Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (24 page)

Gamu asked to see Marco’s stubs, and he unlaced his sneakers. She examined the amputations briefly, then waited for him to pull on his socks. “You are fortunate, sir,” she said. “You can conceal your sorrow inside your shoes.”

Marco nodded and pressed her hand. “K2 was good to me.”

Across town, Pemba Gyalje must have felt the same. His double rescue had attracted fame, and visitors to his home in Kathmandu could squish down on the living room sofa and stare up at an effigy of their host: a five-foot-by-three-foot poster of Pemba Gyalje’s face on the cover of
National Geographic Adventure
. The magazine had christened him “The Savior.”

By helping Pasang down the Bottleneck, Chhiring had pulled off one of the most heroic rescues in K2 history; by sacrificing his ice axe and anchoring it to a rope system, Pasang had anonymously prevented many climbers from wandering off-route to their deaths. Both men had played crucial roles in leading the climb and keeping others alive, but hardly anyone knew it.

“The mainstream media
focused on the rescues
of August second and third,” Pemba noted. Those
rescues involved Western lives
. But the cameras eventually reached the Bhotes in Kathmandu. In January 2009, Pemba Gyalje’s agent, Pat Falvey, arrived at the Hotel Marshyangdi with a film crew. Pat was producing a documentary about the tragedy, and Pemba had agreed to conduct the interviews in Nepali. Pat met with the Bhotes, introducing himself as a ragpicker-turned-millionaire.

“I owe Ger this film,” Pat told Pasang Lama. Four years earlier, Ger had found Pat dying on Everest and short-roped him down the mountain, saving his life. Now Pat wanted to ensure that Ger received credit for his heroism on K2.

Pat offered to fly the Bhotes to Switzerland to shoot a reenactment on the Eiger. They would wear the same Kolon Sport suits used on K2. Pasang liked the idea and agreed to share his summit footage, but his cousin Pemba Jeba objected. Pemba Jeba didn’t know the photo of Jumik’s corpse was already making the rounds in one climber’s slideshow, but he’d seen enough Hollywood films to fear that Jumik would be depicted by a test dummy leaking red dye and corn syrup. “What do you know about survival?” Pemba Jeba implored Pasang. Gamu, Jumik’s mother, had burned her forearms and chest in grief. His widow, Dawa Sangmu, had spent her nights inside the same Kolon Sport sleeping bag that Jumik had taken to K2. Their infant, Jen Jen, would never know his father.

Pemba Jeba snatched the summit footage. “I am saving this video for Jen Jen,” he said.

Pasang didn’t try to justify himself. “My life didn’t make sense anymore,” he recalled. He had survived K2 but wasn’t sure he could survive now. The crime of survival weighed upon him. It was the guilt of breathing when other men—better ones, he felt—no longer could.

During the filming, Pasang met Chhiring for the first time since August. He thanked him, but the pain was transparent. Pasang’s spirit seemed to be cannibalizing his body. He smelled sour, of beer and sweat, and spoke in monosyllables. Chhiring, unsure what to say, invited him to go climbing.

Under the skylight of the great hall, Parveen, Karim’s widow, served Nazir Sabir tea and
chilpindok,
a flatbread soaked in melted goat cheese. As they waited for Jehan’s mother to join them, Nazir thanked her. “I wanted to come to Shimshal to pay my respects to you,” said the Alpine Club president. The house filled with mourners; soon it was standing room only. Finally, Nazir broke the silence. He asked how the families were doing.

For a time, no one spoke. Then Karim’s father, Shadi, broke down.
“I’ve been cut in half,” he said. “I hide my grief in front of my grandchildren, but they see it. They feel it.”

Karim’s four-year-old, Rahmin Ullah, skimmed the air with a toy Pan Am jet, as his grandfather spoke. “He still believes his father will return from K2,” Shadi explained.

Children are the most affected when their fathers leave for the mountains, Muhammad Raza, the local schoolteacher, told Nazir. The students become distracted in class and silent during recess. They spend too much time alone. As climbing season ends, they start to laugh again, and they listen for the rumble of jeeps along the riverbed. Once their fathers are safely home, he said, “The children become themselves again.”

For the children whose fathers would not return, it was different. Jehan’s son, Asam, had borrowed a cassette player. The boy spent hours alone, listening to a tape he had made. “Long live my father,” the tape repeated. “Long live brave Jehan.” The ten-year-old had become withdrawn, said Nazib, his grandmother.

Jehan’s youngest son, eight-year-old Zehan, had grown to resent Western expeditions that employ Shimshalis. When his grandmother was discussing the downturn in tourism, the boy had blurted out: “I hate foreigners. Why do they come to climb mountains and kill our fathers?”

The elders worried for the children but had no solution except the passage of time. No one had dealt with deaths like these. Karim and Jehan were the first Shimshalis to die in modern mountaineering. The community had banded together to help the widows, but for some, it was hard even to look at the White Horn, where Karim and Jehan had learned to climb. Shaheen Baig found the memories so unbearable that he had quit mountaineering for a time and left Shimshal to work as an oil prospector in the Taliban-occupied North-West Frontier Province.

Nazir nodded, knowing he could do
little else but listen
. And even that felt inadequate, for soon the families had nothing more to say. The great hall became quiet. Nazir cupped his hands, lifting them toward the skylight. He tried to compose himself, but soon he wept openly with Shadi. Struggling to keep his voice steady, he twice recited the Surah Ikhlas, a Quranic verse, for the lost men:

Say: He is Allah, the One and Only.

God, the Eternal, Absolute.

He begets not, nor is He begotten.

And there is none like Him.

After the prayer, almost all the men were sobbing. Grief made it hard for Shadi to stand. Nazir supported him, helping him rise. Outside, the sun tinted White Horn’s glacier a brassy gold. Nazir realized he’d have to leave soon or navigate the Shimshal gorge in the dark. Shadi led him down the irrigation channel, along the jeep track, to the place he’d last seen his son.

As the disaster on K2 was unfolding, Dawa tried to follow the online reports. Sometimes Chhiring’s wife asked tourists at Internet cafés to decipher the news. Otherwise, she had to guess what
ExplorersWeb
was reporting in a foreign language she couldn’t read. Kathmandu’s electrical grid fizzled daily, for eight hours at a time, so Dawa often went without any news at all. She had to go on instinct and tended to imagine the worst.

The stress of the expedition had been too much. She’d needed to get her mind off K2, so she had stayed with German friends while her daughters attended summer school. But in the first days of August, even fast Wi-Fi couldn’t confirm whether Chhiring was among the living. Newspapers listed sherpa fatalities but typically failed to provide names.

“The only time I didn’t suffer was when I was asleep,” she said. She tried calling Chhiring’s brother Ngawang, to see whether he’d heard anything, but the circuits were overloaded. In early August, still unsure what had happened and unable to reach anyone who could tell her, Dawa summoned her courage and headed home.

As she opened the gate, Dolkar the spaniel yelped and spun in circles, charging ahead to alert his master. Moments later, Dawa was reunited with her husband. She wanted to reproach Chhiring for going to K2 against her wishes, but she couldn’t do it. She was too grateful to see him alive. As Chhiring told her a sanitized version of the climb, Ngawang gathered up relatives and neighbors, and soon a dozen people had arrived. Instead of debating love and death, Dawa found herself snatching fermenting socks off the rug, chopping vegetables, and scrambling to host a party. Things were back to normal.

But not everything was the same. Chhiring now considered mortality when he deliberated about future expeditions. As anticipated, his ascent of K2 netted a sponsorship offer to climb another deadly peak, Nanga Parbat. Chhiring declined it. Instead, he decided to spend the summer with his family and climb Makalu, a statistically safer mountain, with two Swedes. Dawa appreciated the compromise and set forth her terms: “Stay away from Annapurna, K2, and Nanga Parbat”—the most dangerous mountains—“and you may climb Everest and the others.”

Chhiring agreed. Survival had given him strong resolve to hold onto Dawa and the rest of his family and friends. Perhaps this was why, for a second time, Chhiring couldn’t leave Pasang Lama behind. He was taking him along to Makalu. Dawa considered it a good partnership, and when Chhiring and Pasang left for the mountain, she gave them a tepid blessing.

At Makalu Base Camp, everything reminded Pasang of his cousins. The village where they were born was nearby, two days on foot. While dicing potatoes for dinner, Pasang had a dim memory of Jumik hiding boiled potatoes from his mother; while exploring the foothills, Pasang thought of a hot spring where the cousins used to bathe; while preparing gear for the summit assault, he remembered how Big Pasang first showed him an artificial claw he dubbed “the crampon.”

One afternoon before the Makalu summit bid, Pasang and Chhiring huddled around a stove, heating beer in a pot. Pasang spoke of his most recent climb with the Flying Jump on Manaslu. His family had called him a collaborator. “They tried to stop me from working for the Flying Jump again, but I didn’t listen,” he told Chhiring. The money was good, and there was a fair chance of getting killed, which seemed attractive at the time. Chhiring asked him if he still felt that way. Pasang put down the mug and, unwilling to say more, studied a rising cloud bank.

The despair that haunted Pasang also unsettled Chhiring. He usually slept soundly at altitude, but that night Pasang heard him tossing. They didn’t speak much while climbing to the summit on May 2, and they could barely grin for their clients’ victory photos. Pasang turned to Chhiring and tried to point out his village, but Hungung remained smothered in low-lying clouds.