“You can store all of this in my office,” Changazi said. “Then we’ll take tea and discuss what to do with your school.” He looked Mortenson Beaten by the Braldu up and down, grimacing at the grease-caked shalwar and Mortenson’s grime-blackened face and matted hair. “But why don’t you have a wash first, and such like that,” he said.
The bearish assistant handed Mortenson his plumb line and level, still wrapped neatly in Abdul’s cloth. As load after load of cement and sheets of sturdy four-ply passed by an increasingly enthusiastic Changazi, Mortenson unwrapped the fresh bar of Tibet Snow soap his host provided. He set to work scouring away four days of road grit with a pot of water Changazi’s servant Yakub heated over an Epigas cylinder that had probably been pilfered, he realized, from an expedition.
Mortenson, suddenly anxious, wanted to take an inventory of all the supplies, but Changazi insisted there would be time later. Accompanied by the call of the muezzin, Changazi led Mortenson to his office, where servants had unrolled a plush, scarcely used Marmot sleeping bag on a charpoy they’d placed between a desk and a dated wall map of the world. “Rest now,” Changazi said, in a way that invited no argument. “I’ll see you after evening prayer.”
Mortenson woke to the sound of raised voices in an adjoining room. He stood and saw by the unrelenting mountain light scalpeling through the window that he’d blacked out once again and slept straight through until morning. In the next room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, next to a cold cup of untasted tea, was a small, scowling, solidly muscled Balti Mortenson recognized as Akhmalu, the cook who had accompanied his K2 expedition. Akhmalu stood and made a spitting motion toward Changazi’s feet, the ultimate Balti insult, then, in the same instant, saw Mortenson standing in the doorway.
“Doctor Girek!” he said, and his face changed as quickly as a mountain crag fired by a shaft of sun. He ran to Mortenson, beaming, and wrapped him in a Balti bearhug. Over tea, and six slices of toasted white bread that Changazi served proudly with a fresh jar of Austrian lingonberry jam that he had mysteriously procured, Mortenson came to understand that a bout of tug-of-war had begun. News about the arrival of his building supplies had spread throughout Skardu. As the man who had cooked Mortenson’s dal and chapatti for months, Akhmalu had come to stake his claim.
“Dr. Girek, you promise one time to me you come salaam my village,” Akhmalu said. And it was true. He had. “I have one jeep waiting go to Khane village,” he said. “We go now.”
“Maybe tomorrow, or the next day,” Mortenson said. He scanned Changazi’s compound. An entire Bedford-load of building supplies worth more than seven thousand dollars had arrived the evening before, and now he didn’t see so much as a hammer, not in this room, or the next, or the courtyard he could see clearly through the window.
“But my whole village will expect you, sir,” Akhmalu said. “We have prepare special dinner already.” The guilt of wasting a feast that a Balti village could barely afford was too much for Mortenson. Changazi walked with him to Akhmalu’s hired jeep and climbed into the backseat before the question of his invitation could be considered.
The pavement ran out just east of Skardu. “How far is Khane?” Mortenson asked, as the rust-red Toyota Land Cruiser began bouncing over rocks scarcely smaller than its tires, up a narrow switchback to a ledge above the Indus River.
“Very far,” Changazi said, scowling.
“Very near,” Akhmalu countered. “Only three or seven hours.”
Mortenson settled back into the seat of honor, next to the driver, laughing. He should have known better than to ask the time a journey took in Baltistan. Behind him, on the cargo seats, he felt the tension between the two men as palpably as the Toyota’s unforgiving suspension. But ahead of him, through the windshield, with its spidery webwork of fissures, he saw the sixteen-thousand-foot-high panorama of the Karakoram’s foothills tearing at a blameless blue sky with its fearsome assortment of brown, broken teeth, and felt unaccountably happy.
They bounced along a branch of the Indus for hours until it turned south toward India, then climbed up the Hushe Valley, alongside the Shyok River, with its chill blue glacial melt thundering over boulders recently departed, in geological time, from eroding cliffs on both sides of the slender valley. As the road worsened, the laminated 3D card depicting the great black-shrouded cube, the Kaaba of Mecca, that hung from the Toyota’s rearview mirror, repeatedly smacked the windshield with the fervency of prayer.
The Al-Hajarul Aswad, a great black rock entombed within the walls of the Kaaba, is thought to be an asteroid. Many Muslims believe that it fell to earth in the time of Adam, as a gift from Allah, and its jet-black color indicates its ability to absorb the sins of the faithful who are fortunate enough to touch its once-white surface. Looking up at the boulder-strewn escarpments overhanging the road, Mortenson hoped that those celestial rocks would choose another moment to come crashing to earth.
Great brown crenulated walls hemmed in the terraced patchwork of potato and wheat fields as they climbed, like the battlements of castles constructed beyond the scale of human comprehension. By late afternoon, it was misty where the Hushe Valley narrowed to a pass. But Mortenson, who’d studied relief maps of the Karakoram for months as he waited out storms at K2 base camp, knew that one of the world’s most formidable peaks, 25,660-foot Masherbrum, lay dead ahead.
Unlike most of the high peaks of the central Karakoram, Masherbrum was readily visible to the south, from what had once been the crown jewel of British India, Kashmir. That’s why, in 1856, T. G. Montgomerie, a British Royal Engineers lieutenant, named the great gray wall rising above the snows “Kl,” or Karakoram 1, for the first peak in the remote region he was able to accurately survey. Its taller and more elusive neighbor twenty kilometers to the northeast became K2 by default, based on the later date of its “discovery.” Mortenson stared at the whiteness, where Americans George Bell, Willi Unsoeld, and Nick Clinch had made the first ascent with their Pakistani partner Captain Jawed Aktar in 1960, willing Masherbrum’s summit pyramid to pierce the clouds, but the mountain drew its cloak tight: The snowlight from its great hanging glaciers illuminated the mist from within.
The jeep stopped next to a zamba, swaying over the Shyok, and Mortenson got out. He’d never been comfortable crossing these yak-hair bridges, since they were engineered to support Balti half his weight. And when Akhmalu and Changazi piled on behind him, shaking the structure violently, he struggled to keep his feet beneath him. Mortenson grasped the twin handrails and shuffled his size-fourteen feet tightrope-walker-style along the single braided strand between him and the rapids fifty feet below. The zamba, was slick with spray, and he concentrated so successfully on his feet that he didn’t notice the crowd waiting to greet him on the far bank until he was nearly upon them.
A tiny, bearded Balti, wearing black Gore-Tex mountaineering pants and an orange T-shirt proclaiming “climbers get higher,” helped Mortenson onto the firm ground of Khane village. This was Janjungpa, who had been head high altitude porter for a lavish Dutch-led expedition to K2 during Mortenson’s time on the mountain, and who possessed an uncanny ability to stroll over to base camp for a visit at the precise moment his friend Akhmalu was serving lunch. But Mortenson had enjoyed Janjungpa’s company and his bravado, and mined him for stories about the dozens of expeditions he had led up the Baltoro. Westernized enough to extend his hand to a foreigner for a shake without invoking Allah, Janjungpa steered Mortenson through the narrow alleys between Khane’s mud and stone homes, taking his elbow as they crossed irrigation ditches running ripe with waste.
Janjungpa led his large foreigner at the head of a procession of two dozen men, and two brown goats that followed with imploring yellow eyes. The men turned into a neat whitewashed home and climbed a ladder of carved logs toward the smell of cooking chicken.
Mortenson let himself be seated on cushions after his host beat the dust halfheartedly from them. The men of Khane crowded into the small room and arranged themselve
s in a circle on a faded floral carpet. From his seat, Mortenson had a fine view, over the rooftops of neighboring houses, toward the steep stone canyon that brought Khane its drinking water and irrigated its fields.
Janjungpa’s sons rolled a pink, plasticized tablecloth onto the floor at the center of the circle, and arranged platters of fried chicken, raw turnip salad, and a stew of sheep liver and brains at Mortenson’s feet. The host waited until Mortenson bit into a piece of chicken to begin. “I wish to thank Mr. Girek Mortenson for honoring us and coming to build a school for Khane village,” Janjungpa said.
“A school for Khane?” Mortenson croaked, almost choking on the chicken.
“Yes, one school, as you promised,” Janjungpa said, gazing intently around the circle of men as he spoke, as if delivering a summation to a jury. “A climbing school.”
Mortenson’s mind raced and he looked from face to face, scanning them for signs that this was an elaborate joke. But the craggy faces of the men of Khane looked as stolid as the cliffs outside the window, looming impassively in the setting sunlight. He ran through months of his K2 memories. He and Janjungpa had discussed the need to provide specialized mountaineering skills to Balti porters, who were often ignorant of the most basic mountain rescue techniques, and Janjungpa had dwelt at length on the Balti porters’ high rate of injuries and low salaries. Mortenson could clearly remember him describing Khane and inviting him to visit. But he was quite sure they’d never discussed a school. Or a promise.
“Girek Sahib, don’t listen to Janjungpa. He is the crazy man,” Akhmalu said, and Mortenson felt flooded by relief. “He say the climbing school,” Akhmalu continued, shaking his head violently. “Khane need the ordinary school, for Khane children, not for making the rich house for Janjungpa. This you should do.” The relief evaporated as swiftly as it had come.
To his left, Mortenson saw Changazi reclining on a plump cushion, delicately stripping a chicken leg of its meat with his fingernails and smiling faintly. Mortenson tried to catch his eye, hoping Changazi would speak up and put an end to the madness, but a heated argument broke out in Balti, as two factions quickly formed behind Akhmalu and Janjungpa. Women climbed onto the adjoining rooftops, clutching their shawls against a bitter wind blowing down from Masherbrum, and trying to eavesdrop on the argument as it grew in volume.
“I never made any promise,” Mortenson tried, first in English, and then when no one seemed to be listening, he repeated it in Balti. But it was as if the largest person in the room had become invisible. So he followed the argument, as well as he could. Repeatedly, he heard Akhmalu calling Janjungpa greedy. But Janjungpa parried every charge leveled against him by repeating the promise he claimed Mortenson had made to him.
After more than an hour, Akhmalu rose suddenly and pulled Mortenson up by the arm. As if he could steer the outcome his way by conducting Mortenson to his own home, Akhmalu led a still-shouting procession of men down the log ladder, across a muddy irrigation ditch and upstairs into his own home. Once the group was arranged on cushions in a smaller sitting room, Akhmalu’s teenage son, who had been a kitchen boy on Mortenson’s expedition, lay another procession of dishes at Mortenson’s feet. A ring of wildflowers decorated the dish of turnip salad, and glistening kidneys floated prominently on the surface of the sheep organ stew, but otherwise the meal was almost identical to the banquet Janjungpa had served.
Akhmalu’s son scooped a kidney, the choicest morsel, over a bowl of rice and handed it to Mortenson, smiling shyly, before serving the others. Mortenson pushed the kidney to one side of the bowl and ate only rice swimming in the greasy gravy, but no one seemed to notice. He was invisible again. The men of Khane ate as heartily as they argued, as if the previous argument and meal had never happened and each point of each faction’s argument had to be shredded as thoroughly as the chicken and mutton bones they tore apart with their teeth.
Well into the argument’s fourth hour, his eyes stinging from the cigarette smoke choking the room, Mortenson climbed up onto Akhmalu’s roof and leaned back against a sheaf of newly harvested buckwheat that blocked the wind. The moon, on the rise, smoldered behind the eastern ridgeline. The wind had blown the peak of Masherbrum clear, and Mortenson stared a long time at its knife-edged summit ridges, sharpened eerily by moonlight. Just beyond it, Mortenson knew, could in fact feel, loomed the great pyramid of K2. How simple it had been to come to Baltistan as a climber, Mortenson thought. The path was clear. Focus on a peak, as he was doing now, and organize the men and supplies until you reached it. Or failed trying.
Through the large square hole in the roof, cigarette smoke and burning yak dung furnaced up out of the room below, fouling Mortenson’s perch. And the argumentative voices of Khane’s men rose with it, fouling Mortenson’s mood. He took a thin jacket from his daypack, lay back on the buckwheat, and spread it over his chest like a blanket. The moon, nearly full, climbed clear of the jagged ridgeline. It balanced on top of the escarpment like a great white boulder about to fall and crush the village of Khane.
“Go ahead. Fall,” Mortenson thought, and fell asleep.
In the morning, Masherbrum’s south face was cloaked, once again, in clouds and Mortenson climbed down from the roof on stiff legs to find Changazi sipping milk tea. He insisted that Changazi get them back to Skardu before another round of meals and arguments could begin. Janjungpa and Akhmalu joined them in the jeep, not willing to abandon their chance of winning the argument by letting Mortenson escape.
All the way back to Skardu, Changazi wore the same thin-lipped smile. Mortenson cursed himself for wasting so much time. As if to emphasize the looming end of weather warm enough to build a school, Skardu was gripped in a wintry chill when they returned. Low clouds blotted out the encircling peaks and a fine rain seemed to hover constantly in the air, rather than having the mercy to fall and be finished.
Despite the plastic flaps folded down over the jeep windows, Mortenson’s shalwar kamiz was soaked through by the time the jeep parked in front of Changazi’s compound. “Please,” Changazi said, staring at Mortenson’s mud-caked, mud-colored shalwar. “I’ll have Yakub heat some water.”
“Before we do anything else, let’s get a few things straightened out,” Mortenson said, unable to keep the heat out of his voice. “First thing. Where are all my school supplies? I don’t see them anywhere.”
Changazi stood as beatifically still as a portrait of a revered prophet. “I had them shifted to my other office.”
“Shifted?”
“Yes… shifted. To the safer place,” he said, with the aggrieved air of a man forced to explain the obvious.
“What’s wrong with right here?” Mortenson said.
“There are many dacoits about,” Changazi said.
“I want to go see everything right now,” Mortenson said, drawing himself up to his full height and stepping close to Changazi. Mohammed Ali Changazi closed his eyes and laced his fingers together, lashing his thumbs over each other. He opened his eyes, as if he hoped Mortenson might have disappeared. “It is late and my assistant has gone home with the key,” Changazi said. “Also I must wash and prepare for evening prayer. But I promise you, tomorrow, you will have 100 percent satisfaction. And together, we will put aside these shouting village men and set to work on your school.”
Mortenson woke at first light. Wearing Changazi’s sleeping bag like a shawl, he stepped out into the damp street. The crown of eighteen-thousand-foot peaks that garlanded the town was still hidden behind low clouds. And without the mountains, Skardu, with its trash-strewn shuttered bazaar, its squat mud-brick and cinder-block buildings, seemed unaccountably ugly. During his time in California he’d made Skardu the gilded capital of a mythical mountain kingdom. And he’d remembered the Balti who peopled it as pure and fine. But he wondered, standing in the drizzle, if he’d invented the Baltistan he’d believed in. Had he been so happy to simply be alive after K2 that his exuberance had colored this place, and these people, beyond reason?
He shook his head, as if trying to erase his doubts, but they remained. Korphe was only 112 kilometers to the north, but it felt a world away. He’d find his supplies. Then he’d get himself somehow to Korphe. He’d come so far he had to believe in something, and so he chose that blighted place clinging to the Braldu Gorge. He’d get there before he’d give up hope.
Over breakfast, Changazi seemed unusually solicitous. He kept Mortenson’s teacup topped up himself, and assured him they’d set out as soon as the driver arrived with his jeep. By the time the green Land Cruiser arrived, Janjungpa and Akhmalu had walked to Changazi’s from the cheap truck driver’s rest house where they’d spent the night. The group set out together in silence.
They drove west through sand dunes. Where the sand relented, burlap bags of recently harvested potatoes awaited collection at the edge of fields. They stood as tall as men and Mortenson, at first, mistook them for people waiting mutely in the mist. The wind gained force and blew scraps of cloud cover aside. Glimpses of snowfields flitted high overhead like hope, and Mortenson felt his mood lifting.
An hour and a half from Skardu, they left the main road and fish-tailed up a rutted track to a cluster of large, comfortable-looking mud-and-stone homes sheltered by weedy willow trees. This was Kuardu, Changazi’s home village. He led the awkward party through a pen, nudging sheep aside with his sandaled foot, and up to the second floor of the village’s largest home.
In the sitting room, they reclined, not on the usual dusty flowered cushions, but on purple and green Thermarest self-inflating camping pads. The walls were decorated with dozens of framed photos of Changazi, distinctive in spotless white, posing with scruffy members of French, Japanese, Italian, and American expeditions. Mortenson saw himself, his arm hooked jauntily over Changazi’s shoulder, on the way to K2, and he could hardly believe the photo was only a year old. His own face looking back at him from the photograph seemed to belong to someone a decade younger. Through the door, he could see women in the kitchen frying something over a pair of expedition-grade field stoves.