The Everest Files (4 page)

‘You cut yourself,' Kami told me with a smile. His eyes were locked on my chin.

‘Oh … I just shaved.' I took out a tissue and dabbed at the bloodspot.

‘Have you got news from Shreeya?'

‘Yes. It was Shreeya that sent me to try and find you.'

This provoked a sort of gasp from Kami and he turned his face away. A single tear ran down his cheek and he breathed deeply for a minute or two as he recovered his composure.

‘I will leave you both,' Dawa said tactfully.

He softly closed the door.

And that was when Kami began to talk.

It was a crisp November morning, a rare day of calm punctuating the turbulence of the Himalayan winter. Kami and his father were high above the snowline, cutting trees by hand. A small billycan of tea was boiling up on an open fire nearby. A handful of potatoes were baking in the ashes, their deliciously earthy scent mingling with the wounded, resiny smell of freshly cut wood.

Back and forth swung the two-man saw, the sixteen-year-old Sherpa lad hardened to the labour by years of practice. There was a hypnotic quality to the work, he had come to realise, and he found he could lose himself in elaborate daydreams to dull the pain.

Most of his fantasies were about the big mountains.

Everest above all.

Then a voice called out nearby; a young boy from the village had run up with a message for Kami; ‘There's a man come to see you from Namche Bazaar.' He said breathlessly. ‘Says his name is Jamling.'

The tree gave up its fight with a rendering crack of splintering wood. Kami and his father had to jump for their lives as it fell.

The work was over for the day; the two of them washed in a nearby stream and followed the young boy down to the village where they found the smiling figure of Jamling waiting for them by the village shrine.

‘Namaste.' He greeted them warmly.

‘Namaste.'

Kami bowed deeply as a mark of respect.

The elderly Sherpa was well known in the village, his ever smiling face always a welcome presence in Kami's home. Kami and his father had met him some years before, on one of their trading trips to sell timber in Namche Bazaar and since that time he had become a firm family friend.

Jamling had been to the summit of Everest on five occasions and his scrapbook of photographs was an endless source of fascination to Kami. He had become something of a mentor to the young Sherpa boy, and had employed him the previous year as a trainee porter on a few short expeditions to local trekking peaks.

Kami had proved himself to be strong and reliable out on the trail and Jamling had given him some climbing training. He even paid for Kami to continue his English studies and bought him the textbooks his family could not otherwise afford.

‘Come and share rice with us.' Kami's father insisted.

Jamling accepted the invitation and followed the two to the house where Kami's mother and sister had already prepared lentils and curried potatoes in his honour.

Being the most senior person present, the visitor performed a small ritual of thanks before they ate, sprinkling a few grains of rice and water on the mud floor of the kitchen and thanking the gods for their generosity.

As he performed this task Kami noticed that three of Jamling's fingers on his right hand were now little more than stumps. He wasn't surprised at this new injury; frostbite was quite common amongst the men of Namche Bazaar, especially those who went high with the climbing expeditions.

The men ate in silence, Kami wondering with barely suppressed excitement what the purpose of the visit could be. For some years he had dreamed of working with one of the big expeditions. Jamling had often dropped hints that he would consider Kami for his high altitude climbs, but until now he had evidently considered the boy too young.

But now? Maybe the time had come.

When the rice was finished, tea was brought in. The men sipped it appreciatively and finally Jamling judged it a decent moment to speak his business.

‘I'm looking for an assistant,' he said at last, ‘an expedition to Everest next spring. We'll be helping an American politician to get to the summit. Three months.'

Everest!

The very word seemed to be loaded with a spectacular type of magic. Kami had to bite his tongue to stop himself crying out with joy. An invitation to work on an expedition was one thing but this was the ultimate!

‘Ah,' Kami's father nodded calmly but his mother looked away and Kami could see the shadow across her face. She was alert to the dangers inherent in such a proposal; everyone in the Khumbu knew a family who had lost a loved one to the big mountains.

‘What would the duties be?' His father asked.

‘General stuff,' Jamling replied, ‘looking after the yaks, helping to set up Base Camp and so on.'

‘Will I be part of the climbing team?' Kami asked, his heart pounding away crazily at the very thought of such an honour.

‘That depends on a great many things,' Jamling replied thoughtfully, ‘and the final decision will be with the Sirdar … '

The room went quiet as the family digested this.

‘But I think you would be strong enough to carry loads on the mountain,' Jamling continued, more encouragingly. ‘And you already know most of the climbing techniques.'

‘What would the pay be?' His father asked.

‘Twelve dollars a day.'

Kami did a quick calculation in his head. Twelve dollars a day for ninety days … came to more than a thousand dollars. If he was careful not to spend it, he would come out of the expedition with a small fortune by local standards.

He would be earning more cash in three months than his father could make in the same period through cutting and selling timber. It was a peculiar thought and in a way it made Kami sad. A lifetime of backbreaking labour had given his father no financial security at all; the family had always lived hand-to-mouth.

‘What about clothing?' His father asked. ‘The special gear he will need?'

‘Everything will be provided,' Jamling said. ‘Down jacket, proper boots, glacier goggles, the works. If the Sirdar likes you he'll let you keep it all at the end as a bonus.'

Kami was thrilled to hear this.

‘You will have to train,' Jamling warned, ‘all through the winter. There's no room for slackers on these expeditions.'

‘I won't let you down.' Kami told him earnestly.

Jamling nodded at this and then showed Kami a magazine article about the ‘boss' of the forthcoming expedition, an American senator by the name of Alex Brennan. The pictures showed a handsome middle-aged man with a flowing mane of blonde hair. Kami thought he looked more like a surfer or rock star than a politician.

Kami quickly scanned the article, learning that Brennan had big ideas for America; he had written passionate articles against war and won the hearts of millions of ordinary people with his proposals for a fairer government.

‘He's an amazing man,' Jamling told them. ‘He rowed for the USA Olympic team when he was at college, loves to climb, loves to explore his own limits. They say he may one day be the President of the United States so we have to make sure he gets back from Everest in one piece!'

And with that the venerable Sherpa was done. He finished his tea and respectfully bade the family farewell.

Kami could barely sleep that night. He was wound up with excitement at the events of the day.

The invitation from Jamling was thrilling enough but that wasn't the only reason that Kami saw this as a priceless opportunity.

This wasn't just about the mountain. There was a problem in Kami's life that he really needed to solve.

And Everest might give him a way to do it.

When he was eight years old, Kami had been put through a ceremony in which he was ‘married' to a girl from a neighbouring village.

Her name was Laxmi. She was six, and he had never seen her in his life before.

Child marriages like this were quite rare amongst the Sherpa people, but Kami's mother was from the south-west of Nepal where the custom was still fairly common. She had persuaded Kami's father that the ‘marriage' should go ahead.

Kami still had some faint memories of the ceremony: his mother bathing him in a perfumed tub of warm water, the suit of finest cloth that he was forced to wear, the rich red dress and glinting of gold coins worn by his nervous ‘bride'. Incense was burned, musicians played Dhimay drums late into the night and a great deal of Rakshi was drunk by the men.

The family of the bride paid a dowry to Kami's father, a sum measured in many thousands of rupees. The deal was done. The pact solemnised by a holy man. Kami and Laxmi would one day live together as man and wife, raise a family together and live happily ever after.

At the time Kami was barely aware of the significance of the ceremony. Such a ‘marriage' was seen more as a social pact between two families, a way of strengthening ties between villages.

The fact that it was technically illegal under Nepali law was of no concern at all.

The ceremony was nothing but a faded memory to Kami, but now the clock was ticking. He had recently turned sixteen, his ‘bride' was fourteen, and pressure was already beginning to kick in. Word had reached him that Laxmi had gone through her coming of age ritual to mark her first menstruation.

In the eyes of her family she was ready to become Kami's wife for real. And they had the right to insist on it.

‘When is your son coming for Laxmi?' Her father enquired sharply of Kami's father when they met at the local market. ‘People are beginning to talk. I do not want my daughter to suffer any shame.'

Kami's father had long dreaded this encounter. He knew full well that the time had come for Kami to bring Laxmi back to his family home.

‘I will talk to the boy,' he assured Laxmi's father. ‘Things will happen soon.'

Laxmi's father nodded gracefully but there was an unmistakeable gleam of doubt in his eyes.

And Kami's father knew why.

The reason for that gleam of doubt was Kami's relationship with a girl from his own village. Her name was Shreeya and she had been a friend and companion to Kami since he was old enough to roam around the village on his own.

Shreeya was a little younger than Kami. She had a quicksilver laugh and a secret desire to be an actress. Although she seemed shy and timid in public, in private she could be a wicked mimic, able to imitate the tremulous, quavering tones of the village elders in a way that could have other kids in stitches.

She had curiosity for everything, excelling at school where she was effortlessly the most talented pupil in her class. Like Kami she was a good linguist, and had mastered English easily.

Shreeya and Kami had shared some extraordinary adventures, mainly thanks to the honey hunting expeditions of her father. Shreeya had always been enthralled by his tales of river crossings on rickety old rope bridges and of freezing cold nights camped in the shadow of mighty glaciers.

‘Take me with you,' she begged. But her father merely laughed and told her it was man's work.

Finally, when she had turned fourteen, Shreeya's father told her she could accompany him on one of the journeys. She immediately asked if her friend Kami could come along too.

‘He can come if he's prepared to help me carry the honey,' her father said with a smile. ‘That's a twenty kilo jerrycan in each hand.'

Kami was thrilled to get the invitation. He wasn't afraid of hard work and he was already strong as an ox from the forestry work with his father.

They left at dawn one fine August day, trekking towards the Langtang district where the wild bees could be found. As the sun went down, Shreeya's father would light a small fire and put water to boil. Rice was cooked with spicy sauce. For dessert they would eat handfuls of wild strawberries or blackberries they found along the trail.

After two days on the trek they reached wild valleys which were packed with alpine flowers.

‘You see that?' Shreeya's father pointed to a fawn-coloured object high on a cliff, ‘That's one of the nests. The bees are smart. They build them out of reach of the bears.'

Then the harvesting began and for the first time Shreeya and Kami understood the incredible risks involved. In some places, ancient bamboo ladders were already in place. In new locations her father cut fresh bamboo in the forest and built ladders of his own. He would light a fire, create a core of glowing coals, and then clamber up those precipitous cliffs with a metal can of the smouldering embers.

‘The smoke calms them down,' he told them, but it hardly seemed to be true.

Once he was up there, he would attack the nest with a special tool – a long pole with a curved blade set into the end. As soon as the knife began to cut into the honeycomb, the furious insects would go into a frenzy, flying into the air and attacking en masse.

‘Here comes a big bit!' he would scream down.

Kami and Shreeya would run to catch the honeycomb before it hit the ground. Seeing her father disappear beneath a swirling swarm of bees was a heart-stopping sight for Shreeya; on occasions she could hardly see him for the black cloud of insects. Time and again he would hack at the hive, cleaving dripping chunks of honeycomb off as fast as he could.

‘Let me see your arms,' Shreeya said after one honey raid.

Her father reluctantly pulled up his shirt sleeves to reveal a mass of livid red bumps. Sometimes the accumulation of bee venom would send him into a sort of shivering trance which could last an hour or more.