Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (45 page)

Cole was first out of the tent. When Junk came out, he looked upon a ridge lit up by a full moon in the southern sky. Its angle was low enough to the horizon that Fumu’s cloud did not obscure it. The scene must have felt like a dream; a dream wrought with unfamiliar symbolism. Men cloaked in white with dead cobras tied around their necks. The men’s faces are the faces of people Junk knows, but playing a different role in waking life. They were the faces of the four dyspeptic Sherpa. Why are they dressed like that? Why had they removed Cole’s oxygen mask? And why are they holding a curved knife to Cole’s throat? To Junk’s right, he sees Pasang Dolma walking down the ridge, descending into obscurity. “We let him go” one of the men in white yelled over the sound of eruptions. “He is a fellow countryman. We showed mercy and let him live. Maybe he will be willing to join our ranks some day.” Ranks?

As we will soon see, Junk had an extended window time to write down the events of the evening, and he did so in a rather thorough manner:

“
All I could mumble in my confusion and exhaustion was the inevitable question ‘Who are you?’ Their response was thorough, eloquent, but as odd as their outfits. The one man holding the knife to Cole’s neck spoke, or rather yelled, over Fumu’s racket.

“‘
We are the Nepalese Cobras: Weapons Division. Our mission is to develop the weapons capable of liberating Nepal. We will cleanse it of the bacteria permeating its every facet, from government to school to steppes to mountain top. We mostly fill our days attacking British soldiers, stealing their weaponry. We had been in Calcutta last month for two reasons. First, we intended to meet Nepalese citizens in India who were involved in India’s nationalist movement. They would be likely sympathizers with our cause. Although they generally agreed with our grievances against the West, they thought our methods – and our uniforms - were too garish. Too bedizened. We had no luck recruiting there so we killed several of them. Second, we were waiting to ambush a British minister named Galloway who was reported to be on his way to Nepal from England. We had heard he would have an entourage of soldiers guarding him. These targets were sure to get us on the front page of Indian papers. But as we waited in a portside tavern, we overheard you, Mister Junk. And we heard you, Doctor Cole. We had struck gold. Not only did we have Americans to rend, but we had an American who knew how to make a weapon that incinerates entire cities! The ultimate weapon. The weapon that can make Nepal not only independent, but feared! What needed to happen was patent; We disguised ourselves as Sherpa, spoke Sherpa, and threw ourselves at Pasang Dolma. The Cannibal Division of the Nepalese Cobras had taught us a thing or two about climbing, and we were trained in the Gurkha battalions to fight at high altitudes (none of the Cobras wore oxygen masks). You know the rest. We have feigned peonage ever since. Cole, your documents are not lost. We have them and will return them to you once we have begun our trip down the mountain. You are coming with us to Kathmandu. There, you will help us build an atomic bomb.’

“
The guy kept talking and talking. His bass-heavy voice was just forceful enough to be heard over the eruptions. He went on about how, yes, he did spit on the man-children’s monastery, because Mano and his people had proved unwilling to join their cause. He found the man-children’s pacifism offensive. Even after threatening to kill one of these man-children, and even after following through on that threat, the others just cried. They were useless to the Cobras. He found them to be an embarrassment to the Kingdom.

“
As this freak of nature jawed away, I became distracted. There was someone climbing in the moonlight. He was above us on the ridge, climbing away, toward the cloud. A tall guy, maybe 6 foot three or so. No one from my team. And then it dawned on me. It dawned on me like the coldest sunrise imaginable. That was Hoyt there. That was the fucker who had dared me here, the man responsible for every horrid event of the past month. And here I was getting a midnight lecture on geopolitical strategy from a lunatic. Take Cole, I thought. Take him but let me go. Seeing Hoyt so close was too much for me. Any consideration I may have had for my old, dear climbing partner was rendered inaccessible by the temptation.

“
My captors did not seem to notice Hoyt making his way up the ridge. They were too focused on me. Cole seemed to be fading without the help of his oxygen. His head kept nodding and eyes rolling like so many drunks I had seen around Fenway. Hoyt! Hoyt! I just wanted to follow Hoyt! Stop talking, I thought. Go away. Kill me and end my suffering or leave me to complete my personal war. Hoyt was disappearing from sight. He had stood out as a dark figure against a bright ground of moonlit snow. But as he approached the cloud and the snow mixed more and more with black lapilli and scoria, he could no longer be easily seen. What’s more, he was very far away now, and he might have already started to disappear into the cloud.

“
Another person appeared on the ridge between us and Hoyt. But he was climbing down to us. He moved quickly. He held out something in his hand. I would later find out this man was Chhiri Tendi, a well-known Sherpa who had aided Hoover in his efforts to reach the top of Fumu. I had no idea why he was approaching. Perhaps he didn’t know of my rivalry with his sahib and wanted us to join forces? Did he see there was a problem from so far away and now was coming to aid us? No. All of these theories were wrong. When he came close enough that I could make out finer details, I saw he was holding a gun.

“
The Cobras finally saw him but did not flinch. When the approaching man took off his oxygen mask, the lead Cobra grinned. He spoke in Nepali to Chhiri Tendi, his sentences riddled with insincere laughter Chhiri Tendi did not seem as jovial. He looked angry. He also looked terribly frostbitten.. He had the gun aimed at the lead Cobra, but his aim was far from true. His arm moved haphazardly due to fatigue and wind.“

Chhiri Tendi remembers holding the gun at these men who had killed his father. They did not seem scared, and Chhiri Tendi knew why. They knew his father had been tortured by the violence in himself; that he could not live with the knowledge that he had killed a man. Being aware of this, what were the odds the son of Phurbu Tawa was going to resort to similar violence? He was not going to pull the trigger, and the Cobras knew it. He is a Sherpa, a people who fancy themselves pacifists. But in the Cobras’ opinion, ‘pacifist’ is just another word for ‘coward.’ “Put the gun down, Chhiri Tendi. You are not going to pull that trigger.”

Chhiri Tendi responded, “Well, as an alternative, perhaps I’ll stick this gun so far up your ass that the next time you gag on your lover, you’ll shoot his testicles off.” The Cobras all laughed out loud. The leader complimented Chhiri Tendi on his humour, saying that it was delightful but unable to help him now.

The lead Cobra said he was so confident in Chhiri Tendi’s unwillingness to shoot them that he would remove the knife from Cole’s neck. He pushed Cole forward several feet. The Cobra leader was now wide open. Chhiri Tendi did nothing. He was frozen – not with cold, but with indecision. Kill the men and continue the shame of his father, or spare the men and fail to avenge his father? Might there be another possibility? As Chhiri Tendi’s mind churned, the Cobra leader said “We are going to leave now and take Cole with…”

“
You’re right” Chhiri Tendi interrupted. “I cannot kill you. Instead, I leave your fate up to the mountain.” With that, he aimed the gun at the ridge immediately in front of the Cobras’ feet and pulled the trigger. With a loud report, the gun fired and the bullet disappeared into a kicked up cloud of snow and ash. And as quickly as a single beat of a skylark’s heart, the cornice upon which the treasonous Gurkhas stood broke and fell away. The four aggressors disappeared down the north face of Fumu, yelling bloody murder until distance, wind, and eruptions conspired to swallow their cries whole. As quickly as the threat had arrived, it was gone.

After only a brief moment of taking in the scene, Chhiri Tendi threw Rauff’s gun off of the ridge to the south where it descended into the Maw, returning whence it came. He was upset, but not so upset he could forget his job and his charge. He turned and began catching up with Hoyt. He moved with fresh speed up the ridge, undeterred by the pack and oxygen on his back. The adrenaline suffusing the heart upon approaching victory cannot be underestimated. Frostbite, hunger, thirst; they all step aside when we know our goal is near. Chhiri Tendi was a new man, ready to follow his leader into the Unknown. “Many questions were about to be answered,” Chhiri Tendi told me. “I felt that on the ridge. I felt excitement like I had never known. My failure on the Hoover expedition was about to be wiped clean. The top of Fumu would finally be revealed to us.” He was off like a coney in the vegetable gardens of springtime.

Surprised by the sudden change in predicament, Junk stood still and silent for a moment, eyes fixed on the place where the Cobras had been. Cole stared back. Had the Cobra leader not let go of his hostage, the hostage would have fallen as well. Cole’s shocked expression betrayed that realization. The two continued to stare at each other, Cole with his mask off, Junk with his mask on.

“
Thank Saint -austina” Cole shouted over the cacophony. Junk observed that his colleague could not get the initial “F” of the saint’s name out due to frozen lips. “She has shown –ee -ercy!” He was laughing and crying at the same time. He was looking everywhere, considering his reprieve and taking in the sight of the world that was still his to enjoy. “I -ust say” he yelled through the tears and laughter, “that could not have turned out -etter!”

And with that a massive geyser of lava shot straight up where Cole had stood. The spew arced thirty feet above the ridge. Chhiri Tendi looked back at the event and saw Cole’s detached arms hit Junk, as if trying to pick a fight despite lack of management. As for the rest of Cole, he was simply gone, incinerated, instantly cured of frostbite, and lost in the brilliantly lit night sky. Junk instinctively dove into the deep snow, as did Chhiri Tendi even though he was already easily thirty yards up the ridge. Bright red liquid spat out, not quite as high anymore, but still voluminously and in a wide span. Junk rolled about, trying to dodge volcanic bombs as they landed and hissed around him. He dug into the snow behind his head, hoping to hide as much of himself as possible under snow cover. Lava poured over the edge of the north face but did not drop far before solidifying and turning to black rock. Then the lava stopped, and what was left was a fat and perfectly conical hornito with black smoke belching out of the top.

Junk’s horror passed quickly; one might say too quickly for a sane man. He did not look back at his camp or the remnants of the explosion or the severed arms of his friend. Chhiri Tendi heard him give out a roar and begin to approach. Junk waded through the deep snow - passing Chhiri Tendi without even a sideways glance to acknowledge the Sherpa’s presence - on his way to Hoyt, the summit, and almost Certain Death. Chhiri Tendi followed suit but was losing ground by the moment. The two Americans ahead of him were moving at a shocking clip, as if the transported by a sleigh hidden beneath the snow. It did not help matters that Chhiri Tendi was weighted down by a heavy pack while Junk and Hoyt were unencumbered. Had Junk reasoned for even one moment through the fog of his dizzy anger, he would have realized Pasang Dolma was no longer with him. Not carrying a pack to the summit was foolish to a degree the mountains do not forgive. He could survive without a tent and cooker, but that assumes all goes as planned, with nothing to bollocks up progress. Should he be delayed even slightly – if he got lost in the cloud for several hours for instance – the mistake of leaving behind his pack could become deadly. Even the water supply he had manufactured earlier using ice melted on the cooker was now freezing in the canteen on his belt. The frostbite continued its own slow ascent up Junk’s arms and legs. The master planner of business schemes and expeditions had skipped planning altogether at this, his most crucial hour.

Hoyt could not be seen when the sun came up on the morning of the 12
^th
. He was already in the cloud. Junk was almost there. “The sun was behind me” Junk wrote later. “I knew it would be only a memory in a matter of moments, yet still I did not slow down nor did I turn to look back at her brightness. She had stopped providing warmth long ago anyway. Her light had become a meaningless flirt. The sun offered nothing to me anymore.” And then the sun set upwards, rising over the inverted horizon of Fumu’s cloud.

Chhiri Tendi wrote:

“
When I reached the cloud several minutes after Junk, I was terrified to enter it. If I removed my mask, would it be breathable? Would I be able to see a single inch ahead of me? I thought of my wife and child one more time, pictured them taking their late-day walk around the village with me, a fly landing on my wife’s brow and her brushing it away, my son running ahead with the intent of hiding behind a fence and jumping out to scare us. But I would run behind him, hands out, turning the prank on him. With this thought, I left the frigid wind and sunlight behind and walked up into the cloud. The world around me changed immediately…”

Chhiri Tendi could see several feet ahead of him, and then he could not, and then he could again. The density of the cloud changed moment by moment. The temperature shot up to blistering heat, and then it dropped again, like taking a steam and then jumping into a lake in winter. This made it impossible for Chhiri Tendi to regulate his core temperature. If he disrobed, he would suffer frostbite from the cold. If he kept the layers on, he would slowly cook. The ground around him was a monochrome paisley, whorls of black ash and stone flowing into snow, slush, and rivulets of icy runoff.