Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  Mortenson asked if Balti women whose husbands were away could also be granted muthaa.

  “No, of course not,” Changazi said, waggling his head at the na’ivete of Mortenson’s question, before offering him a biscotti to dunk in his tea.

  Now that the cable was ordered and on its way, Mortenson hired a place on a jeep to Askole. All up the Shigar Valley, they tunneled through ripening apple and apricot trees. The air was so clear that the serrated rust and ochre ridges of the Karakoram’s eighteen-thousand-foot foothills seemed close enough to touch. And the road seemed as passable as a boulder-strewn dirt track carved out of the edge of a cliff could ever be.

  But as they turned up the Braldu Valley, low clouds pursued and overtook their jeep, moving fast from the south. That could only mean the monsoon, blowing in from India. And by the time they arrived in Askole, everyone in the windowless jeep was wet and spattered with gouts of gray mud.

  Mortenson climbed out at the last stop, before the village of Askole, in a dense rain that raised welts in the muddy road. Korphe was still hours farther on by foot, and the driver couldn’t be convinced to continue up the track in darkness, so Mortenson reluctantly spent the night, sprawled on bags of rice in a shop attached to the home of Askole’s nurmadhar, Haji Mehdi, fending off rats that tried to climb up from the flooded floor.

  In the morning, it was still raining in an apocalyptic fashion and the jeep driver had already contracted to carry a load back to Skardu. Mortenson set off on foot. He was still trying to warm to Askole. As the trailhead for all expeditions heading northeast up the Baltoro, it had been contaminated by repeated contact of the worst kind between Western trekkers needing to hire porters or purchase some staple they’d forgotten and hustlers hoping to take advantage of them. As in many last places, Askole merchants tended to inflate prices and ruthlessly refuse to bargain.

  Wading through an alley running two feet deep with runoff, between the rounded walls of stone-and-mud huts, Mortenson felt his shalwar clutched from behind. He turned to see a boy, his head swarming with lice, his hand extended toward the Angrezi. He didn’t have the English to ask for money or a pen, but his meaning couldn’t have been clearer. Mortenson took an apple out of his rucksack and handed it to the boy, who threw it in the gutter.

  Passing a field north of Askole, Mortenson had to hold the shirt-tail of his shalwar over his nose against the stench. The field, a campsite used by dozens of expeditions on their way up the Baltoro, was befouled by hundreds of piles of human waste.

  A book he’d recently read, Ancient Futures, by Helena Norberg-Hodge, was much on Mortenson’s mind. Norberg-Hodge had spent seventeen years living just south of these mountains, in Ladakh, a region much like Baltistan, but cut off from Pakistan by the arbitrary borders colonial powers drew across the Himalaya. After almost two decades studying Ladakhi culture, Norberg-Hodge had come to believe that preserving a traditional way of life in Ladakh—extended families living in harmony with the land—would bring about more happiness than “improving” Ladakhis’ standard of living with unchecked development.

  “I used to assume that the direction of ‘progress’ was somehow inevitable, not to be questioned,” she writes. “I passively accepted a new road through the middle of the park, a steel-and-glass bank where a 200-year-old church had stood… and the fact that life seemed to get harder and faster with each day. I do not anymore. In Ladakh I have learned that there is more than one path into the future and I have had the privilege to witness another, saner, way of life—a pattern of existence based on the coevolution between human beings and the earth.”

  Norberg-Hodge continues to argue not only that Western development workers should not blindly impose modern “improvements” on ancient cultures, but that industrialized countries had lessons to learn from people like Ladakhis about building sustainable societies. “I have seen,” she writes, “that community and a close relationship with the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication. I have learned that another way is possible.”

  As he walked up the rain-slick gorge to Korphe, keeping the rushing Braldu on his right, Mortenson fretted about the effect his bridge would have on the isolated village. “The people of Korphe had a hard life, but they also lived with a rare kind of purity,” Mortenson says. “I knew the bridge would help them get to a hospital in hours instead of days, and would make it easier to sell their crops. But I couldn’t help worrying about what the outside world, coming in over the bridge, would do to Korphe.”

  The men of Korphe met Mortenson at the riverbank and ushered him over in the hanging basket. On both sides of the river, where the two towers of the bridge would stand, hundreds of slabs of rough-hewn granite were stacked, awaiting construction. Rather than having to haul rocks across the river and depend on the vagaries of transport up rutted roads, Haji Ali, in the end, had convinced Mortenson to use rock cut on hillsides only a few hundred yards distant from both banks. Korphe was poor in every material thing but its endless supply of rock.

  Up through the rain-soaked village, Mortenson led a procession toward Haji Ali’s house, to convene a meeting about how to proceed with the bridge. A long-haired black yak stood blocking their progress between two homes, while Tahira, the ten-year-old daughter of Hussein, Korphe’s most educated man, pulled the yak by a bridle attached to the animal’s nose ring and tried to coax him out of the way. The yak had other ideas. Leisurely, he voided a great steaming mound onto the mud, then walked off toward Tahira’s home. Tahira swept her white headscarf out of the way and bent frantically to make patties out of the yak dung. She slapped them against the stone wall of the nearest home to dry, under the eaves, before the precious fuel could be washed away by the rain.

  At Haji Ali’s, Sakina took Mortenson’s hand in welcome, and he realized it was the first time a Balti woman had touched him. She grinned boldly up into his face, as if daring him to be surprised. In answer, he crossed a threshold, too, and entered her “kitchen,” just a fire ring of rocks, a few shelves, and a length of warped wood board on the packed dirt floor for chopping. Mortenson bent to a pile of kindling and said hello to Sakina’s granddaughter Jahan, who smiled shyly, tucked her burgundy headscarf between her teeth, and hid behind it.

  Sakina, giggling, tried to shoo Mortenson from her kitchen. But he took a handful of tamburok, an herbal-tasting green mountain tea, from a tarnished brass urn and filled the blackened teapot from a ten-gallon plastic gasoline container of river water. Mortenson added a few slivers of kindling to the smoldering fire, and put the tea on to boil.

  He poured the bitter green tea for Korphe’s council of elders himself, then took a cup and sat on a cushion between Haji Ali and the hearth, where burning yak dung filled the room with eye-smarting smoke.

  “My grandmother was very shocked when Doctor Greg went into her kitchen,” Jahan says. “But she already thought of him as her own child, so she accepted it. Soon, her ideas changed, and she began to tease my grandfather that he should learn how to be more helpful like his American son.”

  When overseeing the interests of Korphe, however, Haji Ali rarely relaxed his vigilance. “I was always amazed how, without a telephone, electricity, or a radio, Haji Ali kept himself informed about everything happening in the Braldu Valley and beyond,” Mortenson says. Two jeeps carrying the cable for the bridge had made it to within eighteen miles of Korphe, Haji Ali told the group, before a rockslide blocked the road. Since the road might remain blocked for weeks, and heavy earth-moving equipment was unlikely to be dispatched from Skardu in bad weather, Haji Ali proposed that every able-bodied man in the village pitch in to carry the cable to Korphe so they could begin work on the bridge at once.

  With a cheerfulness that Mortenson found surprising among men setting out on such a grueling mission, thirty-five Balti, ranging from teenagers to Haji Ali and his silver-bearded peers, walked all the next day in the rain, turned around, and spent twelve more hours carrying the cable up to
Korphe. Each of the coils of cable weighed eight hundred pounds, and it took ten men at a time to carry the thick wood poles they threaded through the center of the spools.

  More than a foot taller than all the Korphe men, Mortenson tried to carry his share, but tilted the load so steeply that he could only watch the other men work. No one minded. Most of them had served as porters for Western expeditions, carrying equally brutal loads up the Baltoro.

  The men marched cheerfully, chewing naswar, the strong tobacco that Haji Ali distributed from the seemingly endless supply stashed in his vest pockets. Working this hard to improve life in their village, rather than chasing the inscrutable goals of foreign climbers, was a pleasure, Twaha told Mortenson, grinning up from under the yoke beside his father.

  In Korphe, the men dug foundations deep into both muddy riverbanks. But the monsoon lingered, and the concrete wouldn’t set in the wet weather. Twaha and a group of younger men proposed a trip to hunt for ibex while the rain persisted, and invited Mortenson to accompany them.

  In only his running shoes, raincoat, shalwar kamiz, and a cheap Chinese acrylic sweater he’d purchased in Skardu’s bazaar, Mortenson felt poorly prepared for a high-altitude trek. But none of the six other men were better equipped. Twaha, the nurmadhar’s son, wore a sturdy pair of brown leather dress shoes given to him by a passing trekker. Two of the men’s feet were wrapped in tightly lashed hides, and the others wore plastic sandals.

  They walked north out of Korphe in a steady rain, through ripening buckwheat fields clinging to every surface where irrigation water could be coaxed. The well-developed wheat kernels looked like miniature ears of corn. Under the onslaught of thick raindrops, the kernels bobbed on the end of their swaying stalks. Twaha proudly carried the group’s only gun over his shoulder, a British musket from the early colonial era. And Mortenson found it hard to believe they were hoping to bring down an ibex with such a museum piece.

  Mortenson spotted the bridge he’d missed on his way back from K2, a sagging yak-hair zamba, lashed between enormous boulders on either side of the Braldu. He was cheered by the sight. It led to Askole and skirted the place he was coming to consider his second home. It was like looking at the less-interesting path his life might have taken had he not detoured down the trail to Korphe.

  As they climbed, the canyon walls closed in and both rain and spray from the Braldu soaked them with equal thoroughness. The trail clung to the vertiginously sloping side of the canyon. Generations of Balti had buttressed it against washing away by wedging flat rocks together into a flimsy shelf. The Korphe men, carrying only light loads in woven baskets, walked along the shifting two-foot ledge as surely as if they were still strolling through level fields. Mortenson placed each foot carefully, leaning into the canyon wall, which he traced with trailing fingertips. He was all too conscious of the two-hundred-foot plunge to the Braldu.

  Here the river was as ugly as the ice peaks that birthed it were beautiful. Snarling through a catacomb of sculpted black and brown boulders, down in the dank recesses where sunlight rarely reached, the mud-brown Braldu looked like a writhing serpent. It was difficult to believe that this grim torrent was the source of life for those golden buckwheat kernels, and all the crops of Korphe.

  By the snout of the Biafo Glacier, the rain stopped. A shaft of stormlight skewered the cloud cover and picked out Bakhor Das, a peak to the east, in a burst of lemony light. These men knew the nineteen-thousand-foot pyramid as Korphe K2, since its purity of form echoed its big brother up the Baltoro, and it loomed over their homes like a protective deity. In valleys like the Upper Braldu, Islam has never completely vanquished older, animist beliefs. And the Korphe men seized this vision of their mountain as a good omen for the hunt. Led by Twaha, together the men chanted a placation of the Karakoram’s deities, promising that they would take only one ibex.

  To find ibex, they’d have to climb high. The celebrated field biologist George Schaller had pursued the ibex and their cousins all over the Himalaya. A 1973 trek with Schaller through western Nepal to study the bharal, or blue sheep, became the basis of Peter Matthiessen’s stark masterpiece The Snow Leopard. Matthiessen anointed his account of their long walk through high mountains with a sense of pilgrimage.

  The world’s great mountains demand more than mere physical appreciation. In Schaller’s own book, Stones of Silence, he confesses that his treks through the Karakoram, which he called “the most rugged range on earth,” were, for him, spiritual odysseys as well as scientific expeditions. “Hardship and disappointment marked these journeys,” Schaller writes, but, “mountains become an appetite. I wanted more of the Karakoram.”

  Schaller had trekked up this same gorge two decades earlier, gathering data on the ibex, Marco Polo sheep, and scouting sites he hoped the Pakistani government might preserve as the Karakoram National Park. But for long days hunched over his spotting scope, Schaller found himself simply admiring how magnificently the ibex had adapted to this harshest of all environments.

  The alpine ibex is a large, well-muscled mountain goat easily distinguished by its long scimitar-shaped horns, which the Balti prize almost as much as they savor ibex meat. Schaller found that the ibex grazed higher than any animal in the Karakoram. Their sureness of foot allowed them to range over narrow ledges at altitudes up to seventeen thousand feet, high above their predators, the wolves and snow leopards. At the very limit where vegetation could exist, they mowed alpine shoots and grasses to the nub and had to forage ten to twelve hours every day to maintain their mass.

  Twaha paused by the tongue of soiled ice that marked the leading edge of the Biafo Glacier and took a small circular object from the pocket of the wine-colored fleece jacket Mortenson had given him during his first visit to Korphe. It was a tomar, or “badge of courage.” Balti hang a tomar around the neck of every newborn to ward off the evil spirits they blame for their communities’ painfully high rates of infant mortality. And they wouldn’t think of traveling over something as dangerous as a shifting river of ice without taking similar precautions. Twaha tied the intricate medallion woven of maroon and vermilion wool to the zipper of Mortenson’s jacket. Each of the men fixed his own tomar in place, then stepped onto the glacier.

  Traveling with a party of men hunting to eat, rather than Westerners aiming for summits with more complicated motives, Mortenson saw this wilderness of ice with new eyes. It was no wonder the great peaks of the Himalaya had remained unconquered until the mid-twentieth century. For millennia, the people who lived closest to the mountains never considered attempting such a thing. Scratching out enough food and warmth to survive on the roof of the world took all of one’s energy.

  In this sense, Balti men weren’t so different from the ibex they pursued.

  They climbed west, picking a path through shifting slabs of ice and deep pools tinted tropical blue. Water echoed from the depths of crevasses and rockfalls shattered the silence as the weather’s constant warming and cooling pried boulders loose. Near, to their north, somewhere within the wall of low clouds, was the Ogre, a sheer 23,900-foot wall that had only been conquered in 1977, by British climbers Chris Bonington and Doug Scott. But the Ogre exacted revenge during the descent, and Scott was forced to crawl back to base camp with two broken legs.

  The Biafo rises to 16,600 feet at Snow Lake before joining with the Hispar Glacier, which descends into the Hunza Valley. At seventy-six miles from snout to snout, it forms the longest contiguous glacier system outside the Earth’s poles. This natural highway was also the path Hunza raiding parties historically took to plunder the Braldu Valley. But the hunting party had this high traverse to themselves, except for the occasional tracks of the snow leopard Twaha pointed out excitedly, and two mournful lammergeiers, vultures that circled curiously on a thermal high above the hunters.

  Walking for hours over the brittle ice in his running shoes, Mortenson’s feet were soon freezing. But Hussein, Tahira’s father, took hay out of his pack and lined Mortenson’s Nikes with handfuls of f
olded stalks. With this, the cold was tolerable. Just. Mortenson wondered, without tents or sleeping bags, how they would pass the bitter nights. But the Balti had been hunting on the Biafo long before Westerners started arriving with the latest gear.

  Each night, they slept in a series of caves along the lateral moraine, as well-known to the Balti as a string of watering holes would be to a caravan of Bedouin. Every cave was stocked with dry brush and bits of sage and juniper for fires. From under heavy piles of rocks, the men retrieved sacks of lentils and rice they’d placed there on previous visits. And with the loaves of skull-shaped kurba bread they baked over fire stones, they had all the fuel they needed to continue the hunt.

  After four days they spotted their first ibex. It was a carcass lying on a flat rock, picked clean as snow by lammergeier and leopard. High on a ledge above the bones, Twaha spotted a herd of sixteen ibex grazing, shouting skiin! skiin! their name in Balti. Their great curving horns were silhouetted against a changeable sky, but too far above the men to hunt. Twaha guessed that a rdo-rut, an avalanche, had brought the dead ibex down, since he was so far below his grazing ground. He tore the bleached head and horns loose from the spine and lashed it to Mortenson’s pack. A present.

  The Biafo bores a trench through high peaks deeper than that of the Grand Canyon. They trekked up to where it met the long north ridge of Latok, which has repelled more than a dozen expeditions’ attempts. Twice they worked their way stealthily downwind of ibex herds, but the animals sensed them with a cunning Mortenson couldn’t help admiring, before they were close enough to attempt a shot.

  Just before dusk on the seventh day, it was Twaha who sighted the big stag on an outcropping sixty feet above them. He tilted a tin of gunpowder into his musket, added a steel slug, and tamped it down. Mortenson and the others crawled behind him, pressing against the base of a cliff, which they hoped would conceal them. Twaha folded down two legs from the barrel of the gun, steadied them atop a boulder, and cocked back the hammer quietly, but not quietly enough. The ibex whirled toward them. They were close enough to see his long beard bristle with alarm. Mortenson saw Twaha’s mouth moving in prayer as he pulled the trigger.