Hell Is Above Us The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World’s Tallest Mountain By Lord Kenneth Tersely With foreword by Jonathan Bloom, Ph.D. Hell Is Above Us By Lord Kenneth Tersely With Foreword by Jonathan Bloom, Ph.D. Copyright 2011 Jonathan Bloom Kindle Edition Cover art by Heather Kern Kindle Edition, License Notes This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. This book is dedicated to Tricia, Ruby, and Jesse. Thank you for being patient while my mind passed this rather large and oddly-shaped stone. Table of Contents Foreword Prelude PART ONE: BEFORE THE ASCENT Chapter One: Hatred on Stilts Chapter Two: The Presidentials Interlude: August 23rd, 1937 Chapter Three: The Stakes Keep Climbing Chapter Four: Fumu and the Dividing Engine Chapter Five: Mount Everest Interlude: July 14, 1881 Chapter Six: The Sins of the Father Chapter Seven: “Souls at Sea” with Gary Cooper Chapter Eight: The Lord High Executioner PART TWO: THE ASCENT Chapter Nine: The Qila Pass Chapter Ten: Naked, Silly, and Godless Chapter Eleven: The Rakhiot Glacier Interlude: Winter, 1920 Chapter Twelve: A Team Divided Chapter Thirteen: What Happened To McGee Chapter Fourteen: Vespers Chapter Fifteen: The Oculus Part I Chapter Sixteen: Cannibals! Chapter Seventeen: The Eastern Ridge Chapter Eighteen: The Oculus Part II Interlude Chapter Nineteen: The Locket Chapter Twenty: The Summit PART THREE: THE DESCENT / ASCENSION Chapter Twenty-One: The Tragedy Chapter Twenty-Two: Return to “Civilization” Chapter Twenty-Three: The Joy of the End Foreword Hell Is Above Us wasn’t on the shelves of my local library in Maplewood, New Jersey. It was wedged in between the stacks, about two feet in and only inches from the floor. A well-aimed morning sunbeam lit up the book just as I wandered past looking for any printed material to read on my day off. I knelt down, made a reach and it came loose without a struggle. Brushing the dust and human hair from its green, jacketless binding, I reviewed the title and author. Both were unknown to me. A quick inspection of the inside back cover showed that no one had checked it out since 1962, almost fifty years before the writing of this foreword. How sad. Whoever Kenneth Tersely was, he had probably put his heart and soul into writing these pages and now here they were, forgotten and covered in mouse excrement. My curiosity was nothing more than a spark at that point but it was enough for me to take the book over to a nearby carrel for a quick review. The next ten hours in that carrel proved to be a life-changing experience for me. By the time I was leaving the library that evening, my stomach was empty, my wife had left ten unrequited voicemails on my phone, and the sun which had exposed the book to me in the first place was already gone. What was it about the book that had caused me to burn through it in one day? For one thing, it certainly was not the writing. Full of labored metaphors and dated, racist terms, I often found myself fighting through the language instead of being carried along by it. Tersely’s wielding of the Queen’s English reflected the pompous, defensive tone of an empire recently relieved of its dominance. The style may have worked in 1955 when it was published but it certainly doesn’t stand up to 2010 standards. My intense experience also had nothing to do with the two men who are the focus of the book, William Hoyt and Aaron Junk. Certainly their actions were brave and their adventures breathtaking, but Hoyt and Junk seemed like horrible people; aggressively male and endlessly shadow-boxing their respective parent issues. If they were transported to the current year, I could easily see myself crossing the street to avoid them. No. What stopped me cold was the sheer audacity of the book’s central conceit. Did Kenneth Tersely really expect us to believe there is a mountain – a volcano no less - taller than Everest? And yet, as I devoured the book - each page being more exciting than its predecessor - I was slowly won over. By the end I was convinced Fumu is the tallest mountain in the world, the truth about it had been kept secret by a circle of elite climbers who wanted the mountain as their personal playground, and two relatively unknown climbers had raced to be the first to reach its summit. Believe me when I say I’m not a man easily swayed, especially when it comes to something as fundamental as this. There are some facts I almost refuse to question outright. For example, June follows May. Squares have four sides. Any number divided by itself equals one. These facts build our universe and are immovable. But recently, astronomers told us Pluto was, in fact, not a planet at all. How could that be? The nine heavenly bodies of our solar system are actually eight? The impact of this edict was incalculable to me. If such a basic building block of our universe could be wrong, then what else could be brought into question? Would the sun not rise over adult non-fiction at the library tomorrow but instead over the children’s section? Would George Washington turn out to have been the second President of the United States? Now along comes Kenneth Tersely to tell us all Everest is not the “third pole.” Some volcano called Fumu is taller. As far as hard sells go, that had to be the hardest. But in the end, using the testimonials of mountaineers both living and dead, scientific data from respected sources, and the fruits of his own scholarly research, he convinced me. Tersely did not fare as well convincing his contemporaries in 1955. Although he had already written and published two well-received accounts of his personal climbing experiences (High Camp on Aconcagua and Dancing with The Ogre) and written hundreds of excellent articles on mountain 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,