Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (9 page)

At age seven, Tenzing got a glimpse of his future. In the spring of 1921, the legendary British mountaineer George Mallory pitched several camps in the Kharta region to explore Everest’s north side. During his four-month reconnaissance, Mallory spent a halcyon month in the grazing lands of Ghang La. Spreading money around, he hired local scouts and bought yak butter and cream from herders at Ghang La and Dangsar, where Tenzing’s family stayed. Mallory would die three years later below the summit of Everest, but Tenzing never forgot the hobnailed boots that his expedition left behind.

Mountaineering was the least of Tenzing’s concerns in the 1920s. His family leased the herd they cared for, and one day the yaks erupted in lesions and died, likely during the 1928 pandemic of rinderpest disease. Tenzing’s father couldn’t repay his debts or support his six children in Kharta, so the family migrated across the border, possibly to Thame or Khumjung, villages in the Sherpa heartland of the Khumbu.

The Sherpas in the Khumbu were relatively affluent, enjoying a monopoly on regional trade. For centuries, Tibetan salt and wool had been carried over the Nangpa La Pass into Nepal and exchanged for lowland products such as bamboo, medicinal plants, paper, rice, and soot-based ink. Tenzing labored as an indentured servant for a more solvent family, and, as a Tibetan among the Sherpas, suffered from ethnic discrimination. Inevitably, he fell in love with a beautiful Sherpani whose family disapproved of him. Tenzing, then seventeen, proposed eloping, and the girl, Dawa Phuti, agreed. The couple left the Khumbu, heading to a new life at the Indian hill station of Darjeeling.

Nepal, then an insular kingdom, forbade foreign mountaineering expeditions, so Darjeeling, with its hot baths and billiards, became the
recruitment hub
for Everest. When the couple arrived, Englishman Hugh Ruttledge was recruiting porters for his 1933 Everest expedition. “They wanted only Sherpas,” Tenzing recalled. As a Bhote, he was turned away. “And you go away wondering if you will
never get a job
in your life.” For two years, expeditions continued to reject him because of his ethnicity.

In the early 1930s, Sherpa mountaineers deployed aggressive tactics to force Tibetans out of the profession. Instead of merely staging strikes when they had to work alongside Tibetans, Sherpas on a 1931 German expedition even threatened to sue their paymaster, Paul Bauer, for refusing to hire and
compensate Sherpas preferentially
. Most expeditions, including Bauer’s, caved. Sherpas dominated the local workforce, and they could halt expeditions that failed to meet their demands. To avoid delays and ethnic conflicts, some expeditions hired Sherpas exclusively, and only local climbers who passed as Sherpa were able to accumulate experience.

In 1935, Tenzing was still in Darjeeling, jockeying for a mountaineering job. Determined to hold out, he milked cows, set mortar, and read Darjeeling’s eponymous tea leaves. He finally got a break. A mountaineer named Eric Shipton was about to leave for Everest as part of a British reconnaissance when he made a last-minute decision to hire more men.

At that point, pickings were slim: The most-experienced Sherpas had been killed the year before on Nanga Parbat. In a rush, Shipton decided to broaden his search and encourage Tibetans to apply. Tenzing darted up to the veranda of Darjeeling’s Planters Club, where Shipton was inspecting a throng of candidates. “[T]here was one Tibetan lad of nineteen, a newcomer, chosen largely because of
his attractive grin
,” Shipton later wrote. “His name was Tensing Norkay—or Tensing Bhotia, as he was generally called.” Tenzing was finally on his way to Everest.

En route, the Sherpas staged a strike, refusing to carry loads, so Shipton had mules and Tibetan porters such as Tenzing lug the gear instead. Later, in a village called Sar, the Sherpas got into a drunken brawl with the Tibetans. Tenzing kept out of it, carried whatever weight he was given, accepted coworkers of any ethnicity, and kept on grinning until the reconnaissance ended with the approach of the monsoon.

Tenzing returned from Everest with new boots, snow goggles, and a recommendation from Shipton. His obsession with the summit may have started then, but the deaths of his wife and son may explain the determination he showed in the years to come. Climbing gave him solace and, with his reputation established, work became easier to find. Eventually, he married again. His new wife was Ang Lhamu, a Sherpani who helped him gain acceptance within her community, something he’d never had with Dawa Phuti.

By 1953, Tenzing had clocked more time on Everest than
any mortal
, and the British offered him an opportunity he couldn’t refuse. During their Everest expedition, Tenzing would work as
sirdar
—chief of the mountain workers—and climb as a full team member, a status the British had never before afforded an indigenous climber. Tenzing quit smoking and started carrying around a rock-filled pack. This would be his seventh Everest expedition, and he was destined for the summit.

Early in the climb, Tenzing became fast friends with Edmund Hillary, a beekeeper from New Zealand. Hillary had tried to jump a crevasse but landed short, breaking off a cornice. He slid with the ice sheet into the chasm. As Hillary grasped for the sides, Tenzing snagged the trailing line, flicked it around his axe, and planted the axe into the mountain. The rope yanked tight. Hillary’s ice axe and a single crampon dropped into the fissure. Tenzing, “after positioning himself to gain some leverage, was able to gradually haul Hillary up to the edge of the crevasse, with some help from Hillary’s
single cramponed foot
,” wrote Tenzing’s son and biographer, Jamling Tenzing Norgay. The rescue forged a friendship that led Hillary and Tenzing to the roof of the world.

During the summit bid, it was Hillary’s turn to help Tenzing. Tenzing belayed Hillary as he cut steps toward their final obstacle, a 40-foot protrusion of near-vertical rock now named the Hillary Step. Sherpas call it Tenzing’s Back, but, in fact, it was Hillary who led the section, “[t]aking advantage of every little rock hold and all the force of knee, shoulder and arms. . . .” As Hillary “heaved hard on the rope,” Tenzing stemmed up a crack in the rock face and “finally collapsed exhausted at the top,
like a giant fish
when it has been hauled from the sea after a terrible struggle.” Hillary was just as tired, but from the top of the Step, the route was straightforward: “
A few more whacks
of the ice axe in the firm snow, a few very weary steps,” Hillary recounted, “and we were on the summit.”

It was 11:30 a.m., May 29, 1953, when they became the first mountaineers to reach the highest point on earth. Tenzing felt “[a]
 
t that great moment for which I had waited all my life, my mountain did not seem to me a lifeless thing of rock and ice, but warm and friendly and living. She was a mother hen, and the other mountains were chicks
under her wings
.” Hillary felt emotional too, but expressed it differently: “We knocked the bastard off.”

Tenzing left an offering of chocolates in the snow and tried to take a photo of Hillary but didn’t know how to operate the camera. So he passed it to Hillary, who snapped Britain’s iconic victory image: A Tibetan hoisting an axe strung with a flapping
Union Jack
, the most visible of his four flags. The men basked in the achievement for fifteen minutes before descending to an alien world.

The sudden stardom that followed caught Tenzing by surprise. “I appeared
on television
, before I had ever even seen a set.” Queen Elizabeth got word of the triumph and invited Tenzing to receive the King George Medal. King Tribhuvan awarded him the Most Refulgent Order of the Star of Nepal, the Shah dynasty’s highest civilian award. Mickey Mantle sent a signed baseball bat and cheers from the New York Yankees. Not to be outdone, India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, offered Tenzing a passport and suits from his own closet.

In the Kathmandu Valley, fans mobbed Tenzing, chanting his name and hoisting him aloft on their shoulders. Rumors swirled that Tenzing had three lungs. He and Hillary rode in the Shahs’ gilded chariot and tried to ignore the banners overhead: An artist had depicted Everest with a brown man on the summit and a white stick figure sprawled below. Autograph seekers muscled in, and Tenzing, who could neither read nor write, accepted their outstretched pens and scrawled his mark. Far removed from his life in Tibet, he was visibly dazed.

Such wild, postcolonial display unsettled his teammates, and the impropriety intensified when one of Tenzing’s autographs suddenly became front-page news. Tenzing had unwittingly signed a statement declaring himself to be the first to summit Everest. Hillary did not want to comment, so the British mobilized. Colonel John Hunt, the expedition leader, called a
press conference
to deflate the native son. Tenzing Norgay isn’t a mountaineer of Hillary’s caliber, Hunt proclaimed, and he lacked the technical skill to lead the climb. A Sherpa wasn’t first on the summit of Everest; that distinction belongs to a citizen of the Commonwealth.

The backlash in Kathmandu was brutal. Tenzing’s supporters smeared Hillary as a buffoon carried to the summit in a sedan chair. Hunt apologized and retracted his statement. Hillary drafted one of his own, declaring that he and Tenzing had climbed to the summit “almost together.” The summiters signed it and released it to the press, but they failed to bury the controversy.

“Why Hillary added ‘almost,’ I have no idea,” Tenzing’s son Jamling later said. “Ever since that day, my father and Hillary have maintained that they climbed together and reached the summit together. People still ask who was first, and
it doesn’t matter
.”

Between Sherpas and Tibetans, another dispute arose. Which ethnicity could claim Tenzing as their own? Various Bhotia groups in India and Nepal, including those claiming to be Tenzing’s own relatives from Tibet, noted that Tenzing was born in Tibet and spent his youth there. The Sherpas made their own case. Tenzing had married Sherpanis, spent his adult life in villages with sizable Sherpa populations, and reared his children in the Sherpa language and culture. “Many see my father as the godfather of Sherpas because he was the one who brought the ethnicity into the limelight,” Jamling said. “If my father had said ‘I am a Tibetan’ then there would have been no Sherpas” as the West knows them. The Bhotias of Ghang La in Tibet would be the celebrity ethnicity.

In his autobiography, Tenzing chose to describe himself as a Sherpa from the Khumbu, and that’s what the media continued to report. In a passage deleted from the book, he went further, distancing himself from Tibetans: Tibetans “would often pretend they were Sherpas so as to get jobs,” he explained, and they would become “very quarrelsome and often
draw their knives
.”

Tenzing also had an exigent reason to identify himself as Sherpa in the 1950s. China had invaded his Tibetan homeland, seizing a cornucopia of mineral wealth. Mao Zedong’s Red Army, at the crest of the Cultural Revolution, consigned roughly one-sixth of ethnic Tibetans to prisons, labor camps, and starvation. Tenzing’s spiritual leaders were under siege. The Dalai Lama fled to India.

If Tenzing had publicly declared himself Tibetan, China would have claimed him as one of the “Chinese” ethnicities and used the first ascent of Everest in its propaganda—something Tenzing would have deplored. Coming out as Tibetan, as biographer Ed Webster put it, “would only have magnified his nationality problems.”

Tenzing had fully assimilated by then. He was the world’s most prominent Sherpa. But in his heart he was neither Sherpa nor Tibetan, exclusively; he was both. After Everest, Tenzing honored his complex heritage by founding the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, which trains indigenous mountaineers of many ethnicities, including Sherpas and Bhotes. Since 1954, the school has trained more than 100,000 students, excelling in its mission to “produce a thousand Tenzings.”

5

Insha’Allah

Shimshal, Pakistan
10,500 feet above sea level

S
haheen Baig warned his son and daughter to look before flopping into bed. A dormouse the size of an apricot pit lived between the cushions where the family slept, and Shaheen refused to trap it. With winter approaching, “the creature has no time to make another burrow,” he said, “and if we turn him out, he’ll freeze in half an hour.”

For an entire winter, his family shared their bed and bread with the rodent. “Shaheen may be the toughest mountaineer in Pakistan, but he can’t get rid of a mouse,” said his wife, Khanda. “He hates to see anything suffer.”

With humans, Shaheen was even worse. Working as a guide, he fretted over clients’ headaches, tracked how much they ate and drank, checked and rechecked their harnesses, and filed their crampons with a nursemaid’s anxiety. The thirty-nine-year-old had tapered brows that emphasized his constant concern. He had already summited K2 in 2004 without bottled oxygen, and when he returned four years later, many climbers recognized his familiar frown. They turned to him for advice, let him negotiate their labor disputes, and put him in charge of rope placement on the Bottleneck. Shaheen knew the terrain better than anyone.

Shimshal Valley, Pakistan
Shaheen Baig, one of Pakistan’s best mountaineers, grew up in Shimshal and taught two local men, Jehan Baig and Karim Meherban, how to climb. All three Shimshalis worked as high-altitude porters on K2; Shaheen was at one point a leader of the climb.

“He was an ace,” said Wilco van Rooijen of the Dutch team. “I trusted that guy completely. If he had been at the Bottleneck as planned, nothing would have gone wrong on summit day.”

Shaheen was born in Shimshal, a mountain village in the Hunza region of Pakistan, 76 miles northwest of K2. Shimshal lies beyond a snow-choked gorge that’s impassable from November to March. Nine peaks, each rising higher than the tallest mountain in North America, flank the village; to the east over a pass, the Silk Road meanders through Xinjiang, China. Shimshalis make up the majority of Pakistan’s K2 summiters, and three Shimshalis were at the epicenter of the 2008 disaster.

Shimshalis have long been soldiers of fortune. Their ancestors, by some accounts, deserted Alexander the Great as he drove his army through the area in 372 BC on a campaign to conquer the world. Three shield bearers named Titan, Khuro, and Gayar wanted to find
a strange creature
described by the Greek historian Herodotus. “Northward of all the rest of the Indians,” he wrote, live “the great sand ants, in size somewhat less than dogs, but
bigger than foxes
. . . and very much resembling Greek ants in shape.” These ants excavated a deep tunnel network, and “the sand that they threw up was full of gold.” Modern scholars suspect that Herodotus mistranslated the Persian word for
marmots
; the legendary ants were probably the whistling ground squirrels that burrow above Pakistan’s Indus River, tossing up gold dust.

Disappointed, the prospectors abandoned their quest and settled in a hundred-mile-long valley that would be claimed by the Kingdom of Hunza. They worshipped their hometown gods at first, but around 150 BC Zeus gave way to Buddha, who was displaced, in turn, by Allah. In 711 AD, General Muhammad bin Qasim invaded the Indus Valley with “
the Bride
,” a stone-launching precursor of the artillery gun. He sheltered those who submitted, disemboweled those who didn’t, and introduced Islam. Qasim’s faith spread, but not immediately throughout Hunza, which remained predominantly Buddhist and animist until the sixteenth century.

Around the time of the Islamic conversion, Shaheen’s village was founded in a remote valley of the kingdom. According to legend, a herder and his wife wandered into the Shimshal Valley and tripped over a slab of slate. As they dusted themselves off, the wife noticed that the slab was vibrating. Curious, she flipped it aside. Water spurted from a hole underneath, soaking the couple, filling the gorge that led out of the valley, and creating the Shimshal River. The couple grabbed their bedraggled sheep and waded to shore. Unable to leave the flooded valley, they collected driftwood to build a hut and waited for the waters to drain. They planted apricot orchards along the riverbank and watched their sheep grow fat in the high grass.

The ewes and rams multiplied each spring, but the herder’s family did not grow. The couple lived alone, praying for children but unable to conceive. One morning, when they had become infirm and too weak to feed themselves, the river abruptly receded, revealing a waterlogged saint named Shams. The herder and his wife were overjoyed to see someone after so many years of living in solitude. They offered Shams dry clothes and what little food remained.

Shams appreciated their kindness and took pity on them. He fished deep within his pockets and pulled out a pot and a stick that transmuted water into cream. Shams instructed the herder’s wife to drink twelve drafts a day. She had to be strong, he said, if she wanted to start a village. Miraculously, the woman’s belly swelled, and, forty-eight hours later, she gave birth painlessly to a son named Sher. Less than a few minutes old, the infant stood up, introduced himself to his parents, bathed, folded the laundry, and cooked breakfast. Sher had many talents, among them an ability to understand the speech of animals.

As Sher grew, he explored beyond the valley and discovered that Chinese merchants from Xinjiang had claimed his father’s territory as their own. To settle the land dispute, Sher challenged the merchants to a game of polo, using the entire valley as a playing field. The Chinese told Sher he’d lose. After all, the boy rode a miniature yak against a team of expert horsemen. But Sher was resourceful. He discussed game strategy with his yak and carried the saint’s stick as his mallet.

When the match started, the Chinese charged down the field in control of the ball, but Sher’s yak knew the stakes and pushed himself to keep up. When one merchant tried to hit the ball forward, Sher hooked his mallet to block the swing and whacked the ball across the glaciers, winning single-handedly. Shimshalis trace their ancestry back fifteen generations to this original champion.

If Sher did live for two centuries, as the legend claims, he’d have seen Shimshal’s population grow from three to 150, but this increase had more to do with sinners than saints. The Mir, Hunza’s ruler, was sending his best thieves to Shimshal. He ordered them to scale the Shimshal Pass into Xinjiang and pillage camel caravans that were plying the Silk Road between the oases of Leh and Yarkand. Successful raids yielded bullion, cannabis, coral, felt, indigo, opium, pashmina, sugar, silk, slaves, and tea bricks, all of which were taken to the Mir. He either rewarded the raiders or, if dissatisfied, dropped their broken bodies into a pit beneath his stronghold, the Baltit Fort.

Faced with this choice—climb and steal or be killed—Shimshalis learned to climb and steal. In the eyes of the British, they served their master too well: slaughtering and enslaving, disrupting British trade, and exposing holes in British defenses. Intelligence officers were alarmed. The British had assumed that Hunza’s peaks buffered their Indian empire from Russian invasion, but now raiders were punching through, using a previously unknown pass to slink in and out. Could the Russians use the same breach to launch an attack? The Shimshal Pass, the British determined,
had to be secured
.

They sent out their smoothest spy to find it. His mission ultimately positioned Shimshalis to become pioneers of Karakorum mountaineering.

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.