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

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.

So as not to waste the remaining power in the torch, River Leaf turned it off and they sat in the dark. There could be no doubt, McGee confided, that Junk