House of Snow Read online

  “You must be patient with Pangboche,” said the head lama. “My people at times behave like children and must be treated as such. You must be patient!” Dawa Tenzing drew us into his house as we departed and thrust into our hands large bowls of excellent chang. “Drink it,” he said; “it will be a horse for your road.” Ten minutes later we were striding through a heavy snowstorm on our way back to Khumjung.

  We didn’t have long to wait for a reply from Pangboche. Next day it was still snowing when a group of men appeared, led by the head lama’s secretary. It was all a mistake, they explained. They hadn’t realized there was a meeting at Thyangboche. Already thirty-five children were signed up and these would definitely not go up to the Dingboche fields for the potato planting. As soon as the word was given they’d dash madly down to Khumjung and carry the building material back up to Pangboche. Finally, they’d already started to demolish the old house. I was a little skeptical of this enthusiasm but the head lama’s secretary assured me there had been a misunderstanding and recommended we go ahead with the deal. I paid over the Rs 6oo and we received the signed documents. Then I asked Dawa Tenzing to represent our interests in Pangboche and the villagers promised to give him every support in preparing the site for the school.

  By April 10 we were ready to move to Pangboche and start our construction program. The majority of the party carried the building equipment over the shorter route via Thyangboche and vaccinated everyone as they went. Desmond, Murray and I went the long way around via the village of Phorche, for we wanted to meet the panchyat and assess the interest and enthusiasm of the village for a school in the future. The route to Phorche is a spectacular one. The track climbs through the vast rock bluffs above Khumjung on wooden staircases and delicately perched rock platforms. Then you plunge steeply down into a narrow gorge enclosing the Dudh Kosi River. With knees quivering from the solid pounding of your descent, you cross the cantilever bridge and then climb steeply up the other side through twisted rhododendrons draped with long fingers of silver moss. Cupped in a smiling hollow on the flanks of Taweche, Phorche has a charm all its own. Mountains are all around, but you are hardly conscious of them. The village lies in the warm sun and your eyes instinctively follow the river to the south, over the foothills of Nepal towards the throbbing plains of India. Phorche has no easy approach – it is frequently cut off even from the other Sherpa villages – and yet its warmth and aspect make you forget at times that you are living high on a grim Himalayan peak.

  There are fifty to sixty houses in the village, and we seemed to visit most of them to be plied with chang, rakshi and hospitality. The elders conducted us to the site they had chosen for a school – a gorgeous position amongst spidery trees on the edge of a huge bluff – but one careless kick of a ball and its next stop would be 2000 feet down in the Dudh Kosi River. I told the village elders they should plan to send their children to Pangboche School for the next few years and we would then try and get them a school of their own. But the elders shook their heads. “It is too far for our children to go to Pangboche each day, sahib, and the track is too narrow and dangerous.”

  In a haze of bonhomie, we carried on to Pangboche, following the tiny twisting track high above the valley floor. Slips and bluffs, loose traverses and falling rocks made it an adventurous trip and we could easily understand the reluctance of Phorche to send their children over it. But the villagers’ enthusiasm for education had been so encouraging that I was determined to think up some way of helping them.

  Camp at Pangboche was set up on a terrace above the village in a pleasant grove of stunted pine trees. A tinkling stream was near at hand and there was a tremendous sweep of valley and mountains in front of the tent doors. I wasted no time in camp – I wanted to see what progress had been made on the school site and rumor had it that the village had been slothful and disinterested. I climbed up to the ridge to find women and children swarming over the place like ants, carrying rocks and timber and I leveling out the rough spots (as I found later, there had been a sudden increase of workers on the day of our arrival). Progress had not been as rapid as we had hoped but at least some progress had been made.

  Dawa Tenzing, the masons and carpenters, Murray Ellis, Desmond and I gathered on the site to lay out the foundations of the school building. The back and side walls were to be of rock and would be constructed by the Sherpa masons.

  “How many inches wide are the rock walls, Dawa Tenzing?” we asked.

  “Inches, sahib? We don’t measure in inches. The width of the wall is the distance from the mason’s elbow to the tips of his fingers.”

  With a broad grin the chief mason presented his arm for measurement – about eighteen inches more or less. Under Murray’s watchful eye we laid out the positions for the walls and took the necessary levels. Then we were brushed aside as the masons rolled big rocks into position for the cornerstones. It soon became apparent that Dawa Tenzing and the masons regarded us as hindrances when rock walls were being built, so we slunk off to camp. Later in the afternoon I returned unannounced to the school site to inspect progress on the foundations. To Dawa Tenzing’s chagrin I arrived just at the wrong moment – they had discovered that one of their walls was ten inches out of line and were laboriously shifting the stones. I refrained from comment but resolved that a quiet check on distances and angles wouldn’t be a bad idea.

  The weather in Khumbu had been unstable for some time and as the Pangboche School was at 13,500 feet, we were getting daily falls of snow – rarely more than a couple of inches but enough to make work on the building a cold and arduous business. For the next week I left Bhanu Bannerjee in charge at Pangboche with instructions to harry the masons unmercifully and get the rock walls finished as soon as possible.

  Over small radio transceivers we kept in touch with Bhanu and he told us of his many problems. One morning he reported 3 inches of fresh snow and a dense fog; another time it was shortage of labor to carry rocks; then one day nobody turned up. Religious festival.

  On April 21 we moved back to Pangboche in force with the intention of getting on with the main building program. I found all sorts of troubles in the village. The stonemasons and carpenters were doing a good job but they were constantly hampered by lack of labor to collect stones, as had been promised. Little of the timber had been earned from the forests, and worst of all, none of the children had turned up for enrollment at the announced time. About the enrollment we received a variety of comments:

  “They’ll be enrolled in seven days.”

  “The lamas have to give their blessings.”

  “They’re too busy digging the potato fields at the moment.”

  I summoned the headmen to a meeting on the school site. After much delay they all appeared. This time there was a new addition – the senior headman, who had been away previously on a trading trip.

  He was a much more sophisticated character than his compatriots and seemed determined to be obstructive. Why hadn’t the village supplied the labor they had promised? we asked. It was all our fault, the headman advised. We had vaccinated the village for smallpox and as a result everyone had been prostrate and unable to work. We pointed out that Khumjung and Thami had also been vaccinated but they had still managed to turn out in force. But he only scowled and muttered about “when the village was good and ready!”

  In a fine old fury I gave an ultimatum – tomorrow there’d be a man from each house carrying timber and the children would all enroll or we’d pick up our building material and put a school at Phorche instead. I stamped off, leaving them in a stunned silence, and Desmond, Tom and Phil only waited to deliver a few more well-chosen words before departing as well.

  As we sat around camp, sipping tea and simmering over the injustices of the world, another crisis was rapidly developing.

  HORROR STORY

  One of our young Sherpas, Purbu Chundu, was a favorite nephew of the famous sirdar, Passang Dawa Lama. He now appeared before us in the grip of fierce emotion and asked permissio
n to tell his story.

  He explained that in 1962 he had been a member of a German expedition of which his uncle was sirdar. This expedition had tackled the formidable peak, Pumori, a mountain which had rebuffed a number of previous expeditions. The German party was not to be denied and they forced a difficult and spectacular route to the summit. On the descent of the mountain the assault team was very late and the weather had become cold and thick. On one rope were two men, the only Swiss climber in the party and an experienced Sherpa. Tired from their climb and baffled by the bad visibility, the two men strayed too close to the edge of a bluff and when the snow underneath gave way they plunged thousands of feet to their deaths.

  On the other rope were three men – two Germans and the renowned Sherpa, Annullu, who had first made his name with us on Everest in 1953. Only after a terrible struggle were these men able to make their escape. At one stage the two Germans slid off in an avalanche and only a superhuman effort by Annullu was able to prevent them all from being swept away. The cold powder snow and the bitter weather took their toll and the men’s extremities were white and frostbitten before they reached safety in their assault camp.

  Purbu explained how next day they had started the search for the bodies of the two men and had found them on the glacier at the foot of the mountain. Two graves were made for the men in a deep crevasse. The expedition leader placed in the Sherpa’s grave his down jacket as a bed and in the grave of the Swiss his colorful wool sweater. Then the bodies were lowered gently into place and after a short ceremony rocks were piled high above them. Over the Swiss a cross was erected and over the Sherpa a Buddhist chorten.

  Quite a number of high-altitude Sherpas and ordinary porters were present at the funeral, said Purbu including a man from Pangboche – the village elder we called the Nike, who was now helping build the school. Purbu quickly came to the heart of the matter. Yesterday he had seen the Nike wearing a jersey that was far too big for him. “Even the sahibs noticed the jersey and made jokes about it,” said Purbu. He had recognized it as the jersey from the grave.

  I sent Mingmatsering to see if he could get the Nike to come to our camp, but he proved hard to find. It wasn’t until we were crowded around the campfire after tea that he was led up to us. Desmond started to question him quietly.

  “Yes,” he admitted quite freely, “I was wearing the pullover that belonged to the dead sahib.”

  After further prompting he conceded that he also had the down jacket belonging to the Sherpa.

  “How did you get them?” asked Desmond. The response was glib and well prepared. “I was given them by Sirdar Passang Dawa Lama.”

  At this accusation against his uncle, Purbu Chundu sprang to his feet and with eyes full of fire asserted that this was an outright lie. “I was with my uncle all the time after the accident,” he said, “and at no time did he go near the graves. In fact he warned everyone (including the Nike) that if the graves were disturbed he would come back and kill them with his own hands. Already in Darjeeling the wife of the dead Sherpa has heard rumors that a man has been seen in Pangboche wearing the ring she had given her husband on their wedding day!”

  At this fierce denunciation the Nike hastily withdrew his story and replaced it with another. Some time after the accident, he said, he happened to be strolling up on this lonely glacier and he’d come upon the opened graves. To his astonishment he’d found the pullover and down jacket stuffed carelessly under a rock. They were too good to waste and he’d brought them home.

  I had been listening to this tale with growing horror. The man was so obviously lying and was so confident that nothing could be done about it anyway that my gorge rose. When he cracked a hearty joke with the silent ring of Sherpas round about I could stand it no longer. I leaped up and thumped him vigorously around the ears and knocked him down. He scrambled about on his hands and knees, trying to escape, and presented the seat of his pants to my irate gaze. Next moment I had delivered a mighty kick to send him tumbling down the hill into the darkness.

  Whether it was my ultimatum to the village or harsh treatment of the Nike I don’t know, but early next morning we heard signs of action in the village and saw loads of timber starting to come up the long climb from the river. At breakfast time the headman and Dawa Tenzing arrived in conciliatory vein and assured us that all the timber would be brought up by the end of the day.

  At 10 A.M. we gathered on the school site for the enrollment of children. Nobody had yet appeared but first one little family group and then another – all spick and span in their best clothes – left their homes and climbed slowly up towards us. Everyone gathered around as teacher Tem Dorje took particulars and then instructed the parents to sign the register with their thumb marks. Each parent had to agree to leave his children at the school at all times and not take them away for yak tending or potato planting. By the end of the day we had thirty-five children enrolled. I had been surprised at their caliber. I suppose I had expected a group of morons but this red-cheeked and sparkling-eyed group didn’t look much different from any group of children anywhere.

  Half a day’s walk up the valley from us was the encampment of a small German scientific expedition. I had sent them a message about the Nike’s activities and two of them arrived the same afternoon. They considered it their duty to visit the sites of the graves and re-establish them if necessary. I agreed to make Purbu Chundu available for this. When weather permitted, the Germans trekked up to the foot of Pumori. The mountain had done the job for them. A huge avalanche had swept down over the graves, covering everything in millions of tons of ice and leaving the dead men to sleep peacefully and undisturbed.

  Desmond and I were determined that the Nike should he punished by the authorities for his crime. Our liaison officer, “K. C.,” had authority to represent the government and marched off to place the Nike under arrest. He found him lying in bed, groaning and holding onto his head and claiming he was about to die – whether from shame or from my blows wasn’t quite clear. K. C. warned him not to try to escape and placed a guard outside his door.

  By now my wrath had subsided considerably and although I still regarded the Nike as a nasty piece of work, I couldn’t help feeling that in a way he was a product of his village. The other headmen were now freely admitting that they’d known about the Nike’s activities all along and though they hadn’t approved of his actions, they’d never raised their voices in censure in the village council. This attitude is common indeed amongst the Sherpas and is a direct consequence of their religious beliefs. They accept the existence of cause and effect and are all too ready to explain away any misdeed by saying that it wouldn’t have happened to the victim if his karma hadn’t attracted it to him. The Sherpas will rarely combine together against a bully or even put in a complaint to the police. They prefer to accept the bully and criminal as an ordinary member of society who will receive his punishment in due course – but they don’t want to be the ones giving the punishment, as by so doing their soul may be linked by cause and effect with that of the transgressor for many reincarnations. Perhaps this basic trait is at the back of many of their more charming qualities as well, but when an emergency arises one can’t help wishing for a little more materialism.

  When K. C. and the senior headman suggested that the Nike should not be handed over to the police but should be subjected to the village “disgracing” ceremony, I was only too happy to agree. The Nike had been given a considerable scare and his disgrace in front of his neighbors would serve as a salutary lesson to the village.

  In the middle of the afternoon we gathered in the courtyard of the gompa and a miserable Nike was brought stumbling in with a bandage around his head, completely crushed by the whole proceeding. He seated himself in the gloom of a corner with his head between his hands. Desmond refused to allow this – the man must face his punishment in the open – and he instructed the headman to have the Nike brought out in front of the people. He sat on the bottom step of the gompa with a weeping sister on
one side and his stalwart and dry-eyed wife on the other.

  The tension built up to a high pitch as the proceedings commenced. First a document was read to the assembled gathering, a confession from the Nike in which he admitted his guilt but pleaded for mercy and forgiveness. Then another, longer document, signed by all the senior men of the village, in which they condemned the Nike’s action and guaranteed that such a thing would not happen in the village again. I was then called on to say a few words to be translated into Nepali by Desmond, and into Sherpa by Mingmatsering. By now I was feeling rather sorry for the Nike, who must have been undergoing mental torture, and my words were brief: a suggestion that he had been punished in the sight of his equals and it was now up to him to rehabilitate himself by his actions over the next few years. Desmond, too, had few words to say but they were telling ones.

  “We can forgive your crime,” he declaimed to the crouching man. “But you will have to make your own peace with God!”

  There was a deathly hush after this statement, broken only by the sobs of the Nike’s sister, and there was no doubt that these last words had made a strong impression.

  The Nike and his family were asked if they had anything to say, but the man was glad to be silent. Only his wife, a tall, handsome woman, wanted to speak. Still dry-eyed, with a hard set to her jaw, she repeated the story of the discovery of the clothes – how her husband had found them under a rock. When questioned by the headman, she admitted that this was the story her husband had told her. The headman shrugged his shoulders and passed on.

  We admired the way this woman had supported her husband, although there seemed little emotion in her reactions. Later we discovered that her background had given her some training in such crises: she was a “fallen” nun, a category accepted but not really approved by this non-critical Buddhist community. And her brother was the biggest racketeer and strong-arm man in the Khumbu area.