but other questions remained in my mind. For example, how did they survive? Did they farm and hunt? They certainly did not seem the type to live off of the land; they took turns pushing each other in baby carriages for goodness sake! No, they must subsist on something else. Someone takes care of them.”

It had already been a day of firsts for Hoyt. He had laughed. He had patted someone on the back. He had even stated an ontological thought in front of Ferguson in the tent that morning. Now, possibly out of boredom, Hoyt did the unthinkable and struck up a conversation. He asked Mano about his people and their culture. Hoyt later tried to recreate a transcription of the cave conversation from memory in his journal.

ME: “So, you’re children who are men.”

MANO: “Well, we are men of course. We choose to act like children. Licorice?”

ME: “No thank you.” [He seemed to offer people sweets quite a bit. I am not sure where he stowed them.] “Do you know how to hunt?”

MANO: “No.”

ME: “Does anyone in your little group know how to hunt?”

MANO: “We are not so little and no.”

ME: “Do any of you know how to tend a garden?”

MANO: “What is a garden? I’m just kidding. But no, none of us knows how to tend a garden. Not to mention that the earth around the monasteries cannot be farmed. The soil is rocky and devoid of nutrients. My bunting is too small and riding up my bottom.”

ME: “How frustrating your answers are! Then tell me, how is it you aren’t dead from malnutrition?”

MANO: “Allowance.”

ME: “Come again?”

MANO: “Allowance.”

I paused for a quite a while, trying to imagine what in the blazes this oddity was going on about. We heard someone down the line whining like a baby, complaining in Spanish about having to make water. Mano yelled back in fluent Spanish that the person should “hold it.”

ME: “Explain yourself. What allowance?”

MANO: “Look around you.”

ME: “I see nothing.”

MANO: “Lift your lantern to the walls.”

I held my lantern to the stone surrounding us. It was no longer amethyst. The cold, sweating surface still had a shine to it, but it was much duller now with a yellow-brownish cast. I stopped, removed my knife from my belt and scraped. The scar in the wall glistened marvelously. Gold. “Allowance” Mano repeated.

It seemed the man-children returned to Fumu regularly not only to worship, but to harvest the gold of her fortress. The lava tubes extending out from her burrow through gold, and according to the man-children, Fumu itself has hidden strata of the precious metal. Granted, silver is the coin of the realm among Nepal’s local inhabitants; but gold by the
pram-full
could still keep a man in boundless comfort.

Perhaps it was because Hoyt came from money but he did not become crazed by the realization he was walking through an uncharted gold mine. His notes continue as if he had just learned a dull mathematics fact at school. No other expedition members mention the gold in their journals either. Hoyt must have kept it to himself to avoid a widespread outbreak of the Sin of Greed.

Mano explained that neighboring Nepalese people brought them whatever they needed thanks to Fumu’s allowance. Food, services, toys, games, books. Everything they required.
There was no reason to farm or hunt.
On this trip, Mano’s people would collect gold from the caves upon their return trip to the monasteries, after they had paid their respects to the mountain. They would stuff their buntings with gold, deposit the gold in their prams, and wheel it home. “We will sleep first at the base of the mountain before mining” he apparently said. “We will need to rest before we dig and scrape with our toys. Rock candy?”

Hoyt turned down the offer, but the topic of being tired must have triggered another question in Hoyt’s head, because according to his journal, he also asked Mano about the average age of the man-children. None of them seemed young. “Most of them slouched, had sagging bosoms, and wore thinning grey manes” Hoyt wrote. Mano’s explanation was minimal and far from satisfying. “We do not have children because sex is naughty. We have also stopped recruiting because the sibling rivalry is getting to be ridiculous. Fumu can only have so many children. He is not a Catholic after all.” Mano apparently laughed at his own joke. Hoyt did not.

Time passed slowly. Patience was tested. Tempers shortened. Stomachs growled for dinner. The yak bellowed. “Each expedition member looked at the feet of the man in front of them and waited for a cry from the front of the march announcing daylight” Thornton wrote. “No announcement would come. A man-child would occasionally cry out, confessing to fear of the dark, and a Sherpa would tell them to calm down.” The urge to get out was growing strong among everyone.

Like Hoyt and Mano, many of the men talked to pass the time. After getting over his reservations about Yuudai’s nationality, Drake discussed an idea for an invention he had had while sitting in his broken down automobile on the side of the road many years earlier. Thinking her husband was late because he had been out raising his wrist with other scientists, his wife had greeted him at the door with a skillet to the face.
At that moment, he had realized how terribly he could have used a telephone on the way home. He told Yuudai of his idea for a “wireless” telephone, an impossible contraption that worked like a long-distance two-way radio. It required no overhead telephone lines and could be used almost anywhere provided there was a “tower” transmitting a signal nearby. Drake planned to patent the idea when he returned to the States. Yuudai was raised to be polite and did not respond to this silliness.

Just when conversations had run out of replenishing topics, Mano informed the team they were approaching the end. They had reached a narrow point preceding the cave mouth. The narrow point before exiting out to the Qila Sanctuary and Fumu is five feet in diameter and continues like that for no more than three feet, wide enough and short enough to allow for the men and their equipment to pass through without much effort. About fifty feet beyond this narrow point lay the cave mouth.

Mano noticed something was wrong immediately after passing through the narrow portion. They had neared the mouth no later than one in the afternoon, but upon approaching, they saw only darkness at the end. Mano approached the place where the mouth should have been and found it had been blocked. The barrier was created by flat rocks sitting atop one another reaching all of the way to the ceiling. “Hoyt had been happy as a schoolboy all day” Chhiri Tendi told me in our discussions many years later. “But when we reached that obstruction, goodness gracious. His face contorted into a scowl and his movements came in short, enraged bursts. He was audibly grumbling. It was like he’d suffered from a life-long curse of the limbs and muscles, experienced a momentary reprieve, only to have it return in a tragic instant.” He began yelling at Mano, calling him every terrible name he could think of. No one was happy at the moment, but Hoyt’s abuse seemed unnecessarily vicious. Being a “good child,” Mano did not fight back. He accepted his scolding. However, when the tempest of Hoyt’s rage had subsided, Mano did point out that the obstruction was not natural. A viewing by lantern light suggested the stones were too flat and stacked too carefully to be the result of a cave-in.