by Andrew Greig
Sandy tried to put these unproductive thoughts behind him and, while argument raged on round about him, worked out how much it would cost to carry their own gear to Gash 2.
No. Even that was impossible. He’d told Mal just a few weeks ago that his estimate of sixty porters was way low. From Alex’s figures it looked like eighty-five loads. What if we dropped Kathleen and her porters? No, even that won’t get us through. Or if we added, say, five pounds to each load, how many loads less would we have? Not enough. What if … No.
It went on like that all afternoon. By the end of it we were divided, suspicious, and very tired. We went round and round trying to square the circle, to prove the impossible was possible. But there was never quite enough; there was always something or someone who was going to get dumped, and nobody wanted to be the one.
I was alarmed at the way our cumulative disappointment, suspicion and hostility were being directed at the absent Mal. Yes, he had fucked up by seriously underestimating our costs in Pakistan, but the level of abuse and accusation was way beyond what the situation merited. Burt’s spittle sprayed across the table with the violence of his denunciation. This wasn’t a climbing expedition, this was a lynching party. I hoped that the weather would allow Mal’s flight in tomorrow. Kath and I in particular needed him here – or would he leave us in the lurch, as some insinuated?
To save money, we decided we’d eat Expedition food on the grass outside the hotel. Somehow Mohammed persuaded the manager to allow us to do that. Sitting cross-legged in the brief twilight, we ate our first Expedition meal, rice and retorts. At least the retorts, being real food – stews, chilli con carne, steaks – without preservatives, not freeze-dried, were a success. With the last platinum-pale light hitting the highest peaks in the distance, and the porters gathering and singing quietly beside the river, it should have been a joyful, calm evening.
In the early hours of the morning, while some members of the party sat up frying their brains with best Paki black, Kathleen came to my single bed and lay sobbing with anger and disappointment. I held her but there was little I could say. It was difficult to see our way round this one. She fell asleep but I stayed awake a long time, scheming and worrying.
Next morning I woke feeling low and headachy. When I blew my nose, it began to bleed. This wasn’t just stress, this was altitude. If I was reacting to it like this at 7800 feet, how would I handle Base Camp, let alone being on the mountain? Mal had mentioned that some people simply don’t adjust to altitude. Maybe I was one of them.
Suitably depressed, I went in to breakfast, only to remember that it was being made by Alex on the lawn outside. We were all subdued and dispirited. In the middle of another pointless wrangle, I think it was Jon who finally announced, ‘Look, we’re all in this Expedition. We’ve got to pull together and solve these problems instead of arguing about them.’
Silence as we considered this. He was right. If we didn’t work together, we were nothing. Mohammed then made an astonishing offer: he’d lend us 100,000 rupees of his own money (some £7500) to pay our porters, and we could repay it when we returned home. We were moved by his trust in us and his commitment to the Expedition – and shamed, for these were the qualities we’d so conspicuously lacked.
We couldn’t accept his offer. It’s pretty bad when you have to start borrowing off the locals – we were supposed to be endlessly wealthy westerners handing out money, not receiving it. Besides, we couldn’t guarantee repaying him.
But his suggestion made us pull ourselves together. In a couple of minutes it was agreed that we’d all put in whatever personal money we had with us. In the case of Burt, Donna and Sybil, this was quite a large amount. We trusted each other to declare honestly our assets. Sandy did the sums. Yes, if we pooled all we had, there’d just be enough cash to get us to Base Camp and back. When Mal arrived he’d have to try to raise some 40,000 rupees to repay us and pay for Gash 2. If necessary, he’d have to fly back to ’Pindi to do it. That was up to him to sort out; for the time being we could at least guarantee getting ourselves to the Mustagh Tower. (Or so we thought!) That was all that counted when it came down to it, that someone at least got onto the mountain and had a chance of climbing it.
At last we were thinking and working as an expedition.
So we all set off to the bank, clutching our pounds and dollars and traveller’s cheques to change them into rupees. A simple enough operation, you’d think.
A total epic.
The bank is a two-room shack with peeling plaster walls, a faded portrait of General Zia and two bare lightbulbs. Four battered desks and clustered round them, behind them, on them, a motley crew who might be tellers or janitors or friends or the local bin men. We are admitted by a cross-eyed guard with a shotgun and an enormous bandillero of cartridges looped across his shoulder.
By a process of elimination, we find the manager. Change traveller’s cheques? Need passport. We produce our passports. Need photocopy. Why? Need photocopy. Oh, okay. Need traveller’s cheque list, and photocopy. But why photocopy? And why the list of numbers? Some of us don’t have our lists – you’re always told not to keep them together. Burt left his in ’Pindi. Shrug. No photocopy, very sorry.
Look, we have our passports and our traveller’s cheques, why do we need photocopies? Shrug. Follow man, he show you.
We’re taken to a taxi that drives to the other end of town to a shack that supposedly has a photocopier. Closed. Cousin’s funeral. Is there another photocopier in Skardu? Shrug, inshallah, a beaming smile. We go see.
We find another shack. Closed. Gone to see brother. Wait here. We wait in the blistering heat, resolution rapidly ebbing away. The sky’s clear, will Mal and the LO fly in today? Will we ever get out of here? Man comes back, makes photocopies. Pay him, pay taxi, back to the bank.
We work through the crowd of leisurely gossiping bank employees, relatives, friends, farmers, priests, porters, brigands, goat herds, to the manager’s desk. He gravely puts on his slippers and considers our documents, then reaches into a drawer and pulls out a wedge of forms. Answer here, please. We sigh and obediently fill them in. The manager considers them thoughtfully for five minutes, then hands them to a guard, who takes away passports, cheques, photocopies, everything. We wait. And wait. Forms appear on the desk, are signed or merely motioned away. None of them is ours. There’s no sign of actual money anywhere. The manager eases off his slippers, smiles, indicates the bank is closing in five minutes. For how long? Three days. I take off my shoes and settle into the corner. No way we’re leaving here without our rupees.
The guard returns. He’s so cross-eyed he’d have problems deciding which barn door to try to hit with his shotgun. Another set of forms, sign here, please. The forms are taken away again by a shuffling janitor.
To pass the time, I decide to change my remaining dollars into rupees. I finally get to the counter and hand them over. Passport, please. Sorry, but that man took it away. Photocopy of passport. Why? What on earth? Do I need a passport to certify the mighty dollar? I dig out a second photocopy, and fill in more forms. Might as well help employ Skardu. Do the notes have to be consecutively numbered? He looks at me seriously, shakes his head regretfully.
Back to the manager’s room. It’s past closing time but no one’s leaving. We’re trying not to be tense or aggressive. It’s counterproductive anyway, and too hot to hurry. The manager smiles suddenly, offers round a battered pack of K2 cigarettes. We light up. They make Gauloises seem like Silk Cut. Sandy cracks a joke, we laugh and relax. No hurry after all. We’ll wait here for hours if necessary.
Hours is what it takes. One by one, our forms come back, the manager signs the magic chit and we go from desk to desk slowly tracking down our elusive rupees. The manager explains that a month ago someone cashed a large amount of stolen traveller’s cheques, and thus all the precautions.
My traveller’s cheques come back. The manager looks concerned. My countersignature is different. No, it’s not. Signature different. But i
t’s my signature, you saw me sign it. Not same, cannot accept. I try to explain that I cannot exactly duplicate my original signature, made light years ago with a ballpoint pen in the sane and respectable town of Edinburgh, with an italic dip pen in this sweating hole when I’m suffering from altitude. Cannot accept. Okay, I’ll do it again. Okay.
Carefully as any forger, I try to duplicate my original signature. The manager looks at it critically while I idly picture him strung up by his necktie to the overhead fan. Okay, he says finally.
So once again I follow my forms as they move at a random and leisurely pace from desk to desk, are exclaimed over, chuckled over; heads shake in profound sorrow, eyes narrow suspiciously or widen in disbelief at such headstrong foolishness as trying to change money in a Skardu bank.
Till some three and a half hours later we emerge triumphantly into the blinding light, our pockets bulging with rupees. The Expedition is viable again.
We returned to the hotel for tea on the lawn, after which Mohammed led us forth for another shopping expedition, buying cake and tea and cooking stoves and kerosene, eighty pairs of sandals, eighty pairs of sunglasses, and a few hundred packets of throat-mangling K2 cigarettes – statutory provisions for the porters.
By evening we were exhausted but optimistic. Instead of seeing problems, we were solving them. We’d all put in our money and gained a certain solidarity. And the magic Mohammed had decided he might be able to body-swerve round the trekking problem and get the LO to agree to Kath and Sybil visiting Base Camp. Furthermore, Mohammed had been adopted as part of the climbing team. He wanted to help out by load-carrying from Base Camp further up the mountain. We were short on manpower and, though he’d never done any technical climbing before, his strength, agility and experience of altitude could make all the difference.
He was such a warm man. He would sometimes sit and watch us as we talked and argued, his observant brown eyes moving from one to another. Like a student, Jon thought – not judging, just taking in. For some reason, despite our money problems and disharmony, he seemed to trust us and identify with us. That in itself was a great boost, and with his cheerfulness and ability to fix anything from a discount on our hotel bill to a knackered starter motor, he was the biggest plus that had happened to us.
Kath and I were now quite cheery. We packed our blue barrel with climbing gear and clothes and books for Base Camp. Unlike the others, we had to share a barrel, and this meant we had a lot of extra gear, including our precious box of personal munchies, scattered about in the big standard cardboard boxes.
A lot of tactical cunning went into the packing of these loads. Everyone wanted to off-load as much as possible from his own rucksack to make the walk-in easier, yet because of our finances we had to impose a set number of porter loads per person. People were going round at the last minute slipping a sleeping bag in one load, cassettes or spare clothing in another, while still trying not to go over the 55-pound limit. The constant repacking and reallocation was driving Alex to distraction as he tried to keep up with his contents list.
Jon came up to me as I repacked my barrel for the last time. ‘Ah mate, you seem to have some space left in there. Would you shove these in for me?’ He handed over half a dozen books and walked away. A classic Jon manoeuvre, the same one he used to keep the best seats on the bus. I was suddenly fed up with it. I ran after and stopped in front of him. ‘Look, Jon, if I can fit your books in, I will. But they’re your responsibility, not mine. If they’re too heavy, I’ll leave them. Okay?’
He gave me what was intended to be a withering look, shrugged and went into his room. But he’d heard me. If the books didn’t turn up at Base, that was his problem. There were dozens of moments like that when one had to judge when to be helpful and put oneself out, and when to refuse. The balancing act between looking after one’s own interests and those of the group is at the heart of a mountaineering expedition and determines its character. It’s the same in ‘ordinary life’, of course, only less evidently so.
I looked at his books: some Russian novels and a history of the Spanish Armada. Very Jon. I found a space for them, wondering if I was an obliging fellow or a mug.
Now we were all packed up and ready to go. Our eighty-five porters were selected by Mohammed (who seemed to be related to most of them). They sang a prayer, a blessing on the Expedition, then they and our loads went off ahead by tractor through the desert and hills towards Dassu, where we hoped to follow them by jeep the next morning. But we couldn’t leave till Mal and our LO showed up. The plane hadn’t got through, and the road was still closed for repairs. Would they show up the next morning so we could get away? And how was Mal going to react to the coming confrontation?
In the evening, while the sky grew paler and paler above the mountains and darkness seeped up the valley towards us, Kath and I, Adrian and Jon took a walk through the miniature fields of Skardu. Potatoes, maize, wheat, a few cattle and goats, bordered by poplar trees hissing in the breeze against the darkening sky, crisscrossed by irrigation streams, dotted with rough stone houses crouched in the trees. It was deeply peaceful after the last two days’ stress, and we were content to walk along in silence. The imam started calling the faithful to prayer and the streets were empty as we walked back in the soft half-light. The high-pitched sobbing yell trailed off into silence. We stood for a moment, each with our own thoughts of home, of tomorrow, each alone yet not alone.
‘Good action,’ Jon said quietly.
We were all gathered in the corridor of the K2 motel. It was time to go to bed but we were too wound up and anxious to leave. The hostility and suspicion against Mal were reaching a new crescendo, conducted by Burt, who was practically foaming at the mouth as he talked of the thousands of dollars he’d put into the trip. I thought how Kathleen’s few hundred had been all she had. And just then, the man himself walked in with the LO. Big wave, big smile. Very muted ‘Hi’, curt nods in reply.
They were happy and pleased with themselves to have arrived. They’d enterprisingly flown to Gilgit, then commandeered a jeep on the road from there to Skardu. They were tired and wanted to eat and catch up on our news.
The reception was not friendly. Because of Shokat’s presence, we couldn’t launch straight into our cash crisis. We had to make conversation politely, while my heart for one was hammering with adrenalin. This moment of confrontation had been delayed so long, it had got out of all proportion. ‘For God’s sake, take Shokat aside,’ Sandy whispered. So Kath and I had to chat to the good captain about the bus journey, the weather, weren’t they clever flying to Gilgit, yes Baltistan is lovely, while all the time straining to make out the muffled voices from the room the others had taken Mal into. I felt that once again we’d been edged onto the periphery, and suspected that any further economizing would be at our expense.
We persuaded Shokat to go and eat, then hurried along to see how Mal was taking it. He looked dazed and baffled as he tried to take in in five minutes what we’d turned over for three days. But he soon saw the seriousness of our position, that we desperately needed money and that it was his responsibility to find it. That acceptance, together with his simply being there and obviously not a scheming monster, helped diffuse the situation, though the atmosphere was not exactly friendly.
So it was agreed then and there he’d have to go back to ’Pindi next morning and raise some 40,000 rupees (£2500). Somehow. Anyhow. By telexing Rocky, or getting an overdraft, or arranging a second mortgage through Liz and getting her to wire the money out. The message was clear: don’t come back if you haven’t got the money. If he managed to raise it, he’d probably wait in ’Pindi for Tony Brindle’s arrival in another week, then they would follow us up to Mustagh Tower as quickly as possible.
Once the others had finished putting him through the wringer, I took him aside. I felt some sympathy for him as he sat, dazed, on the bed, hand on his forehead as he smoked and stared at the floor. I told him as much, that I still considered him my friend, and tried to explain
how things had gone in his absence and why there was so much aggravation. He listened in silence, still trying to take it all in, still looking for solutions.
Then came the sticky part. I told him that we needed a clear statement of his and Rocky’s commitment to our being part of the Expedition. I asked him to assure us that either he or the Expedition would pay some of the Karakoram Tours expenses since it was the Expedition, not Kathleen, who was benefiting from Mohammed.
And, being Malcolm and, despite what some of the others had said or feared about him, an honourable man, he said yes. We were part of the trip, Rocky wanted that, and somehow or other he’d find the money. I believed he was sincere. I just didn’t know if he could do it. Like most serious climbers, he was broke most of the time. I felt acutely sorry for Liz at the prospect of his phoning her up and asking her to raise some £2500 of their money. Could they do it?
But there it was. We said good night. We hoped to meet again at Mustagh Base Camp in ten days or so – it seemed a long way off and fairly unlikely. Then I took three aspirin, my Streptotriad, my Stressguard and a sleeping pill, checked my pack for tomorrow – and fell asleep, grey and blank as an old blackboard, face down on the bed.
5
Living on Balti Time
We get a little higher
22–24 June 1984
That day was raised.
For us all it was one long sustained high note of joy. The joy of forward movement, of companionship, of scene after scene flicking by as we revved and jolted up into the mountains. The further on and up we got, the further we were from civilization, from officialdom and its pratfalls. Every mile left us lighter and freer.
We had bundled our rucksacks into the jeep in the cool early morning sunshine, grabbed our water bottles, cameras and sunglasses, and swung up into the open back of the Suzuki. For the first hour we bounced along the remains or the beginning of a road with the wind in our faces and the sun jumping in and out of the poplar trees. All the jokes and repartee started to flow for the first time in days. ‘Let’s not use Duff any more as the needle to thread our jokes on,’ Alex murmured as he clung to a crossbar, his elongated legs dangling over the side. We nodded. Point taken. The past was behind us. We were living on amnesia once again.