Strum

by Nancy Young

  “Are you hearing the music, my dear?”

  “Yes,” the girl whispered back. “Do you hear it too?”

  “Yes. If you hear it, then you have a special place in this family.” Ellen replied with a smile, as the girl stared at the guitar in wonder. “It was hand-made by my son, Bernard. He is a woodworker. I hope you meet him someday.”

  “Yes — that would be most amazing and absolutely fabulous!” the girl replied, moving closer to the guitar and picking it up gingerly. The melody stopped when she placed her fingers upon it. She held it upright like a cello on the bed and worked out the melody by moving her fingers on the fret-board until she worked out the first note. From there she readily picked out the melody and repeated it three times, finding chord patterns to express the sad melody in a variety of keys. “You must bring this instrument with us. We can play together in the moonlight tonight. It will be a full moon. Perhaps the spirit in this instrument will speak to us again! Come on, let’s get going … never a minute to waste when the trail beckons, Mrs. Tenderfield.”

  “Please, Neena-darling, do call me Ellen.”

  “Okay. How about I call you Auntie Ellen?”

  “I would love that. Yes. That would be nice.”

  “Shall we, Auntie?” Neena packed the guitar in the case and closed it firmly. Holding it lightly in her arms, they left the room together to find Col in the kitchen ready with two thermoses of milky tea for the lady travelers.

  “Neena heard the ghost guitar,” Ellen remarked.

  “Did she?” he asked with one eyebrow raised and a smile on his craggy face. “And what did she think of that?”

  “Most extraordinary, sir!” was the reply. “Uncle Col, you never told me you two were ghost-whisperers! In Singapore, you would be most revered!”

  “Aahh! Now that would be something!” All three heard the guitar reply and it was with strains of this melodic refrain that they started out on their long trek to the highest peak in the world.

  At Bhandar they spent their first night in a rustic teahouse. “You should know that this trail is centuries-old,” Neena explained. “It is an old Tibetan trail, and also the route originally taken by Sir Edmund Hillary, Tenzing Norgay, and their crew when they made their first ascents onto Everest.”

  “Ahh, Sir Edmund Hillary! He is quite the celebrity in these parts, isn’t he?” Col replied.

  “Did you know that, with his brother Rex, Edmund Hillary was a beekeeper — a summer occupation that allowed him to pursue climbing in the winter?”

  “A most clever fellow!”

  “And remember, in Hillary’s day, there were Sherpa homes in these villages, but no trekking lodges nor an airfield. We are lucky today. Tourism has found root here in the ‘Mountaintop of the World.’”

  And with this bit of happy information, the trekkers took the first steps of the many thousands they took before they were near the peaks. They followed the trail over several passes, descending over 1,000 feet through fir and rhododendron forests just on the first morning, visiting a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, Thupten Chhuling, where Neena was anointed by one of the monks when she took his photo with her special camera. Crossing the Junbesi Khola and Dudh Koshi rivers and several picturesque streams by wooden bridge, they followed the waterways through endless forests before climbing through sweeping terraces to reach a village in a tributary valley. Neena stopped their progress in the midst of a particularly lush forest to photograph a pair of mountain hawk-eagles perched in a prickly black oak. As soon as they stopped, the birds took to the air. Their voices filled the valley with a soft soprano call as they soared above the canopy, their flight undulating and forceful.

  “They are trying to distract us from their nest, I would wager,” Neena whispered. “Nest-building for these mountain hawk-eagles is a joint enterprise — the male fetches the material, and the female performs the actual construction. It’s quite economical. They work as a team actually. The single egg is incubated entirely by the female, who is brought food by the male throughout the incubation period. During this time the female will be very aggressive to any potential intruder. She will remain in the nest with the young, not leaving until it has fledged. The family will remain together until the fledgling is able to fly strongly and hunt independently. Eventually they become a competitor to their own parents and then the parents will chase them off and encourage them to relocate.”

  “They are predators after all,” Ellen observed.

  “Langur monkeys and red pandas can also be found here from time to time,” Neena added excitedly as she scrambled up the steep side of the trail and positioned her camera nearly above her head to capture the swooping forms. “And, if you are extremely lucky, a snow leopard!”

  “Neena,” Ellen asked their knowledgeable guide when she slipped back onto level ground, “that is an impressive camera.”

  “Oh, this Hasselblad? For an ornithologist like me it’s a little unorthodox, but I like the quality of the photos. They come out almost exactly as I see them — in black and white and crystal clear. Without it I would have to visually memorize each new bird species — which I do, but it’s a lot more scientific to have actual visual and forensic records. My sketchpad is useful too. I often render them in pen or pencil and record the size, shape and markings — the camera, however, is the more artistic medium.”

  “And where does one get such a magnificent machine?”

  “The camera was a gift from my father, who was an employee at the Swedish consulate in Sydney, Australia. He received this Hasselblad from a visiting dignitary one summer when he was newly in his job. He had the good fortune one day of saving one of the dignitary’s children from drowning at sea. He had been delivering a very important and urgent package to the Swedish diplomat while his family was enjoying the Manly Coast. The youngest of the children had drifted on a raft too far out to sea and could not swim back. Her father was a decorated captain in the Swedish Navy but curiously could not swim. My father had been a Nipper — a junior surf lifesaver — during his early years of grammar school in Sydney, before returning to his native Singapore and becoming a soldier, then an officer in the Malayan army.”

  After he left Malaysia, Neena continued, he took a job at the Australian embassy in Singapore where he met and eventually married his wife, a pretty, young Aussie girl whose family had been in Asia for a century as missionaries. She was in the typing pool and fluent in Chinese. Bruce and Joan Tan were still without children after ten years of marriage when they asked one of their well-connected diplomat friends to assist them to adopt a baby from a Catholic aid organization. Neena was only four months old when she was brought by the nuns to Singapore from Vietnam. Mr. Tan’s adopted daughter inherited his passion for photography and at a very early age learned to play the violin, and later an instrument her mother gave her when she was eight.

  “It is called a dan nhi,” Joan had told the girl, “a two-stringed traditional Vietnamese violin. It is best known for its expressively emotional and somewhat melancholy sound.” She did not tell the curious child that the exquisitely inlaid lacquered instrument had been included with her official paperwork when she was delivered to them by the nuns so many years before. The daughter assumed her mother had purchased it for her from the nightly markets in the Old Chinese quarter.

  Several days into the trek, at a large scattered village called Chauri Kharka, which boasted a monastery and high school built by Sir Edmund Hillary, the party stopped at a large white-washed tea house for the night. After they peeled off their steaming boots and Col organized the Sherpas to place their packs onto their corresponding bunk beds, Neena pulled out her musical instrument and invited Ellen to bring hers into the dining area where the hosts were preparing their meal of potato curry and dhal baht — lentils and rice — on the white earthen stove.

  “Chauri Kharka is the ‘breadbasket’ of the Khum
bu region,” she began, tuning the strings by turning the two large pegs at the top of the long round wooden neck. “The land is fertile and they harvest crops like barley, wheat, and enough green vegetables to supply the many buyers who walk for days and weeks from throughout this mountainous region to come here. They send out boys as young as six years old to bring back rice and vegetables to the higher altitude villages.” Without skipping a beat she drew her attached bow across the silk strings. The whole mountain range seemed to reverberate with the sound. “They would strap a large hunting knife to the back of these six-year-olds — to defend themselves against mountain lions or wild yaks! Imagine doing that with your average six-year-old in Québec?” she said nonchalantly, drawing the bow back again as the sun began to set in a pale pink glow and the temperature dropped precipitously. Neena’s melody drew an immense smile across the faces of their hosts. Before long the tea house was filled with the neighbors and several guest trekkers who gathered to listen to the soaring emotional sounds of her sonorous two-stringed violin.

  Ellen silently observed the young woman and wondered to herself how one thinks one knows a person, and then they completely surprise you with their personal talents and secrets. She tentatively joined with her guitar, but it was at first a tenuous accompaniment, because she had never before heard such hauntingly soulful melodies as those which Neena coaxed from her violin.

  “The sound of the dan nhi is said to imitate that of a singer,” she explained. “Think of it as the soloist, and accompany it as such.” As her delicate fingers held down the strings at varying distances from the bow, the sound became mesmerizing, and Ellen’s strumming accompaniment stirred the audience in a way that none had experienced before.

  One of the Sherpa lads exclaimed something in the language and Neena immediately translated it for the Tenderfields to the thundering applause of all the local listeners.

  “He just said: ‘This is how one feels when they make a steep descent before crossing at the confluence of two rivers!’”

  “What do you call it? Ellen inquired, amazed that her young guide was also fluent in Sherpa.

  “It is called a dan nhi.”

  “Dan nhi?” Ellen repeated.

  “Yes, in Vietnamese. In Chinese it is called an erhu. It is a two-stringed fiddle. The strings are made of silk. Its soundboard is made of wood and snakeskin. Have you never heard of it?”

  “A two-stringed fiddle made of snake-skin? Never!”

  “Well, it’s a violin, really — only much richer and more emotional,” she said trailing off, her fingers finding their positions as she again drew her bow across the strings in a sinuous undulating line that was reminiscent of the graceful flight of the mountain hawks, complete with their soprano song.

  Ellen listened in awe, and then heard the guitar take up an accompanying arpeggio. The swelling melodies held her in thrall for as long as the soaring continued. Mid-flight she joined in. “My sister played the violin when we were young. But I have never heard anything like this.”

  On the morning of their departure, the hosts made Neena promise to return with her husband when she was married. The young woman only smiled and said, “Yes, Uncle Kili. Namaste!”

  A half hour later the trekkers crossed a large suspension bridge high above the river where they caught their first glimpse of the peaks of Sagarmatha, Lhotse, Nuptse, Ama Dablam, and Taweche in a miraculous keyhole in the clouds, appearing at a height impossibly high and unfamiliar. Neena felt a particular pulling at her heart as her eyes panned across the breathtakingly beautiful panorama before her. The scenery had a surreal quality that set her soul alight — it stunned and amazed her the way only a spiritual experience can manifest a desire to know what lay beyond, beyond the known boundaries of this earth-bound existence. She heard the crystal clear strains of her dan nhi in her inner ear; they made her heart soar, and she had a sudden urge to cry at the enormity of the mountain peaks.

  They had been walking for over three weeks by the time they reached their first destination, Namche Bazaar, and decided to remain there for two or three nights to acclimatize to the extreme altitude they now entered. Col felt tired and retired early to bed while Ellen tried her hand at the dan nhi as Neena walked her through it, the bow feeling unfamiliar to the older woman yet apparently so effortless for the younger. She closed her eyes and let the melody emerge from the silk like a waft of perfume or a cloud of breath in the thin mountain air. These nights Neena felt particularly sad, an emotion she did not often experience. The feelings seemed mixed up with the cold brisk air and with the melancholy call of the nightingale in the dark. By morning Neena was able to turn to her lectures for some solace. To focus on the scientific facts she knew was a form of comfort.

  “Situated in a large protected hollow, this village gained importance during the period when Tibetan salt was traded for the lowland grains of Nepal. Today trade still exists here and Tibetans can be seen trading rugs and Chinese-made goods, clothing, salt, and dried meat.”

  On the fourth day, Col was feeling much more energetic and insisted on pushing on to catch a sight of Everest at Kala Pattar. Ellen looked worriedly at Neena, who looked into Col’s eyes and saw that they were clear, inspected his tongue and took his pulse and was satisfied with his energy levels, so she cleared him to continue.

  From Namche, they ascended steeply to Khumjung, the largest village in the region. “Towering above Khumjung village is the sacred rocky peak of Khumbila, home of Thangka, the guardian goddess of the region, often depicted in religious painting as a striking white-faced woman on a white horse.”

  The trail contoured around Khumbila’s lower slopes, passing through beautiful birch forest and on to treeless grassy slopes to a stupa, a mounded structure containing Buddhist relics on top of a rocky ridge. After trekking through a picturesque village set in a patchwork of stone-walled fields, they descended onto a series of switchback trails to the river again, 900 feet below. Leaving the bridge, they ascended steeply and enjoyed excellent views of the mammoth Cho-Oyu at the head of the valley. They were now trekking beyond the tree line and passed some imposing waterfalls. Although they felt the effects of high altitude, the barren alpine scenery with small clusters of scrub juniper did not escape them and they appreciated the beautifully stark contrast they made to the snowy white peaks and deep blue skies above.

  “Keep an eye open for Tibetan snow cocks,” Neena called behind her. “These steep grassy slopes could reveal colorful fauna. The valley here widens onto the moraines of the Ngozumpa Glacier, the largest in Nepal and the source of the Dudh Kosi River.”

  Countless towering snow-peaks and rock spires filled the horizons at Cho La Pass. The breath-taking altitude was now asserting itself on the travelers as they climbed the ridge beside the trail for excellent views of Everest’s North Face. To acclimatize, they lingered for three days in Gokyo, a village surrounded by yak-settlements. The herders were particularly good and jovial singers and when Ellen and Neena plied their instruments, they were delighted to find some of the brown-faced men with creased and weather-worn smiles joining in with their own chorus of chants and yak-like bellows to accompany their rhythmic strumming and bowing, with Col providing a low bass counterpoint to the occasional bellows.

  Over the three nights the women traded instruments again; one learned to strum with passion and the other to draw a bow with emotion. The convivial atmosphere and spirited music warmed the hearts of the travelers and inspirited all the villagers in a way that no travelers had done before them. They were invited to stay at a different Sherpa family’s home each night, but the whole village showed up promptly after dinner for the sing-along. After three days it was difficult to say goodbye, but it was not sad since everyone knew they had to come back again on their way down. There was only one path up and back down from the peak of Chomolungma.

  From Lobuche a gradual ascent enabled them to build the sl
ow, steady rhythm required for high altitude walking. A series of small ascents and descents over a rocky trail lined with cairns eventually led to the surprising glacial sands of Gorak Shep. It took them several hours to cross the glacier, technically the hardest and most dangerous section of the mountain, which wove its way between translucent ice pinnacles and past bottomless crevasses.

  “The trek to the base camp from here is about three hours. We will encounter yaks and porters supplying food and equipment to climbing expeditions. From Base Camp we do not get views of Everest but we will be able to see the notorious Khumbu Ice Fall. That will be our destination.” And just as the words slipped from Neena’s lips, Col suddenly collapsed in a heap on the icy path.

  “Uncle Col! What’s the matter? Are you all right?!” Neena called out.

  “Col, what’s happening?!” Ellen was beside her husband, shaking him, but he seemed unable to hear and respond, his eyes rolling slightly in their sockets and his body rigid. Neena methodically implemented the CPR methods she knew very well, but after twenty minutes of pumping his chest and breathing into his mouth, there was nothing more she could do. Ellen kneeled to one side, holding his hand tightly while the other woman worked diligently. Eventually, a small band of mountain climbers arrived and carried the unconscious man fireman-style back down to Lobuche, but acute mountain sickness claimed Ellen’s husband before the rescue helicopter arrived to take him to lower elevation. It developed so rapidly and quietly at that altitude that descending would not necessarily have stopped the swelling of his brain. High altitude cerebral edema, Neena sighed.

  By the time they reached the airfield in Lukla with Col’s body a day later, Neena and Ellen had walked in the mountains for over seven weeks and were fully acclimatized to the rhythm of the villages. They were sad that they could not visit the Sherpa families they had earlier stayed with, but instead rose early for the arrival of their twin-prop aircraft for the flight back to Kathmandu. On the precipitous journey which felt dangerously close to falling off the mountain, both women were emotional and on the verge of tears.