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

of white and his face is weathered by the elements, Chhiri Tendi looks about twenty years younger than he actually is. He explains his youthfulness thusly: “It’s because of all of the whoopee I’m getting.” He laughs at his own bawdiness, even though his wife, who is handing us tea, looks displeased.

As his laughter subsides, Chhiri Tendi stares down at the cup in his hand. It seems as if he is seeing something much grander – like Everest from the ledge, moments before the world went haywire.

“To use the language of your country,” he says to me “it was a total cock-up at thirty-thousand feet. I’m lucky to be here telling you about it.”

But the Hoover expedition was only the beginning of the story. Chhiri Tendi was not done with Fumu after that. Nor was Fumu done with him.

With the beginning of the tale finally filled in, I bid the old Sherpa a good day and returned to my home in England. I now had a solid grasp on the entire story of all three players: Hoyt, Junk, and Chhiri Tendi. I was ready at last to put the final touches on the book that would bring into question some of the most sacrosanct scientific assumptions known to Man.

But enough about me and my humble aspirations . You are here to learn about Fumu, so let me take you there. But the route we must take to get there is somewhat circuitous. You see, no one can truly get to Fumu without following the trajectories of two rather unpleasant men: William Hoyt and Aaron Junk…

PART ONE: BEFORE THE ASCENT

Chapter One: Hatred on Stilts

“Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.”

-Bertrand Russell

Aaron Junk and William Hoyt loathed each other before they had even exchanged a word. Looking back at the relationship between the two rivals, it seems their hatred went to some microscopic substrate, as if their genetic compositions were designed solely for mutual destruction. Without each other for the first half of their respective lives, Junk and Hoyt were not complete as human beings. This all changed when they accidentally met on a snowy Boston night in 1935 and wasted no time getting into a rather nasty argle bargle that would portend the events of the next six years.

Junk was drinking with his old friend Patrick McGee and one other man named Simon Phelps at the Beacon Hill Tavern. According to The Boston Globe clipping recalling the trouble, William Hoyt and his party sauntered into the bar at approximately ten at night. They were returning from a three-day traverse of the Presidential Mountain Range in New Hampshire. Most of Hoyt’s group was already drunk from visiting other public houses in the area and from consuming cordials in the car. We can be sure Hoyt himself was not drunk, as the rather pious man never let alcohol pass his lips. On the topic of drink, he once said, “I may as well heat my head and strike it with a blacksmith’s hammer, forming it into the shape of an ass.”

The Globe article does not specify who started the fight, nor does it say anything about the cause, but only states that an “eight-man rhubarb” broke out in the bar and quickly moved out to a back alley. By the time it was over, five men went to jail and three others went to the hospital.

If William Hoyt’s life were boiled down to a simple sheet of facts, it would betray a pleasant enough American fellow. In his prime during the 1920’s and 1930’s, he worked effectively as the president of his own bread manufacturing company. He helped out every weekend at his local church. He was a husband and father of two. And of course he was a mountaineer.

However, festering within and between these facts lay another detail that was hardly subjective: William Hoyt was an asocial bore with a bad temper. He was perfunctory and pedantic with a tendency to snap at anyone who disagreed with him about anything. He felt comfortable reimagining his own mistakes as the mistakes of others, and he could not brook the mistakes of others. His temper was notorious among his co-workers, fellow climbers, and even his church. This unpleasant disposition might have been tolerable to others had it been paired with an equally adorable side; a Twain-ish wit perhaps, or the occasional glimpse of nurturance. But that was not the case. He was uninteresting. Hoyt remained quiet no matter where he was. His one-word responses to people’s questions hardly counted for conversation and so those who knew him avoided the situation entirely. When it came to climbing, his personality was a serious and even dangerous liability. Many of his best climbs were ones he did alone.

Surprisingly, these unpleasant traits roamed the world inside a human vessel uniquely built for great physical accomplishments. At six-foot-three and roughly thirteen stone, Hoyt was slim but powerful. Even at the time of the Fumu ascent, one year past the age of fifty, Hoyt was in better shape than most twenty-one-year-olds. He was built for crawling up mountains, with long limbs and a heart that beat as slowly as a hibernating bear’s. When most climbers were halfway up the Avalanche Gulch route of Mount Shasta in California, Hoyt was waiting at the summit, making coffee. He had been climbing for thirty years when Fumu came into his life, and he looked every bit of it. His face was thick and tough and wrinkled beyond his age. There were white splotches around his nose and forehead where frostbite had won, and a small scar on his temple where skin cancer had lost. But the overall effect was rugged and handsome. He also framed this beaten-up visage with perfectly-cut, slicked-back brown hair – a well-manicured lawn around an old landmark war cannon.

In a letter to his new friend Calvin Coolidge, Aaron Junk recounted the events