Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time
by Greg Mortenson, David O. Relin
Contents
Introduction: In Mr. Mortenson's Orbit
Chapter 1: Failure
Chapter 2: The Wrong Side of the River
Chapter 3: "Progress and Perfection"
Chapter 4: Self-Storage
Chapter 5: 580 Letters, One Check
Chapter 6: Rawalpindi's Rooftops at Dusk
Chapter 7: Hard Way Home
Chapter 8: Beaten by the Braldu
Chapter 9: The People Have Spoken
Chapter 10: Building Bridges
Chapter 11: Six Days
Chapter 12: Haji Ali's Lesson
Chapter 13: "A
Smile Should Be More Than a Memory"
Chapter 14: Equilibrium
Chapter 15: Mortenson in Motion
Chapter 16: Red Velvet Box
Chapter 17: Cherry Trees in the Sand
Chapter 18: Shrouded Figure
Chapter 19: A Village Called New York
Chapter 20: Tea with the Taliban
Chapter 21: Rumsfeld's Shoes
Chapter 22: "The Enemy Is Ignorance"
Chapter 23: Stones into Schools
Acknowledgments
Introduction
In Mr. Mortenson's Orbit
The little red light had been flashing for five minutes before
Bhangoo paid it any attention. "The fuel gages on these old aircraft are
notoriously unreliable," Brigadier General Bhangoo, one of Pakistan's most
experienced high-altitude helicopter pilots, said, tapping it. I wasn't sure if
that was meant to make me feel better.
I rode next to Bhangoo, looking down past my feet through the
Vietnam-era Alouette's bubble windshield. Two thousand feet below us a river
twisted, hemmed in by rocky crags jutting out from both sides of the Hunza
Valley. At eye level, we soared past hanging green glaciers, splintering under a
tropical sun. Bhangoo flew on unperturbed, flicking the ash of his cigarette out
a vent, next to a sticker that said "No smoking."
From the rear of the aircraft Greg Mortenson reached his long
arm out to tap Bhangoo on the shoulder of his flight suit. "General, sir,"
Mortenson shouted, "I think we're heading the wrong way."
Brigadier Bhangoo had been President Musharraf's personal pilot
before retiring from the military to join a civil aviation company. He was in
his late sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache as clipped and
cultivated as the vowels he'd inherited from the private British colonial school
he'd attended as boy with Musharraf and many of Pakistan's other future leaders.
The general tossed his cigarette through the vent and blew out
his breath. Then he bent to compare the store-bought GPS unit he balanced on his
knee with a military-grade map Mortenson folded to highlight what he thought was
our position.
"I've been flying in northern Pakistan for forty years," he
said, waggling his head, the subcontinent's most distinctive gesture. "How is it
you know the terrain better than me?" Bhangoo banked the Alouette steeply to
port, flying back the way we'd come.
The red light that had worried me before began to flash faster.
The bobbing needle on the gauge showed that we had less than one hundred liters
of fuel. This part of northern Pakistan was so remote and inhospitable that we'd
had to have friends preposition barrels of aviation fuel at strategic sites by
jeep. If we couldn't make it to our drop zone we were in a tight spot,
literally, since the craggy canyon we flew through had no level areas suitable
for setting the Alouette down.
Bhangoo climbed high, so he'd have the option of auto-rotating
toward a more distant landing zone if we ran out of fuel, and jammed his stick
forward, speeding up to ninety knots. Just as the needle hit E and the red
warning light began to beep, Bhangoo settled the skids at the center of a large
H, for helipad, written out in white rocks, next to our barrels of jet fuel.
"That was a lovely sortie," Bhangoo said, lighting another
cigarette. "But it might not have been without Mr. Mortenson."
Later, after refueling by inserting a handpump into a rusting
barrel of aviation fuel, we flew up the Braldu Valley to the village of Korphe,
the last human habitation before the Baltoro Glacier begins its march up to K2
and the world's greatest concentration of twenty-thousand-foot-plus peaks. After
a failed 1993 attempt to climb K2, Mortenson arrived in Korphe, emaciated and
exhausted. In this impoverished community of mud and stone huts, both
Mortenson's life and the lives of northern Pakistan's children changed course.
One evening, he went to bed by a yak dung fire a mountaineer who'd lost his way,
and one morning, by the time he'd shared a pot of butter tea with his hosts and
laced up his boots, he'd become a humanitarian who'd found a meaningful path to
follow for the rest of his life.
Arriving in Korphe with Dr. Greg, Bhangoo and I were welcomed
with open arms, the head of a freshly killed ibex, and endless cups of tea. And
as we listened to the Shia children of Korphe, one of the world's most
impoverished communities, talk about how their hopes and dreams for the future
had grown exponentially since a big American arrived a decade ago to build them
the first school their village had ever known, the general and I were done for.
"You know," Bhangoo said, as we were enveloped in a scrum of 120
students tugging us by the hands on a tour of their school, "flying with
President Musharraf, I've become acquainted with many world leaders, many
outstanding gentlemen and ladies. But I think Greg Mortenson is the most
remarkable person I've ever met."
Everyone who has had the privilege of watching Greg Mortenson
operate in Pakistan is amazed by how encyclopedically well he has come to know
one of the world's most remote regions. And many of them find themselves, almost
against their will, pulled into his orbit. During the last decade, since a
series of failures and accidents transformed him from a mountaineer to a
humanitarian, Mortenson has attracted what has to be one of the most
underqualified and overachieving staffs of any charitable organization on earth.
Illiterate high-altitude porters in Pakistan's Karakoram have
put down their packs to make paltry wages with him so their children can have
the education they were forced to do without. A taxi driver who chanced to pick
Mortenson up at the Islamabad airport sold his cab and became his fiercely
dedicated "fixer." Former Taliban fighters renounced violence and the oppression
of women after meeting Mortenson and went to work with him peacefully building
schools for girls. He has drawn volunteers and admirers from every stratum of
Pakistan's society and from all the warring sects of Islam.
Supposedly objective journalists are at risk of being drawn into
his orbit, too. On three occasions I accompanied Mortenson to northern Pakistan,
flying to the most remote valleys of the Karakoram Himalaya and the Hindu Kush
on helicopters that should have been hanging from the rafters of museums. The
more time I spent watching Mortenson work, the more convinced I became that I
was in the presence of someone extraordinary.
The accounts I'd heard about Mortenson's adventures building
schools for girls in the remote mountain regions of Pakistan sounded too
dramatic to believe before I left home. The story I found, with ibex hunters in
the high valleys of the Karakoram, in nomad settlements at the wild edge of
Afghanistan, around conference tables with Pakistan's military elite, and over
endless cups of paiyu cha in tearooms so smoky I had to squint to see my
notebook, was even more remarkable than I'd imagined.
As a journalist who has practiced this odd profession of probing
into people's lives for two decades, I've met more than my share of public
figures who didn't measure up to their own press. But at Korphe and every other
Pakistani village where I was welcomed like long-lost family, because another
American had taken the time to forge ties there, I saw the story of the last ten
years of Greg Mortenson's existence branch and fork with a richness and
complexity far beyond what most of us achieve over the course of a full-length
life.
This is a fancy way of saying that this is a story I couldn't
simply observe. Anyone who travels to the CAI's fifty-three schools with
Mortenson is put to work, and in the process, becomes an advocate. And after
staying up at all-night jirgas with village elders and weighing in on proposals
for new projects, or showing a classroom full of excited eight-year-old girls
how to use the first pencil-sharpener anyone has ever cared to give them, or
teaching an impromptu class on English slang to a roomful of gravely respectful
students, it is impossible to remain simply a reporter.
As Graham Greene's melancholy correspondent Thomas Fowler
learned by the end of The Quiet American, sometimes, to be human, you have to
take sides.
e sidesI choose to side with Greg Mortenson. Not because he doesn't
have his flaws. His fluid sense of time made pinning down the exact sequence of
many events in this book almost impossible, as did interviewing the Balti people
with whom he works, who have no tenses in their language and as little
attachment to linear time as the man they call Dr. Greg.
During the two years we worked together on this book, Mortenson
was often so maddeningly late for appointments that I considered abandoning the
project. Many people, particularly in America, have turned on Mortenson after
similar experiences, calling him "unreliable," or worse. But I have come to
realize, as his wife Tara Bishop often says, "Greg is not one of us." He
operates on Mortenson Time, a product, perhaps, of growing up in Africa and
working much of each year in Pakistan. And his method of operation, hiring
people with limited experience based on gut feelings, forging working alliances
with necessarily unsavory characters, and, above all, winging it, while
unsettling and unconventional, has moved mountains.
For a man who has achieved so much, Mortenson has a remarkable
lack of ego. After I agreed to write this book, he handed me a page of notepaper
with dozens of names and numbers printed densely down the margin in tiny script.
It was a list of his enemies. "Talk to them all," he said. "Let them have their
say. We've got the results. That's all I care about."
I listened to hundreds of Mortenson's allies and enemies. And in
the interest of security and/or privacy I've changed a very few names and
locations.
Working on this book was a true collaboration. I wrote the
story. But Greg Mortenson lived it. And together, as we sorted through thousands
of slides, reviewed a decade's worth of documents and videos, recorded hundreds
of hours of interviews, and traveled to visit with the people who are central to
this unlikeliest of narratives, we brought this book to life.
And as I found in Pakistan, Mortenson's Central Asia Institute
does, irrefutably, have the results. In a part of the world where Americans are,
at best, misunderstood, and more often feared and loathed, this soft-spoken,
six-foot-four former mountaineer from Montana has put together a string of
improbable successes. Though he would never say so himself, he has
single-handedly changed the lives of tens of thousands of children, and
independently won more hearts and minds than all the official American
propaganda flooding the region.
So this is a confession: Rather than simply reporting on his
progress, I want to see Greg Mortenson succeed. I wish him success because he is
fighting the war on terror the way I think it should be conducted. Slamming over
the so-called Karakoram "Highway" in his old Land Cruiser, taking great personal
risks to seed the region that gave birth to the Taliban with schools, Mortenson
goes to war with the root causes of terror every time he offers a student a
chance to receive a balanced education, rather than attend an extremist
madrassa.
If we Americans are to learn from our mistakes, from the
flailing, ineffective way we, as a nation, conducted the war on terror after the
attacks of 9/11, and from the way we have failed to make our case to the great
moderate mass of peace-loving people at the heart of the Muslim world, we need
to listen to Greg Mortenson. I did, and it has been one of the most rewarding
experiences of my life.
David Oliver Relin, Portland, Oregon
Chapter 1
Failure
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Persian proverb
In Pakistan's Karakoram, bristling across an area barely one
hundred miles wide, more than sixty of the world's tallest mountains lord their
severe alpine beauty over a witnessless high-altitude wilderness. Other than
snow leopard and ibex, so few living creatures have passed through this barren
icescape that the presence of the world's second-highest mountain, K2, was
little more than a rumor to the outside world until the turn of the twentieth
century.
Flowing down from K2 toward the populated upper reaches of the
Indus Valley, between the four fluted granite spires of the Gasherbrums and the
lethal-looking daggers of the Great Trango Towers, the sixty-two-kilometer-long
Baltoro Glacier barely disturbs this still cathedral of rock and ice. And even
the motion of this frozen river, which drifts at a rate of four inches a day, is
almost undetectable.
On the afternoon of September 2, 1993, Greg Mortenson felt as if
he were scarcely traveling any faster. Dressed in a much-patched set of
mud-colored shalwar kamiz, like his Pakistani porters, he had the sensation that
his heavy black leather mountaineering boots were independently steering him
down the Baltoro at their own glacial speed, through an armada of icebergs
arrayed like the sails of a thousand ice-bound ships.
At any moment, Mortenson expected to find Scott Darsney, a
fellow member of his expedition, with whom he was hiking back toward
civilization, sitting on a boulder, teasing him for walking so slowly. But the
upper Baltoro is more maze than trail. Mortenson hadn't yet realized that he was
lost and alone. He'd strayed from the main body of the glacier to a side spur
that led not westward, toward Askole, the village fifty miles farther on, where
he hoped to find a jeep driver willing to transport him out of these mountains,
but south, into an impenetrable maze of shattered icefall, and beyond that, the
high-altitude killing zone where Pakistani and Indian soldiers lobbed artillery
shells at one another through the thin air.
Ordinarily Mortenson would have paid more attention. He would
have focused on life-and-death information like the fact that Mouzafer, the
porter who had appeared like a blessing and volunteered to haul his heavy bag of
climbing gear, was also carrying his tent and nearly all of his food and kept
him in sight. And he would have paid more mind to the overawing physicality of
his surroundings.
In 1909, the duke of Abruzzi, one of the greatest climbers of
his day, and perhaps his era's most discerning connoisseur of precipitous
landscapes, led an Italian expedition up the Baltoro for an unsuccessful attempt
at K2. He was stunned by the stark beauty of the encircling peaks. "Nothing
could compare to this in terms of alpine beauty," he recorded in his journal.
"It was a world of glaciers and crags, an incredible view which could satisfy an
artist just as well as a mountaineer."
But as the sun sank behind the great granite serrations of
Muztagh Tower to the west, and shadows raked up the valley's eastern walls,
toward the bladed monoliths of Gasherbrum, Mortenson hardly noticed. He was
looking inward that afternoon, stunned and absorbed by something unfamiliar in
his life to that pointfailure.
Reaching into the pocket of his shalwar, he fingered the
necklace of amber beads that his little sister Christa had often worn. As a
three-year-old in Tanzania, where Mortenson's Minnesota-born parents had been
Lutheran missionaries and teachers, Christa had contracted acute meningitis and
never fully recovered. Greg, twelve years her senior, had appointed himself her
protector. Though Christa struggled to perform simple tasksputting on her
clothes each morning took upward of an hourand suffered severe epileptic
seizures, Greg pressured his mother, Jerene, to allow her some measure of
independence. He helped Christa find work at manual labor, taught her the routes
of the Twin Cities' public buses, so she could move about freely, and, to their
mother's mortification, discussed the particulars of birth control when he
learned she was dating.
Each year, whether he was serving as a U.S. Army medic and
platoon leader in Germany, working on a nursing degree in South Dakota, studying
the neurophysiology of epilepsy at graduate school in Indiana in hopes of
discovering a cure for Christa, or living a climbing bum's life out of his car
in Berkeley, California, Mortenson insisted that his little sister visit him for
a month. Together, they sought out the spectacles that brought Christa so much
pleasure. They took in the Indy 500, the Kentucky Derby, road-tripped down to
Disneyland, and he guided her through the architecture of his personal cathedral
at that time, the storied granite walls of Yosemite.
For her twenty-third birthday, Christa and their mother planned
to make a pilgrimage from Minnesota to the cornfield in Deyersville, Iowa, where
the movie that Christa was drawn to watch again and again, Field of Dreams, had
been filmed. But on her birthday, in the small hours before they were to set
out, Christa died of a massive seizure.
After Christa's death, Mortenson retrieved the necklace from
among his sister's few things. It still smelled of a campfire they had made
during her last visit to stay with him in California. He brought it to Pakistan
with him, bound in a Tibetan prayer flag, along with a plan to honor the memory
of his little sister. Mortenson was a climber and he had decided on the most
meaningful tribute he had within him. He would scale K2, the summit most
climbers consider the toughest to reach on Earth, and leave Christa's necklace
there at 28,267 feet.
He had been raised in a family that had relished difficult
tasks, like building a school and a hospital in Tanzania, on the slopes of Mount
Kilimanjaro. But despite the smooth surfaces of his parents' unquestioned faith,
Mortenson hadn't yet made up his mind about the nature of divinity. He would
leave an offering to whatever deity inhabited the upper atmosphere.
Three months earlier, Mortenson had positively skipped up this
glacier in a pair of Teva sandals with no socks, his ninety-pound pack beside
the point of the adventure that beckoned him up the Baltoro. He had set off on
the seventy-mile trek from Askole with a team of ten English, Irish, French, and
American mountaineers, part of a poorly financed but pathologically bold attempt
to climb the world's second-highest peak.
Compared to Everest, a thousand miles southeast along the spine
of the Himalaya, K2, they all knew, was a killer. To climbers, who call it "The
Savage Peak," it remains the ultimate test, a pyramid of razored granite so
steep that snow can't cling to its knife-edged ridges. And Mortenson, then a
bullishly fit thirty-five-year-old, who had summited Kilimanjaro at age eleven,
who'd been schooled on the sheer granite walls of Yosemite, then graduated to
half a dozen successful Himalayan ascents, had no doubt when he arrived in May
that he would soon stand on what he considered "the biggest and baddest summit
on Earth."
He'd come shatteringly close, within six hundred meters of the
summit. But K2 had receded into the mists behind him and the necklace was still
in his pocket. How could this have happened? He wiped his eyes with his sleeve,
disoriented by unfamiliar tears, and attributed them to the altitude. He
certainly wasn't himself. After seventy-eight days of primal struggle at
altitude on K2, he felt like a faint, shriveled caricature of himself. He simply
didn't know if he had the reserves left to walk fifty more miles over dangerous
terrain to Askole.
The sharp, shotgun crack of a rockfall brought him back to his
surroundings. He watched a boulder the size of a three-story house accelerate,
bouncing and spinning down a slope of scree, then pulverize an iceberg on the
trail ahead of him.
Mortenson tried to shake himself into a state of alertness. He
looked out of himself, saw how high the shadows had climbed up the eastern
peaks, and tried to remember how long it had been since he'd seen a sign of
other humans. It had been hours since Scott Darsney had disappeared down the
trail ahead of him. An hour earlier, or maybe more, he'd heard the bells of an
army mule caravan carrying ammunition toward the Siachen Glacier, the
twenty-thousand-foot-high battlefield a dozen miles southeast where the
Pakistani military was frozen into its perpetual deadly standoff with the Indian
army.
He scoured the trail for signs. Anywhere on the trail back to
Askole, there would be debris left behind by the military. But there were no
mule droppings. No cigarette butts. No food tins. No blades of the hay the mule
drivers carried to feed their animals. He realized it didn't look much like a
trail at all, simply a cleft in an unstable maze of boulders and ice, and he
wondered how he had wandered to this spot. He tried to summon the clarity to
concentrate. But the effects of prolonged exposure to high altitude had sapped
Mortenson of the ability to act and think decisively.
He spent an hour scrambling up a slope of scree, hoping for a
vantage point above the boulders and icebergs, a place where he might snare the
landmark he was looking for, the great rocky promontory of Urdukas, which thrust
out onto the Baltoro like a massive fist, and haul himself back toward the
trail. But at the top he was rewarded with little more than a greater degree of
exhaustion. He'd strayed eight miles up a deserted valley from the trail, and in
the failing light, even the contours of peaks that he knew well looked
unfamiliar from this new perspective.
Feeling a finger of panic probing beneath his altitude-induced
stupor, Mortenson sat to take stock. In his small sun-faded purple daypack he
had a lightweight wool Pakistani army blanket, an empty water bottle, and a
single protein bar. His high-altitude down sleeping bag, all his warm clothes,
his tent, his stove, food, even his flashlight and all his matches were in the
pack the porter carried.
He'd have to spend the night and search for the trail in
daylight. Though it had already dropped well below zero, he wouldn't die of
exposure, he thought. Besides, he was coherent enough to realize that stumbling,
at night, over a shifting glacier, where crevasses yawned hundreds of feet down
through wastes of blue ice into subterranean pools, was far more dangerous.
Picking his way down the mound of scree, Mortenson looked for a spot far enough
from the mountain walls that he wouldn't be crushed by rockfall as he slept and
solid enough that it wouldn't split and plunge him into the glacier's depths.
He found a flat slab of rock that seemed stable enough, scooped
icy snow into his water bottle with ungloved hands, and wrapped himself in his
blanket, willing himself not to focus on how alone and exposed he was. His
forearm was lashed with rope burns from the rescue, and he knew he should tear
off the clotted gauze bandages and drain pus from the wounds that refused to
heal at this altitude, but he couldn't quite locate the motivation. As he lay
shivering on uneven rock, Mortenson watched as the last light of the sun
smoldered blood red on the daggered summits to the east, then flared out,
leaving their afterimages burning in blue-black.
Nearly a century earlier, Filippo De Filippi, doctor for and
chronicler of the duke of Abruzzi's expedition to the Karakoram, recorded the
desolation he felt among these mountains. Despite the fact that he was in the
company of two dozen Europeans and 260 local porters, that they carried folding
chairs and silver tea services and had European newspapers delivered to them
regularly by a fleet of runners, he felt crushed into insignificance by the
character of this landscape. "Profound silence would brood over the valley," he
wrote, "even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be
no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so
completely ignored by Nature, so incapable of entering into communion with her."
Perhaps it was his experience with solitude, being the lone
American child among hundreds of Africans, or the nights he spent bivouacked
three thousand feet up Yosemite's Half Dome in the middle of a multiday climb,
but Mortenson felt at ease. If you ask him why, he'll credit altitude-induced
dementia. But anyone who has spent time in Mortenson's presence, who's watched
him wear down a congressman or a reluctant philanthropist or an Afghan warlord
with his doggedness, until he pried loose overdue relief funds, or a donation,
or the permission he was seeking to pass into tribal territories, would
recognize this night as one more example of Mortenson's steely-mindedness.
The wind picked up and the night became bitterly crystalline. He
tried to discern the peaks he felt hovering malevolently around him, but he
couldn't make them out among the general blackness. After an hour under his
blanket he was able to thaw his frozen protein bar against his body and melt
enough silty icewater to wash it down, which set him shivering violently. Sleep,
in this cold, seemed out of the question. So Mortenson lay beneath the stars
salting the sky and decided to examine the nature of his failure.
The leaders of his expedition, Dan Mazur and Jonathan Pratt,
along with French climber Etienne Fine, were thoroughbreds. They were speedy and
graceful, bequeathed the genetic wherewithal to sprint up technical pitches at
high altitude. Mortenson was slow and bearishly strong. At six-foot-four and 210
pounds, Mortenson had attended Minnesota's Concordia College on a football
scholarship.
Though no one directed that it should be so, the slow,
cumbersome work of mountain climbing fell naturally to him and to Darsney. Eight
separate times Mortenson served as pack mule, hauling food, fuel, and oxygen
bottles to several stashes on the way to the Japanese Couloir, a tenuous aerie
the expedition carved out within six hundred meters of K2's summit, stocking the
expedition's high camps so the lead climbers might have the supplies in place
when they decided to dash to the top.
All of the other expeditions on the mountain that season had
chosen to challenge the peak in the traditional way, working up the path
pioneered nearly a century earlier, K2's Southeastern Abruzzi Ridge. Only they
had chosen the West Ridge, a circuitous, brutally difficult route, littered with
land mine after land mine of steep, technical pitches, which had been
successfully scaled only once, twelve years earlier, by Japanese climber Eiho
Otani and his Pakistani partner Nazir Sabir.
Mortenson relished the challenge and took pride in the rigorous
route they'd chosen. And each time he reached one of the perches they'd clawed
out high on the West Ridge, and unloaded fuel canisters and coils of rope, he
noticed he was feeling stronger. He might be slow, but reaching the summit
himself began to seem inevitable.
Then one evening after more than seventy days on the mountain,
Mortenson and Darsney were back at base camp, about to drop into well-earned
sleep after ninety-six hours of climbing during another resupply mission. But
while taking a last look at the peak through a telescope just after dark,
Mortenson and Darsney noticed a flickering light high up on K2's West Ridge.
They realized it must be members of their expedition, signaling with their
headlamps, and they guessed that their French teammate was in trouble. "Etienne
was an Alpiniste," Mortenson explains, underlining with an exaggerated French
pronunciation the respect and arrogance the term can convey among climbers.
"He'd travel fast and light with the absolute minimum amount of gear. And we had
to bail him out before when he went up too fast without acclimatizing."
Mortenson and Darsney, doubting whether they were strong enough
to climb to Fine so soon after an exhausting descent, called for volunteers from
the five other expeditions at base camp. None came forward. For two hours they
lay in their tents resting and rehydrating, then they packed their gear and went
back out.
Descending from their seventy-six-hundred-meter Camp IV, Pratt
and Mazur found themselves in the fight of their lives. "Etienne had climbed up
to join us for a summit bid," Mazur says. "But when he got to us, he collapsed.
As he tried to catch his breath, he told us he heard a rattling in his lungs."
Fine was suffering from pulmonary edema, an altitude-induced
flooding of the lungs that can kill those it strikes if they aren't immediately
evacuated to lower ground. "It was terrifying," Mazur says. "Pink froth was
pouring out of Etienne's mouth. We tried to call for help, but we'd dropped our
radio in the snow and it wouldn't work. So we started down."
Pratt and Mazur took turns clipping themselves to Fine, and
rapelling with him down the West Ridge's steepest pitches. "It was like hanging
from a rope strapped to a big sack of potatoes," Mazur says. "And we had to take
our time so we wouldn't kill ourselves."
With his typical understatement, Mortenson doesn't say much
about the twenty-four hours it took to haul himself up to reach Fine other than
to comment that it was "fairly arduous."
"Dan and Jon were the real heroes," he says. "They gave up their
summit bid to get Etienne down."
By the time Mortenson and Darsney met their teammates, on a rock
face near Camp I, Fine was lapsing in and out of conciousness, suffering also
from cerebral edema, the altitude-induced swelling of the brain. "He was unable
to swallow and attempting to unlace his boots," Mortenson says.
Mortenson, who'd worked as an emergency room trauma nurse for
the freedom the irregular hours gave him to pursue his climbing career, gave
Fine injections of Decadron to ease the edema and the four already exhausted
climbers began a forty-eight-hour odyssey of dragging and lowering him down
craggy rock faces.
Sometimes Fine, ordinarily fluent in English, would wake enough
to babble in French, Mortenson says. At the most technical pitches, with a
lifelong climber's instinct for self-preservation, Fine would rouse himself to
clip his protective devices onto the rope, before melting back into deadweight,
Mortenson remembers.
Seventy-two hours after Mortenson and Darsney set out, the group
had succeeded in lowering Fine to flat ground at their advance base camp.
Darsney radioed the Canadian expedition below, who relayed his request to the
Pakistani military for a high-altitude Lama helicopter rescue. At the time, it
would have been one of the highest helicopter rescues ever attempted. But the
military HQ replied that the weather was too bad and the wind too strong and
ordered Fine evacuated to lower ground.
It was one thing to issue an order. It was quite another for
four men in the deepest animal stages of exhaustion to attempt to execute it.
For six hours, after strapping Fine into a sleeping bag, they communicated only
in grunts and whimpers, dragging their friend down a dangerous technical route
through the icefall of the Savoia Glacier.
"We were so exhausted and so beyond our limits that, at times,
we could only crawl ourselves as we tried to get down," Darsney remembers.
Finally, the group approached K2 base camp, towing Fine in the
bag behind them. "All the other expeditions strolled about a quarter mile up the
glacier to greet us and give us a hero's welcome," Darsney says. "After the
Pakistani army helicopter came and evacuated Etienne, the Canadian expedition
members cooked up a huge meal and everyone had a party. But Greg and I didn't
stop to eat, drink, or even piss, we just fell into our sleeping bags like we'd
been shot."
For two days, Mortenson and Darsney drifted in and out of the
facsimile of sleep that high altitude inflicts on even those most exhausted. As
the wind probed at their tents, it was accompanied by the sound of metal cook
kit plates, engraved with the names of the forty-eight mountaineers who'd lost
their lives to the Savage Mountain, clanging eerily on the Art Gilkey Memorial,
named for a climber who died during a 1953 American expedition.
When they woke, they found a note from Pratt and Mazur, who'd
headed back up to their high camp. They invited their teammates to join them for
a summit attempt when they recovered. But recovery was beyond them. The rescue,
coming so quickly on the heels of their resupply climb, had ripped away what
reserves they had.
When they finally emerged from their tent, both found it a
struggle simply to walk. Fine had been saved at a great price. The ordeal would
eventually cost him all his toes. And the rescue cost Mortenson and Darsney
whatever attempt they could muster at the summit they had worked so hard to
reach. Mazur and Pratt would announce to the world that they'd stood on the
summit a week later and return home to glory in their achievement. But the
number of metal plates chiming in the wind would multiply, as four of the
sixteen climbers who summited that season died during their descent.
Mortenson was anxious that his name not be added to the
memorial. So was Darsney. They decided to make the trek together back toward
civilization, if they could. Lost, reliving the rescue, alone in his thin wool
blanket in the hours before dawn, Greg Mortenson struggled to find a comfortable
position. At his height, he couldn't lie flat without his head poking out into
the unforgiving air. He had lost thirty pounds during his days on K2, and no
matter which way he turned, uncushioned bone seemed to press into the cold rock
beneath him. Drifting in and out of consciousness to a groaning soundtrack of
the glacier's mysterious inner machinery, he made his peace with his failure to
honor Christa. It was his body that had failed, he decided, not his spirit, and
every body had its limits. He, for the first time in his life, had found the
absolute limit of his.
From Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. Copyright Greg Mortenson 2005. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of Viking Press.
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