Table Of ContentHell 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,
