Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (3 page)

Chhiring watched the
lama
perform the death rites on his mother, yanking her hair to let her spirit leave through the head, whispering into her ear advice about the afterlife. Chhiring tried not to cry, believing it could cause a veil of blood to cover her eyes and obscure her way into the next life. He was too young to go up the hill for the cremation, so he sat in the room where he was born and watched his mother’s smoke lift into the sky. His father, Ngawang Thundu Sherpa, returned home and collapsed.

From then on, Ngawang passed out several times a day. Villagers suspected that a demon possessed him. As the fainting became more frequent, Chhiring’s father stopped caring for the four remaining children. He fell mute and forgot to eat and bathe. When he slept, he woke crying, and sobbed until he fainted again.

The fields withered, the animals strayed, and the house fell into disrepair. The family ran low on food. The children’s shoes and clothing wore out. No matter how hard he tried, Ngawang could not motivate himself to work. When able to rouse himself, he spent all his effort praying, trying to appease the gods. “I didn’t understand what I had done to make them punish me,” he recalled.

Chhiring, then twelve years old, became head of the household. He sold off livestock and bartered for food to feed his siblings but soon ran out of things to trade. In exchange for potatoes, he worked for other families, fetching water, gathering firewood, and sweeping. His sister, Nima, cared for their father and the two youngest children. Chhiring didn’t make enough to afford shoes, but he and his family didn’t starve, and relatives helped when they became desperate.

Around the time he turned fourteen, Chhiring’s aunts and uncles told him he had no choice: He was a man now, old enough to marry, and he had to find a faster way to pay off his father’s debts. Some suggested he leave the village to carry fuel and equipment for European climbers and trekkers. Chhiring was reluctant. He had never wandered far from the sacred valley. At that time, few Sherpas had left Rolwaling, and those who had entered the climbing industry described it as miserable and speculative. “Chhiring seemed too young to be a porter, too small to carry loads for foreigners,” recalled his uncle, Ang Tenzing Sherpa. “I told him it was a bad idea.”

Furthermore, Chhiring worried about the deities who lived on the mountains; the glaciers were their embodiment. Climbing the spine of a goddess or trespassing into her home amounted to insolence, even blasphemy. Chhiring’s grandfather,
Pem Phutar
, had carried loads for a 1955 British expedition to Gauri Shankar, the sacred peak where Tseringma resides, but the family rarely spoke of it. Many villagers looked down on mountaineers and told disparaging stories about them.

These tales had the same theme and usually ended with a broken man from Germany. Fifteen sherpas were infamously killed on German expeditions to Nanga Parbat in 1934 and 1937. Even Hitler’s
Reichssportführer
had condemned
two members of the 1934 expedition
who abandoned their team in a storm, and a strange stereotype evidently developed among the Sherpas. For example, villagers in Beding spoke of a once-successful German businessman who tried to climb Gauri Shankar. He failed, of course, and the mountain goddess punished him. Within a year, the German lost his teeth, contracted leprosy, and was robbed of everything but his wife. When she left him, he died of despair.

Although that story must be apocryphal, another one isn’t. In 1979, American mountaineer John Roskelley decided to conquer Gauri Shankar. Pitch after pitch, conditions on the peak were so frustrating that Roskelley found the experience vaguely erotic. The “goddess of love,” he surmised, wanted to “
remain a virgin
.” Approaching the summit, he had nearly seduced her when his climbing partner—“a young and upcoming Sherpa ‘tiger’ ” named Dorje—begged him to stop. Roskelley, nonetheless, “hugged [the peak] like a fat lady’s bottom and shimmied up,” Dorje in tow. “Gauri Shankar was ours,” he gloated. “We were the first non-deities to reach its 23,405-foot summit.”

Although Roskelley didn’t suffer any
ill effects from the climb
, residents of Rolwaling believe they did. Soon after Roskelley’s summit, a glacial lake on the flanks of Gauri Shankar burst through a natural dam, triggering a flash flood. Icemelt and debris submerged three women working at a water-powered gristmill. Two were fished out alive.
The third died
.

Chhiring didn’t want to end up like the German or cause a flash flood as John Roskelley had. He considered it risky even to speak to mountaineers and figured they all were crackpots. Why would anyone spend so much money to climb without any practical purpose? And why weren’t they strong enough to carry their own food and gear, as the rest of the world did?

But necessity and curiosity got the best of him. His family needed money, and Chhiring couldn’t make enough gathering firewood. His uncle Sonam Tsering, a mountaineer, told him that portering was the solution. The gods would overlook the offense, given his circumstances, and Chhiring could return home rich. So at the age of fourteen, Chhiring left for the city, walking most of the way.

When he arrived in Kathmandu, Chhiring discovered that the elders weren’t exaggerating. The apocalypse, predicted to occur outside Rolwaling, was known to the general public. Even the U.S. Embassy was issuing survival kits. The capital was doomed.

Kathmandu is still waiting for the Big One, an earthquake that could flatten the city. The tremors of 1253, 1259, 1407, 1680, 1810, 1833, 1860, and 1934 knocked down temples and killed tens of thousands. The next quake will be worse. Kathmandu has swelled to a million residents, and most of them live in brick warrens tottering atop shallow foundations. Assessing the risk, the United Nations has waged a campaign to promote earthquake preparedness, but nobody seems flustered. Fatalism is part of Kathmandu’s character.

If driving rules exist
in the city, they’re Darwinian. A green light means full speed ahead; a yellow light means full speed ahead; a red light means full speed ahead and honk. Traffic spills into a medieval grid too narrow for the modern world, and no meaningful lines are painted on the road. Seat belts are a novelty, and drivers and pedestrians go wherever they dare, braving a crush of buses, bicycles, cows, chickens, children, dogs, food carts, lepers, motorbikes, peddlers, pilgrims, protesters, rats, rickshaws, sewage, strollers, taxis, trucks, and trash.

A moonscape of brick factories rings the city, and soot thickens the air and congeals in the slits between the tenements. The smog, cupped inside an amphitheater of mountains, rarely disperses from Kathmandu, even at night. The particulate matter in the air almost always exceeds
World Health Organization standards
, and pedestrians wear surgical masks so they can breathe through the grit that settles in the lungs.

Paradoxically, this polluted city started with a shade tree. According to legend, the Hindu god Gorakhnath, like many modern commuters, didn’t respect the right of way. Racing to a festival, he plowed into a chariot processional, and, to avoid embarrassment, tried to impersonate a human. Fortunately, a responsible bystander made a citizen’s arrest. To post bail, Gorakhnath planted a seed in the mud. It sprouted into a sal tree that grew tall enough to scrape the firmament. A monk felled the tree and used the wood to build Kasthamandap, a three-tiered pavilion. Still standing, it’s one of the world’s oldest wooden structures. Kasthamandap is Kathmandu’s namesake.

In the 1950s, Kathmandu became a launching pad for mountaineering expeditions. Hippies followed in the 1960s, and Freak Street, acrid with incense, remains an asylum for the New Age movement. Tourism makes up a large percentage of Nepal’s economy, and Kathmandu depends on it. Tour guides, prostitutes, drug dealers, and self-appointed messiahs hustle near the city’s Durbar Square seven days a week.

When Chhiring arrived in Kathmandu for the first time, he had never switched on a lightbulb. The teenager settled in Little Tibet, a community of Buddhist refugees who had fled the Chinese invasion in the 1950s. Chhiring’s neighbors helped him adapt to city life, and the nearby Boudhanath
stupa
gave him a sense of permanence. Considered one of the holiest Buddhist sites in Nepal, Boudhanath is a reliquary buried beneath an enormous mound of soil. The
stupa
’s shape symbolizes Mount Meru, the center of the Buddhist cosmos, with its summit in the heavens and its bedrock in hell. As soon as he arrived in Little Tibet, Chhiring joined the crowd of worshippers, pacing clockwise around the
stupa
in prayer. He repeated the ritual each morning until his uncle found him a portering job that paid $3 a day.

For that job, Chhiring spent a month hauling seventy pounds of kerosene, stoves, and climbing gear to Island Peak, near the base of Everest. The Japanese clients were surprised that a teenager could lug so much up steep trails without complaining, and they praised his upbeat attitude. To Chhiring, these trekkers seemed normal enough—and by the end of the month he had earned $90. Never had he seen so much money.

He spent half his wages on food, shoes, and clothes, which he took to his family in Beding. He returned to Kathmandu a few weeks later to find another job. It wasn’t long before Chhiring was spending six months of the year outside Rolwaling, accepting one portering job after another. The work fit his talents. He befriended clients and picked up their languages, becoming a leader among the porters because he could serve as an interpreter. Around the time he turned sixteen, a women’s team, impressed with Chhiring’s endurance and command of English, invited him to carry loads on Everest. Chhiring had never climbed on a glacier but agreed to do it.

Western climbers spend years preparing for Everest; for many Sherpas, it’s their training ground. During their first week on the job, some Sherpas who have never climbed will be breaking trail, hauling gear, and establishing camps for professional guides and their clients. It makes a certain kind of sense on Everest. Thousands of people have summited it. The routes are well established, the climbing is nontechnical, and the wage for each support climber is substantial—about $3,000 plus a bonus for each client who tops out. Sherpas from mountain villages are better acclimatized than their clients and often have superior strength and balance at high altitude. On Everest, these abilities can compensate for inexperience.

Sherpas begin with Everest for another reason too. Most believe the mountain can be climbed without retribution. Miyolangsangma, the goddess who resides on Everest, only occasionally punishes trespassers. If she dislikes being climbed, pragmatism offsets her displeasure. The goddess of prosperity loves to see Sherpas make money. “As long as you treat Miyolangsangma with respect, ask forgiveness and get paid well, she’ll tolerate the climb,” said Ngawang Oser Sherpa, the head
lama
of Rolwaling. “You shouldn’t do it, but she is the most forgiving of the five sisters.”

Chhiring went up Everest for the first time in 1991. In the beginning, the climb was straightforward. He didn’t have much gear or formal training, but other Sherpas showed him how to strap on crampons and grip an ice axe, and he carried seventy pounds of bottled oxygen to the South Col at 26,200 feet. On his way down, however, a storm rolled in. The temperature dropped and Chhiring’s fingers turned gray. As everyone rushed to camp, Chhiring tried to catch up, but he stepped on a smooth plate of ice. It gave way under him like a trapdoor. Chhiring sank down to his shoulders. He clawed at snow, but his fingers were too stiff to grab hold, and he slid deeper. Waiting, he hung, his feet dangling in space.

It seemed as though hours had passed, and he was nearly unconscious when another climber, also named Chhiring Sherpa, pulled him out by the collar. The older Chhiring was furious. He scolded the teenager. You’re too young to be on Everest, he said. Nobody your age should be
up this high
.

The warning had an unintended effect. It humiliated Chhiring and made him want to climb even more. Something about failing, knowing he might have reached the top of the world if he’d worn thicker gloves and boots, made him want the summit. He decided he would learn to climb better than the Sherpa who had saved him—or anyone else. Money was another incentive. He made 35,000 rupees, or about $450, from his first Everest climb. Although it wasn’t a fifth of what experienced climbers were receiving, it was more than the average Nepali made in a year, and he had earned it in a month.

For the next two years, Chhiring continued to work on high mountains, to seek advice and help from his uncle Sonam. Then, in 1993, Sonam left on an expedition that would be his last. Sonam, with four Everest summits to his credit, was joining Pasang Lahmu, a friend aiming to become the first Nepali woman on the summit of Everest. The duo topped out on April 22.

Sonam may have prayed to Miyolangsangma, the goddess of Everest, and apologized for violating her sacred space. Nevertheless, as he and Pasang Lahmu descended toward the South Col, an upturned bowl of swirling clouds coalesced around the summit. The lenticular formation meant brutal weather blowing in. With no time to strategize, Pasang and Sonam joined three teammates in a forced bivouac. Huddling together in the open, they braced against raging winds.