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

in a straight line behind Rauff and Lobsang Tenjing, all tied off. They had given themselves about ten feet of rope between climbers, but climbed much closer to each other than that. The nine other Sherpa brought up the rear, also unfettered by the rope.

The warm weather put everyone in good spirits. Despite the thin air, the Germans began singing, most likely the infamous songs written for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Nima Sonam knew enough German to catch the gist of the lyrics. “They sang songs praising their leader, condemning outsiders, and glorifying the brotherhood among Aryan men,” he remembers. “It goes without saying they did not ask us to sing along.” The Sherpa could only assume they were not included in the “brotherhood.” Lobsang Tenjing was making every effort to defy the tradition and break through to their world. But everyone knew that when a climb was over, the old boundaries between “coolie” and “sahib” – regardless of the sahib’s origin – rose back up to a great height.

Below the singing, another sound began to rise, tuneless and terrible. The men stopped their revelry one by one as it reached their ears. A cracking sound. All eighteen souls stopped in their tracks and remained motionless. Whatever was cracking was enormous, the sound coming from directly below and also echoing from afar. And in another moment, it simply stopped.

The men looked at each other, shaken. Rauff laughed to break the tension. After some time, the other Germans laughed as well. The Sherpa did not. The whole team began to walk again. Rauff broke into the first line of Das Lied der Deutschen when the Earth opened up beneath them. The sound was deafening as ice chunks the size of city row houses separated from each other and fell. What had a moment ago been a featureless field of ice and snow now looked like an enormous cat’s eye - white on both sides with a long black slit up the middle, roughly fifty feet wide. The men on the rope were draped across the slit, with Rauff and Lobsang Tenjing holding onto the man at the front, and the nine Sherpa holding onto the man at the end. The ones in the middle flailed their arms and legs over the chasm and yelled for help.

Rauff was slipping and his backpack was ripping open. Oxygen tanks, cooker parts, cups, and the like fell out and rolled over the edge of the chasm. No one heard the sound of these things hitting the bottom. That may have been because of the screaming, or it may have been because the bottom was very far away.

Rauff yelled for everyone to keep quiet. Although straining to hold the rope, he needed a moment to think. Complete silence fell over the group, even those hanging in mid-air. The situation was problematic. The weight of the tethered men was being shared by the people standing on both sides of the chasm. Neither side could safely let go without placing all of the weight on the men on the other side. Also, if either side let go, the tethered man closest to them would fall and swing in a fifty foot arc – a fatal fall without question.

The man in the middle of the rope was an older climber named Dieter Hofstadter. Rauff called to him, telling him to take out a knife and cut through the hemp of the rope above him. In this way, the fall would be minimized for all of the hanging men, and the weight would be minimized for those holding the rope on land. But Dieter was helpless. He could not manage his knife with frozen, shaking hands.

They sat there for what must have seemed like an eternity, trying to consider a way out of this vexation. Rauff and Lobsang Tenjing would certainly have been growing exhausted quickly. In his stubbornness and desperation, Rauff demanded the Sherpa on the other side let go. He refused to be directly responsible for the deaths of any men on his expedition, and he was certain once the men on the rope were vertical, they could use their spikes and the pickaxes in their belt to take hold of the ice, thereby removing the burden of their weight from him and Lobsang Tenjing. The Sherpa on the other side were incredulous, as was the man the Sherpa were holding, a young typeface designer from Munich named Hermann Shultz – the person who would take the fifty-foot fall if Rauff had his way. Shultz yelled for Rauff to be a true leader and take the difficult step of letting go. Rauff refused angrily. Everyone was now yelling.

Having reached his limit, Rauff drew the pistol he kept tucked into his belt. He fired directly at the Sherpa on the other side. He was too focused on holding onto his climber and fired wildly, missing the Sherpa entirely. The Sherpa did not lose their grip on Shultz for even a moment.

Rauff’s desperate act could not have failed more miserably. The sound of the gunshot loosened whatever ground was beneath him. The cat’s eye dilated wider. Rauff and Lobsang Tenjing fell, pulling every last tethered man with them into the bowels of the mountain, screaming for their lives the whole way down. The remaining Sherpa looked down in shock at the massive opening below them. It was no crevasse. It was an entirely new feature in the topography of the mountain. The snowfield they had been walking on less than twenty minutes earlier had apparently been a frozen roof – one hundred feet thick - over a concave face between major buttresses. The roof may have been weakening and cracking for some time, but the warm weather and Nazi mirth had been enough to break it open. The southern route to the summit now had a major hurdle added to it. Ever since the Sherpa returned to tell of the disaster, western climbers have called the area “Rauff’s