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

The wind and snow continued to pummel the tents, threatening to collapse or bury them at any moment. The din of the weather and the summit was deafening. The outer chaos and inner conflict taunted Chhiri Tendi. As night fell, he made a decision. “Even if it killed me, I was going out to find Hoyt and Yuudai. Sleep was not coming for me and I sure as hell was not going to waste any more effort looking for it.”

He suited up and walked out into an unwelcoming world.

Hoyt looked out over the darkening grey and then retired to the cave. He did not know the date. Time was no longer a property of the universe. There was only space, and very little of it. “Dearest Journal, Waiting for death. Won’t be quick. Warm in here and puddle to drink. May starve over weeks. Scared.” William Hoyt was actually scared. That is, he may have been scared many times in his life, but he was actually confessing to it in print.

As the snow in the cave melted from the warm vent in the rock, more of the vent became exposed and more warm air entered. It widened at the bottom so the rate of warm air coming into the space also increased. They knew this temporary luxury would soon give way to tragedy in the form of a collapse of their shelter.

“Mr. Hoyt. I thought of something.” Hoyt concluded that the words were uttered by voices in his head. After all, Yuudai had not initiated a conversation since the airplane ride to Fumu. It came again; “Mr. Hoyt.” Yuudai was now rifling through his backpack with a ferocious urgency. Then he was pulling out a massive piece of fabric, white silk divided into sections by some machine’s stitch work. Hoyt was hallucinating from his deprivations. “A marshmallow?” he wrote in his journal. “If so, big enogh [sic] to feed us for weeks!”

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