Beyond the summit: An Everest adventure and Romance

by Linda LeBlanc

  “Over there. The little girl making mud patties and plastering them all over the house.”

  Her turn to tease now, she gave his shoulder a quick hug. “No, Babe I’m sure that’s dung. She must have retrieved it from a yak.”

  “Cute, real cute. And the plastering?”

  “Probably drying it for fuel. Look around. There aren’t many trees.”

  While Eric took more pictures, Beth wandered down the narrow street. Larger than other villages they had passed through, Namche reminded her of a giant horseshoe-shaped amphitheatre rising steeply on all sides. The center buildings packed tightly together along single-file, dirt paths all looked the same. Passing an open doorway, she was noting the all-purpose mud/dung floor when Dorje startled her by emerging from the next building and turning north, so engrossed he didn’t notice her. Besieged by a shortness of breath that Eric never quite aroused, Beth tried to get control of herself. She had to know whom he was with just now and what they were doing. Stepping back, she peered at the second-story window expecting to see a woman but met instead the gaze of the man from the market.

  Even more intrigued now by Dorje and the man in the window, she joined Eric and they continued roaming the village to document life at 11,300 feet. He took pictures of a woman sweeping the entrance to her home with a yak-tail broom and a Sherpani bathing her babies in a shallow pan on the stone step. As in Kathmandu, there appeared to be no mingling of the sexes. Girls walked hand in hand with girls and boys did the same. Women washed at the spring while men sat in the village center gambling and drinking chang. For half an hour, Beth and Eric watched four men playing on a raised, four-foot-square carom board and concluded it was similar to eight ball pool except using chips flicked with the index finger.

  Back in camp in time for tea and biscuits, Beth noticed two chickens caged near the makeshift kitchen: the evening entrée, chicken hacked into small squares making it almost impossible to separate the bones from meat. The color back in her face, Helen was sitting on the ground playing a kind of jacks with two village girls while Ruth blew up balloons for three boys.

  “Anyone seen Dorje?” Beth asked.

  “Not since morning,” said Ruth.

  Making notes in her journal, Beth kept a constant eye on the trail to the north and finally saw Dorje arrive just in time to instruct the cook about dinner. Something had made him that late. The myriad questions brought up by the village excursion provided an easy entrance to a man who had eluded her all day. Concise and informative, his answers allowed no opening for further discussion. Without making eye contact, he explained lumber came from a Sal forest in the Terai of southern Nepal, twelve days on foot. Curious about all the yaks wandering through the village, she asked if they were sacred like the cows in Kathmandu. Yes, he told her but unlike the Hindus, Buddhists never killed a living thing, not even the ant under one’s foot. But willing to eat meat slaughtered by someone else, the Sherpas paid low-class Khambas from Tibet to perform the task. Also allowed were animals that died by accident. A subtle smile spreading across his lips, he confessed that an unusually high number of yaks appeared to commit suicide by falling off cliffs.

  While jotting notes, she’d tried to think of a tactful way to approach the subject of the man in the window. “Why were those two men yelling at each other in the market this morning?”

  Dorje shifted from one foot to the next as if anxious to leave. “I told you. Just two old friends having an argument.”

  “About what?” Forging ahead with her usual directness, she probed further until she had the whole story of friends who were at odds because one refused to change. He was being left behind because he couldn’t afford the prices set by tourists and those who profited from them.

  Excusing himself, Dorje said he must leave now and would answer more questions tomorrow. As she watched him head north again, it seemed he didn’t share the connection she’d felt last night. Aware of more cultural changes unfolding than she had envisioned and a Sherpa who had stirred her emotions, she lay awake that night contemplating a longer stay in Namche.

  * * * * * * * * *

  Trekkers usually reached Khumjung in an hour but Dorje could do so in under thirty minutes. Racing up the hill, he groused about Beth all the way. Last night he had tried to remove her from his thoughts. And today, hearing of Mingma’s intention to arrange a marriage, he had rushed immediately to Shanti’s village and learned of a party tonight for which he would now be late because of Beth’s incessant questions. If only she hadn’t sat there in that blue top that made her eyes even more brilliant. The woman had a way of squeezing information from him like a fist around chapatti dough and not the least bit shy about giving out her own. Imagine a stranger talking about missing her father and waiting for him, almost as if she knew he had waited for his. But that was impossible unless she was some kind of witch and had peered inside his head. Females could alter their form at night and often appeared as a blue light. Perhaps American witches cast love spells on men. A shiver ran through him and he climbed faster, his eyes darting warily in every direction.

  In Khumjung, he listened for a conch announcing the location of the party. Then he wound along a narrow path lined with stone fences until he reached a house with lights and laughter streaming from the upstairs windows. Entering an open living space identical to Mingma’s, he headed for a table filled with chapatis, potato cakes with ground spices, vegetable and yak momos, hard nak cheese, fried Tibetan bread, and plenty of chang. Dorje dipped a momo in hot chili sauce and searched the room. Shanti was standing with a group of young women who were whispering and casting furtive glances at the men on the other side. When she looked at him, the same seductive smile and large brown eyes she had used on him all last summer totally encompassed him and shoved all thoughts of Beth aside. Whipping her head with the thick black hair flowing over her shoulder, Shanti turned back to her friends and left him gazing at her and remembering how they had made love in the meadows at Gokyo. A strong and bright Sherpani, she would make a good wife and mother.

  The room stirred with excitement when two musicians arrived with hollow cylindrical, wooden drums 18 inches long and covered with parchment on both ends. Sitting on the window bench, the musicians strapped the madals around their knees with the drums resting on their thighs and then began slapping the ends while singing. Dorje joined the men in a line down the center of the room, arms locked around waists, moving forward a few steps and then backwards. Lining up opposite them, the women moved in unison. When the men sang several lines from a song, the women responded with the next verses. After they had alternated a few times, one of the men sang to a woman in a bright red blouse, “If you are so beautiful, why do you spend your days gathering dung cakes?”

  The other men sang his refrain and the women responded. “If you are so handsome, why do you only have naks for girlfriends?”

  After the women repeated the refrain, the first man continued, “And where is the rich mikaru who will carry you off to America? Do you hide him in your goiter?”

  As the two sides matched wits and bantered with playful insults, the tempo increased. Their footwork quickened to a rhythmic stomping and kicking until the dancing became so frenetic that everyone was giggling and panting too hard to sing. The faster Dorje’s feet moved, the more his heart raced with desire. His gaze never strayed from Shanti. Her tantalizing eyes and lips promised the same rapture he had shared all summer, and it had been too long since he had held her in his arms. Consumed with the thought of making love again, he hardly noticed when the music stopped and everyone broke for refreshments. As ladles of chang with fermented grains floating on top filled everyone’s cups, the party livened into the playful wrestling and sexual innuendos common at summer pasture.

  Other musicians entered, one with a hand drum and the other a sarangi. Playing the small four-stringed instrument with a horsehair bow, the musician sang a love song, and the dancing resumed but not in lines. Men and women danced alone, turning and swayi
ng with their arms upraised, their hands dipping and rising, circling in and out. Dorje watched Shanti’s body undulating in a continual, sinuous motion, gliding with effortless grace, her feet barely grazing the floor. Teasing him, she parted her lips just slightly with her tongue until he couldn’t stand it. Longing to be inside her again, he inched close enough to whisper, “Come with me.”

  She cupped her hand around his rear cheek to give it a squeeze and then sashayed to the door tossing a mischievous smile over her shoulder. As soon as they were out of sight, Shanti whipped her skirt up and giggled.

  “Not here,” he laughed, “I want to lie with you. “I’ll . . .” Before he could finish, her tongue was tracing his lips and she was snuggling up to him. “Quit that,” he said, pulling away. He wanted time to explore and relish her entire being. “Open the shutter a crack when your parents are asleep and I’ll come to you.”

  “Now,” she purred, drawing his hand to her thigh until laughter coming from the doorway swept a frown across her face.

  Dorje yanked her skirt back down, turned her, and put one hand on her waist to direct her towards home. “My father will be coming soon with beer for a sodene.”

  Shanti stopped so quickly, his stride carried him past. He spun around and pulled her to him. Burying his face in her hair, he whispered, “Will you ask your father to accept?”

  “I shall tell him that if he does not, I will run off to Kathmandu with you.” Slipping out of his arms, she ran along the path, yelling, “Watch for the shutter.”

  Dorje waited on the rock wall opposite her house as he’d done the first few weeks of fall before the tourists arrived. Trekking season had separated them as it did many families in the Solu Khumbu when husbands left their wives and children to work for two to three months each fall and spring. His leg bounced nervously. At great risk sitting here alone with Beth’s bewitching ways trying to depose Shanti, he had to fill his head with her brown eyes and full, warm lips. Hurry up and open the damn shutter. Finally a playful hand crawled out the window and beckoned to him. Groping his way up the dark stairway, he paused outside the door to the living area, knowing her parents were in the same open room. The first time he had come, her father coughed loudly as Dorje tiptoed to her place on the floor just to let him know he was aware of his presence. But nothing was said that night or any other. With nowhere else to go, it was accepted that boys would visit girls. Tonight her father rustled in his bed as if to say, so you finally came back to see my daughter after these many weeks. But no words were spoken as Dorje’s feet slid in a whisper across the floor. Loving her was fun and exciting. Teasing and tickling his most sensitive parts, she sent goose bumps all the way to his toes. When he came, his entire body shuddered in a wild explosion.

  Afterwards, Dorje lay with her head in the hollow of his shoulder and stroked her hair and cheek. The most beautiful girl in the Khumbu and he knew how to please her. But he also feared he could never stay in one place raising yaks or farming potatoes as their fathers did. The restless shadow that had chased him all summer would always be in pursuit. Closing his eyes, he held her tight, planning to stay until the misty light of dawn slithered through the shutters and crept across the room.

  CHAPTER 11

  Lying awake for over an hour, Beth couldn’t ignore her bladder another minute. After carefully lifting Eric’s arm from around her waist, she opened her side of the sleeping bag leaving the other still attached to his to maximize body heat. She crawled through the tent door and arched her back like a cat stretching in the sun and yawned. This sleeping on the ground, even with a foam pad, killed her back. Shivering, she hugged herself and lumbered to the latrine tent mumbling, “What bothers me most is I’m getting used to this.” Inside the tarp, the awkward and unglamorous Asian toilet awaited. The most workable position was squatting slightly and straddling the hole in the ground.

  As she exited, Beth watched dawn seeping down the hills with a gentle apricot glow in the still air. Embraced by the solitude, she stood a long while in the sleeping camp with her eyes closed. Even though she’d given up on an all-seeing, protective God many years ago, this felt like some kind of spiritual experience. Finally opening her eyes, she saw someone hurrying down the path from the north. It was Dorje. As he neared and their gaze met, he quickly turned away as if she were a stranger.

  Back in her tent, Beth waited for the tea and warm wash water that announced the beginning of another day. “How do you feel?” she asked Helen at breakfast.

  “Okay but really disappointed because I wanted to walk all the way to Tengboche and now I won’t even get to see what I came for.”

  “I’m not so sure. The doctor said you could probably go if transported.”

  Fifteen minutes later, a doko appeared at the dining tent door with the top half of the back cut out and stuffed with Helen’s bag and pad for a seat. Eric laughed. “Methinks your taxi has just arrived, My Lady.” And so had the driver. After getting Helen settled and reassuring her she was not too heavy, Dorje adjusted the naamlo and slowly rose to his feet with her on his back facing away from him. The air resounded with cheers from everyone. Although Beth was also pleased at Helen’s good fortune, her presence precluded any personal conversation with Dorje on the trail. Since he had avoided her since the night of the yeti, perhaps Dorje planned it this way.

  The trail led them to the very spot where Dorje had brought Beth two nights earlier. She wanted some acknowledgment that they had shared a moment there, but he never looked in her direction. Instead he focused on the ladies, identifying Everest, Nuptse, Lhotse, Ama Dablam, and a speck on a dark ridge that was Tengboche. When he showed them the photo rock, Beth wanted to say, but that’s ours where we sat together.

  Posing them with Everest in the background, adjusting his lens, and teasing to elicit just the right smile, Eric was very good at what he did and Beth admired that. They could build a comfortable and exciting life around work and travel. So why did her entire being grow faint when she glanced at Dorje and caught him watching her? Not turning away this time, he fixed his eyes on hers as if to say, I remember our night together. It meant something to me too..

  Eric broke the moment when he asked Dorje to take his picture with Beth. Standing with her arm around Eric’s waist and his on her shoulder, Beth felt something was missing as if the photo would develop in black and white. When Dorje returned the camera, Beth couldn’t let go of that night. “Dorje,” she said quietly as he started to help Helen into the doko, “I want a picture with our sirdar to take home.”

  “Great idea,” said Eric. “You two get up there.” On watery legs, Beth posed beside Dorje, not touching, barely able to breathe, but knowing the photo would print in blazing color.

  Continuing the trek, they headed out on a contouring trail high above the Dudh Kosi, called the milk river because of its glacial flour. Then they moved along a steeply plunging hillside through forests of blue pine, fir, black juniper, and colorful mountain rhododendrons. Sparkling micas, mosses, lichens, and azaleas lined the path. Ruth spotted two Himalayan tahr and Eric shot half a roll on the national bird, the Impeyen Pheasant. Gleaming in the sunlight, the male revealed its iridescent, multicolored plumage while Dorje explained they were downhill flyers and could only walk uphill. Overhead a lammergeier with a ten-foot wingspan soared on thermals.

  Descending 1,100 feet to the river, the group reached the small village of Phunki Tenga next to a series of water-driven prayer wheels with the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum carved on the outside and printed on parchment inside. Dorje explained that all who touched the wheel receive sönam or merit towards a better incarnation. Sitting in front of her house, an elderly woman spun a hand-held prayer wheel made of a hollow metal cylinder attached to a handle with a lead weight on a chain to aid rotation, each turn equivalent to reciting one mantra. Simultaneously with her other hand, she fingered rosary beads counting her recitations with each prayer earning merit.

  After resting half an hour, they began the 2,000-foo
t ascent on a trail that initially climbed steeply along the right flank of the ridge, narrowing to single file at times above cliffs that dropped hundreds of feet to the river. Dorje regularly urged them to go bistarai, bistarai and drink more water, so they rested often. Eventually the trail grew more gradual and the trekkers marveled at the lush canopy of scarlet rhododendron, pine, magnolia, and birch. The dark forest contrasted sharply against the soaring white mountains.

  Three hours from Phunki Tenga, they reached a covered gateway with brightly painted scenes of local deities and forms of Buddha adorning the walls and arched ceiling. Built by the monks, the kani cleansed people of evil spirits before entering the sacred grounds. Passing through and then around a large chorten, the group entered a clearing surrounded by dwarf firs, sweet smelling incense scrubs, and colorful rhododendrons. Perched on a ridge at 12,700 feet and ringed by spectacular peaks, Tengboche sat in the most stunning natural setting Beth had ever seen. To the left, a broad stone stairway led to the main gompa, its whitewashed walls and red shutters rising against a stark blue sky where yellow billed choughs and black ravens played on the winds.

  While the Sherpas set up camp in the clearing, Eric took photos of the ladies and Beth with Everest and Ama Dablam, the Matterhorn of the Himalayas, in the background. “That has to be one of the most photographed mountains in the world,” he said, pointing to the latter. “Look how the steep slopes and curving ridges draw your eyes to the glacier on the summit.”