Three Cups of Tea Read online

  Mortenson was anxious that his name not be added to the memorial. So was Darsney. They decided to make the trek together back toward civilization, if they could. Lost, reliving the rescue, alone in his thin wool blanket in the hours before dawn, Greg Mortenson struggled to find a comfortable position. At his height, he couldn’t lie flat without his head poking out into the unforgiving air. He had lost thirty pounds during his days on K2, and no matter which way he turned, uncushioned bone seemed to press into the cold rock beneath him. Drifting in and out of consciousness to a groaning soundtrack of the glacier’s mysterious inner machinery, he made his peace with his failure to honor Christa. It was his body that had failed, he decided, not his spirit, and every body had its limits. He, for the first time in his life, had found the absolute limit of his.

  Chapter 2

  The Wrong Side Of The River

  Why ponder thus the future to foresee,

  and jade thy brain to vain perplexity?

  Cast off thy care, leave Allah’s plans to him—

  He formed them all without consulting thee.

  —Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat

  MORTENSON OPENED HIS EYES.

  The dawn was so calm that he couldn’t make sense of the frantic desire he felt to breathe. He untangled his hands from the blanket’s tight cocoon with nightmarish inefficiency, then flung them toward his head, where it lay, exposed to the elements on a bare slab of rock. His mouth and nose were sculpted shut beneath a smooth mask of ice. Mortenson tore the ice free and took his first deep, satisfying breath. Then he sat up, laughing at himself.

  He had slept just enough to be thoroughly disoriented. As he stretched and tried to rub some feeling back into the numb spots the rocks had imprinted on him, he took in his surroundings. The peaks were painted in garish, sugary colors—all pinks and violets and baby blues—and the sky, just before sunrise, was windless and clear.

  The details of his predicament trickled back in along with the circulation in his limbs—still lost, still alone—but Mortenson wasn’t worried. Morning made all the difference.

  High above the Baltoro, a gorak circled hopefully, its large black wings brushing the vista of candied peaks. With hands clawed from the cold, Mortenson jammed his blanket into his small purple pack and tried unsuccessfully to unscrew his half-full water bottle. He stowed it carefully and told himself he’d drink it as soon as his hands thawed. The gorak, seeing Mortenson stir, flapped away down the glacier, seeking another source of breakfast.

  Maybe it was however much sleep he’d managed, but Mortenson sensed he was thinking more clearly. Looking back up the valley the way he’d come, he realized if he retraced his steps for a few hours, he couldn’t help running into the trail.

  He set off north, stumbling a bit over boulders, straining just to jump the narrowest of crevasses with his still-numb legs, but he made what he considered acceptable progress. The song floated up out of his childhood as it so often did, keeping pace with his steps. “Yesu ni re-fiki Yangu, Ah kayee Mbinguni” (“What a friend we have in Jesus, He lives in Heaven”), he sang in Swahili, the language they had used in the plain church building, with its distant view of Kilimanjaro, at services every Sunday. The tune was too ingrained for Mortenson to consider the novelty of this moment—an American, lost in Pakistan, singing a German hymn in Swahili. Instead, among this moonscape of boulders and blue ice, where pebbles he kicked would disappear down crevasses for seconds, before splashing into subterranean rivers, it burned with a nostalgic warmth, a beacon from the country he had once called home.

  An hour passed this way. And then another. Mortenson hauled himself up a steep trail out of the gulch he had been traveling in, dropped to his hands and knees to scramble over a cornice, and stood at the top of a crest just as the rising sun climbed free of the valley walls.

  It was as if he’d been shot through the eyes.

  The panorama of colossi blinded him. Gasherbrum, Broad Peak, Mitre Peak, Muztagh Tower—these ice-sheathed giants, naked in the embrace of unfiltered sunlight, burned like bonfires.

  Mortenson sat on a boulder and drank from his water bottle until it was empty. But he couldn’t drink in enough of this setting. Wilderness photographer Galen Rowell spent years, before his 2002 death in a plane crash, trying to capture the transcendent beauty of these mountains that escort the Baltoro down to lower ground. His images startle, but Rowell always felt they failed compared to the experience of simply standing there, dwarfed by the spectacle of what he considered the most beautiful place on earth, a place he dubbed “the throne room of the mountain gods.”

  Though Mortenson had already been there for months, he drank in the drama of these peaks like he’d never seen them before. “In a way, I never had,” he explains. “All summer, I’d looked at these mountains as goals, totally focused on the biggest one, K2. I’d thought about their elevation and the technical challenges they presented to me as a climber. But that morning,” he says, “for the first time, I simply saw them. It was overwhelming.”

  He walked on. Maybe it was the architectural perfection of the mountains—the broad set-backs and buttresses of maroon and ochre granite that built, with symphonic intensity, toward the lone soaring finale of their peaks—but despite his weakened state, his lack of food and warm clothing, his poor odds of surviving if he didn’t find some of both sometime soon, Mortenson felt strangely content. He filled his water bottle from a fast-running trickle of glacial meltwater and winced from the cold as he drank. Food won’t be a problem for days, he told himself, but you must remember to drink.

  Toward late morning, he heard the faintest tinkling of bells and tacked toward them to the west. A donkey caravan. He searched for the stone cairns that marked the main route down the Baltoro, but found only rock strewn in its most random arrangements. Over a sharp lip of lateral moraine, the debris band that forms at the edge of a glacier, he was suddenly face to face with a five-thousand-foot wall blocking any hope of further progress. He realized he must have passed over the trail without noticing it, so returned the way he came, forcing himself to look down for signs, not up at the mesmerization of the peaks. After thirty minutes, he spotted a cigarette butt, then a cairn. He walked down the still indistinct trail toward bells that he could hear more clearly now.

  He couldn’t spot the caravan. But, finally, a mile or more distant, he made out a man’s form, standing on a boulder that overhung the glacier, silhouetted against the sky. Mortenson shouted, but his voice wouldn’t carry that far. The man vanished for a few moments, then reappeared on a boulder a hundred yards closer. Mortenson bellowed with as much force as he had in him, and this time, the man turned sharply toward him, then climbed quickly down from his perch and dropped out of sight. Down in the center of the glacier, among a catacomb of boulders, in dusty, stone-colored clothes, Mortenson wasn’t visible, but he could make his voice echo off the rock.

  He couldn’t manage to run, so trotted, panting, toward the last spot he’d seen the man and shouted every few minutes with a roar that surprised him every time he heard himself produce it. Then, there the man was, standing on the far side of a wide crevasse, with an even wider smile. Dwarfed by Mortenson’s overloaded North Face backpack, Mouzafer, the porter he had hired to haul him and his gear back down to inhabited regions, searched for the narrowest section of the crevasse, then leaped over it effortlessly, with more than ninety pounds on his back.

  “Mr. Gireg, Mr. Gireg,” he shouted, dropping the pack and wrapping Mortenson in a bear hug. “Allah Akbhar! Blessings to Allah you’re alive!”

  Mortenson crouched, awkwardly, crushed almost breathless by the strength and vigor of the man, a foot shorter and two decades older than himself.

  Then Mouzafer released him and began slapping Mortenson happily on the back. Whether from the cloud of dust coming off his soiled shalwar or from Mouzafer’s blows, Mortenson began coughing, then doubled over, unable to stop.

  “Cha, Mr. Gireg,” Mouzafer prescribed, worriedly assessing Morte
nson’s weakened condition. “Cha will give you strength!” Mouzafer led Mortenson to a small cave out of the wind. He tore two handfuls of sagebrush from the bunch he’d strapped to his pack, rummaged through the pockets of the sun-faded, oversized purple Gore-Tex jacket he wore, a castoff from one of the countless expeditions he’d guided through the Baltoro, found a flint and a metal pot, and sat down to prepare tea.

  Mortenson had first met Mouzafer Ali four hours after leaving K2 with Darsney. The three-mile walk to the base camp of Broad Peak, which had taken only forty-five minutes when they had strolled over earlier in the summer to visit a female member of a Mexican expedition whom Darsney had been trying, all summer, to seduce, had become a four-hour ordeal of stumbling on altitude-spindled legs under weight they couldn’t imagine carrying for more than sixty miles.

  Mouzafer and his friend Yakub had completed their assignment for the Mexican team and were headed home down the Baltoro unladen. They offered to carry Mortenson and Darsney’s heavy packs all the way to Askole for four dollars a day. The Americans had happily agreed and though they were down to their last handful of rupees, planned to present the men with more when they’d made it out of the mountains.

  Mouzafer was a Balti, the mountain people who populated the least hospitable high-altitude valleys in northern Pakistan. The Balti had originally migrated southwest from Tibet, via Ladakh, more than six hundred years ago, and their Buddhism had been scoured away as they traveled over the rocky passes and replaced by a religion more attuned to the severity of their new landscape—Shiite Islam. But they retained their language, an antique form of Tibetan. With their diminutive size, toughness, and supreme ability to thrive at altitudes where few humans choose even to visit, they have physically reminded many mountaineers climbing in Baltistan of their distant cousins to the east, the Sherpa of Nepal. But other qualities of the Balti, a taciturn suspicion of outsiders, along with their unyielding faith, have prevented Westerners from celebrating them in the same fashion as they fetishize the Buddhist Sherpa.

  Fosco Maraini, a member of the 1958 Italian expedition that managed the first ascent of Gasherbrum IV, a rugged neighbor of K2, was so appalled and fascinated by the Balti, that his erudite book about the expedition, Karakoram: The Ascent of Gasherbrum IV, reads more like a scholarly treatise on the Balti way of life than a memoir of mountaineering triumph. “They connive, and complain and frustrate one to the utmost. And beyond their often-foul odor, they have an unmistakable air of the brigand,” Maraini wrote. “But if you are able to overlook their roughness, you’ll learn they serve you faithfully, and they are high-spirited. Physically they are strong; above all in the show of resistance they can put up to hardship and fatigue. You can see thin little men with legs like storks’, shouldering forty kilos day after day, along tracks that would make the stranger think twice before he ventured on them carrying nothing at all.”

  Mouzafer crouched in the cave, blowing violently on the sagebrush he’d lit with a flint until it bloomed into flame. He was ruggedly handsome, though his missing teeth and sun-weathered skin made him look much older than a man in his mid-fifties. He prepared paiyu cha, the butter tea that forms the basis of the Balti diet. After brewing green tea in a blackened tin pot, he added salt, baking soda, and goat’s milk, before tenderly shaving a sliver of mar, the aged rancid yak butter the Balti prize above all other delicacies, and stirred it into the brew with a not especially clean forefinger.

  Mortenson looked on nervously. He’d smelled paiyu cha ever since arriving in Baltistan, and its aroma, which he describes as “stinkier than the most frightening cheese the French ever invented,” had driven him to invent any number of excuses to avoid drinking it.

  Mouzafer handed him a smoking mug.

  Mortenson gagged at first, but his body wanted the salt and warmth and he swallowed it all. Mouzafer refilled the mug. Then dipped it full again.

  “Zindabad! Good! Mr. Gireg,” Mouzafer said after the third cup, pounding Mortenson delightedly on the shoulder, clouding the tiny cave with more of Mortenson’s surplus of dust.

  Darsney had gone on ahead toward Askole with Yakub, and for the next three days, until they were off the Baltoro, Mouzafer never let Mortenson out of his sight. On the trail that Mortenson still struggled to follow, but Mouzafer saw as clearly as the New Jersey Turnpike, the porter held Mortenson’s hand as they walked, or insisted that his charge walk directly on the heels of the cheap plastic Chinese high-tops that he wore without socks. Even during his five daily prayer sessions, Mouzafer, a fastidious man of faith, would steal a glance away from Mecca to make sure Mortenson was still nearby.

  Mortenson made the best of their proximity and quizzed Mouzafer on the Balti words for all they saw. Glacier was gangs-zhing, avalanche rdo-rut. And the Balti had as many names for rock as the Inuit have for snow. Brak-lep was flat rock, to be used for sleeping or cooking upon. Khrok was wedge-shaped, ideal for sealing holes in stone homes. And small round rocks were khodos, which one heated in a fire, then wrapped in dough to make skull-shaped kurba, unleavened bread, which they baked every morning before setting out. With his ear for languages, Mortenson soon had a basic Balti vocabulary.

  Picking his way down a narrow gorge, Mortenson stepped off ice and onto solid ground for the first time in more than three months. The snout of the Baltoro Glacier lay at the bottom of a canyon, black with debris and sculpted to a point like the nose of a 747. From this aperture, the subterranean rivers traveling under sixty-two kilometers of ice shot into the open with an airblast like a jet engine’s exhaust. This foaming, turbulent waterspout was the birthplace of the Braldu River. Five years later, a Swedish kayaker arrived with a documentary film crew and put in at this same spot, attempting to run the Braldu to the Indus River, all eighteen hundred miles to the Arabian Sea. He was dead, smashed against boulders by the primordial strength of the Braldu, minutes after he hit the water.

  Mortenson saw his first flower in months, a five-petaled pink rosehip, and he knelt to examine it, marking as it did his return from eternal winter. Reeds and sagebrush dotted the riverbanks as they walked down, and life, meager though it was in this rocky river gorge, seemed lush to Mortenson. The autumn air down at eleven thousand feet had a weight and luxury he’d forgotten.

  Now that they had left the dangers of the Baltoro behind, Mouzafer hiked ahead, setting up camp and preparing dinner each evening before Mortenson arrived. Though Mortenson occasionally strayed where the trail forked toward a shepherd’s summer pasture, he soon found the path again and it seemed a simple enough business to follow the river until he found the smoke of Mouzafer’s campfire each evening. Walking on his weak and aching legs wasn’t as simple, but, since he had no choice, he soldiered on, stopping more and more often to rest.

  On his seventh day after leaving K2, high on a ledge on the south bank of the Braldu River Gorge, Mortenson saw his first trees. They were five poplars, bowed by strong wind, and waving like the fingers of a welcoming hand. They had been planted in a row, indicating human influence, rather than the raw force of the Karakoram, a force that sent shelves of ice and slabs of rock racing down mountainsides where they indiscriminately blotted out creatures as insignificant as a lone human. The trees told Mortenson he’d made it down alive.

  Lost in contemplation of the greenery, he failed to see the main trail fork down to the river, where it led to a zamba, a “bridge” of yak hair rope lashed together and strung across the torrent between two boulders. For the second time, Mortenson had lost his way. The bridge led to his destination, Askole, eight miles farther on the north side of the river. Instead, he stayed high on the ledge that led along the river’s south bank, walking toward the trees.

  The poplars petered out into apricot orchards. Here, at ten thousand feet, the harvest had already ended by mid-September. Piles of ripe fruit were stacked on hundreds of flat woven baskets. They bathed the underleaves of the apricot trees with their fiery reflection. There were women kneeling by the baskets, splitting the f
ruit and setting aside their pits to be pried open for the nutty meat of their kernels. But they pulled their shawls over their faces when they saw him and ran to put trees between themselves and the Angrezi, the strange white man.

  Children had no such reservations. Mortenson gathered a comet’s tail as he passed into tawny fields where other women peered at him over growths of buckwheat and barley, which they were at work harvesting with scythes. The children fingered his shalwar, searched his wrists for the watch he didn’t wear, and took turns holding his hands.

  For the first time in many months, Mortenson became aware of his appearance. His hair was long and unkempt. He felt huge, and filthy. “By that time it had been more than three months since I’d had a shower,” he says. He stooped, trying not to tower over the children. But they didn’t seem to find him threatening. Their shalwar kamiz were as stained and torn as his own, and most were barefoot despite the cold.

  Mortenson smelled the village of Korphe a mile before he approached it. The scent of juniper woodsmoke and unwashed humanity was overwhelming after the sterility of altitude. Thinking he was still on the correct trail, he assumed he was approaching Askole, which he’d passed through three months earlier on his way to K2, but nothing looked familiar. By the time he reached the village’s ceremonial entrance, a simple archway constructed of poplar beams standing alone at the edge of a potato field, he was leading a procession of fifty children.

  He looked ahead, hoping to see Mouzafer waiting at the outskirts of town. Instead, standing on the other side of the gate, wearing a topi, a lambswool pillbox cap the same distinguished shade of gray as his beard, a wizened old man, with features so strong they might have been carved out of the canyon walls, waited. His name was Haji Ali and he was the nurmadhar, the chief, of Korphe.