by Roland Smith
“You’re on.” The only reason I took the bet was that I was pretty certain there wouldn’t be trees at the top of the trail. Trees and bushes need water, and what lay ahead was as dry as any landscape I had ever seen.
Mom took the lead and set a pretty fast pace herself . . . a pace I could have kept up with, but didn’t, because I didn’t want to rush. I wanted to enjoy the feel of Afghanistan under my old boots.
It isn’t long before she vanishes like Elham. I’m climbing alone. The rocks slip and crumble under my boots. In several places I have to use my hands to catch myself from skidding backwards on the scree. After one of these skids, I pause to catch the view, but what I’m really doing is catching my breath. I see something move a couple hundred feet above me along the cliff face. A flash of dusky white. Elham? His pants and kurta are white, a soiled white, but he couldn’t possibly be this far ahead, nor could he be traveling horizontally on a sheer cliff in sandals. I wipe the sweat from my face and shade my eyes against the glare of the setting sun. I wish I’d thought to bring sunglasses and binoculars, both of which Plank provided. I catch the flash of white again. It isn’t Elham. It isn’t Mom. It’s a shen. A snow leopard. It makes an impossible leap. Twelve feet. Maybe fifteen. Up the sheer rockface. Landing on a narrow shelf as if it’s lighter than air. Impossible. A hallucination, a flashback caused by altitude, dehydration, sun, jet lag, or a combination of all four. But it isn’t. The cat pauses on the narrow ledge and looks down at me. I see its thick tail clearly, flicking back and forth . . .
“You okay?”
Mom had backtracked to check on me.
I pointed up at the cliff. “Did you see him . . . or her?”
“Him or her what?”
“The . . .” I scanned the wall. There was no sign of the shen. “I guess I just imagined—”
“I saw,” a familiar, but completely out of place, voice said.
Now I really thought I was having an audio hallucination. I turned toward the sound of the voice to confirm that I had officially lost it. Standing up the trail just past Mom was a man.
It wasn’t Elham.
Mom turned and looked at the man. “I don’t understand. What did you see?”
“A shen,” Zopa answered.
I translated. “A snow leopard.”
The Climb Master
Seeing Zopa in the Wakhan Corridor is less likely than spotting the shen on the cliff. As far as I know, he has never been out of Nepal and Tibet, where I last saw him standing on a road in the middle of nowhere as I left my failed climb and headed home. When I asked him, on that lonely road, how he had gotten there ahead of me, which was impossible, he had shrugged, showed his thumb, and said he had hitchhiked. He had also found the time to get rid of his climbing equipment and his Sherpa clothes, shave his head, and put on an orange Buddhist robe. He took me to the airport in Kathmandu and thanked me for what I had done for his grandson, Sun-jo, on Everest. It was the least I could do. Zopa’s son, Ki-tar, died saving my father’s life on K2. I’m not close to my father, but a debt like that had to be repaid.
THE ORANGE BUDDHIST robe was gone now, replaced by jeans, a T-shirt that had seen better days, a vest, scuffed hiking boots, and a battered baseball cap that looked like he had picked it up out of a ditch. Two coils of rope were slung across his broad chest like bandoliers. White stubble was growing beneath the cap. He’d been away from the monastery for a while.
I am obsessed with the mystery of things. Not solving the mysteries. Observing them. And Zopa was the most mysterious human I had ever met.
“You’re the climb master?”
Zopa shrugged.
I almost laughed.
The shrug. This is what everyone does when you ask a question about Zopa, because they don’t know the answer. This is what Zopa does when he is asked a question he doesn’t want to answer or you ask a question he doesn’t think is worthy of an answer.
Of course Zopa was the master for this ridiculous climb in Afghanistan. Who else could it be?
“You’ve met my mom.”
“She is just as I knew she would be. Stronger than you. And much stronger than your father.”
Mom was smiling. I wondered if she was aware that this was probably the best compliment she had ever received.
“I must go back to the top to make sure no one has fallen.”
Mom and Zopa scrambled up the slope like a pair of mountain goats. I took my time, enjoying the view of two of my favorite people negotiating the steep scree.
Their trail ended at a sheer wall several hundred feet tall. Zopa, Mom, and Elham waited for me outside the entrance of a cave opening big enough to drive a bus through.
“You have light?” Zopa asked, fishing his headlamp out of his vest pocket.
Mom and I pulled out our new expensive headlamps and slipped them over our foreheads.
Zopa pulled off a coil of rope and handed it to Mom. “You will check on the young climbers?”
“I would be honored.” Mom slipped the coil around her neck.
Mom and Zopa had never met. She only knew him through what I had written about him on Everest. He didn’t know her at all, but somehow he did. Now he was asking her to check on his climbers. Deciding about someone at first glance is so Zopa-like.
Elham pointed to the sky and said something in Pashtun.
To my surprise, Zopa answered him back in what sounded like the same language.
“You speak Pashtun?” I asked.
“Kathmandu is an international city. Many people from many countries.”
Typical Zopa answer, which explained nothing. New York City is an international city with many people from many countries, including Afghanistan, and I don’t speak Pashtun.
“What did Elham say?” Mom asked.
“He says he prefers to wait outside so he doesn’t miss the evening prayer if we are delayed.”
We left Elham watching the sun and followed Zopa into the dark cave. I expected the cave to be cool, but it wasn’t. It felt like I was walking into a kiln. It smelled musty and close. Fifty feet from the entrance was a dim shaft of light coming from the ceiling. A single rope dangled from the opening to the ground.
“Chimney,” Zopa said.
I couldn’t see the source of the light, but obviously the chimney went all the way to the top of the cliff. Three hundred feet up. Maybe more.
“The others should have reached the top by now,” Zopa continued. “Climb up and meet them. Have them rappel down the north face cliff on the river side.”
I put my pack on the ground. “I’ll get my ascenders.” Ascenders are mechanical devices that slide up on ropes and grab, making it easier to pull yourself up. Plank, of course, had included the newest and best, and I was eager to try them. But Zopa shook his head.
“Not you,” he said. “Just your mother.” He looked at her. “Do you need ascenders?”
She smiled. “No.”
She slipped on her gloves, grabbed the rope, hooked her leg around the slack, and started up like a vine snake, with effortless fluidity. I had never seen her climb. It was beautiful to watch, but it’s not cool for sons, or climbers, to express how they really feel.
“Showoff!” I shouted.
Off, off, off . . . echoed throughout the cave.
She smiled down at me, then disappeared behind a boulder. The rope went slack, and a second later it dropped to the ground. She was free climbing.
I coiled the rope and attached it to my pack.
“How are the other climbers?” I asked, but what I really wanted to know was why Zopa didn’t want me to climb the chimney.
“One is odd. Two are out of shape. One is pretty good. None are as good as your mother . . . or you.”
“I’m not in great shape either.”
“We watched you and your mother come up the scree. You looked to be in great shape to us.”
“Us?”
“The shen and me.”
“I was in slow motion.”
“Climbing is
not a race.”
I was never sure if my strange conversations with Zopa were a result of his English, which was actually pretty good, or if he just thought this way.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” I said.
“You have to be somewhere.”
“But it’s a long way from Nepal. A long way from the monastery. I thought you only came out of retirement to get Sun-jo to the top of Everest.”
“People offered the monastery money. It was decided that I should climb again.”
“Sebastian Plank.”
Zopa shrugged. Although I was sure he knew who Plank was, and all the minutiae of the deal.
“So the monastery made you climb?”
“Nobody can make one climb. It is always a choice.”
Here we go, I thought. All answers are indirect. Questions are answered with questions. I changed the subject.
“Odd seeing a shen here. I saw one a couple of days ago in New York City. In fact, I was looking at a snow leopard at the very moment I got the call to come here.”
“Odder yet to see a shen in New York City, where there are no mountains.”
“It was at a zoo.”
“The ghost cat belongs in the mountains.”
“Ghost cat?”
“Snow leopard, shen, sah, barfānī chītā, wāwrīn pṛāng, shan, bars, barys, irves, ilbirs, him tendua . . . it’s called many things in many languages, but I like ghost cat because it is rarely seen, and not everyone can see it. Your mother did not see it. The other climbers did not see it either, even though it was there in plain sight.”
“My mom wasn’t in a good position to see it.”
“She was in a perfect position. She wasn’t looking. You were looking.”
It was more luck than looking.
“How long have you been here?”
“Three days. It took me four days to get here from Kabul.”
So Zopa was the old guy Rob was talking about on the jet.
“On the camel and the donkey?” I asked.
“Not all the way. I caught rides on trucks and cars. When the road ran out, I rented the camel. I did not need the donkey, but the owner said they were inseparable. If I wanted the camel, I had to take the donkey.”
“Why didn’t you just take the helicopter?”
Zopa shrugged.
“When did the others arrive?”
“This morning. The film crew is with you?”
“Yes. And you know them. JR, Will, and Jack.”
“Good. They are likeable.”
“There’s a new guy with them named Ethan.”
“What does this Ethan do?”
“He’s their technical advisor. He’s a climber.”
“Is he a good climber?”
“I’ve never seen him climb, but I’ve read about him. He’s made some righteous ascents. I like him. I think you will too.”
Zopa nodded.
“What do you think of Phillip and Cindy?”
Zopa shrugged. Which was a pretty good answer.
“Has Phillip told you where we’re climbing?”
Zopa shook his head. “He has never been here before. He has not left camp. He uses his computer to look at topographical maps and photos, which you know are worthless in picking a place to climb.”
“He’s not looking on the Internet because there’s no signal.”
“So the woman has said. It is no big thing. I don’t think it matters where we climb as long as it is in Afghanistan on the appointed day. I have found some good places.”
“Why didn’t Sun-jo come?”
“Busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Speaking, endorsing gear, making money.”
“This might have been good publicity for him.”
“He does not need publicity. He needs to go to school. He almost has enough money to support his mother and pay for his and his sister’s tuition. Another month, and he will have enough money to keep everyone he loves alive forever without common worries.”
“Did he know I was going to be here?”
“He doesn’t know anything about this climb. He doesn’t know that I am here. I did not tell him.”
“He would have come if he had known.”
“Which is why I did not tell him.”
“He’ll be upset when he finds out.”
“He will be relieved that he did not know.”
“I don’t understand.”
My not understanding was not surprising, which is part of the Zopa mystery. When I met Zopa on Everest, my father described him as a cagey monk. He said that it was hard to say what Zopa’s motivation was for agreeing to do something. Like Plank, Josh had donated money to the monastery to get Zopa to lead me to the top of Everest, but it turned out that Zopa was really leading Sun-jo to the top. He’s not taking you up there just to do me a favor or because I gave money to the temple, Josh had said. There’s another reason—more likely half a dozen reasons—he agreed to do it. And you and I will probably never know what all of them are.
“You are a climber,” Zopa said. “Your father is a climber, and your mother. I was never a climber. I was a Sherpa. I helped real climbers to the tops of mountains. Were it not for the money, I would not have climbed, nor would have my son, Ki-tar. Climbing was a means to an end, and the end was not the summits. The end was supporting our families. Sun-jo is not a climber. Because of you, he no longer has to climb mountains. So you are correct he would have climbed if he knew you were going to be here, but only because you are his friend.”
“He didn’t reach the top of Everest because of me,” I protested. “He reached the summit on his own two feet.”
Zopa shrugged.
“They showed me a list of all the climbers and where they were to climb,” he said. “Sun-jo was to climb Kilimanjaro.”
Mount Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania. I’d always wanted to climb it and wished . . . I smiled. This was exactly why Plank hadn’t told anyone where they were climbing beforehand.
“Of course I crossed Sun-jo’s name from the list,” Zopa continued. “They were disappointed, but they did not give up. They asked if I would be one of their climb masters. I was not interested, but I did look at the climbs that did not yet have climb masters. Your name was on the list for the Pamirs.”
“How long ago was this?”
“A month and a few days.”
“They only asked me a couple of days ago.”
“I know.”
“How did you know that I would say yes?”
“I did not know.”
“So you agreed to lead the climb on the off chance that I would say yes?”
Zopa nodded. “But I hoped you would say no. You should not have come. You should not have brought your mother.”
“Why?”
“This is not going to be a good climb.”
“In what way?”
Zopa shrugged.
“Then how do you know it’s going to be a bad climb?”
“A feeling.”
Uh-oh. Zopa’s feelings were often a lot like reality. He sometimes knew, or felt, things before they happened. All climbs have disaster as a possible outcome, but I had a feeling this was different.
“What kind of feeling?”
“Something violent is going to happen here.”
“Maybe you’re picking up all the past violence in Afghanistan.”
“Possible. That has happened before.”
I started to feel a little better.
“So if you thought something was going to turn sour, why didn’t you say no?”
“Because I thought you would say yes.”
“At first I said no. I wasn’t going to come here, until it looked like JR and the film crew would lose the gig.”
“Gig?”
“Job,” I translated.
Zopa shook his head. “I wish you had said no.”
I’d been wishing the same thing until I saw Zopa. “We’ll be fine. All climbs are safe if yo
u do them correctly.”
“You cannot control nature, or human nature. I can smell a bad climb.”
I gave him a grin. “You smelled it all the way from Kathmandu to Kabul?”
Zopa returned the grin. “That is a good question. I have always wondered if you make a climb bad by thinking it is going to be bad ahead of time. It is difficult to know. Climbs go bad by what people do. Climbs go bad by what people think. And sometimes climbs just go bad.”
“I hope you’re wrong about this one. Why didn’t you have me climb the chimney and join the others?”
“So I could talk to you.” He picked up his pack and glanced up at the opening. “Your mother has made it through the chimney and is organizing the climbers for their rappel.”
There was no possible way he could know this by looking up through the chimney, which was partially blocked, but with Zopa you never knew. I picked up my pack.
“We will take all the packs,” Zopa said.
Hauling seven packs between us wasn’t going to be easy. Zopa must have sensed my hesitation.
“I will ask Elham to help us,” he said.
“Evening prayer,” I reminded him.
“Too early for evening prayer. He has plenty of time.”
He called Elham into the cave. Apparently Zopa was right about the prayer time because after a brief conversation (of which I didn’t understand a word), Elham cheerfully slung a pack over each shoulder.
I followed the cagey monk and the rifle-toting Afghan back out into the light.
The Team
I WAS GULPING water as the five ropes were hurled over the cliff. I offered my water bottle to Zopa. He finished it off. Evening prayer had commenced. Elham was behind us, kneeling toward Mecca on a small prayer rug he had pulled out of his little pack.
The ends of the ropes were curled at our feet like brightly colored snakes, each a different color. The sun was sinking behind the cliff. If the climbers didn’t hurry, we’d be heading down the unstable scree to base camp using headlamps.
Zopa and I tilted our heads back and shaded our eyes from the bright sun. Five shadowy figures appeared on the edge with their backs to us. I wondered how Mom was going to handle the rappel. A free-fall race to the bottom, or a synchronized controlled descent? Most climbers, me included, liked the free-fall race.