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

From a sitting position, in a slurred voice clearly experimenting with English for the first time, one of the fallers began to announce, “We are Nepalese Co-…” but another one interrupted him with a short utterance in Nepali. The interrupter gestured toward the hole that had swallowed their cohort moments earlier. McGee wrote “He shrugged his shoulders and made a look on his face that seemed to say ‘Eh…forget it.’” At that, the person who had initiated the introduction started anew. “We fell.”

The Sherpa were all bruised from their falls, but they also seemed to heal quite well and were hobbling about within a few hours. They had some food among them in their packs and shared it willingly with the Irishman and the Indian. Their bilious dispositions seemed to be gone. Camaraderie now came easier to them. To our heroes, it must have seemed the change in nature came from the precarious situation which they now faced. But as you the reader know from previous chapters, there was likely another reason. These ruffians had lost their leader down the hole, and so the “weapons division” of the Nepalese Cobras was no more. Kill the head and the body will die.

This odd collection of people spent several days in the cave. Several plans of escape were hatched and then quickly thwarted. A tent canvas was tied to one of the smaller Sherpa who was to use it like a parachute over the volcano’s windy mouth. He was also secured to the rest of the team by a second rope so he would not plummet to his death. Instead of floating upward on the winds, the tent went flat and dropped downward. Ice axes were used to pick away at the cave walls in an attempt to make a pile of ice high enough to allow for escape. The ice in the walls proved too firmly packed after centuries of downward pressure to allow for chunks any larger than a man’s cufflink.

As each plan failed and each morsel of food was consumed and the chill began to permeate to bone, hopes diminished. McGee wrote: “Boston…the cheers of Fenway…the sissys [sic] with the skinny boats on the Charles yeling [sic] ‘stroke’…the ladies gigling [sic] in the Beekin [sic] Hill Tavern…I see it all rising up like one loud ball of stuff, leaving us behind and exiting by the hole above us. I’d wave bye to it if anyone else could see it.”

On September 15th, McGee and River Leaf had been in the cave for five days and the Sherpa for three. The group had become quieter. There was no longer much to say. Attempts to escape had ended and now everyone mostly rested in their bags or sat on the ground looking empty. McGee was still writing once in a while, an amazing feat considering who we are discussing. “I hope Junk makes it” he wrote that day.

As sun set over the western lip of the Icy Bellows and the light dimmed in the cave, weeping could be heard, not from McGee, but from some of the Sherpa. McGee wrote “Hope is gone. This is our grave.” For the first time, River Leaf showed signs of weakness. Like the others, she sat and stared at nothing. Her mouth hung open. Her brain was undoubtedly still trying to generate plans of escape, but the gears of thought were locking up, and dreamy irrelevances were taking hold.

A conversation broke out in the dark that night. It was no longer the type of exchange that focused on the future, planning and problem-solving and otherwise seeking to improve one’s place in the world – the type of conversation that came most naturally to the breed of person trapped in this cave. Rather, it was a conversation focused on the past. Such conversations too have a purpose, but it is quite different. Its purpose is to provide a blanket against the cold. It is the embracing of a child after she has skinned her knee. It is the fire in the hearth lit by the old woman, awaiting the shepherd returned from the fields in February. This conversation was not for bettering lives, it was a palliative before death.

McGee had started it, talking about how much he loved gambling. He loved the way his heart raced when the first roll came out in craps and the joy he felt when it was a seven, especially if he had a lot of money on the line. One of the Sherpa – the one who had a tenuous grasp of English - understood this just enough to say he agreed. He loved to gamble as well. But even better, he liked dancing with young women. There was apparently one woman he especially liked who was taller than him but he did not care. He became very happy when she was around. When she left his presence, his life was just a place to wait until she returned. “And you, River Leaf?” the Sherpa asked to the darkness. He wanted to know what made her happy and what she missed about the world they had left behind. She did not respond. Perhaps she was asleep? McGee wrote:

“I decided to help with the question cuz [sic] I was curius [sic] about her to [sic]. I asked wether [sic] she missed Boston. Nothing. ‘Do you miss the Dakotas.’ Nothing. She was mute. ‘Teepees [sic]? Riding horses? Totem poles?’ That got her. She said ‘What’s a totem pole?’”

Our dear, culturally-illiterate McGee did not know that constructing totem poles is a ritual of Indians of the American Northwest, not the Midwest. River Leaf would know as much about constructing totem poles as would a Lord Chancellor. With nothing else to discuss and a surfeit of hours to kill, McGee explained the concept to her, or at least explained what he had seen in picture shows