Francis Younghusband was a nineteenth-century James Bond. With a walrus mustache and hair slick with pomade, he considered marriage “coercive” and could talk himself out of danger in a dozen languages. In 1889, the twenty-six-year-old joined six Gurkhas—elite soldiers from Nepal—and left in search of Shimshal. From the stories traders told him, Shimshalis moved like snow leopards, silently stalking and devouring their prey, then vanishing into the Karakorum. Intrigued, Younghusband trekked in the direction of the raids. Within a month, he had found the Shimshal Pass and, below it, a den of thieves. Younghusband scrambled up the cliff to the raiders’ fort, peered inside the wide-open gate, and waved a greeting.
The gate slammed shut. Instantly, “the wall was manned by wild-looking Kanjutis, shouting . . . and pointing their matchlocks” at him. The spy waited, “expect[ing] at any moment to have bullets and stones whizzing about [his] ears,” until two henchmen emerged from the gate, sized him up, and left.
Younghusband returned that afternoon on horseback. This time, when he approached the gate, it swung open. Leaving his Gurkha soldiers behind, he trotted inside the fort. Before his eyes could adjust to the darkness, a man sprang from the shadows and yanked the horse’s bridle. The startled animal reared, nearly bucking Younghusband off the saddle. In the commotion, the Gurkhas charged, ready to defend horse and rider, but Younghusband kept his cool. He dismounted as though he’d just arrived at a stable, and the Shimshalis burst out laughing. As the spy had guessed, this mock ambush had been their way of testing his mettle. He had passed.
The raiders welcomed him, offered him tea and dope, and showed off their matchlocks, which fired the only slugs available: garnets gouged from the hillsides. When conversation turned to the caravan raids, the Shimshalis said they couldn’t negotiate; Younghusband would have to speak to their employer, Mir Safdar Ali. They agreed to escort him to Baltit, the Mir’s stronghold down the valley.
Younghusband scaled the Shimshal Pass to map it and continued his reconnaissance. En route, he encountered his archrival, Bronislav Gromchevsky, a spy for the Russians. Although adversaries in the diplomatic duel known as The Great Game, Younghusband and Gromchevsky considered themselves gentlemen, so they shared vodka and brandy, debated imperial policy, and gossiped about the Mir, whom Gromchevsky knew by reputation. Mir Safdar Ali, Younghusband learned, claimed descent from Alexander the Great and a promiscuous fairy. Safdar had ascended the throne by chucking one brother off a cliff, beheading a second, dismembering a third, poisoning his mother, and garroting his father, who had murdered his own father by sending him a smallpox-laced robe. “Patricide and fratricide may be said to be hereditary failings of the royal families of Hunza,” contemporary historian E. F. Knight once noted. The Mir, “whose cruelty was unrelieved by any redeeming feature,” took personal and military advice from a drum pounded by invisible hands, audible only to him. Younghusband must have wondered how he could negotiate with such a psychopath.
When Younghusband arrived in Hunza, he buttoned up his scarlet Dragoon Guards uniform and, flanked by Gurkhas, strode into the Mir’s ceremonial tent. The throne of absolute power resembled a wooden lounge chair, and, when Younghusband glanced around for a place to sit, the Mir motioned for him to kneel in the dust.
Younghusband suspended negotiations. The next day, the Mir visited Younghusband’s tent and proposed a compromise. Raids through Shimshal were a legitimate source of income, Safdar declared, and would stop only if Britain provided a bribe.
But “the Queen is not in the habit of paying blackmail,” Younghusband replied, balancing on the folding chair his aides had found. He switched tactics and tried intimidation, ordering his six Gurkhas to point their rifles out the tent flap and shoot a rock far down the valley. Every bullet struck the target. But when Safdar told the Gurkhas to shoot an innocent bystander scrambling along a path, they refused. Seeing this as a weakness, the Mir pressed for more money—and “some soap for his wives.”
So Younghusband picked up his chair and left. The Mir “was a poor creature,” he wrote, “and unworthy of ruling so fine a race as the people of Hunza.” Younghusband returned to his handlers, recommended that the British seize Hunza, and in 1891, a thousand soldiers invaded under the command of Algernon Durand.
As the British colonel marched toward the kingdom, the Mir bombarded his enemy with maniacal letters. In them, Safdar promised to defend Hunza “with bullets of gold”; he considered one seized fort “more precious than the strings of our wives’ pajamas”; he threatened to hack off Durand’s head and serve it on a platter. Nonetheless, Durand kept advancing, snatched the fortress at Nilt, and seized Baltit Fort.
When Durand’s troops blasted apart the gate of the Mir’s stronghold, they stormed into empty rooms. Instead of exotic concubines, a search of the harem revealed “artificial flowers, scissors . . . tooth-powder, boxes of rouge, pots of pomade and cosmetics.” Safdar and his wives were gone, enjoying a comfortable exile in China. On Durand’s orders, the soldiers dumped Safdar’s wooden throne over the embankment, installed the Mir’s half-brother as the new ruler, and set up a garrison in the valley.
The new ruler, Mir Muhammad Nazim Khan, kept his pledge to monitor the Shimshal Pass for the British. Shimshalis turned to herding, and the surrounding kingdom of Hunza became a vacation destination. Bestselling 1930s novelist James Hilton modeled his Shangri-la after the region; pseudoscientists claimed that the local apricots helped residents live to 160; Life magazine called the kingdom “Happy Land,” a utopia “where the ruler sows gold dust with the year’s first millet seeds, and where mothers-in-law go along on honeymoons in order to school their newlyweds in the intimate art of marriage.” During the turbulent years of Partition, the Mir was so intent on maintaining stability that he refused to take sides with India or Pakistan. He asked to join the United States. Pakistan ultimately administered the region—first called the Northern Areas, sometimes considered part of Kashmir, and now governed by elected leaders as part of Gilgit-Baltistan.
The next foreign invasion was by mountaineers. In 1953, Hermann Buhl and the Austrian Embassy sent a telegram to the Mir, asking him to recruit high-altitude porters for Buhl’s expedition to Nanga Parbat. Buhl offered to pay the men 20 rupees, or $6 a month, to carry loads.
Aspirants, many of them Shimshali, packed the Durbar, a dusty courtyard below the Mir’s Baltit Fort. Wearing a black velvet robe embroidered with gold sequins, the Mir rejected the weak and sent the strongest to a German doctor in the town of Gilgit. With a magnifying glass, the physician examined each patient’s chest, mouth, and teeth, and then “he smelled us to see how we would do in altitude,” recalled Haji Baig, one of the high-altitude porters selected for Buhl’s expedition.
With men like Haji and Amir Mehdi, the sniff test proved accurate. When Buhl struggled down from the summit with frostbitten feet, Haji and Mehdi alternated carrying him on their backs. Impressed, Buhl spread the word about his Pakistani high-altitude porters, and the Italians recruited the same men the following year for the first ascent of K2. This success established a warrior class known as the Hunza Tigers, mountaineers whose political influence grew to rival the Mir’s.
One of these Hunza Tigers, Nazir Sabir, later overthrew the Mirs’ 950-year rule. Walking to elementary school one morning on the way to Baltit, a holy man waved him down and presented the young Nazir with a pebble of rock salt. Lick this once a day until it is dissolved, the holy man told the eight-year-old, and you will bring fame to these valleys.
The boy finished the rock salt and, decades later, pioneered a new line up K2’s treacherous West Ridge with a Japanese expedition. Without using bottled oxygen, he survived a forced bivouac in the Death Zone, four days without sleep and two days without food or water. After K2, Nazir focused his legendary toughness on politics.
In 1994, Nazir ran against Crown Prince Ghazanfar Ali Khan, the hereditary Mir of Hunza, for a seat in the local legislature. With mountaineers as his supporters, Nazir trounced the mona
rchists, becoming the first commoner to lead Hunza in almost a millennium. Once forced to steal and kill to satisfy their Mir’s greed, climbers now controlled Hunza politics. As the region’s most powerful leader, Nazir fought corruption and built schools and roads, including a jeep track to Shimshal. He mentored Shimshali climbers and employed them on K2 with his expedition company.
Nazir Sabir Expeditions organized the 2008 Serbian K2 Expedition, and Nazir hired Shaheen Baig as the team’s leader. “He’s the safest climber around,” Nazir said, “one of the best in Pakistan.” Nazir breaks down when he thinks of what happened to Shaheen and the other two Shimshalis. “That village will never be the same.”
Despite the new jeep track, Shimshal seems inviolate. The six hundred residents farm barley and herd goats, which they carry in their arms to the grazing lands to avoid setting off landslides. In spring, Shimshal’s apricot orchards explode in a pastel flurry; in winter, snow leopards pad along the riverbank, leaving prints in the frost. After dark, Shimshalis tell mountaineering stories while huddled around yak-tallow candles in a central hall where ancient beams, carved with stars, frame a skylight to the heavens. The village has one satellite phone, which is almost always switched off.
Shimshalis speak Wakhi, a rare language related to Persian. Many of their climbing tales feature Shaheen, but not everyone enjoys them. “These are ghost stories of living men,” said Shaheen’s wife, Khanda. “I leave the room.” She tolerates only one: her husband’s failure on Broad Peak. “It gives me confidence that he has the sense to stay alive.”
Broad Peak, or K3, juts out of the Karakorum like a giant incisor. A moderate 8000er compared to its neighbor, K2, Broad Peak turns brutal in December. Winds pummel the slopes at up to 130 miles per hour, gouging out tents, shredding ropes, and shooting hail like rounds from a machine gun. No climber has managed a winter ascent. Only a few have been daring enough to try.
On Broad Peak in the winter of 2007, Shaheen started each day with a clean shave, although it was haraam, forbidden by Quranic law. The Prophet directed Muslim men to grow beards as a visible sign of their faith, but a temperature of minus 49 degrees Fahrenheit made Shaheen a pragmatist. His whiskers created air pockets between his cheeks and his neoprene mask. At cold enough temperatures, those humid pockets could freeze the mask to his face.
After shaving, Shaheen and his Italian climbing partner, Simone Moro, left for the summit around 6:30 a.m. They made each other a promise: No matter how close they were to the top, they’d turn around at 2 p.m. That way, they’d avoid descending in darkness.
Shaheen felt strong, and at 2 p.m., he could taste the summit. It was perhaps an hour away. Winds were low. Shaheen understood the temptation to continue. If he topped out, the winter ascent would go down as one of the most extreme in mountaineering history, and he would become internationally famous.
“But you can’t think clearly in the Death Zone,” he said. “You have to do it before you get there, when you have judgment. Climbers die when they ignore a set turnaround time.” So he and Simone turned back, reaching their tent before temperatures plunged further at sunset. By getting so close, yet respecting the turnaround time, Shaheen earned his reputation as one of the sanest of the madmen who take on winter ascents. Shimshalis respected his judgment, and if a local carpenter or a shepherd wanted to become a mountaineer, Shaheen was the man to talk to.
In 2001, two such men had approached Shaheen for climbing instruction. Twenty-four-year-old Karim Meherban and twenty-five-year-old Jehan Baig had been scrambling up mountainsides since they were boys, using hemp rope and ibex-horn anchors to reach the grazing lands. Now the two shepherds wanted to earn climbers’ salaries.
“Karim and Jehan became my little brothers,” said Shaheen. “I set technical routes on the White Horn and made them climb the ice, over and over, until I knew they had the skills.”
Shaheen’s students proved not only strong but lucky, with Jehan cheating death more than once. When Jehan was crossing an icy pass near Shimshal, the slope slithered beneath his boots as though the mountain were shedding its skin. He couldn’t sprint faster than the tons of sliding snow, so he waded to a boulder, wrapped his arms around the granite, and hugged. The rock shielded Jehan, and the flow rumbled around him, leaving him unharmed.
Another avalanche brought Jehan recognition. On July 18, 2007, on K4, or Gasherbrum II, a German pulling fixed lines out of the snow triggered a slide. It partially buried Japanese mountaineer Hirotaka Takeuchi, crushing his rib cage and collapsing a lung. Jehan grabbed a shovel and sprinted more than 600 feet across the wash of the avalanche and made it to Hirotaka. Jehan dug him out of the snow and lowered him down to camp. Hirotaka survived, and Jehan won acclaim and gratitude. He’d seen enough to know that fortunes reverse in a split second on mountains. Now thirty-two, his experience made him seem much older than his friend Karim, whom clients called “Karim the Dream.”
Unlike mountaineers who seldom look up from their boots, Karim reveled in the views and seemed unable to conceive of anything going wrong. It never did. In 2005 on Nanga Parbat, sometimes called “The Killer Mountain,” Karim reached the summit and earned a hefty tip from his French client, an aristocratic insurance salesman named Hugues Jean-Louis Marie d’Aubarède. Karim returned to Shimshal and told his two children about the climb; his youngest, a three-year-old named Abrar, begged to hear what had happened on the summit. Had Karim entered the magical crystal palace of Nanga Parbat? Was it true that mischievous fairies buzz around the mountaintop, dining at translucent tables and kicking off avalanches for fun?
Karim shook his head. He’d seen nothing supernatural on Nanga Parbat, but he promised to pay better attention on the next climb. That peak, he announced, would be K2. His French client had hired him again for the following summer.
Karim’s children cheered and hugged their father; his wife, Parveen, picked at the tablecloth. She asked her husband for more details about this plan. Wasn’t his client pushing sixty? Could Hugues handle the climb? Was the money worth the risk?
Hugues brokers insurance, Karim replied. He is too sensible to sell our lives cheaply.
Comforted by Karim’s confidence, Parveen congratulated her husband on getting the job and joined the rest of the family in celebration.
Karim guided Hugues on K2 in 2006 and 2007 and returned home both times with a stack of rupees but no summit. In 2008, Hugues hired him again, and Karim told his wife that he’d reach the summit this time. After all, Karim now had experience from two previous attempts, and this summer he’d be climbing alongside his friends, Shaheen and Jehan. The Shimshalis had been hired by different teams—Karim by the French, Shaheen by the Serbians, Jehan by the Singaporeans—but they planned to help each other on the mountain. Maybe they’d even stand together on the top. “Everything seemed so perfect,” recalled Shaheen, echoing Karim’s sentiments. “We were all so young and strong. I never thought there would be an accident.”
Parveen was more realistic. In late May, as her husband prepared to leave for his third attempt of K2, she made a last-ditch effort to stop him. She told Karim that they didn’t need the money; she could support him with her general store. Shimshal’s most successful female entrepreneur, Parveen had invested her husband’s mountaineering earnings in a one-room shop that sold soap, pens, children’s shoes, embroidery, and nail polish. The family no longer needed to rely on Karim’s dangerous career. “I asked him to stay in Shimshal,” Parveen said. “Then I begged.”
Karim embraced his wife and his children, grabbed his pack, and left the house he’d built. He walked down the irrigation channel, crossing barley fields cloaked in waki sholm wush, a yellow wildflower. Karim’s father, Shadi, met him by the jeep track that runs through the village. Shadi also tried to convince Karim to stay.
No Shimshali has ever died on K2, Karim replied. Then, to make the assurance ironclad, he added, “Father, I’m going with Shaheen.”
As he listened to his son, Shadi stared at the riverbed
and remembered how three glaciers—the Khurdopin, the Virjerab, and the Yukshin—had once conspired to exterminate the village. Slow-flowing rivers of ice, the glaciers drain their summer meltwater through a subterranean channel. A natural ice dam constricts the flow, blocking a torrent. In 1964, the dam broke. Snowmelt gushed down, and the river rose 90 feet. It uprooted apricot orchards, hurled homes down the valley, and washed away half the settlement. Villagers scrambled to higher ground. The water tore through the gorge that leads out of Shimshal and demolished the village of Passu 40 miles downstream. Nature had devastated Shadi’s family once. He knew it could happen again.
Shadi looked back at his son and tried to reason with him. “I said, ‘You don’t need to climb K2 again. What about carpentry?’ But Karim smiled and told me: ‘Father, I can’t stop yet. Just this one summit, then maybe.’ ”
When Karim left that afternoon, Shadi watched the jeep disappear down the river basin, kicking up sand. He stayed fixed on the spot long after his son was gone.
“Insha’Allah,” he prayed—if God wills it.
PART II
CONQUEST
Shimshal to K2: From Shimshal, the climbers drove to Askole, the village where the trail to K2 begins. This trekking path is too treacherous for jeeps, so climbers employ hundreds of low-altitude porters, who ferry food and supplies to Base Camp.
6
The Approach
The Karakorum Highway, barely two lanes wide, rolls through the intersection of the Karakorum, Himalaya, and Hindu Kush. The builders of the original road faced tribesmen who stalled construction by “rolling down avalanches of rocks upon them.” Blasting a modern highway from the cliffs was nearly as treacherous. It took twenty years and cost nine hundred lives—about a life a week. Today, jeeps bumping down the highway dodge pits and boulders, swerve around hairpin turns, and squeeze between trucks tricked out like pinball machines.
Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day Page 9