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

climbing for British and American papers, almost no one was willing to believe or support the obsessively investigated claims he put forward in his draft of Hell Is Above Us. There was also the fact that Tersely was in and out of hospitals during the writing of the book. Was the ailment physical or psychological? No one but his family knew and his family never spoke of it. This led to even more rumors that he was mentally unstable and Fumu was nothing more than a castle in the sky built by a lost dreamer.

The final blow to Tersely’s endeavor came from an unexpected source. In 1956, W.E. Bowman wrote the classic mountain climbing parody The Ascent of Rumdoodle. Some thought it was a spoof of Maurice Herzog’s canonical climbing book Annapurna, but it was in fact aimed directly at Tersely and Hell Is Above Us. After every back had been turned to him, from the climbing community to the publishing houses to the public at large, Tersely was brought down by the deadliest weapon of all: Wit. He finally turned to a family friend, William Parker, who owned a small publishing company in London called William Parker Books. Hell Is Above Us hit the shelves of a few British bookstores with an unnoticed thud. Tersely never wrote again. From then until his death from a heart attack in 1972, he stayed mostly in his London flat, rarely venturing out for a paper or tea. The experience of writing about Fumu had turned an adventurous man into a shut-in.

This new edition of Hell Is Above Us provides a fresh opportunity for the world to read and accept the truth. The evidence is here, in your hands. So please, sit back and enjoy the adventure. I think you may join Kenneth Tersely and me in our conviction. But there is an even more important reason for you to believe in Fumu. To reuse George Mallory’s famous quip: “Because it is there.”

Jonathan Bloom,

September 14, 2010

HELL IS ABOVE US

"I embrace hardship and privation with ecstatic delight; I want everything that the world holds; I would go to prison or to the scaffold for the sake of the experience. I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck."

-Aleister Crowley

Prelude

Highly regarded British academics, most notably those of the softer sciences, have recently theorized that humans require warmth, comforting sounds, and the nurturing smell of another’s body in order to thrive. Without such riches, humans and lower beasts tend to waste away. We have no reason to doubt such findings. For these academics are good Christian men of letters who have no reason to mislead us. Nonetheless, their hypothesis leaves us with a riddle: For how do we account for a mountain climber’s joy as he walks through empty cold space thousands of feet in the air and countless miles from family, home, and hearth? Is it masochism? Sociopathy? The query leaves me baffled, even though I myself have been known to don the Burberry, coil the rope, and leave the world for the lonely, icy shore between sky and earth that is the Himalaya.

Unable to answer, I posed the question to the legendary, retired Sherpa Chhiri Tendi as we sat sipping tea on the terrace of his humbly-appointed Phoenix, Arizona home.

“How the hell should I know?” he responded, squinting into the desert. “You said on the phone you wanted me to tell you about my first experience climbing Fumu. I can do that, but if you’d rather I try to explain why some men enjoy being cold and distant, I can give it a try. But you’re the British one so you probably know a lot more about such things.”

It was a capital point (if I understood it correctly). I had traveled from my cottage in Kingsbridge, England to visit Chhiri Tendi for the sole purpose of filling in some rather murky spaces in the tale of Fumu before I shared it with the world. I know that few will believe me when I share the epic of the giant volcano that consumed more lives than Chronos himself, but this Sherpa Chhiri Tendi is respected by the climbing community and if I could get the old bloke to go on the record as saying that Fumu is the tallest mountain in the world, then by Jove it is! I turned on my tape recording device and asked Chhiri Tendi to begin. He lit a pipe, looked west, and began to speak. For a moment, I could have sworn that the desert air was dropping in temperature…

The rest of the team remains at lower camps as planned, leaving Zachary Hoover and me to summit Fumu together. My excitement is so great at this point it’s almost shameful to me, and I’m sure sahib Hoover’s spirits are in a similar state. Our ascent has been uneventful and rapid so far today. It’s September 1st, 1939 and the sky is cloudless across Nepal. The air is cold, dry, and like it usually is in the icy mountains, scentless. The weather has played along well since the beginning of the month, the cold has been tolerable, and the wind mild enough to avoid any tragic tumbles over cliff edges. The only unpleasant characteristic of the place is the noise coming from above us. Stampedes of sound shake the Earth, rumble the gut, and the send the testicles into hiding. It’s the sound of lava, steam, and smoke being wretched up by the mountain we plan to conquer this very day.

When he gets into a rhythm, this young daredevil Hoover is known not to break it. He is thrilled with the pace of our ascent and does not want to slow things down for any reason at all, not even to keep measurements like altitude and barometric pressure. Without these measurements, all the two of us know about our location