Three Cups Of Tea Part 1

Three Cups of Tea.

by Greg Mortenson.

INTRODUCTION.

IN MR. MORTENSON's...o...b..T

The little red light had been flas.h.i.+ng for five minutes before Bhangoo paid it any attention. "The fuel gages on these old aircraft are notoriously unreliable," Brigadier General Bhangoo, one of Pakistan's most experienced high-alt.i.tude helicopter pilots, said, tapping it. I wasn't sure if that was meant to make me feel better.

I rode next to Bhangoo, looking down past my feet through the Vietnam-era Alouette's bubble winds.h.i.+eld. Two thousand feet below us a river twisted, hemmed in by rocky crags jutting out from both sides of the Hunza Valley. At eye level, we soared past hanging green glaciers, splintering under a tropical sun. Bhangoo flew on unperturbed, flicking the ash of his cigarette out a vent, next to a sticker that said "No smoking."

From the rear of the aircraft Greg Mortenson reached his long arm out to tap Bhangoo on the shoulder of his flight suit. "General, sir," Mortenson shouted, "I think we're heading the wrong way."

Brigadier Bhangoo had been President Musharraf's personal pilot before retiring from the military to join a civil aviation company. He was in his late sixties, with salt-and-pepper hair and a mustache as clipped and cultivated as the vowels he'd inherited from the private British colonial school he'd attended as boy with Musharraf and many of Pakistan's other future leaders.

The general tossed his cigarette through the vent and blew out his breath. Then he bent to compare the store-bought GPS unit he balanced on his knee with a military-grade map Mortenson folded to highlight what he thought was our position.

"I've been flying in northern Pakistan for forty years," he said, waggling his head, the subcontinent's most distinctive gesture. "How is it you know the terrain better than me?" Bhangoo banked the Alouette steeply to port, flying back the way we'd come. is it you know the terrain better than me?" Bhangoo banked the Alouette steeply to port, flying back the way we'd come.

The red light that had worried me before began to flash faster. The bobbing needle on the gauge showed that we had less than one hundred liters of fuel. This part of northern Pakistan was so remote and inhospitable that we'd had to have friends preposition barrels of aviation fuel at strategic sites by jeep. If we couldn't make it to our drop zone we were in a tight spot, literally, since the craggy canyon we flew through had no level areas suitable for setting the Alouette down.

Bhangoo climbed high, so he'd have the option of auto-rotating toward a more distant landing zone if we ran out of fuel, and jammed his stick forward, speeding up to ninety knots. Just as the needle hit E and the red warning light began to beep, Bhangoo settled the skids at the center of a large H, for helipad, written out in white rocks, next to our barrels of jet fuel.

"That was a lovely sortie," Bhangoo said, lighting another cigarette. "But it might not have been without Mr. Mortenson."

Later, after refueling by inserting a handpump into a rusting barrel of aviation fuel, we flew up the Braldu Valley to the village of Korphe, the last human habitation before the Baltoro Glacier begins its march up to K2 and the world's greatest concentration of twenty-thousand-foot-plus peaks. After a failed 1993 attempt to climb K2, Mortenson arrived in Korphe, emaciated and exhausted. In this impoverished community of mud and stone huts, both Mortenson's life and the lives of northern Pakistan's children changed course. One evening, he went to bed by a yak dung fire a mountaineer who'd lost his way, and one morning, by the time he'd shared a pot of b.u.t.ter tea with his hosts and laced up his boots, he'd become a humanitarian who'd found a meaningful path to follow for the rest of his life.

Arriving in Korphe with Dr. Greg, Bhangoo and I were welcomed with open arms, the head of a freshly killed ibex, and endless cups of tea. And as we listened to the s.h.i.+a children of Korphe, one of the world's most impoverished communities, talk about how their hopes and dreams for the future had grown exponentially since a big American arrived a decade ago to build them the first school their village had ever known, the general and I were done for.

"You know," Bhangoo said, as we were enveloped in a scrum of 120 students tugging us by the hands on a tour of their school, "flying with President Musharraf, I've become acquainted with many world leaders, many outstanding gentlemen and ladies. But I think Greg Mortenson is the most remarkable person I've ever met."

Everyone who has had the privilege of watching Greg Mortenson operate in Pakistan is amazed by how encyclopedically well he has come to know one of the world's most remote regions. And many of them find themselves, almost against their will, pulled into his...o...b..t. During the last decade, since a series of failures and accidents transformed him from a mountaineer to a humanitarian, Mortenson has attracted what has to be one of the most underqualified and overachieving staffs of any charitable organization on earth.

Illiterate high-alt.i.tude porters in Pakistan's Karakoram have put down their packs to make paltry wages with him so their children can have the education they were forced to do without. A taxi driver who chanced to pick Mortenson up at the Islamabad airport sold his cab and became his fiercely dedicated "fixer." Former Taliban fighters renounced violence and the oppression of women after meeting Mortenson and went to work with him peacefully building schools for girls. He has drawn volunteers and admirers from every stratum of Paki-stan's society and from all the warring sects of Islam.

Supposedly objective journalists are at risk of being drawn into his...o...b..t, too. On three occasions I accompanied Mortenson to northern Pakistan, flying to the most remote valleys of the Karakoram Himalaya and the Hindu Kush on helicopters that should have been hanging from the rafters of museums. The more time I spent watching Mortenson work, the more convinced I became that I was in the presence of someone extraordinary.

The accounts I'd heard about Mortenson's adventures building schools for girls in the remote mountain regions of Pakistan sounded too dramatic to believe before I left home. The story I found, with ibex hunters in the high valleys of the Karakoram, in nomad settlements at the wild edge of Afghanistan, around conference tables with Pakistan's military elite, and over endless cups of paiyu cha paiyu cha in tearooms so smoky I had to squint to see my notebook, was even more remarkable than I'd imagined. in tearooms so smoky I had to squint to see my notebook, was even more remarkable than I'd imagined.

As a journalist who has practiced this odd profession of probing into people's lives for two decades, I've met more than my share of public figures who didn't measure up to their own press. But at Korphe and every other Pakistani village where I was welcomed like long-lost family, because another American had taken the time to forge ties there, I saw the story of the last ten years of Greg Mortenson's existence branch and fork with a richness and complexity far beyond what most of us achieve over the course of a full-length life.

This is a fancy way of saying that this is a story I couldn't simply observe. Anyone who travels to the CAI's fifty-three schools with Mortenson is put to work, and in the process, becomes an advocate. And after staying up at all-night jirgas jirgas with village elders and weighing in on proposals for new projects, or showing a cla.s.sroom full of excited eight-year-old girls how to use the first pencil-sharpener anyone has ever cared to give them, or teaching an impromptu cla.s.s on English slang to a roomful of gravely respectful students, it is impossible to remain simply a reporter. with village elders and weighing in on proposals for new projects, or showing a cla.s.sroom full of excited eight-year-old girls how to use the first pencil-sharpener anyone has ever cared to give them, or teaching an impromptu cla.s.s on English slang to a roomful of gravely respectful students, it is impossible to remain simply a reporter.

As Graham Greene's melancholy correspondent Thomas Fowler learned by the end of The Quiet American, The Quiet American, sometimes, to be human, you have to take sides. sometimes, to be human, you have to take sides.

I choose to side with Greg Mortenson. Not because he doesn't have his flaws. His fluid sense of time made pinning down the exact sequence of many events in this book almost impossible, as did interviewing the Balti people with whom he works, who have no tenses in their language and as little attachment to linear time as the man they call Dr. Greg.

During the two years we worked together on this book, Mortenson was often so maddeningly late for appointments that I considered abandoning the project. Many people, particularly in America, have turned on Mortenson after similar experiences, calling him "unreliable," or worse. But I have come to realize, as his wife Tara Bishop often says, "Greg is not one of us." He operates on Mortenson Time, a product, perhaps, of growing up in Africa and working much of each year in Pakistan. And his method of operation, hiring people with limited experience based on gut feelings, forging working alliances with necessarily unsavory characters, and, above all, winging it, while unsettling and unconventional, has moved mountains.

For a man who has achieved so much, Mortenson has a remarkable lack of ego. After I agreed to write this book, he handed me a page of notepaper with dozens of names and numbers printed densely down the margin in tiny script. It was a list of his enemies. "Talk to them all," he said. "Let them have their say. We've got the results. That's all I care about."

I listened to hundreds of Mortenson's allies and enemies. And in the interest of security and/or privacy I've changed a very few names and locations.

Working on this book was a true collaboration. I wrote the story. But Greg Mortenson lived it. And together, as we sorted through thousands of slides, reviewed a decade's worth of doc.u.ments and videos, recorded hundreds of hours of interviews, and traveled to visit with the people who are central to this unlikeliest of narratives, we brought this book to life.

And as I found in Pakistan, Mortenson's Central Asia Inst.i.tute does, irrefutably, have the results. In a part of the world where Americans are, at best, misunderstood, and more often feared and loathed, this soft-spoken, six-foot-four former mountaineer from Montana has put together a string of improbable successes. Though he would never say so himself, he has single-handedly changed the lives of tens of thousands of children, and independently won more hearts and minds than all the official American propaganda flooding the region.

So this is a confession: Rather than simply reporting on his progress, I want to see Greg Mortenson succeed. I wish him success because he is fighting the war on terror the way I think it should be conducted. Slamming over the so-called Karakoram "Highway" in his old Land Cruiser, taking great personal risks to seed the region that gave birth to the Taliban with schools, Mortenson goes to war with the root causes of terror every time he offers a student a chance to receive a balanced education, rather than attend an extremist madra.s.sa. madra.s.sa.

If we Americans are to learn from our mistakes, from the flailing, ineffective way we, as a nation, conducted the war on terror after the attacks of 9/11, and from the way we have failed to make our case to the great moderate ma.s.s of peace-loving people at the heart of the Muslim world, we need to listen to Greg Mortenson. I did, and it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

-David Oliver Relin Portland, Oregon

CHAPTER 1.

FAILURE.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

-Persian proverb

In Pakistan's Karakoram, bristling across an area barely one hundred miles wide, more than sixty of the world's tallest mountains lord their severe alpine beauty over a witnessless high-alt.i.tude wilderness. Other than snow leopard and ibex, so few living creatures have pa.s.sed through this barren icescape that the presence of the world's second-highest mountain, K2, was little more than a rumor to the outside world until the turn of the twentieth century.

Flowing down from K2 toward the populated upper reaches of the Indus Valley, between the four fluted granite spires of the Gasherbrums and the lethal-looking daggers of the Great Trango Towers, the sixty-two-kilometer-long Baltoro Glacier barely disturbs this still cathedral of rock and ice. And even the motion of this frozen river, which drifts at a rate of four inches a day, is almost undetectable.

On the afternoon of September 2, 1993, Greg Mortenson felt as if he were scarcely traveling any faster. Dressed in a much-patched set of mud-colored shalwar kamiz, shalwar kamiz, like his Pakistani porters, he had the sensation that his heavy black leather mountaineering boots were independently steering him down the Baltoro at their own glacial speed, through an armada of icebergs arrayed like the sails of a thousand ice-bound s.h.i.+ps. like his Pakistani porters, he had the sensation that his heavy black leather mountaineering boots were independently steering him down the Baltoro at their own glacial speed, through an armada of icebergs arrayed like the sails of a thousand ice-bound s.h.i.+ps.

At any moment, Mortenson expected to find Scott Darsney, a fellow member of his expedition, with whom he was hiking back toward civilization, sitting on a boulder, teasing him for walking so slowly. But the upper Baltoro is more maze than trail. Mortenson hadn't yet realized that he was lost and alone. He'd strayed from the main body of the glacier to a side spur that led not westward, toward Askole, the village fifty miles farther on, where he hoped to find a jeep driver willing to transport him out of these mountains, but south, into an impenetrable maze of shattered icefall, and beyond that, the high-alt.i.tude killing zone where Pakistani and Indian soldiers lobbed artillery sh.e.l.ls at one another through the thin air. of the glacier to a side spur that led not westward, toward Askole, the village fifty miles farther on, where he hoped to find a jeep driver willing to transport him out of these mountains, but south, into an impenetrable maze of shattered icefall, and beyond that, the high-alt.i.tude killing zone where Pakistani and Indian soldiers lobbed artillery sh.e.l.ls at one another through the thin air.

Ordinarily Mortenson would have paid more attention. He would have focused on life-and-death information like the fact that Mouzafer, the porter who had appeared like a blessing and volunteered to haul his heavy bag of climbing gear, was also carrying his tent and nearly all of his food and kept him in sight. And he would have paid more mind to the overawing physicality of his surroundings.

In 1909, the duke of Abruzzi, one of the greatest climbers of his day, and perhaps his era's most discerning connoisseur of precipitous landscapes, led an Italian expedition up the Baltoro for an unsuccessful attempt at K2. He was stunned by the stark beauty of the encircling peaks. "Nothing could compare to this in terms of alpine beauty," he recorded in his journal. "It was a world of glaciers and crags, an incredible view which could satisfy an artist just as well as a mountaineer."

But as the sun sank behind the great granite serrations of Muztagh Tower to the west, and shadows raked up the valley's eastern walls, toward the bladed monoliths of Gasherbrum, Mortenson hardly noticed. He was looking inward that afternoon, stunned and absorbed by something unfamiliar in his life to that point-failure.

Reaching into the pocket of his shalwar, shalwar, he fingered the necklace of amber beads that his little sister Christa had often worn. As a three-year-old in Tanzania, where Mortenson's Minnesota-born parents had been Lutheran missionaries and teachers, Christa had contracted acute meningitis and never fully recovered. Greg, twelve years her senior, had appointed himself her protector. Though Christa struggled to perform simple tasks-putting on her clothes each morning took upward of an hour-and suffered severe epileptic seizures, Greg pressured his mother, Jerene, to allow her some measure of independence. He helped Christa find work at manual labor, taught her the routes of the Twin Cities' public buses, so she could move about freely, and, to their mother's mortification, discussed the particulars of birth control when he learned she was dating. he fingered the necklace of amber beads that his little sister Christa had often worn. As a three-year-old in Tanzania, where Mortenson's Minnesota-born parents had been Lutheran missionaries and teachers, Christa had contracted acute meningitis and never fully recovered. Greg, twelve years her senior, had appointed himself her protector. Though Christa struggled to perform simple tasks-putting on her clothes each morning took upward of an hour-and suffered severe epileptic seizures, Greg pressured his mother, Jerene, to allow her some measure of independence. He helped Christa find work at manual labor, taught her the routes of the Twin Cities' public buses, so she could move about freely, and, to their mother's mortification, discussed the particulars of birth control when he learned she was dating.

Each year, whether he was serving as a U.S. Army medic and platoon leader in Germany, working on a nursing degree in South Dakota, studying the neurophysiology of epilepsy at graduate school in Indiana in hopes of discovering a cure for Christa, or living a climbing b.u.m's life out of his car in Berkeley, California, Mortenson insisted that his little sister visit him for a month. Together, they sought out the spectacles that brought Christa so much pleasure. They took in the Indy 500, the Kentucky Derby, road-tripped down to Disneyland, and he guided her through the architecture of his personal cathedral at that time, the storied granite walls of Yosemite.

For her twenty-third birthday, Christa and their mother planned to make a pilgrimage from Minnesota to the cornfield in Deyersville, Iowa, where the movie that Christa was drawn to watch again and again, Field of Dreams, Field of Dreams, had been filmed. But on her birthday, in the small hours before they were to set out, Christa died of a ma.s.sive seizure. had been filmed. But on her birthday, in the small hours before they were to set out, Christa died of a ma.s.sive seizure.

After Christa's death, Mortenson retrieved the necklace from among his sister's few things. It still smelled of a campfire they had made during her last visit to stay with him in California. He brought it to Pakistan with him, bound in a Tibetan prayer flag, along with a plan to honor the memory of his little sister. Mortenson was a climber and he had decided on the most meaningful tribute he had within him. He would scale K2, the summit most climbers consider the toughest to reach on Earth, and leave Christa's necklace there at 28,267 feet.

He had been raised in a family that had relished difficult tasks, like building a school and a hospital in Tanzania, on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. But despite the smooth surfaces of his parents' unquestioned faith, Mortenson hadn't yet made up his mind about the nature of divinity. He would leave an offering to whatever deity inhabited the upper atmosphere.

Three months earlier, Mortenson had positively skipped up this glacier in a pair of Teva sandals with no socks, his ninety-pound pack beside the point of the adventure that beckoned him up the Baltoro. He had set off on the seventy-mile trek from Askole with a team of ten English, Irish, French, and American mountaineers, part of a poorly financed but pathologically bold attempt to climb the world's second-highest peak.

Compared to Everest, a thousand miles southeast along the spine of the Himalaya, K2, they all knew, was a killer. To climbers, who call it "The Savage Peak," it remains the ultimate test, a pyramid of razored granite so steep that snow can't cling to its knife-edged ridges. And Mortenson, then a bullishly fit thirty-five-year-old, who had summited Kilimanjaro at age eleven, who'd been schooled on the sheer granite walls of Yosemite, then graduated to half a dozen successful Himalayan ascents, had no doubt when he arrived in May that he would soon stand on what he considered "the biggest and baddest summit on Earth."

He'd come shatteringly close, within six hundred meters of the summit. But K2 had receded into the mists behind him and the necklace was still in his pocket. How could this have happened? He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, disoriented by unfamiliar tears, and attributed them to the alt.i.tude. He certainly wasn't himself. After seventy-eight days of primal struggle at alt.i.tude on K2, he felt like a faint, shriveled caricature of himself. He simply didn't know if he had the reserves left to walk fifty more miles over dangerous terrain to Askole.

The sharp, shotgun crack of a rockfall brought him back to his surroundings. He watched a boulder the size of a three-story house accelerate, bouncing and spinning down a slope of scree, then pulverize an iceberg on the trail ahead of him.

Mortenson tried to shake himself into a state of alertness. He looked out of himself, saw how high the shadows had climbed up the eastern peaks, and tried to remember how long it had been since he'd seen a sign of other humans. It had been hours since Scott Darsney had disappeared down the trail ahead of him. An hour earlier, or maybe more, he'd heard the bells of an army mule caravan carrying ammunition toward the Siachen Glacier, the twenty-thousand-foot-high battlefield a dozen miles southeast where the Pakistani military was frozen into its perpetual deadly standoff with the Indian army.

He scoured the trail for signs. Anywhere on the trail back to Askole, there would be debris left behind by the military. But there were no mule droppings. No cigarette b.u.t.ts. No food tins. No blades of the hay the mule drivers carried to feed their animals. He realized it didn't look much like a trail at all, simply a cleft in an unstable maze of boulders and ice, and he wondered how he had wandered to this spot. He tried to summon the clarity to concentrate. But the effects of prolonged exposure to high alt.i.tude had sapped Mortenson of the ability to act and think decisively.

He spent an hour scrambling up a slope of scree, hoping for a vantage point above the boulders and icebergs, a place where he might snare the landmark he was looking for, the great rocky promontory of Urdukas, which thrust out onto the Baltoro like a ma.s.sive fist, and haul himself back toward the trail. But at the top he was rewarded with little more than a greater degree of exhaustion. He'd strayed eight miles up a deserted valley from the trail, and in the failing light, even the contours of peaks that he knew well looked unfamiliar from this new perspective.

Feeling a finger of panic probing beneath his alt.i.tude-induced stupor, Mortenson sat to take stock. In his small sun-faded purple daypack he had a lightweight wool Pakistani army blanket, an empty water bottle, and a single protein bar. His high-alt.i.tude down sleeping bag, all his warm clothes, his tent, his stove, food, even his flashlight and all his matches were in the pack the porter carried.

He'd have to spend the night and search for the trail in daylight. Though it had already dropped well below zero, he wouldn't die of exposure, he thought. Besides, he was coherent enough to realize that stumbling, at night, over a s.h.i.+fting glacier, where creva.s.ses yawned hundreds of feet down through wastes of blue ice into subterranean pools, was far more dangerous. Picking his way down the mound of scree, Mortenson looked for a spot far enough from the mountain walls that he wouldn't be crushed by rockfall as he slept and solid enough that it wouldn't split and plunge him into the glacier's depths.

He found a flat slab of rock that seemed stable enough, scooped icy snow into his water bottle with ungloved hands, and wrapped himself in his blanket, willing himself not to focus on how alone and exposed he was. His forearm was lashed with rope burns from the rescue, and he knew he should tear off the clotted gauze bandages and drain pus from the wounds that refused to heal at this alt.i.tude, but he couldn't quite locate the motivation. As he lay s.h.i.+vering on uneven rock, Mortenson watched as the last light of the sun smoldered blood red on the daggered summits to the east, then flared out, leaving their afterimages burning in blue-black.

Nearly a century earlier, Filippo De Filippi, doctor for and chronicler of the duke of Abruzzi's expedition to the Karakoram, recorded the desolation he felt among these mountains. Despite the fact that he was in the company of two dozen Europeans and 260 local porters, that they carried folding chairs and silver tea services and had European newspapers delivered to them regularly by a fleet of runners, he felt crushed into insignificance by the character of this landscape. "Profound silence would brood over the valley," he wrote, "even weighing down our spirits with indefinable heaviness. There can be no other place in the world where man feels himself so alone, so isolated, so completely ignored by Nature, so incapable of entering into communion with her."

Perhaps it was his experience with solitude, being the lone American child among hundreds of Africans, or the nights he spent bivouacked three thousand feet up Yosemite's Half Dome in the middle of a multiday climb, but Mortenson felt at ease. If you ask him why, he'll credit alt.i.tude-induced dementia. But anyone who has spent time in Mortenson's presence, who's watched him wear down a congressman or a reluctant philanthropist or an Afghan warlord with his doggedness, until he pried loose overdue relief funds, or a donation, or the permission he was seeking to pa.s.s into tribal territories, would recognize this night as one more example of Mortenson's steely-mindedness.

The wind picked up and the night became bitterly crystalline. He tried to discern the peaks he felt hovering malevolently around him, but he couldn't make them out among the general blackness. After an hour under his blanket he was able to thaw his frozen protein bar against his body and melt enough silty icewater to wash it down, which set him s.h.i.+vering violently. Sleep, in this cold, seemed out of the question. So Mortenson lay beneath the stars salting the sky and decided to examine the nature of his failure.

The leaders of his expedition, Dan Mazur and Jonathan Pratt, along with French climber Etienne Fine, were thoroughbreds. They were speedy and graceful, bequeathed the genetic wherewithal to sprint up technical pitches at high alt.i.tude. Mortenson was slow and bearishly strong. At six-foot-four and 210 pounds, Mortenson had attended Minnesota's Concordia College on a football scholars.h.i.+p.

Though no one directed that it should be so, the slow, c.u.mbersome work of mountain climbing fell naturally to him and to Darsney. Eight separate times Mortenson served as pack mule, hauling food, fuel, and oxygen bottles to several stashes on the way to the j.a.panese Couloir, a tenuous aerie the expedition carved out within six hundred meters of K2's summit, stocking the expedition's high camps so the lead climbers might have the supplies in place when they decided to dash to the top.

All of the other expeditions on the mountain that season had chosen to challenge the peak in the traditional way, working up the path pioneered nearly a century earlier, K2's Southeastern Abruzzi Ridge. Only they had chosen the West Ridge, a circuitous, brutally difficult route, littered with land mine after land mine of steep, technical pitches, which had been successfully scaled only once, twelve years earlier, by j.a.panese climber Eiho Otani and his Pakistani partner n.a.z.ir Sabir.

Mortenson relished the challenge and took pride in the rigorous route they'd chosen. And each time he reached one of the perches they'd clawed out high on the West Ridge, and unloaded fuel canisters and coils of rope, he noticed he was feeling stronger. He might be slow, but reaching the summit himself began to seem inevitable.

Then one evening after more than seventy days on the mountain, Mortenson and Darsney were back at base camp, about to drop into well-earned sleep after ninety-six hours of climbing during another resupply mission. But while taking a last look at the peak through a telescope just after dark, Mortenson and Darsney noticed a flickering light high up on K2's West Ridge. They realized it must be members of their expedition, signaling with their headlamps, and they guessed that their French teammate was in trouble. "Etienne was an Alpiniste, Alpiniste," Mortenson explains, underlining with an exaggerated French p.r.o.nunciation the respect and arrogance the term can convey among climbers. "He'd travel fast and light with the absolute minimum amount of gear. And we had to bail him out before when he went up too fast without acclimatizing."

Mortenson and Darsney, doubting whether they were strong enough to climb to Fine so soon after an exhausting descent, called for volunteers from the five other expeditions at base camp. None came forward. For two hours they lay in their tents resting and rehydrating, then they packed their gear and went back out.

Descending from their seventy-six-hundred-meter Camp IV, Pratt and Mazur found themselves in the fight of their lives. "Etienne had climbed up to join us for a summit bid," Mazur says. "But when he got to us, he collapsed. As he tried to catch his breath, he told us he heard a rattling in his lungs."

Fine was suffering from pulmonary edema, an alt.i.tude-induced flooding of the lungs that can kill those it strikes if they aren't immediately evacuated to lower ground. "It was terrifying," Mazur says. "Pink froth was pouring out of Etienne's mouth. We tried to call for help, but we'd dropped our radio in the snow and it wouldn't work. So we started down."

Pratt and Mazur took turns clipping themselves to Fine, and rapelling with him down the West Ridge's steepest pitches. "It was like hanging from a rope strapped to a big sack of potatoes," Mazur says. "And we had to take our time so we wouldn't kill ourselves."

With his typical understatement, Mortenson doesn't say much about the twenty-four hours it took to haul himself up to reach Fine other than to comment that it was "fairly arduous."

"Dan and Jon were the real heroes," he says. "They gave up their summit bid to get Etienne down."

By the time Mortenson and Darsney met their teammates, on a rock face near Camp I, Fine was lapsing in and out of conciousness, suffering also from cerebral edema, the alt.i.tude-induced swelling of the brain. "He was unable to swallow and attempting to unlace his boots," Mortenson says.

Mortenson, who'd worked as an emergency room trauma nurse for the freedom the irregular hours gave him to pursue his climbing career, gave Fine injections of Decadron to ease the edema and the four already exhausted climbers began a forty-eight-hour odyssey of dragging and lowering him down craggy rock faces.

Sometimes Fine, ordinarily fluent in English, would wake enough to babble in French, Mortenson says. At the most technical pitches, with a lifelong climber's instinct for self-preservation, Fine would rouse himself to clip his protective devices onto the rope, before melting back into deadweight, Mortenson remembers.

Seventy-two hours after Mortenson and Darsney set out, the group had succeeded in lowering Fine to flat ground at their advance base camp. Darsney radioed the Canadian expedition below, who relayed his request to the Pakistani military for a high-alt.i.tude Lama helicopter rescue. At the time, it would have been one of the highest helicopter rescues ever attempted. But the military HQ replied that the weather was too bad and the wind too strong and ordered Fine evacuated to lower ground.

It was one thing to issue an order. It was quite another for four men in the deepest animal stages of exhaustion to attempt to execute it. For six hours, after strapping Fine into a sleeping bag, they communicated only in grunts and whimpers, dragging their friend down a dangerous technical route through the icefall of the Savoia Glacier.

"We were so exhausted and so beyond our limits that, at times, we could only crawl ourselves as we tried to get down," Darsney remembers.

Finally, the group approached K2 base camp, towing Fine in the bag behind them. "All the other expeditions strolled about a quarter mile up the glacier to greet us and give us a hero's welcome," Darsney says. "After the Pakistani army helicopter came and evacuated Etienne, the Canadian expedition members cooked up a huge meal and everyone had a party. But Greg and I didn't stop to eat, drink, or even p.i.s.s, we just fell into our sleeping bags like we'd been shot."

For two days, Mortenson and Darsney drifted in and out of the facsimile of sleep that high alt.i.tude inflicts on even those most exhausted. As the wind probed at their tents, it was accompanied by the sound of metal cook kit plates, engraved with the names of the forty-eight mountaineers who'd lost their lives to the Savage Mountain, clanging eerily on the Art Gilkey Memorial, named for a climber who died during a 1953 American expedition.

When they woke, they found a note from Pratt and Mazur, who'd headed back up to their high camp. They invited their teammates to join them for a summit attempt when they recovered. But recovery was beyond them. The rescue, coming so quickly on the heels of their resupply climb, had ripped away what reserves they had.

When they finally emerged from their tent, both found it a struggle simply to walk. Fine had been saved at a great price. The ordeal would eventually cost him all his toes. And the rescue cost Mortenson and Darsney whatever attempt they could muster at the summit they had worked so hard to reach. Mazur and Pratt would announce to the world that they'd stood on the summit a week later and return home to glory in their achievement. But the number of metal plates chiming in the wind would multiply, as four of the sixteen climbers who summited that season died during their descent.

Mortenson was anxious that his name not be added to the memorial. So was Darsney. They decided to make the trek together back toward civilization, if they could. Lost, reliving the rescue, alone in his thin wool blanket in the hours before dawn, Greg Mortenson struggled to find a comfortable position. At his height, he couldn't lie flat without his head poking out into the unforgiving air. He had lost thirty pounds during his days on K2, and no matter which way he turned, uncus.h.i.+oned bone seemed to press into the cold rock beneath him. Drifting in and out of consciousness to a groaning soundtrack of the glacier's mysterious inner machinery, he made his peace with his failure to honor Christa. It was his body that had failed, he decided, not his spirit, and every body had its limits. He, for the first time in his life, had found the absolute limit of his. toward civilization, if they could. Lost, reliving the rescue, alone in his thin wool blanket in the hours before dawn, Greg Mortenson struggled to find a comfortable position. At his height, he couldn't lie flat without his head poking out into the unforgiving air. He had lost thirty pounds during his days on K2, and no matter which way he turned, uncus.h.i.+oned bone seemed to press into the cold rock beneath him. Drifting in and out of consciousness to a groaning soundtrack of the glacier's mysterious inner machinery, he made his peace with his failure to honor Christa. It was his body that had failed, he decided, not his spirit, and every body had its limits. He, for the first time in his life, had found the absolute limit of his.

CHAPTER 2.

THE W WRONG S SIDE OF THE R RIVER.

Why ponder thus the future to foresee, and jade thy brain to vain perplexity? Cast off thy care, leave Allah's plans to him- He formed them all without consulting thee.

-Omar Khayyam, The Rubaiyat The Rubaiyat