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

I’m climbing in back, not because I’m slow, but because I take the safety of my Western customers seriously. I never want Hoover to be out of my sight. Whenever a customer is missing, even for a fraction of a moment, I get a stomach cramp and sweat starts to bead on my brow. Ask anyone; that sense of responsibility along with my disarming sense of humor makes me stand out. If these qualities weren’t enough to draw others near, I’m also physically impressive. I’m tall for my people in Thame, Nepal, and taller even than Hoover. Some would say that I’m handsome – so handsome, in fact, I have a knife wound in my lower-left back, put there by a man who feared the wives of our village, including his own, were too infatuated with me. Many of the wives are infatuated with me. But it has nothing to do with my looks. It has to do with my sense of humor and the fact that my dancing is so exceptional, it gets every woman in the room pregnant.

Getting back to the climb, I’m also falling behind Hoover because I’m busy telling him filthy jokes through my mask. Most Sherpa hum the folk music of places like Pangboche to relax. But I prefer cursing like a stevedore using the Queen’s English. I tell joke after joke to Hoover, most of them picked up from British, German, Swiss, and Swedish base camps, all of them involving some combination of priests, Irishmen, and cocktail waitresses. I know that the timing of the punch lines is horrible, broken up between huge inhalations of oxygen and eruptions from on high. But I am telling them as much to entertain myself as to entertain my sahib. Hoover is a polite man and gives out at least a brief guffaw in response to each gag.

Since breaking camp that morning, we had been hiking on a gradual rise that was surrounded by gentle inclines on both sides. It is completely safe, non-technical climbing. We are also hiking along a northeastern face so some morning sun reaches us.

At about 11am, Hoover rounds a corner that brings us to a due-north-facing wall of ice. Our wide path turns into an icy precipice slightly narrower than our backpacks. The sun disappears. The wall over our heads rises and disappears into the dark cloud above us and the same wall beneath our boots drops about eight hundred feet to the volcano’s vast, extinct throat. Using ice picks and moving very slowly, we proceed out into the shade of the monstrous cliff. My jokes stop immediately. The only sound is the high wind and the irregular rhythm of nearby eruptions.

Each step is calculated and then re-calculated. As footfalls come down, strength of the ice is tested. Body weight gradually shifts to favor crampons on the leading foot. Then the process starts again. Every other forward movement is accompanied by a piton driven into the wall next to us, a carabiner pulled through the piton’s eye hole, a rope pulled through the carabiner, and finally the rope secured to our respective belts. We move forward with the sluggishness of hour hands. Hoover may be a daredevil, but he is able to attain patience at moments like this and focus obsessively on details. He sees the possibility of death even through the rolling boil of his youth.

We agree to stop and take a break when the ledge takes a gentle turn to the left. The turn proves difficult because the icy wall slopes slightly outward as it rises over the ledge, forcing us to lean into the vast nothingness of space. When we finally stop, I am about four yards behind Hoover. I take off my mitts and oxygen mask for a moment and begin to eat a piece of frozen bread I have stored in my pocket. My stomach is grumbling and I devour the food quickly despite its unsavory state. It fights my teeth every step of the way and cracks into pieces too large to swallow. Finishing the morsel, I notice that the world around me is spinning. I also notice the sound of my own gasping. My chest feels as if it is full of mosquitoes all biting in time with my inhalations. If I don’t breathe canned air again soon, I will collapse. The mask is in my mitts when I notice an unusual look on Hoover’s face. His own mask temporarily resting on the top of his head, Hoover’s mouth is open, his icy brow is furrowed, and his eyes are squinting and gazing out at a point on the horizon. I look out to see the source of Hoover’s confusion.

It is Everest. We are staring at her southern face, reflecting the morning sun so brightly it looks as if the mountain is emitting light. I can make out the Khumbu Icefall just above Base Camp, the saddle of the South Kol, and the dreaded step just below the summit that would later be named for the Brit Edmund Hillary. I estimate Everest is roughly fifty miles away, which is a small distance when talking on a Himalayan scale. I feel like I can practically reach out and touch it.

But I can tell it is not Everest’s beauty or proximity that is holding my sahib’s attention. What is making our minds completely rearrange is the fact that we seem to be looking down at Everest. How could this be?

“Im-ossible,” Hoover says (The letter p is difficult to pronounce when your lips are frozen). “A trick of the eye. We’re not even into the cloud of this -ountain yet. I think we just need to -ut our -asks -ack on.”

I agree and race to introduce oxygen back into my lungs. When the abundant air does pour down my throat, the uncertainty does not