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

Earth is not round. But it is as true a fact as there is. The Earth is not round. To be sure, a child drawing a picture of the planet will trace around a teacup or toy roundabout. However, these children are only following the dictates of their begetters and schoolmarms. We adults are the ones making the unexamined claims. Ask anyone on the street if the world is round and unless they are cracked, they will concur. Why do they do this? Because it is true? No. Because they believe that it is true? Possibly. The cleanest explanation is this: We say the world is round in order to distinguish it from the alternative of being flat. The former is certainly closer to the truth and yet it is still untrue. The mistake we make is that, in fact, there is no either/or distinction. A vast continuum exists between round and flat.

Consider a man’s head. We say it is round, but is it? Certainly it is not flat. But the lower jaw protrudes out to form the severe ridge of the chin. The valleys of the orbital sockets compromise the mantle of the skull. The distance from the top of the head to the bottom of the chin is far greater than the distance between the ears. If anything, the head is closer to an oval. Round? Bah.

To use one more example, consider the cobblestone. It is not round, but we may refer to it as such in order to distinguish it from the flat slate in our gardens or the jagged gneiss of the Scottish Isles. But at best, the cobblestone does a shoddy burlesque of round. To be truly round, every point in an object’s surface must be equidistant from the center. In all three cases above - the Earth, the man’s head, and the cobblestone – we see nothing of the sort. Instead, we see the Language of Convenience smoothing over deep contemplation and hiding the richer, more fascinating truth.

The reader first came across the fact of the Earth’s odd bearing when we discussed the Great Trigonometric Survey of India. We learned that the planet is an “oblate spheroid,” longer in circumference around the equator than around the poles. But that is only the beginning of the planet’s curious lineaments. The thickness of the Earth’s crust varies, from up to fifty miles thick in some locations such as the mountain ranges in the middle of a continent, to as little as three miles under the oceans. With this fluctuation in thickness comes fluctuation in the integrity of the planet’s surface. I believe I have made my point clearly enough. The nurse on my ward was the one who needed to “get some rest” – or at least – she needed a tutor in geology. The world is as oddly formed as her - an old bint with a dowager’s hump.

The shape of the world is a rather uninteresting fact until one considers its impact on Man. And even if the impact does not compare to that of a letter arriving in the mails from a rosy-cheeked admirer, the impact is there nonetheless. You see, gravity at each point on the Earth’s surface is quite dependent on the unique conditions of the Earth at that point. For example, because the equator is farther from the center of the Earth than are the poles, a bushman in the Congo is slightly lighter than the selfsame bushman should he decide to plant a flag at the South Pole. What’s more, because the equator is spinning much faster than the poles, the centrifugal force playing the foil to gravity is strengthened and the bushman’s lightness is only magnified in his homeland. Of course, the same considerations would be at play if he should climb a mountain anywhere in the world; his distance from the center of the earth would increase with the ascent, as would his speed of revolution. He would be lighter at the peak than he would be at the base. What’s more, because the air is thinner at the peak, the world’s grasp on him grows even weaker!

The thickness of the Earth’s crust at a specific location also has a hand in the weight of our bushman. If he should take a steamer to India on holiday, he will weigh more during his voyage at sea than he will at his ports of call. That is because the crust underneath him on the ship is relatively thin. Where there is less crust there is more mantle, and mantle is made of a much heavier, denser rock than the porous crust. The decrease in light material and increase in higher density material beneath his feet makes the bushman heavier.

This house of mirrors upon which we live becomes all the more perplexing when we consider that even the direction from which gravity pulls may change based on surface anomalies. Our poor bushman, wanting nothing more than a peaceful jaunt in his Congolese village, is now being bullied by the world’s esoteric and draconian rules of physics. He is made to be heavier, and then lighter, and now he does not know which way is up and which down because the plumb bob next to him suggests “down” is two degrees offset from his current stance. The obtuse globe and its porous crust are conspiring to redirect gravity ever-so-slightly away from the true center of the Earth’s core.

But what has all this to do with our current story? Quite a bit, I’m afraid. You see, Fumu is a gravitational anomaly. It is not on the equator, but it is close enough to make an American lighter than he is at home, and its height places those at her peak very far from the world’s core, spinning faster than any other human being on the planet. Unhindered by the thick atmosphere at sea level, the person is made lighter still.

Even with all of these variables in play, one should not expect