As they climbed, the air carried the first bite of winter and Mortenson wrapped a wool blanket around his shoulders and head. For the first time, he wondered whether he’d be able to complete the school before cold weather set in, but he banished the thought, propped his head against a bale of hay, and lulled by the slowly rocking truck, slept.
A rooster in a cage five feet from his head woke Mortenson without mercy at first light. He was stiff and cold and badly in need of a bathroom break. He leaned over the side of the truck to request a stop and saw the top of the bearish assistant’s close-cropped head stretching out the window, and beyond it, straight down fifteen hundred feet to the bottom of a rocky gorge, where a coffee-colored river foamed over boulders. He looked up and saw they were hemmed in hard by granite walls that rose ten thousand feet on both sides of the river. The Bedford was climbing a steep hill, and slipped backward near its crest, as Mohammed fumbled with the shift, manhandling it until it clanked into first gear. Mortenson, leaning out over the passenger side of the cab, could see the truck’s rear tires rolling a foot from the edge of the gorge, spitting stones out into the abyss as Mohammed gunned the engine. Whenever the tires strayed too near to the edge, the assistant whistled sharply and the truck swung left.
Mortenson rolled back on top of the cab, not wanting to interfere with Mohammed’s concentration. When he’d come to climb K2, he’d been too preoccupied by his goal to pay much attention to his bus trip up the Indus. And on his way home, he’d been consumed with his plans to raise money for the school. But seeing this wild country again, and watching the Bedford struggling over this “highway” at fifteen miles an hour, he had a renewed appreciation for just how thoroughly these mountains and gorges cut Baltistan off from the world.
Where the gorge widened enough to permit a small village to cling to its edge, they stopped for a breakfast of chapattis and dudh patti, black tea sweetened with milk and sugar. Afterward Mohammed insisted, more emphatically than the night before, that Mortenson join them inside the cab, and he reluctantly agreed.
He took his place between Mohammed and the two assistants. Mohammed, as slight as the Bedford was enormous, could barely reach the pedals. The bearish assistant smoked bowl after bowl of hashish, which he blew in the face of the other assistant, a slight boy still struggling to grow his mustache.
Like the exterior, the inside of the Bedford was wildly decorated, with twinkling red lights, Kashmiri woodcarving, 3D photos of beloved Bollywood stars, dozens of shiny silver bells, and a bouquet of plastic flowers that poked Mortenson in the face whenever Mohammed braked too enthusiastically. “I felt like I was riding in a rolling brothel,” Mortenson says. “Not that we were rolling all that much. It was more like watching an inchworm make progress.”
On the steepest sections of the highway, the assistants would jump out and throw large stones behind the rear wheels. After the Bedford lurched forward a few feet, they’d collect the rocks and throw them under the tires again, repeating the Sisyphian process endlessly until the road flattened out. Occasionally a private jeep would pass them on the uphills, or an oncoming bus would rumble by, its female passengers mummified against road dust and prying male eyes. But mostly, they rolled on alone.
The sun disappeared early behind the steep valley walls and by late afternoon it was night-dark at the base of the ravine. Rounding a blind curve, Mohammed stood on the brakes and narrowly missed ramming the rear of a passenger bus. On the road ahead of the bus, hundreds of vehicles—jeeps, buses, Bedfords—were backed up before the entrance to a concrete bridge. With Mohammed, Mortenson climbed out to have a look.
As they approached the bridge, it was clear they weren’t being delayed by the KKH’s legendary propensity for rockfall or avalanche. Two dozen untamed-looking bearded men in black turbans stood guarding the bridge. Their rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs were trained lazily in the direction of a smart company of Pakistani soldiers whose own weapons were judiciously holstered. “No good,” Mohammed said quietly, exhausting most of his English vocabulary.
One of the turbaned men lowered his rocket launcher and waved Mortenson toward him. Filthy from two days on the road, with a wool blanket wrapped over his head, Mortenson felt sure he didn’t look like a foreigner.
“You come from?” the man asked in English, “America?” He held a propane lantern up and studied Mortenson’s face. In the lamplight, Mortenson saw the man’s eyes were fiercely blue, and rimmed with surma, the black pigment worn by the most devout, some would say fanatical, graduates of the fundamentalist madrassas. The men who were pouring over the western border this year, 1994, as foot soldiers of the force about to take control of Afghanistan, the Taliban.
“Yes, America,” Mortenson said, warily.
“America number one,” his interrogator said, laying down the rocket launcher and lighting a local Tander brand cigarette, which he offered to Mortenson. Mortenson didn’t exactly smoke, but decided the time was right to puff appreciatively. With apologies, never meeting the man’s eyes, Mohammed led Mortenson gently away by the elbow, and back to the Bedford.
As he brewed tea over a small fire by the tailgate of the truck, under Imran Khan’s watchful eyes, and prepared to settle in for the night, Mohammed tapped into the rumor mill circulating among the hundreds of other stranded travelers. These men had blocked the bridge all day, and a squad of soldiers had been trucked up thirty-five kilometers from a military base at Pattan to see that it was reopened.
Between Mortenson’s spotty Urdu and a number of conflicting accounts, he wasn’t able to be sure he had the details properly sorted. But he understood that this was the village of Dasu, in the Kohistan region, the wildest part of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. Kohistan was infamous for banditry and had never been more than nominally under control of Islamabad. In the years following 9/11 and America’s war to topple the Taliban, these remote and craggy valleys would attract bands of Taliban and their Al Qaeda benefactors, who knew how easy it could be to lose oneself in these wild heights.
The gunmen guarding the bridge lived up a valley nearby and claimed that a contractor from the government in distant lowland Islamabad arrived with millions of rupees earmarked to widen their game trails into logging roads, so these men could sell their timber. But they said the contractor stole the money and left without improving their roads. They were blocking the Karakoram Highway until he was returned to them so they could hang him to death from this bridge.
After tea and a packet of crackers that Mortenson shared out, they decided to sleep. Despite Mohammed’s warning that it was safer to spend the night in the cab, Mortenson climbed to his nest on top of the truck. From his perch by the sleeping chickens, he could see the fierce, shaggy Pashto-speaking Kohistanis on the bridge, illuminated by lanterns. The lowland Pakistanis who had come to negotiate with them spoke Urdu, and looked like a different species, girlishly trim, with neat blue berets and ammunition belts cinched tightly about their tiny waists. Not for the first time, Mortenson wondered if Pakistan wasn’t more of an idea than a country.
He lay his head on a hay bale for a moment, sure he wouldn’t be able to grasp any sleep this night, and awoke, in full daylight, to gunfire. Mortenson sat up and saw first the pink, inscrutable eyes of the white chickens regarding him blankly, then the Kohistanis standing on the bridge, firing their Kalashnikovs in the air.
Mortenson felt the Bedford roar to life, and saw black smoke belch out of the twin stacks. He leaned down into the driver’s window. “Good!” Mohammed said, smiling up at him, revving the engine. “Shooting for happy, Inshallah!” He jammed the stick into gear.
Pouring out of doorways and alleys in the village, Mortenson saw, were groups of veiled women scurrying back to their vehicles, from the spots where they’d chosen to sequester themselves through the long night of waiting.
Passing over the Dasu bridge, in a long, dusty line of crawling vehicles, Mortenson saw the Kohistani who had offered him a cigarette and his colleagues p
umping their fists in the air and firing their automatic weapons wildly. Never, not even on an army firing range, had Mortenson experienced such intense gunfire. He didn’t see any lowland contractor swinging from the bridge’s girders and assumed the gunmen had extracted a promise of reparations from the soldiers.
As they climbed, the walls of the gorge rose until they blotted out all but a narrow strip of sky, white with heat haze. They were skirting the western flank of Nanga Parbat, at 26,658 feet the earth’s ninth-loftiest peak, which anchors the western edge of the Himalaya. But the “Naked Mountain” was cloaked to Mortenson by the depths of the Indus Gorge. With a mountain climber’s fixation, he felt it looming irresistibly to the east. For proof, he studied the surface of the Indus. Streams carrying meltwater from Nanga Parbat’s glaciers boiled down ravines and over lichen-covered boulders into the Indus. They stippled the silty, mud-white surface of the river with pools of alpine blue.
Just before Gilgit, the most populous city in Pakistan’s Northern Areas, they left the Karakoram Highway before it began its long switchback toward China over the world’s highest paved road, the Khunjerab Pass, which crests at 15,520 feet, and instead followed the Indus east toward Skardu. Despite the growing chill in the air, Mortenson felt warmed by familiar fires. This riverine corridor carved between twenty-thousand-foot peaks so numerous as to be nameless was the entrance to his Baltistan. Though this lunar rockscape in the western Karakoram has to be one of the most forbidding on Earth, Mortenson felt he had come home. The dusty murk along the depths of the gorge and the high-altitude sun brushing the tips of these granite towers felt more like his natural habitat than the pastel stucco bungalows of Berkeley. His whole interlude in America, the increasing awkwardness with Marina, his struggle to raise money for the school, his insomniacal shifts at the hospital, felt as insubstantial as a fading dream. These juts and crags held him.
Two decades earlier, an Irish nurse named Dervla Murphy felt the same tug to these mountains. Traveling in the intrepid spirit of Isabella Bird, and ignoring the sage advice of seasoned adventurers who told her Baltistan was impassable in snow, Murphy crisscrossed the Karakoram in deep winter, on horseback, with her five-year-old daughter.
In her book about the journey, Where the Indus Is Young, the normally eloquent Murphy is so overcome attempting to describe her journey through this gorge that she struggles to spit out a description. “None of the adjectives usually applied to mountain scenery is adequate here—indeed, the very word ‘scenery’ is comically inappropriate. ‘Splendour’ or ‘grandeur’ are useless to give a feeling of this tremendous ravine that twists narrow and dark and bleak and deep for mile after mile after mile, with never a single blade of grass, or weed, or tiny bush to remind one that the vegetable kingdom exists. Only the jade-green Indus—sometimes tumbling into a dazzle of white foam— relieves the gray-brown of crags and sheer precipices and steep slopes.”
When Murphy plodded along the south bank of the Indus on horseback, she meditated on the horror of traversing this glorified goat path in a motor vehicle. A driver here must embrace fatalism, she writes, otherwise he “could never summon up enough courage to drive an overloaded, badly balanced, and mechanically imperfect jeep along track where for hours on end one minor misjudgement could send the vehicle hurtling hundreds of feet into the Indus. As the river has found the only possible way through this ferociously formidable knot of mountains, there is no alternative but to follow it. Without traveling through the Indus Gorge, one cannot conceive of its drama. The only sane way to cover such ground is on foot.”
On top of the overloaded, badly balanced, but mechanically sound Bedford, Mortenson swayed with the twenty-foot pile of school supplies, yawning irremediably close to the ravine’s edge every time the truck shimmied over a mound of loose rockfall. Hundreds of feet below, a shell of a shattered bus rusted in peace. With the regularity of mile markers, white shahid, or “martyr” monuments honored the death of Frontier Works Organization roadbuilders who had perished in their battles with these rock walls. Thanks to thousands of Pakistani soldiers the road to Skardu had been “improved” sufficiently since Murphy’s day to allow trucks to pass on their way to support the war effort against India. But rockfall and avalanche, the weathered tarmac crumbling unpredictably into the abyss, and insufficient space for oncoming traffic meant that dozens of vehicles plummeted off the road each year.
A decade later, in the post-9/11 era, Mortenson would often be asked by Americans about the danger he faced in the region from terrorists. “If I die in Pakistan, it’ll be because of a traffic accident, not a bomb or bullet,” he’d always tell them. “The real danger over there is on the road.”
He felt the opening in the quality of the light before he noticed where he was. Grinding down a long descent in late afternoon, the air brightened. The claustrophobic ravine walls widened then folded out into the distance, rising into a ring of snowcapped giants that surrounded the Skardu Valley. By the time Mohammed accelerated onto flatland at the bottom of the pass, the Indus had unclenched its muscles and relaxed to a muddy, meandering lakelike width. Along the valley floor, tawny sand dunes baked in the late sun. And if you didn’t look up at the painfully white snow peaks that burned above the sand, Mortenson thought, this could almost be the Arabian Peninsula.
The outskirts of Skardu, awash in pharing and starga, apricot and walnut orchards, announced that the odyssey along the Indus was over. Mortenson, riding his school into Skardu, waved at men wearing the distinctive white woolen Balti topis on their heads, at work harvesting the fruit, and they waved back, grinning. Children ran alongside the Bedford, shouting their approval at Imran Khan and the foreigner riding atop his image. Here was the triumphal return he’d been imagining ever since he sat down to write the first of the 580 letters. Right now, right around the next curve, Mortenson felt certain, his happy ending was about to begin.
Chapter 8
Beaten By The Braldu
Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.
—hand-lettered sign at the entrance to the Fifth Squadron airbase, Skardu
THE FIRST POPLAR branch smacked Mortenson in the face, before he had time to duck. The second tore the blanket off his head and left it hanging in the Bedford’s wake. He flattened himself on the truck’s roof and watched Skardu appear down a tunnel of cloth-wrapped tree trunks, girded against hungry goats.
A military green Lama helicopter flew slow and low over the Bedford, on its way from the Baltoro Glacier to Skardu’s Fifth Aviation Squadron airbase. Mortenson saw a human figure shrouded in burlap and lashed to a gurney on the landing skid. Etienne had taken this same ride after his rescue, Mortenson thought, but he, at least, had lived.
By the base of the brooding eight-hundred-foot-high Karpocho, or Rock of Skardu, with its ruined fort standing sentinel over the town, the Bedford slowed to let a flock of sheep cross Skardu’s bazaar. The busy street, lined with narrow stalls selling soccer balls, cheap Chinese sweaters, and neatly arranged pyramids of foreign treasure like Ovaltine and Tang, seemed overwhelmingly cosmopolitan after the deafening emptiness of the Indus Gorge.
This vast valley was fertile where the sand didn’t drift. It offered relief from the rigors of the gorges and had been a caravan stop on the trade route from Kargil, now in Indian Kashmir, to Central Asia. But since Partition, and the closing of the border, Skardu had been stranded unprofitably at the wild edge of Pakistan. That is, until its reinvention as outfitter to expeditions trekking toward the ice giants of the Karakoram.
Mohammed pulled to the side of the road, but not far enough to let half a dozen jeeps pass. He leaned out the window and shouted to ask Mortenson directions over the indignant shrilling of horns. Mortenson climbed down off his rolling throne and wedged himself into the cab.
Where to go? Korphe was an eight-hour jeep ride into the Karakoram, and there was no way to telephone and tell them he’d arrived to fulfill his promise. Changazi, a trekking agent and tour operator who’d organized the
ir attempt at K2, seemed like the person who could arrange to have the school supplies carried up the Braldu Valley. They stopped in front of Changazi’s neatly whitewashed compound, and Mortenson knocked on a substantial set of green wooden doors.
Mohammed Ali Changazi himself swung open the doors. He was dressed in an immaculate starched white shalwar that announced he didn’t degrade himself with the dusty business of this world. He was tall for a Balti. And with his precisely trimmed beard, noble nose, and startling brown eyes rimmed with blue, he cut a mesmerizing figure. In Balti, “Changazi” means “of the family of Genghis Khan,” and can be used as a slang word conveying a terrifying type of ruthlessness. “Changazi is an operator, in every sense,” Mortenson says. “Of course, I didn’t know that then.”
“Dr. Greg,” Changazi said, enrobing as much of Mortenson as he was able in a lingering embrace. “What are you doing here? Trekking season is over.”
“I brought the school!” Mortenson said slyly, expecting to be congratulated. After K2, he had discussed his plans with Changazi, who had helped him estimate a budget for the building materials. But Changazi seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. “I bought everything to build the school and drove it here from ‘Pindi.”
Changazi still seemed baffled. “It’s too late to build anything now. And why didn’t you buy supplies in Skardu?” Mortenson hadn’t realized he could. As he was searching for something to say, they were interrupted by a blast from the Bedford’s airhorns. Mohammed wanted to unload and start back toward ‘Pindi right away. The truck crew unlashed the load and Changazi glanced admiringly at the valuable stacks of supplies towering above them.