Three Cups of Tea

by Greg Mortenson

  The report was deafening, and brought a rain of pebbles bouncing down from the heights. A spray of gunpowder painted Twaha’s face black as a coal miner’s. Mortenson was sure Twaha had missed because the ibex was still standing. Then the buck’s front legs buckled, and Mortenson saw steam venting into the chill air from a wound in the animal’s neck. The ibex struggled twice to get his legs back beneath him, quieted, and pitched over on his side. “Allah-u-Akbhar!” all the Korphe men shouted in a single voice.

  The butchering began in the dark. Then they carried pieces of the carcass into a cave and lit a fire. Hussein expertly wielded a curved knife the length of his forearm. His long, mournfully intelligent face frowned with concentration as he filleted the liver and shared it out among the men. Mortenson was glad of the food’s warmth, if nothing else. Alone among all the residents of Korphe, Hussein had left the Braldu and been educated through the twelfth grade in distant, lowland Lahore. Bent over the carcass in this cave, his forearms slick with blood, Hussein seemed to Mortenson immeasurably removed from his days of scholarship on the sweltering plains of the Punjab. He would be the perfect teacher for Korphe’s school, Mortenson realized. He’d be able to bridge both worlds.

  By the time the hunting party arrived back in Korphe, the monsoon had retreated and the weather had turned crisp and clear. They marched into the village to a heroes’ welcome. Twaha led the way holding the fresh ibex head aloft. Mortenson, still carrying his present, brought up the back, with the horns of the avalanche victim bristling above his head like his own antlers.

  The men passed out handfuls of cubed ibex fat to children who crowded around them, sucking on the tidbits like candy. The several hundred pounds of meat they carried in their baskets were shared evenly among the hunters’ families. And after the meat had been boiled away, and the brains served in a stew with potatoes and onions, Haji Ali added the horns his son had brought back to a row of trophies nailed over the entrance of his home, proud evidence from the days when he was vigorous enough to hunt himself.

  Mortenson had taken his sketches of the bridges spanning the lower Braldu to a Pakistani army engineer in the regional capital of Gilgit. He examined Mortenson’s drawings, suggested some revisions to strengthen the structure, and drew a detailed blueprint for Korphe’s bridge, indicating the precise placement of cables. His plan called for twin sixty-four-foot stone towers, topped with poured concrete arches wide enough for yak carts to pass through, and a 284-foot suspension span sixty feet above the high-water mark.

  Mortenson hired an experienced crew of masons from Skardu to supervise the construction of the towers. Four Korphe men at a time lifted the blocks of quarried stone and attempted to place them squarely on top of the layer of cement the masons had troweled into place. Children turned out to watch the entertainment and shouted encouragement as their fathers’ and uncles’ faces reddened with the effort of holding the stones steady. Block by block, two three-tiered towers rose on either side of the river, narrowing as they tapered toward the top.

  The clear fall weather made the long days of work pleasant and Mortenson reveled in the tangible results every evening as he measured how many blocks they’d managed to set that day. For most of July, as the men built the bridge, women tended the crops. As the sturdy twin towers rose above the river, women and children watched them rise from their roofs.

  Before the claustrophobia of winter closed in, Korphe’s people lived as much as possible outdoors. Most families took their two daily meals on their roof. And washing down a bowl of dal and rice with strong tamburok tea, after a satisfying day’s work, Mortenson loved basking in the last of the sunlight with Haji Ali’s family, and chatting across the rooftops to the dozens of families doing the same.

  Norberg-Hodge admiringly quotes the king of another Himalayan country, Bhutan, who says the true measure of a nation’s success is not gross national product, but “gross national happiness.” On their warm, dry roofs, among the fruits of their successful harvest, eating, smoking, and gossiping with the same sense of leisure as Parisians on the terrace of a sidewalk cafe, Mortenson felt sure that, despite all that they lacked, the Balti still held the key to a kind of uncomplicated happiness that was disappearing in the developing world as fast as old-growth forests.

  At night, bachelors like Twaha and Mortenson took advantage of the mild weather to sleep under the stars. By this time, Mortenson’s Balti had become fluent, and he and Twaha sat up long after most of Korphe slept to talk. Their great subject was women. Mortenson was fast approaching forty, Twaha, about to turn thirty-five.

  He told Mortenson how much he missed his wife, Rhokia. It had been nine years since he lost her in gaining their only child, Jahan. “She was very beautiful,” he said, as they lay looking at a Milky Way that was so dense it covered them like a shawl. “Her face was small, like Jahan’s, and she was always popping up laughing and singing, like a marmot.”

  “Will you marry again?” Mortenson asked.

  “Oh, for me this is very easy,” Twaha explained. One day I will be nurmadhar and already I have a lot of land. So far I don’t love any other woman.” He lowered his voice slyly. “But sometimes I… enjoy.”

  “Can you do that without marrying?” Mortenson said. It was something he’d been curious about since coming to Korphe, but had never felt confident enough to ask.

  “Yes, of course,” Twaha said. “With widows. We have many widows in Korphe.”

  Mortenson thought of the cramped quarters below, where dozens of family members were sleeping sprawled side by side on cushions. “Where can you, you know?”

  “In the handhok, of course” Twaha said. Every Korphe home had a handhok, a small thatched hut on the roof where they stored grain. “You want me to find you a widow? I think a few love Doctor Greg already.”

  “Thank you,” Mortenson said. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  “You have a sweetheart in your village?” Twaha asked. So Mortenson summarized his major dating failures of the last decade, concluding with Marina, and he couldn’t help noticing, as he talked, that the wound felt far less raw.

  “Ah, she left you because you had no house,” Twaha said. “This thing happens often in Baltistan. But now you can tell her you have a house and almost a bridge in Korphe.”

  “She’s not the one I want,” Mortenson said, and realized he meant it.

  “Then you better quickly find your woman,” Twaha said, “before you grow too old and fat.”

  The day they strung the first cable between the towers, news traveled down the trail with porters returning from the Baltoro that a party of Americans was approaching. Mortenson sat on a boulder by the north bank of the Braldu with the engineer’s blueprints. He supervised as two groups stretched the main cables with teams of yaks and tied them to the towers as tightly as they could manage without power tools. Then the nimblest among them tightroped back and forth, looping support cables through the lash points the engineer had outlined and screwing them tightly in place with clamps.

  Down the north bank of the Braldu, a formidable-looking American man wearing a white baseball cap approached, leaning on a walking stick. At his side, a handsome, heavily muscled local guide hovered protectively.

  “My first thought was, ‘That’s a big guy sitting on that rock,’” says George McCown, “and I couldn’t figure out what the deal with him was. He had long hair. He was wearing local clothes. But it was obvious he was no Pakistani.”

  Mortenson slid down off the boulder and held out his hand. “Are you George McCown?” he asked. McCown took Mortenson’s hand and nodded incredulously. “Then happy birthday,” Mortenson said, grinning, and handed the man a sealed envelope.

  George McCown served on the board of the American Himalayan Foundation, along with Lou Reichardt and Sir Edmund Hillary. He had spent his sixtieth birthday trekking to K2 with two of his children, Dan and Amy, to visit the base camp of an expedition he was helping to sponsor. The birthday card from the AHF’s boa
rd of directors had arrived in Askole, then been passed on to Mortenson by mystified local authorities who figured one American would know how to locate another.

  McCown had been President/CEO of Boise Cascade Home and Land Corporation and built the corporation’s business from $100 million to $6 billion in six years, before it splintered and split apart. He learned his lesson well. In the 1980s, he founded his own venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California, and began buying up pieces of other companies that had grown too large and unwieldy. McCown was still recovering from knee surgery, and after weeks walking on the glacier and wondering if his knee would carry him back to civilization, the sight of Mortenson cheered him immeasurably.

  “After a month away, I was suddenly talking with someone very competent in what can be a very hostile place,” McCown says. “I couldn’t have been happier to meet Greg Mortenson.”

  Mortenson told McCown how the funds for the bridge and the school had been raised only after the blurb Tom Vaughan had written for the AHF’s newsletter. Both men were delighted by their coincidental meeting. “Greg’s a guy you immediately like and trust,” McCown says. “He has no guile. He’s a gentle giant. Watching all those people work with him to build that bridge, it was obvious they loved him. He operated as one of them, and I wondered how in the hell an American had managed that.”

  Mortenson introduced himself to McCown’s chaperone in Balti, and when he answered in Urdu, Mortenson learned that he was not Balti but a Wakhi tribesman from the remote Charpurson Valley, on the Afghanistan border, and his name was Faisal Baig.

  Mortenson asked his countryman if he would consider doing him a favor. “I was feeling out on a limb in Korphe, operating all by myself,” Mortenson says. “And I wanted these people to feel like it wasn’t just me, that there were a bunch of other Americans back home concerned about helping them.”

  “He slipped me a big roll of rupees,” McCown says, “and asked me to act like a big boss from America. So I hammed it up. I walked around like a chief, paying everyone their wages, telling them they were doing a great job, and to really throw themselves into it, and finish as fast as they could.”

  McCown walked on, following his family. But this day of stringing cables between two towers would connect more than the north and south banks of the Braldu. As life for foreigners in Pakistan would become progressively more dangerous, Baig would volunteer to serve as Mortenson’s bodyguard. And from his perch in Menlo Park, McCown would become one of Mortenson’s most powerful advocates.

  In late August, ten weeks after breaking the then-muddy ground, Mortenson stood in the middle of the swaying 284-foot span, admiring the neat concrete arches on either end, the sturdy three-tiered stone foundations, and the webwork of cables that anchored it all together. Haji Ali offered him the last plank and asked him to lay it in place. But Mortenson insisted Korphe’s chief complete Korphe’s bridge. Haji Ali raised the board above his head and thanked all-merciful Allah for the foreigner he’d been kind enough to send to his village, then knelt and plugged the final gap over the foaming Braldu. From their lookout high above the south riverbank, the women and children of Korphe shouted their approval.

  Broke again, and anxious not to dip into what funds still remained for the school, Mortenson prepared to head back to Berkeley and spend the winter and spring earning enough money to return. His last night in Korphe, he sat on the roof with Twaha, Hussein, and Haji Ali and firmed up plans for breaking ground on the school in the summer. Hussein had offered to donate a level field that his wife Hawa owned for the school. It had an unimpeded view of Korphe K2, the kind of view that Mortenson thought would encourage students to aim high. He accepted on the condition that Hussein become the Korphe School’s first teacher.

  They sealed the deal over tea extravagantly sweetened for the occasion and handshakes, and talked excitedly about the school until well after dark.

  Eight hundred feet below, lantern lights flickered from the middle of the Braldu, as the people of Korphe strolled curiously back and forth across the barrier that had once cut them off so completely from the wider world, the world to which Mortenson reluctantly prepared to return.

  Chapter 11

  Six Days

  There is a candle in your heart, ready to be kindled.

  There is a void in your soul, ready to be filled.

  You feel it, don’t you?

  —Rumi

  AT THE ALTA Bates Burn Unit, a constellation of red and green LEDs blinked across a bank of monitors. Though it was 4:00 a.m., and he was slumped behind the nurse’s station, trying and failing to find a comfortable position in a plastic chair designed for a much smaller person, Mortenson felt something that had been in short supply ever since that evening he’d dropped the bottle of Baileys liqueur into the trash can at the Beach Motel—happiness.

  Earlier, Mortenson had smoothed antibiotic cream into the hands of a twelve-year-old boy whose stepfather had pressed them to a stove, then redressed his bandages. Physically, at least, the boy was healing well. Otherwise, it had been a quiet night. He didn’t need to travel to the other side of the world to be useful, Mortenson thought. He was helping here. But each shift, and the dollars accruing in his Bank of America account, brought Mortenson closer to the day he could resume construction of the Korphe School.

  He was again living in his rented room at Witold Dudzinski’s, and here in the half-empty ward, he was glad of a peaceful night away from the smoke and vodka fumes. Mortenson’s cranberry-colored surgical scrubs were practically pajamas, and the light was dim enough for him to doze. If only the chair would allow it.

  Groggily, Mortenson walked home after his shift. The black sky was bluing behind the ridgeline of the Berkeley Hills as he sipped thick coffee between bites of a glazed pastry from the Cambodian doughnut shop. Double-parked in front of Dudzinski’s pickup truck, a black Saab sat in front of Mortenson’s home. And slumped back in the reclined driver’s seat, all but her lips obscured by a cascade of dark hair, lay Dr. Marina Villard. Mortenson licked the sugar from his fingers, then pulled open the driver’s door.

  Marina sat up, stretched, and hugged herself awake. “You wouldn’t answer your phone,” she said.

  “I was working,”

  “I left a lot of messages,” she said. “Just erase them.”

  “What are you doing here?” Mortenson said.

  “Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  Mortenson decided he wasn’t. “Sure,” he said. “How are you?”

  “To tell the truth, not too great.” She pulled down the visor and studied herself in the mirror, before reapplying red lipstick.

  “What happened with Mario?”

  “A mistake,” she said.

  Mortenson didn’t know what to do with his hands. He put his coffee cup down on the roof of her Saab, then held them stiffly at his side.

  “I miss you,” Marina said. She pulled the lever at her hip to raise the seatback and the headrest smacked up against the back of her head. “Ow. Do you miss me?”

  Mortenson felt something more potent than caffeine from the doughnut shop coursing through him. To just show up, after all this time. All those nights thrashing in the sleeping bag on Dudzinski’s dusty floor, trying to banish her and the sense of family found and then lost so sleep could come. “The door is closed,” Mortenson said, closing the driver’s door on Marina Villard, and climbing up into the reek of stale smoke and spilled vodka to fall flat asleep.

  Now that a bridge spanned the Upper Braldu, and the materials he’d made Changazi produce a signed inventory for were on the verge of turning into a school, now that he didn’t feel like he was hiding out at Dudzinski’s, but just economizing until returning to complete his work in Pakistan, Mortenson was glad to speak with anyone connected with the Karakoram.

  He called Jean Hoerni, who sent him a plane ticket to Seattle and asked him to bring along pictures of the bridge. In Hoerni’s penthouse apartment, with a sweeping view of Lake Washington, and the Cascades
beyond, Mortenson met the man he’d found so intimidating on the phone. The scientist was slight, with a drooping mustache and dark eyes that measured Mortenson through his oversized glasses. Even at seventy, he had the wiry vigor of a lifelong mountaineer. “I was afraid of Jean, at first,” Mortenson says. “He had a reputation as a real bastard, but he couldn’t have been any kinder to me.”

  Mortenson unpacked his duffel bag, and soon he and Hoerni were bent over a coffee table studying the photos, architectural drawings, and maps that spilled over onto the deep cream-colored carpet. Hoerni, who’d trekked twice to K2 base camp, discussed with Mortenson all the villages, like Korphe, that didn’t appear on the maps. And he took great pleasure in making an addition to one map, in black marker—the new bridge that spanned the Upper Braldu.

  “Jean really responded to Greg right away,” says Hoerni’s widow, Jennifer Wilson, who later became a member of the Central Asia Institute’s board of directors. “He appreciated how goofy and unbusinesslike Greg was. He liked the fact that Greg was a free agent. You see, Jean was an entrepreneur and he respected an individual trying to do something difficult. When he first read about Greg in the AHF newsletter, he told me, ‘Americans care about Buddhists, not Muslims. This guy’s not going to get any help. I’m going to have to make this happen.’

  “Jean had accomplished a lot in his life.” Wilson says, “But the challenge of building the Korphe School excited him just as much as his scientific work. He really felt a connection to the region. After Greg left, he told me, ‘I think this young guy has a fifty-fifty chance of getting the job done. And if he does, more power to him.’”