Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (42 page)

It was not a marshmallow. It had several ropes streaming off of it, leading back into Yuudai’s pack, which was now half of its original size with the white item removed. As Yuudai unfolded the fabric, it took on a familiar form. A parachute. “I saved it after our arrival,” Yuudai uttered in hoarse, quiet, fluent English. “Just in case.” He went silent again and simply stared at his expedition leader.

Hoyt was now alert. His world had just changed. Possibility permeated into, and ultimately flooded, the hulls of his previously empty thoughts. He wrote later, “Heart beated [sic] agin [sic]. Fath & hope restord. God is grat [sic]!” His story would not end here. He could still prevail. The delightful turn was all due to Yuudai, this archangel sent from Heaven by way of the Orient, who now held in his hands the key to their prison cell. In his joy, Hoyt let out a quick “Ha!” and then promptly covered his mouth and excused himself for the outburst.

Yuudai continued to remove the parachute from his backpack. It was attached to a smaller backpack now being birthed from the larger backpack. Yuudai took the parachute and carefully stuffed it into the smaller backpack so it would be ready for use.

The problem must have been obvious to both men the moment they individually became aware of the parachute’s existence and utility. There were two men and there was one parachute. But perhaps at first neither man had been willing to let his thoughts travel to such a dark place. A discussion began. It never became heated or selfish. Voices remained calm. They considered the possibility of sharing, one person holding fast to the other who wore the chute, but they ultimately agreed such a move would end in two deaths. Another plan was hatched in which one man would jump wearing the chute while tied to a rope secured to their current perch on the other end. The man remaining above could then climb down the sheer cliff aided by the rope. This idea was also rejected because they did not have even a fraction of the rope they would require. What’s more, if they had that length of rope, they would not have needed a parachute in the first place.

Hoyt recommended they draw straws. Yuudai refused. “Some day, when we both survive this, I will tell you about
bushido
, Mr. Hoyt.
Bushido
is the way of the good soldier. Bushido is my code. I cannot take the parachute. Go” he said. “I will find some other way. The team needs you. Go.”

I wish I could write that Hoyt refused to do any such thing; that he would rather die alongside Yuudai than take the good man’s only parachute from him; that he followed the teachings of the Good Shepherd and such an act was unconscionable. Hoyt wrote: “Took it, patted him on shulder [sic], thanked him.”

In the blackness of the wee hours, Hoyt donned the pack and walked out into the storm. Yuudai followed him out briefly to explain how the thing was to be deployed, and then without any more discussion (the weather would not permit it), Yuudai retired into his Den of Slush.

Hoyt probably did not hesitate, concerned if he
did
hesitate, he would lose his nerve. Any further thought would have led him to the realization he was going to land empty-handed. No tent, no food, no climbing equipment. He jumped into the blackness.

The parachute deployed gloriously but the wind made the subsequent ride down hell. “Parashoot [sic]. Wheeee!” Hoyt wrote later. We can only assume from the product of his nuanced pen that the drag on the chute was intermittent, causing violent drops followed by updrafts sending him far from his starting point. He landed on a pile of ice blocks, partway up the western slope of the former Maw. This landing point was a good thing if he was going to attempt a death march to the summit instead of retreating.

“
That is how I found him,” said Chhiri Tendi.

Chhiri Tendi finally caught up to Hoyt, grabbed him by the legs and stopped him. They lay for some moments in that pose, not moving at all and becoming buried in fresh snow. Fumu’s summit raged above them, making an ungodly racket and belching glowing red disagreement into the skies.

Once Chhiri Tendi had enough strength and will to look up, he could not believe his eyes. In the increasing light, he spotted a lone tent peg inches from his face. With a shift of focus, he saw tins of food scattered among the dirty ice and snow. A tent, collapsed and covered in snow but otherwise in tact, lay just to the right of his feet. There was equipment everywhere. More was likely buried under the snow. Either by luck or by the grace of God, they were lying in the middle of the remnants of Camp Three, the ill-fated outpost that had fallen victim to the collapsed maw.

With new-found energy Chhiri Tendi set up the tent. He came across an oxygen mask and tank while sifting through the flotsam and affixed them to Hoyt. When the tent was completed, he pulled Hoyt inside and shoved food into his mouth. “I didn’t know at that point he had had access to water so I also tried to hydrate him” recalls Chhiri Tendi. He had found a sleeping bag and took some time shoving Hoyt into it. After he had boiled tea and drank it down like a shot of brandy, Chhiri Tendi slipped into his own sleeping bag.

“
Yuudai’s gone,” Hoyt mumbled from inside the bag. Chhiri Tendi registered this and then slipped into a dreamless sleep.

When they awoke, the entire day had passed and now darkness was coming. The weather had abated somewhat. Still the sky was overcast but the wind was calm and the snow had stopped falling. Hoyt was awake before Chhiri Tendi. He had fallen asleep with his mask on. When the oxygen in the tank was used up, his own gasps wakened him. A night of air had also revived him. “I’m ready,” he said. “Let us sally forth!”

Chhiri Tendi was more than happy to do so. They ate, got dressed, and ventured out into the cold dusk. At last, the expedition would be a single team again, reunited at Camp Four near the Eastern Ridge. But they would be one man short. “I will speak well of him to the others” Hoyt wrote that morning. “And by way of a letter passed to the mercenaries in Calcutta assigned to pick up Yuudai, I will let his father know of his selfless act.”

Chhiri Tendi and Hoyt hiked with newfound vigor. Their bodies had sustained permanent damage, including frostbite and ghastly bruises from falls on the maw’s uneven remains. But these unpleasantries were drowned out by adrenaline coursing not just through their veins but through their very souls. Ear-damaging explosions were heard from the top of the mountain. Like trumpet blasts on a battle field. One of these blasts was followed by a coda of black rocks rolling down the slope behind them. “The rock hissed. Smoked,” Hoyt wrote. The noise from on high became so disconcerting the two men took wads of toilet paper from their packs and stuck them in their ears.

Before it was completely dark, Hoyt and Chhiri Tendi came upon Camp Four. Any relief they had felt must have been quickly replaced by horror and nausea. Camp Three had been ruined, but Camp Four and its inhabitants had been utterly annihilated. What greeted them was a composition done in blood, snow, marrow, and tent canvas - a scene so abhorrent the likes could only be found in an old penny dreadful or the Grand Guignol. It was impossible to obtain a body count unless one was willing to deal in fractions.

Chapter Fifteen: The Oculus Part I

River Leaf peered down into the darkness. If the night around her was pitch black, then the hole beneath her was even more so. When she lit her torch, it did not help. She could only lean over the hole and aim the beam for so long before having to back away. The arctic wind emanating from the Oculus was simply too much for a person to bear even in small allotments, especially a woman. The wind shot out of the ground with the aggression of the Conqueror Worm itself.

She tried calling down to him, but the noise of blasting wind and the eruptions miles above her overwhelmed all other sound. The weather was bitter here at the bottom of the Icy Bellows and River Leaf knew her time to act was limited. Snow had begun to fall at that point, and this only served to add to the bite of the wind. She would have to set up a tent soon. So she decided sending a flare into the Oculus was the right course of action. Such an act might provide a glimpse of the scene below. If she were to see McGee alive in the glow, then it would alert him to her presence and she would press on in her attempt to rescue him. If the light presented her with no sign of him, or a sign of him obviously dead, then she would give up and hike out of the Icy Bellows immediately toward Camp One at the Rakhiot Glacier (a relatively easy hike, surely the shortest and gentlest route out of the Icy Bellows’ bowl). The only question was what would she do if she saw McGee in tact but not moving? Should she assume he was alive and make a rescue effort, or that he was dead or dying and not unnecessarily risk her own demise?

After bracing herself for the cold, she leaned over the hole and fired her flare gun into it. The shot worked quite well. Although the light made evident there was a seemingly bottomless hole below her, there was also a large chamber around the hole whose floor was some twenty-five feet down. The flare landed on the floor of the chamber. Only feet away from the flare, not even noticing its phosphorescence, sat a very much alive McGee. The vision must have been haunting. He was seated on a rock, motionless, bathed in red flare light. He was holding up a human head.

River Leaf may have been moving quickly to get the rope ready or she may have been recoiling from the cold blast. Whatever the reason for her sudden activity, it caused the ice beneath her to give way. The Oculus consumed her. She fell, but like McGee, the chamber floor broke her fall so she did not disappear down the throat of the dead volcano. Landing on her pack may have been the thing that saved her, for she did not break anything. The only repercussion may have been having the wind knocked out of her.

McGee had been writing in his journal since falling into the Oculus, quite possibly to maintain sanity. His awkward gibberish was enough to paint the picture:

“
River Leaf fell from the sky. An angel sort of. Here I was alredy [sic] dead, but she came to return me to life I think. She got up after falling. semmed [sic] ok. But scared and sad mabe [sic]. I didn’t move cause I think mabe [sic] I was still in shock. I showed her Hoover’s head. ‘Zack Hoover. I knew this guy, river leaf.’ He had been a chum of junk’s back in the states. They knew each other from climbing. I also became his friend. He was funny and as crazy as we were. We chased tail together. He got me into some swank parties. I liked him. Now here’s his fucking head.”

We can only shudder and imagine that the cold air in the cave and lack of elements had preserved the head well. Perhaps its white mouth was still forming the words to tell Chhiri Tendi they were indeed higher than Everest. What a proud moment it had been up on Fumu two years earlier. The sort of moment in which a man is certain he is unstoppable. Infinite. An invincible ego housed in a mortal body. Brought to nothing in the end but a stone in a pit.

McGee’s notes suggest that he wept for the better part of a half hour while River Leaf consoled him. We must assume she too was terrified, but the writings tell of a woman who kept her head. Possibly she was too busy taking inventory of their environs, considering every detail for signs of escape.

But any opportunities for escape remained elusive. The flare had long gone out. There was no light source at all. The only sensation was the sound of cold air rushing up from the vent and out of the Oculus and the breathing of the other captive. River Leaf lit her torch and had a look about. They were in the mouth of the long-deceased volcano. This had once been Fumu’s summit tens of thousands of years ago, back when she was likely twice her current height. Then an eruption occurred of such magnitude that the lava chamber beneath Fumu had been entirely spent and the Earth collapsed down into the chamber’s vast space. The cold air still rushing out from below is inexplicable to this day. In theory there is nothing down there anymore to be expelled. Even if there were a deeper hidden volcanic chamber, then the vent should have been spitting out hot air. There is obviously no such thing as cold lava, but this place must have given off the sense such a thing did exist and was ready to spring forth from below at any moment.

Belgian explorer Jean-Claude Bastiaens, who explored the cave several years later, wrote “its shape makes one feel as if he is inside the hollow flower of a giant ice tulip. From the vent hole at our feet, the floor fans out about eight metres in all directions. It then curves gently upward to become the walls. As the walls rise, the circumference of the room decreases until it became only slightly greater than the circumference of the Oculus at the top.”

River Leaf tied her ice axe to her rope and attempted throwing it through the Oculus, but that did not work. Her one throw managing to reach the surface found no purchase and fell back down into the vent. She pulled it up and tried no more. The Icy Bellows above them was made of maddeningly smooth snow and ice. The axe would never find anything upon which to catch. Then she tried climbing up the slowly-rising ceiling of the cave, hammering in ice screws as she went. But despite the fact River Leaf was as light as dandelion snow, each screw would fall out under her weight. Exhausted, she sat next to McGee who had not moved at all. “The only moving I did was shivering. I was cold and I think in shock” he wrote.