Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (10 page)

But “the Queen is not in the habit of
paying blackmail
,” Younghusband replied, balancing on the folding chair his aides had found. He switched tactics and tried intimidation, ordering his six Gurkhas to point their rifles out the tent flap and shoot a rock far down the valley. Every bullet struck the target. But when Safdar told the Gurkhas to shoot an innocent bystander scrambling along a path, they refused. Seeing this as a weakness, the Mir pressed for more money—and “some
soap for his wives
.”

So Younghusband picked up his chair and left. The Mir “was a
poor creature
,” he wrote, “and unworthy of ruling so fine a race as the people of Hunza.” Younghusband returned to his handlers, recommended that the British seize Hunza, and in 1891, a thousand soldiers invaded under the command of Algernon Durand
.

As the British colonel marched toward the kingdom, the Mir bombarded his enemy with maniacal letters. In them, Safdar promised to defend Hunza “with bullets of gold”; he considered one seized fort “more precious than the strings of our wives’ pajamas”; he threatened to hack off Durand’s head and serve it
on a platter
. Nonetheless, Durand kept advancing, snatched the fortress at Nilt, and seized Baltit Fort.

When Durand’s troops blasted apart the gate of the Mir’s stronghold, they stormed into empty rooms. Instead of exotic concubines, a search of the harem revealed “artificial flowers, scissors . . . tooth-powder, boxes of rouge, pots of
pomade and cosmetics
.” Safdar and his wives were gone, enjoying a comfortable exile in China. On Durand’s orders, the soldiers dumped Safdar’s wooden throne over the embankment, installed the Mir’s half-brother as the new ruler, and set up a garrison in the valley.

The new ruler, Mir Muhammad Nazim Khan, kept his pledge to monitor the Shimshal Pass for the British. Shimshalis turned to herding, and the surrounding kingdom of Hunza became a vacation destination. Bestselling 1930s novelist James Hilton modeled his Shangri-la after the region;
pseudoscientists
claimed that the local apricots helped residents live to 160;
Life
magazine called the kingdom “Happy Land
,
” a utopia “where the ruler sows gold dust with the year’s first millet seeds, and where mothers-in-law go along on honeymoons in order to school their newlyweds in the intimate art of marriage.” During the turbulent years of Partition, the Mir was so intent on maintaining stability that he refused to take sides with India or Pakistan. He asked to join the United States. Pakistan ultimately administered the region—first called the Northern Areas, sometimes considered part of Kashmir, and now governed by elected leaders as part of Gilgit-Baltistan.

The next foreign invasion was by mountaineers. In 1953, Hermann Buhl and the Austrian Embassy sent a telegram to the Mir, asking him to recruit high-altitude porters for Buhl’s expedition to Nanga Parbat. Buhl offered to pay the men
20 rupees
, or $6 a month, to carry loads.

Aspirants, many of them Shimshali, packed the Durbar, a dusty courtyard below the Mir’s Baltit Fort. Wearing a black velvet robe embroidered with gold sequins, the Mir rejected the weak and sent the strongest to a German doctor in the town of Gilgit. With a magnifying glass, the physician examined each patient’s chest, mouth, and teeth, and then “he smelled us to see how we would do in altitude,” recalled Haji Baig, one of the high-altitude porters selected for Buhl’s expedition.

With men like Haji and Amir Mehdi, the sniff test proved accurate. When Buhl struggled down from the summit with frostbitten feet, Haji and Mehdi alternated carrying him on their backs. Impressed, Buhl spread the word about his Pakistani high-altitude porters, and the Italians recruited the same men the following year for the first ascent of K2. This success established a warrior class known as the Hunza Tigers, mountaineers whose political influence grew to rival the Mir’s.

One of these Hunza Tigers, Nazir Sabir, later overthrew the Mirs’ 950-year rule. Walking to elementary school one morning on the way to Baltit, a holy man waved him down and presented the young Nazir with a pebble of rock salt. Lick this once a day until it is dissolved, the holy man told the eight-year-old, and you will bring fame to these valleys.

The boy finished the rock salt and, decades later, pioneered a new line up K2’s treacherous West Ridge with a Japanese expedition. Without using bottled oxygen, he survived a forced bivouac in the Death Zone, four days without sleep and two days without food or water. After K2, Nazir focused his legendary toughness on politics.

In 1994, Nazir ran against Crown Prince Ghazanfar Ali Khan, the
hereditary Mir
of Hunza, for a seat in the local legislature. With mountaineers as his supporters, Nazir trounced the monarchists, becoming the first commoner to lead Hunza in almost a millennium. Once forced to steal and kill to satisfy their Mir’s greed, climbers now controlled Hunza politics. As the region’s most powerful leader, Nazir fought corruption and built schools and roads, including a jeep track to Shimshal. He mentored Shimshali climbers and employed them on K2 with his expedition company.

Nazir Sabir Expeditions organized the 2008 Serbian K2 Expedition, and Nazir hired Shaheen Baig as the team’s leader. “He’s the safest climber around,” Nazir said, “one of the best in Pakistan.” Nazir breaks down when he thinks of what happened to Shaheen and the other two Shimshalis. “That village will never be the same.”

Despite the new jeep track, Shimshal seems inviolate. The six hundred residents farm barley and herd goats, which they carry in their arms to the grazing lands to avoid setting off landslides. In spring, Shimshal’s apricot orchards explode in a pastel flurry; in winter, snow leopards pad along the riverbank, leaving prints in the frost. After dark, Shimshalis tell mountaineering stories while huddled around yak-tallow candles in a central hall where ancient beams, carved with stars, frame a skylight to the heavens. The village has one satellite phone, which is almost always switched off.

Shimshalis speak
Wakhi
, a rare language related to Persian. Many of their climbing tales feature Shaheen, but not everyone enjoys them. “These are ghost stories of living men,” said Shaheen’s wife, Khanda. “I leave the room.” She tolerates only one: her husband’s failure on Broad Peak. “It gives me confidence that he has the sense to stay alive.”

Broad Peak, or K3, juts out of the Karakorum like a giant incisor. A moderate 8000er compared to its neighbor, K2, Broad Peak turns brutal in December. Winds pummel the slopes at up to 130 miles per hour, gouging out tents, shredding ropes, and shooting hail like rounds from a machine gun. No climber has managed a winter ascent. Only a few have been daring enough to try.

On Broad Peak in the winter of 2007, Shaheen started each day with a clean shave, although it was
haraam
, forbidden by Quranic law. The Prophet directed Muslim men to grow beards as a visible sign of their faith, but a temperature of minus 49 degrees Fahrenheit made Shaheen a pragmatist. His whiskers created air pockets between his cheeks and his neoprene mask. At cold enough temperatures, those humid pockets could freeze the mask to his face.

After shaving, Shaheen and his Italian climbing partner, Simone Moro, left for the summit around 6:30 a.m. They made each other a promise: No matter how close they were to the top, they’d turn around at 2 p.m. That way, they’d avoid descending in darkness.

Shaheen felt strong, and at 2 p.m., he could
taste the summit
. It was perhaps an hour away. Winds were low. Shaheen understood the temptation to continue. If he topped out, the winter ascent would go down as one of the most extreme in mountaineering history, and he would become internationally famous.

“But you can’t think clearly in the Death Zone,” he said. “You have to do it before you get there, when you have judgment. Climbers die when they ignore a set turnaround time.” So he and Simone turned back, reaching their tent before temperatures plunged further at sunset. By getting so close, yet respecting the turnaround time, Shaheen earned his reputation as one of the sanest of the madmen who take on winter ascents. Shimshalis respected his judgment, and if a local carpenter or a shepherd wanted to become a mountaineer, Shaheen was the man to talk to.

In 2001, two such men had approached Shaheen for climbing instruction. Twenty-four-year-old Karim Meherban and twenty-five-year-old Jehan Baig had been scrambling up mountainsides since they were boys, using hemp rope and ibex-horn anchors to reach the grazing lands. Now the two shepherds wanted to earn climbers’ salaries.

“Karim and Jehan became my little brothers,” said Shaheen. “I set technical routes on the White Horn and made them climb the ice, over and over, until I knew they had the skills.”

Shaheen’s students proved not only strong but lucky, with Jehan cheating death more than once. When Jehan was crossing an icy pass near Shimshal, the slope slithered beneath his boots as though the mountain were shedding its skin. He couldn’t sprint faster than the tons of sliding snow, so he waded to a boulder, wrapped his arms around the granite, and hugged. The rock shielded Jehan, and the flow rumbled around him, leaving him unharmed.

Another avalanche brought Jehan recognition. On July 18, 2007, on K4, or Gasherbrum II, a German pulling fixed lines out of the snow triggered a slide. It partially buried Japanese mountaineer Hirotaka Takeuchi, crushing his rib cage and collapsing a lung. Jehan grabbed a shovel and sprinted more than 600 feet across the wash of the avalanche and made it to Hirotaka. Jehan dug him out of the snow and lowered him down to camp. Hirotaka survived, and Jehan won acclaim and gratitude. He’d seen enough to know that fortunes reverse in a split second on mountains. Now thirty-two, his experience made him seem much older than his friend Karim, whom clients called “Karim the Dream.”

Unlike mountaineers who seldom look up from their boots, Karim reveled in the views and seemed unable to conceive of anything going wrong. It never did. In 2005 on Nanga Parbat, sometimes called “The Killer Mountain,” Karim reached the summit and earned a hefty tip from his French client, an aristocratic insurance salesman named Hugues Jean-Louis Marie d’Aubarède. Karim returned to Shimshal and told his two children about the climb; his youngest, a three-year-old named Abrar, begged to hear what had happened on the summit. Had Karim entered the magical
crystal palace
of Nanga Parbat? Was it true that mischievous fairies buzz around the mountaintop, dining at translucent tables and kicking off avalanches for fun?

Karim shook his head. He’d seen nothing supernatural on Nanga Parbat, but he promised to pay better attention on the next climb. That peak, he announced, would be K2. His French client had hired him again for the following summer.

Karim’s children cheered and hugged their father; his wife, Parveen, picked at the tablecloth. She asked her husband for more details about this plan. Wasn’t his client pushing sixty? Could Hugues handle the climb? Was the money worth the risk?

Hugues brokers insurance, Karim replied. He is too sensible to sell our lives cheaply.

Comforted by Karim’s confidence, Parveen congratulated her husband on getting the job and joined the rest of the family in celebration.

Karim guided Hugues on K2 in 2006 and 2007 and returned home both times with a stack of rupees but no summit. In 2008, Hugues hired him again, and Karim told his wife that he’d reach the summit this time. After all, Karim now had experience from two previous attempts, and this summer he’d be climbing alongside his friends, Shaheen and Jehan. The Shimshalis had been hired by different teams—Karim by the French, Shaheen by the Serbians, Jehan by the Singaporeans—but they planned to help each other on the mountain. Maybe they’d even stand together on the top. “Everything seemed so perfect,” recalled Shaheen, echoing Karim’s sentiments. “We were all so young and strong. I never thought there would be an accident.”

Parveen was more realistic. In late May, as her husband prepared to leave for his third attempt of K2, she made a last-ditch effort to stop him. She told Karim that they didn’t need the money; she could support him with her general store. Shimshal’s most successful female entrepreneur, Parveen had invested her husband’s mountaineering earnings in a one-room shop that sold soap, pens, children’s shoes, embroidery, and nail polish. The family no longer needed to rely on Karim’s dangerous career. “I asked him to stay in Shimshal,” Parveen said. “Then I begged.”