The Everest Files Page 4

  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.

  ‘You get half a kilo each a day!’ he told them. The fresh honeycomb was the most delicious thing the children had ever tasted; an explosion of lavender and jasmine on the tongue.

  By the third day of the trip they had harvested more than fifty kilos of honey and there was still space in the plastic jerrycans for another ten.

  They passed a high mountain col and came to a windswept plateau, an outstandingly beautiful wilderness of meadows and glaciated peaks.

  ‘We can camp here tonight,’ he told the children. They put down their packs with relief, running to fill the water bottles at one of the natural springs that seeped from the valley wall.

  High above the sacred lakes, in a separate, hidden-away valley, a series of limestone cliffs formed a scar in the mountainside. The location looked a good hunting ground for wild bees, Shreeya’s father had decided, and the next day he led the children across another high pass to take a look.

  As they approached the valley wall Shreeya suddenly froze. ‘There’s something moving’ she said, pointing to the base of the cliffs, ‘over there by the cave.’

  The place she was pointing towards was many hundreds of metres away. Kami couldn’t see anything there at all and nor could her father despite his sharp eyesight.

  ‘What is it?’ Kami asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Some sort of creature. Let’s wait a while, see if it comes out of the rocks.’

  The three of them ducked behind a bush and waited for a while.

  ‘The wind is in our favour,’ her father whispered. ‘If there’s something there it won’t pick up our scent.’

  ‘There it is again,’ Shreeya whispered.

  ‘I can see it!’ Kami hissed excitedly.

  ‘A snow leopard!’ Shreeya’s father whispered in awe. ‘The first time I’ve seen one.’

  The cat strutted out of the rocks with regal grace, the distinctive dark rosettes of its markings clearly visible against a fur that was somewhere between ivory and honey. The thick tail was raised high, moving sensually back and forth in a way that reminded Shreeya of a snake being charmed.

  ‘Don’t make a sound,’ her father whispered. Shreeya hardly dared to breathe, so desperately did she want this moment to continue.

  The cat prowled about the meadow, seeming to check the terrain. Even at that distance, Kami could see the latent power of this rare cat. Every movement it made was filled with a glorious grace and strength.

  Having made a tour of inspection, the leopard began to call, a curiously high pitched ‘chuffing’ sound which was somewhere between a cry and a sneeze. An answering bleat came from the rocks and the children held their breath as a young cub moved cautiously out of cover to join its mother. It mewled a greeting and nuzzled against her cheek as she licked at its fur.

  ‘There’s a second!’ Shreeya whispered. Her sharp eyes once again the first to spot the movement.

  A few moments later the second snow leopard cub crept with elaborate care out of the rocks.

  ‘Keep totally still,’ Shreeya’s father whispered.

  The three of them held their breaths as the leopard scanned the scree slopes, ever vigilant, ever wary of any threat to her cubs. At one point she seemed to look directly at them, but they were well-hidden behind the bush and the creature began to relax as she suckled her cubs.

  They fed for several minutes before becoming restless. The two cubs struck off on their own. Mewing and calling, they started to explore the meadow, sniffing at flowers and leaping up at butterflies.

  The spectacle could have continued but a shrill cry in the sky above the meadow caused the mother leopard to take fright. A huge eagle had soared up the ridge, playing on the late afternoon thermals. The mother cat uttered an alarm cry as she saw this dangerous predator, an urgent barking noise which immediately caused her babies to rush to her side.

  The three creatures leapt with liquid bounds across the meadow and disappeared amidst the boulders that littered the foot of the cliff.

  The show was over and Shreeya’s father decided it would be prudent to quit the area as quickly as they could.

  ‘Better to leave the leopards in peace,’ he said. ‘If they see us they’ll be forced to leave the den.’

  They crossed another watershed and found a different area of cliffs in an adjoining valley, which provided the final ten kilos of honey they needed to make the trip a success.

&n
bsp; During the trek home Shreeya talked incessantly about the leopard encounter, re-living every moment and pestering her father to tell her everything he could about the cats.

  ‘I’m going to be a warden when I grow up,’ Shreeya announced proudly, ‘and work for the national parks so I can see them whenever I like.’

  Kami and her father laughed at this precocious proposition. But neither of them doubted her determination.

  Back at the village Shreeya’s father gave them five hundred rupees each out of the profit he made on the honey. Kami gave his to his father; Shreeya ordered a book from a shop in Kathmandu. It was a picture book about snow leopards, describing everything then known about the behaviour of that most elusive of Himalayan creatures.

  She read it cover to cover, again and again, and it became her most treasured possession.

  There were other memorable moments on that journey but Shreeya and Kami knew that the vision of those snow leopards playing on the meadow would stay with them for the rest of their lives.

  Not long after the honey-collecting trip, in the dying days of that summer, a stranger arrived in the village. A furtive-looking character with sharp features and a mouth full of rotting teeth, he walked with a pronounced limp and his thigh was bandaged with a dirty strip of cotton.

  Nobody knew where he had come from and he did not volunteer his name.

  He just limped out of the forest carrying nothing but an ancient Remington rifle and a greasy hessian sack.

  ‘He smells strange,’ Kami told his father that night as they shared rice, ‘like blood.’

  ‘No good will come of him,’ Kami’s father said, and Kami experienced, for the first time in his life, the unsettling feeling that his father was afraid.

  ‘Is he a bandit?’ Kami asked. He had heard stories of the brigands who lived wild in some of the more remote valleys.

  His father just shrugged. But he couldn’t hide the disquiet in his face.