Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain by Jonathan Bloom (bookreader TXT) 📗

Hell Is Above Us

The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World’s Tallest Mountain

By Lord Kenneth Tersely

With foreword by Jonathan Bloom, Ph.D.

Hell Is Above Us

By Lord Kenneth Tersely

With Foreword by Jonathan Bloom, Ph.D.

Copyright 2011 Jonathan Bloom

Kindle Edition

Cover art by Heather Kern

Kindle Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient.

This book is dedicated to Tricia, Ruby, and Jesse.

Thank you for being patient while my mind passed this rather large and oddly-shaped stone.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Prelude

PART ONE: BEFORE THE ASCENT

Chapter One: Hatred on Stilts

Chapter Two: The Presidentials

Interlude: August 23rd, 1937

Chapter Three: The Stakes Keep Climbing

Chapter Four: Fumu and the Dividing Engine

Chapter Five: Mount Everest

Interlude: July 14, 1881

Chapter Six: The Sins of the Father

Chapter Seven: “Souls at Sea” with Gary Cooper

Chapter Eight: The Lord High Executioner

PART TWO: THE ASCENT

Chapter Nine: The Qila Pass

Chapter Ten: Naked, Silly, and Godless

Chapter Eleven: The Rakhiot Glacier

Interlude: Winter, 1920

Chapter Twelve: A Team Divided

Chapter Thirteen: What Happened To McGee

Chapter Fourteen: Vespers

Chapter Fifteen: The Oculus Part I

Chapter Sixteen: Cannibals!

Chapter Seventeen: The Eastern Ridge

Chapter Eighteen: The Oculus Part II

Interlude

Chapter Nineteen: The Locket

Chapter Twenty: The Summit

PART THREE: THE DESCENT / ASCENSION

Chapter Twenty-One: The Tragedy

Chapter Twenty-Two: Return to “Civilization”

Chapter Twenty-Three: The Joy of the End

Foreword

Hell Is Above Us wasn’t on the shelves of my local library in Maplewood, New Jersey. It was wedged in between the stacks, about two feet in and only inches from the floor. A well-aimed morning sunbeam lit up the book just as I wandered past looking for any printed material to read on my day off. I knelt down, made a reach and it came loose without a struggle. Brushing the dust and human hair from its green, jacketless binding, I reviewed the title and author. Both were unknown to me. A quick inspection of the inside back cover showed that no one had checked it out since 1962, almost fifty years before the writing of this foreword. How sad. Whoever Kenneth Tersely was, he had probably put his heart and soul into writing these pages and now here they were, forgotten and covered in mouse excrement. My curiosity was nothing more than a spark at that point but it was enough for me to take the book over to a nearby carrel for a quick review.

The next ten hours in that carrel proved to be a life-changing experience for me. By the time I was leaving the library that evening, my stomach was empty, my wife had left ten unrequited voicemails on my phone, and the sun which had exposed the book to me in the first place was already gone.

What was it about the book that had caused me to burn through it in one day? For one thing, it certainly was not the writing. Full of labored metaphors and dated, racist terms, I often found myself fighting through the language instead of being carried along by it. Tersely’s wielding of the Queen’s English reflected the pompous, defensive tone of an empire recently relieved of its dominance. The style may have worked in 1955 when it was published but it certainly doesn’t stand up to 2010 standards.

My intense experience also had nothing to do with the two men who are the focus of the book, William Hoyt and Aaron Junk. Certainly their actions were brave and their adventures breathtaking, but Hoyt and Junk seemed like horrible people; aggressively male and endlessly shadow-boxing their respective parent issues. If they were transported to the current year, I could easily see myself crossing the street to avoid them.

No. What stopped me cold was the sheer audacity of the book’s central conceit. Did Kenneth Tersely really expect us to believe there is a mountain – a volcano no less - taller than Everest? And yet, as I devoured the book - each page being more exciting than its predecessor - I was slowly won over. By the end I was convinced Fumu is the tallest mountain in the world, the truth about it had been kept secret by a circle of elite climbers who wanted the mountain as their personal playground, and two relatively unknown climbers had raced to be the first to reach its summit.

Believe me when I say I’m not a man easily swayed, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as this. There are some facts I almost refuse to question outright. For example, June follows May. Squares have four sides. Any number divided by itself equals one. These facts build our universe and are immovable. But recently, astronomers told us Pluto was, in fact, not a planet at all. How could that be? The nine heavenly bodies of our solar system are actually eight? The impact of this edict was incalculable to me. If such a basic building block of our universe could be wrong, then what else could be brought into question? Would the sun not rise over adult non-fiction at the library tomorrow but instead over the children’s section? Would George Washington turn out to have been the second President of the United States?

Now along comes Kenneth Tersely to tell us all Everest is not the “third pole.” Some volcano called Fumu is taller. As far as hard sells go, that had to be the hardest. But in the end, using the testimonials of mountaineers both living and dead, scientific data from respected sources, and the fruits of his own scholarly research, he convinced me.

Tersely did not fare as well convincing his contemporaries in 1955. Although he had already written and published two well-received accounts of his personal climbing experiences (High Camp on Aconcagua and Dancing with The Ogre) and written hundreds of excellent articles on mountain