“As-salaam Alaaikum,” Haji Ali said, shaking Mortenson’s hand. He escorted him through the gate with the hospitality that is unforgivable for the Balti not to extend, led him first to a ceremonial brook, where he instructed Mortenson to wash his hands and face, and then on to his home.
Korphe was perched on a shelf eight hundred feet above the Braldu River, which clung in unlikely fashion to the side of the canyon wall like a rock climber’s sleeping platform bolted into the side of a sheer cliff. The tightly packed warren of square three-story stone homes, built without adornment, would have been almost indistinguishable from the canyon walls but for the riot of apricots, onions, and wheat piled colorfully on their flat roofs.
Haji Ali led Mortenson into a hut that looked no nobler than the others. He beat a pile of bedding until its dust was distributed throughout the balti, the large, central room, placed cushions at the spot of honor close to an open hearth, and installed Mortenson there.
There was no talk as tea was prepared, only the shuffle of feet and placement of pillows as twenty male members of Haji Ali’s extended family filed in and took their places around the hearth. Most of the acrid smoke from a yak dung fire under the teapot escaped, mercifully, through a large open square in the ceiling. When Mortenson looked up, he saw the eyes of the fifty children who had followed him, ringing the opening in the ceiling as they lay on the roof. No foreigner had ever been to Korphe before.
Haji Ali worked his hand vigorously in the pocket of his embroidered vest, rubbing rancid pieces of ibex jerky against leaves of a strong green chewing tobacco known as naswar. He offered a piece to Mortenson, after it had been thoroughly seasoned, and Mortenson choked down the single most challenging mouthful of his life, as the gallery of spectators chuckled appreciatively.
When Haji Ali handed him a cup of butter tea, Mortenson drank it with something similar to pleasure.
The headman leaned forward, now that the required threshold of hospitality had been crossed, and thrust his bearded face in front of Mortenson’s.
“Cheezaley?” he barked, an indispensable Balti word that means, roughly, “What the hell?”
With snatches of Balti, and a lot of gesticulating, Mortenson told the crowd now watching him with rapt attention that he was American, that he’d come to climb K2 (which produced appreciative murmurs from the men), that he had become weak and sick and had walked here to Askole to find a jeep willing to take him on the eight-hour journey down to Skardu, Baltistan’s capital.
Mortenson sank back on his cushions, having drained his final reserve, between the endless days of walking and the effort it took to convey so much information. Here, warm by the hearth, on soft pillows, snug in the crush of so much humanity, he felt the exhaustion he’d been holding at arm’s length surge up over him.
“Met Askole” (“not Askole”), Haji Ali said, laughing. He pointed at the ground by his feet. “Korphe,” he said.
Adrenaline snapped Mortenson back upright. He’d never heard of Korphe. He was positive it hadn’t appeared on any map he’d ever studied of the Karakoram, and he’d studied dozens. Rousing himself, he explained that he had to get to Askole and meet a man named Mouzafer who was carrying all his belongings.
Haji Ali gripped his guest by the shoulders with his powerful hands and pushed him back on the pillows. He summoned his son Twaha, who had traveled down to Skardu often enough to acquire a smattering of Western vocabulary, and instructed him to translate. “Today walking Askole no go. Big problem. Half one days trekking,” said the man, who was an unmistakable incarnation of his father, minus the beard. “Inshallah, tomorrow Haji send find man Mouzafer. Now you slip.”
Haji Ali stood and waved the children away from the darkening square of sky. The men melted from the hearth back to their homes. Despite the anxiety swirling through his thoughts, his anger at himself for having strayed from the trail again, his complete and utter sense of displacement, Greg Mortenson slipped, and fell unshakably asleep.
Chapter 3
“Progress And Perfection”
“Tell us, if there were one thing we could do for your village,
what would it be?”
“With all respect, Sahib, you have little to teach us in strength
and toughness. And we don’t envy you your restless spirits.
Perhaps we are happier than you? But we would like our children to
go to school. Of all the things you have, learning is the one
we most desire for our children.”
—Conversation between Sir Edmund Hillary and Urkien Sherpa,
from Schoolhouse in the Clouds
SOMEONE HAD TUCKED a heavy quilt over him. He was snug beneath it and Mortenson luxuriated in the warmth. It was the first night he’d spent indoors since late spring. By the faint light of coals in the hearth, he could see the outline of several sleeping figures. Snoring came from all corners of the room, in all different calibers. He rolled back over and added his own.
The next time he woke, he was alone and blue sky showed clearly through the square in the ceiling. Haji Ali’s wife, Sakina, saw him stir and brought a lassi, a fresh-baked chapatti, and sweet tea. She was the first Balti woman who had ever approached him. Mortenson thought that Sakina had perhaps the kindest face he’d ever seen. It was wrinkled in a way that suggested smile lines had set up camp at the corners of her mouth and eyes, then marched toward each other until they completed their conquest. She wore her long hair elaborately braided in the Tibetan fashion, under an urdwa, a wool cap adorned with beads and shells and antique coins. She stood, waiting, for Mortenson to sample his breakfast.
He took a bite of warm chapatti dunked in lassi, wolfed all that he’d been served, and washed it down with sugary tea. Sakina laughed appreciatively and brought him more. If Mortenson had known how scarce and precious sugar was to the Balti, how rarely they used it themselves, he would have refused the second cup of tea.
Sakina left him and he studied the room. It was spartan to the point of poverty. A faded travel poster of a Swiss chalet, in a lush meadow alive with wildflowers, was nailed to one wall. Every other object, from blackened cooking tools to oft-repaired oil lanterns, seemed strictly functional. The heavy quilt he had slept under was made of plush maroon silk and decorated with tiny mirrors. The blankets the others had used were thin worn wool, patched with whatever scraps had been at hand. They had clearly wrapped him in the finest possession in Haji Ali’s home.
Late in the afternoon, Mortenson heard raised voices and walked, with most of the rest of the village, to the cliff overlooking the Braldu. He saw a man pulling himself along in a box suspended from a steel cable strung two hundred feet above the river. Crossing the river this way saved the half day it would take a trekker to walk upriver and cross at the bridge above Korphe, but a fall would mean certain death. When the man was halfway across the gorge, Mortenson recognized Mouzafer, and saw that he was wedged into the tiny cable car, just a box cobbled together from scrap lumber, riding on top of a familiar-looking ninety-pound pack.
This time the backslapping from Mouzafer’s greeting didn’t catch him unprepared, and Mortenson managed not to cough. Mouzafer stepped back and looked him up and down, his eyes wet, then raised his hands to the sky, shouting Allah Akbhar! and shook them as if manna had already begun piling up around his feet.
At Haji Ali’s, over a meal of biango, roasted hen that was as wiry and tough as the Balti people who had raised the birds, Mortenson learned that Mouzafer was well known throughout the Karakoram. For three decades he had served as one of the most skilled high-altitude porters in the Himalaya. His accomplishments were vast and varied and included accompanying famed climber Nick Clinch on the first American ascent of Masherbrum in 1960. But what Mortenson found most impressive about Mouzafer was that he’d never mentioned his accomplishments in all the time they’d spent walking and talking.
Mortenson discreetly handed Mouzafer three thousand rupees, far more than the wages they’d agreed on, and p
romised to visit him in his own village, when he’d fully healed. Mortenson had no way of knowing then that Mouzafer would remain a presence in his life over the next decade, helping to guide him past the roadblocks of life in northern Pakistan with the same sure hand he had shown avoiding avalanches and skirting crevasses.
With Mouzafer, Mortenson met up with Darsney and made the long journey by jeep down to Skardu. But after sampling the pedestrian pleasures of a well-prepared meal and a comfortable bed at a renowned mountaineers’ lodge called the K2 Motel, Mortenson felt something tugging him back up into the Karakoram. He felt he had found something rare in Korphe and returned as soon as he could arrange a ride.
From his base in Haji Ali’s home, Mortenson settled into a routine. Each morning and afternoon he would walk briefly about Korphe, accompanied, always, by children tugging at his hands. He saw how this tiny oasis of greenery in a desert of dusty rock owed its existence to staggering labor, and admired the hundreds of irrigation channels the village maintained by hand that diverted glacial meltwater toward their fields and orchards.
Off the Baltoro, out of danger, he realized just how precarious his own survival had been, and how weakened he’d become. He could barely make it down the switchback path that led to the river and there, in the freezing water, when he took off his shirt to wash, he was shocked by his appearance. “My arms looked like spindly little toothpicks, like they belonged to somebody else,” Mortenson says.
Wheezing his way back up to the village, he felt as infirm as the elderly men who sat for hours at a time under Korphe’s apricot trees, smoking from hookahs and eating apricot kernels. After an hour or two of poking about each day he’d succumb to exhaustion and return to stare at the sky from his nest of pillows by Haji Ali’s hearth.
The nurmadhar watched Mortenson’s state carefully, and ordered one of the village’s precious chogo rabak, or big rams, slaughtered. Forty people tore every scrap of roasted meat from the skinny animal’s bones, then cracked open the bones themselves with rocks, stripping the marrow with their teeth. Watching the ardor with which the meat was devoured, Mortenson realized how rare such a meal was for the people of Korphe, and how close they lived to hunger.
As his strength returned, his power of perception sharpened. At first, in Korphe, he thought he’d stumbled into a sort of Shangri-La. Many Westerners passing through the Karakoram had the feeling that the Balti lived a simpler, better life than they did back home in their developed countries. Early visitors, casting about for suitably romantic names, dubbed it “Tibet of the Apricots.”
The Balti “really seem to have a flair for enjoying life,” Maraini wrote in 1958, after visiting Askole and admiring the “old bodies of men sitting in the sun smoking their picturesque pipes, those not so old working at primitive looms in the shade of mulberry trees with that sureness of touch that comes with a lifetime’s experience, and two boys, sitting by themselves, removing their lice with tender and meticulous care.
“We breathed an air of utter satisfaction, of eternal peace,” he continued. “All this gives rise to a question. Isn’t it better to live in ignorance of everything—asphalt and macadam, vehicles, telephones, television—to live in bliss without knowing it?”
Thirty-five years later, the Balti still lived with the same lack of modern conveniences, but after even a few days in the village, Mortenson began to see that Korphe was far from the prelapsarian paradise of Western fantasy. In every home, at least one family member suffered from goiters or cataracts. The children, whose ginger hair he had admired, owed their coloring to a form of malnutrition called kwashior-kor. And he learned from his talks with Twaha, after the nurmadhar’s son returned from evening prayer at the village mosque, that the nearest doctor was a week’s walk away in Skardu, and one out of every three Korphe children died before reaching their first birthday.
Twaha told Mortenson that his own wife, Rhokia, had died during the birth, seven years earlier, of his only child, his daughter, Jahan. The maroon, mirrored quilt that Mortenson felt honored to sleep under had been the centerpiece of Rhokia’s dowry.
Mortenson couldn’t imagine ever discharging the debt he felt to his hosts in Korphe. But he was determined to try. He began distributing all he had. Small useful items like Nalgene bottles and flashlights were precious to the Balti, who trekked long distances to graze their animals in summer, and he handed them out to the members of Haji Ali’s extended family. To Sakina, he gave his camping stove, capable of burning the kerosene found in every Balti village. He draped his wine-colored L.L. Bean fleece jacket over Twaha’s shoulders, pressing him to take it even though it was several sizes too large. Haji Ali he presented with the insulated Helly Hansen jacket that had kept him warm on K2.
But it was the supplies he carried in the expedition’s medical kit, along with his training as a trauma nurse, that proved the most valuable. Each day, as he grew stronger, he spent longer hours climbing the steep paths between Korphe’s homes, doing what little he could to beat back the avalanche of need. With tubes of antibiotic ointment, he treated open sores and lanced and drained infected wounds. Everywhere he turned, eyes would implore him from the depths of homes, where elderly Balti had suffered in silence for years. He set broken bones and did what little he could with painkillers and antibiotics. Word of his work spread and the sick on the outskirts of Korphe began sending relatives to fetch “Dr. Greg,” as he would thereafter be known in northern Pakistan, no matter how many times he tried to tell people he was just a nurse.
Often during his time in Korphe, Mortenson felt the presence of his little sister Christa, especially when he was with Korphe’s children. “Everything about their life was a struggle,” Mortenson says. “They reminded me of the way Christa had to fight for the simplest things. And also the way she had of just persevering, no matter what life threw at her.” He decided he wanted to do something for them. Perhaps, when he got to Islamabad, he’d use the last of his money to buy textbooks to send to their school, or supplies.
Lying by the hearth before bed, Mortenson told Haji Ali he wanted to visit Korphe’s school. Mortenson saw a cloud pass across the old man’s craggy face, but persisted. Finally, the headman agreed to take Mortenson first thing the following morning.
After their familiar breakfast of chapattis and cha, Haji Ali led Mortenson up a steep path to a vast open ledge eight hundred feet above the Braldu. The view was exquisite, with the ice giants of the upper Baltoro razored into the blue far above Korphe’s gray rock walls. But Mortenson wasn’t admiring the scenery. He was appalled to see eighty-two children, seventy-eight boys, and the four girls who had the pluck to join them, kneeling on the frosty ground, in the open. Haji Ali, avoiding Mortenson’s eyes, said that the village had no school, and the Pakistani government didn’t provide a teacher. A teacher cost the equivalent of one dollar a day, he explained, which was more than the village could afford. So they shared a teacher with the neighboring village of Munjung, and he taught in Korphe three days a week. The rest of the time the children were left alone to practice the lessons he left behind.
Mortenson watched, his heart in his throat, as the students stood at rigid attention and began their “school day” with Pakistan’s national anthem. “Blessed be the sacred land. Happy be the bounteous realm, symbol of high resolve, land of Pakistan,” they sang with sweet raggedness, their breath steaming in air already touched with winter. Mortenson picked out Twaha’s seven-year-old daughter, Jahan, standing tall and straight beneath her headscarf as she sang. “May the nation, the country, and the state shine in glory everlasting. This flag of crescent and star leads the way to progress and perfection.”
During his recuperation in Korphe, Mortenson had frequently heard villagers complain about the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani government, which they considered a foreign, lowland power. The common refrain was how a combination of corruption and neglect siphoned off what little money was meant for the people of Baltistan as it made the long journey from Islamabad, the cap
ital, to these distant mountain valleys. They found it ironic that the Islamabad government would fight so hard to pry away this piece of what had once been Kashmir from India, while doing so little for its people.
And it was obvious that most of the money that reached this altitude was earmarked for the army, to finance its costly standoff with Indian forces along the Siachen Glacier. But a dollar a day for a teacher, Mortenson fumed, how could a government, even one as impoverished as Pakistan’s, not provide that? Why couldn’t the flag of crescent and star lead these children such a small distance toward “progress and perfection”?
After the last note of the anthem had faded, the children sat in a neat circle and began copying their multiplication tables. Most scratched in the dirt with sticks they’d brought for that purpose. The more fortunate, like Jahan, had slate boards they wrote on with sticks dipped in a mixture of mud and water. “Can you imagine a fourth-grade class in America, alone, without a teacher, sitting there quietly and working on their lessons?” Mortenson asks. “I felt like my heart was being torn out. There was a fierceness in their desire to learn, despite how mightily everything was stacked against them, that reminded me of Christa. I knew I had to do something.”
But what? He had just enough money, if he ate simply and stayed in the cheapest guest houses, to travel by jeep and bus back to Islamabad and catch his flight home.
In California he could look forward to only sporadic nursing work, and most of his possessions fit in the trunk of “La Bamba,” the burgundy gas-guzzling Buick that was as close as he had to a home. Still, there had to be something.
Standing next to Haji Ali, on the ledge overlooking the valley, with such a crystalline view of the mountains he’d come halfway around the world to measure himself against, climbing K2 to place a necklace on its summit suddenly felt beside the point. There was a much more meaningful gesture he could make in honor of his sister’s memory. He put his hands on Haji Ali’s shoulders, as the old man had done to him dozens of times since they’d shared their first cup of tea. “I’m going to build you a school,” he said, not yet realizing that with those words, the path of his life had just detoured down another trail, a route far more serpentine and arduous than the wrong turns he’d taken since retreating from K2. “I will build a school,” Mortenson said. “I promise.”