Chapter 3 hard way home

This harsh and beautiful land, There are many snow-covered rock peaks, and the cold and clear stream flows, Dense cypress, juniper and ash coexist. Everything you see is part of my life, I cannot be separated from this place or from you, Because we have only one heartbeat. —— "The Biography of King Gesar" When Abdu's knock came at dawn, Mortenson had been lying with his eyes open for hours, his worries about school affairs keeping him from falling asleep.He got up and opened the door, the scene in front of him made him puzzled: the one-eyed old man was holding a pair of clean and shiny shoes, waiting for him to try them on.

Those are his tennis shoes.Abramovich had apparently spent hours mending, scrubbing, and polishing his battered, battered Nikes while Mortenson slept, trying to dignify them for the long, grueling journey ahead. The owner can tie the shoelaces with pride.Abdul's silvery beard was dyed deep orange with henna when it was repainting the shoes, like a cluster of dancing flames. After Mortenson drank his tea, he rinsed briefly with cold water and a final dollop of Zang Xue soap.He had been carefully distributing the soap all week and had just run out today.Abudu picked up the backpack containing his belongings, and Mortenson didn't fight for it—he knew that if he tried to get the backpack back, he would definitely arouse fierce opposition from Abudu—then he reluctantly went to the room on the top floor. "Block room" farewell.

Looking at the shiny shoes on his own feet, and Abu's happy look at seeing him well-groomed, Mortenson agreed to hire a taxi and go to the Raja Market.Black colonial Morriss plod along sleepy streets, a vestige of British imperial power in Rawalpindi. Although the market was still closed and there were only dim lights on the road, they found the truck easily. In the 1940s, when Pakistan was part of British India, military transport trucks were all Bedford trucks.Like most Bedford trucks in this country, most of the replaceable parts in this car have been replaced by locally produced replacements five or six times, and it is far from the original appearance.Original olive green paint, too drab for the king of the Karakoram highway, has been replaced with mirrors and argyle metal accents; where it isn't, it's drowned in dramatic disco paint work —the work of a certain Bedford garage.

After paying the driver, Mortenson circled the sleeping behemoth looking for truck workers, eager to start his day.A loud snoring led him to look under the truck and found three people lying in a hammock under the truck, and two of them were snoring in chorus one after another. The piercing sound of the broadcast from the mosque at the other end of the square was not reduced in volume because it was early in the morning.The muezzin's voice called the workers before Mortenson did.Mortenson and Abu were on their knees ready to pray as they rolled out of their hammocks, grunting, spitting and lighting their first cigarette of the day.

For Mortenson, Abudu, like most Muslims, seems to have a positioning compass in his body, which can always accurately point to the holy city of Mecca.Although they were facing the locked gate of the timber row, and there was no water at hand, Abudu still rolled up his trousers and sleeves and followed the ceremony.Mortenson, ignoring his surroundings as much as possible, prayed with Abudu.Abudu sized him up with critical eyes, and nodded in satisfaction. "So," said Mortenson, "do I look like a Pakistani?" Abu Du wiped off the dust on his forehead from bowing to the ground. "Not like a Pakistani," he said, "but if it's a Bosnian, I believe it."

Wearing another immaculate shawar, Ali opened the store.Mortenson greeted him, then opened a little book bought at the market and started counting.By the time the Bedford truck was filled with all the materials, he had spent more than two-thirds of the total budget, leaving over three thousand dollars to pay workers' wages, hire jeeps to transport building materials to Cole Fei, and He supported his life until the school was built. Five or six members of Ali's family came to help and loaded the wood on the truck under the guidance of the driver and truck workers.Mortenson counted the splints inserted in front of the lathe, making sure each one was a solid four-ply board.A neat "forest" of splints quickly grew, and Mortenson watched contentedly.

When the sun rose, the temperature had already far exceeded thirty-eight degrees Celsius.Stores opened their iron doors one after another to prepare for business, and there was a symphony of clanging doors in the market.All kinds of building materials were transported to the trucks one after another through the crowd: some were carried on the porter's head, pulled by a rickshaw, carried by a motorcycle jeep, pulled by a donkey cart, and a hundred bags of cement were carried by another Bede Delivered by Ford truck. It was quite stuffy in the car, but Abudu stayed by the workers, calling out the name of each material delivered so that Mortenson could tick off the list.Mortenson looked more and more satisfied with the forty-two items the two men had bargained for—they were neatly stacked on the truck, the ax next to the plasterer's trowel, and they were stuffed together between the shovels in order .

In the afternoon, the Bedford truck was packed with people who had heard that there was a big American man in a brown shava with a truck full of supplies to build a school for Muslim children. .The porters had to go through five layers of human walls to deliver the goods.Mortenson's 48cm big feet attracted many surprised eyes, and everyone was amazed.Onlookers murmured about his nationality; most agreed that the tall, grimy man was most likely from Bosnia or Chechnya.When Mortenson interrupted the guesswork of the onlookers in his rapidly improving Urdu to tell everyone that he was American, the crowd watched the sweat-soaked shava against his oily skin. Son, several said in unison: I don't believe it.

In the midst of busy work, two of the most valuable tools—the carpenter's level and the plumb line—were missing.Mortenson was sure the item had arrived, but couldn't find it anywhere in the overstuffed truck.Abu Du took the lead in searching, moved bags of cement aside, and finally found them at the bottom of the platform.He rolled up these two tools in a cloth, carefully instructed the driver to put them carefully in the cab, and escorted them all the way to Skardu. Before nightfall, Mortenson had already assembled all the forty-two items of materials that had piled up into a six- to seven-meter-high hill.Truck workers rushed to tie up the cargo before dark, then covered the roof with burlap and tied it with thick rope on the sides of the truck.

As Mortenson climbed out of the car to say goodbye to Abudu, people rushed to him, offering him cigarettes and rupee notes to donate to the school.The driver, who was in a hurry to leave, had already started the engine, and black diesel fumes spewed from the truck's dual exhaust pipes.Although the surroundings were so noisy and chaotic, Abudu stood quietly in the crowd, doing "dua" and praying for Mortenson's journey.He closed his eyes, moved his hand to Mortenson's face, and was immersed in the Holy Spirit of Allah.He stroked his orange-dyed beard and fervently wished Mortenson a safe journey, his prayers drowned out by the blast of the trumpets.

Abu Du opened his eyes and took Mortenson's big dirty hands.He took a good look at his big friend and noticed that the shoes he had polished last night had been stained with oil, and the new Shawars he had just made yesterday were the same. "I don't think it's Bosnian, Mr Greg." He patted Mortenson on the back. "Now, you're totally Pakistani." Mortenson climbed onto the roof of the truck and nodded to Abudu, who stood exhausted at the edge of the crowd.The driver puts the car in gear and gets ready to hit the road. "Allahu Akbar!" the people chanted in unison, "Allahu Akbar!" Mortenson waved goodbye with a triumphant gesture until his friend's flaming orange beard disappeared into the surging In the crowd. The truck roared westbound.Although the driver Mohammad kept telling Mortenson to sit in the cab, he still insisted on sitting on the roof and enjoying the moment.Artists at the Rawalpindi depot have welded a beautiful seat on top of the truck, which sits high above the cab like a stylish hat.Mortenson, who straddled the material, built himself a comfortable nest out of sackcloth and hay.He was accompanied by boxes of snow-white chickens that Muhammad was going to take to the mountains to sell, and pop songs in Punjabi played from the cab window. After leaving the dense market in Rawalpindi, the dry brown and yellow countryside suddenly unfolded, occasionally dotted with a few patches of green. In the distance is the hilly area of ​​the foothills of the Himalayas, beckoning to them through the hot air and dust in the evening.Every time Bedford's horn blared, the cars would scramble to the side of the road and give way to the behemoth wisely. Mortenson's mood was as calm as the tobacco fields they passed through, and the gleaming green was like a tropical ocean blown by the wind.After a whole week of haggling and haggling over pennies and pennies, he felt he could finally relax. "It was cool and airy on the truck," Mortenson recalls. "From the first day I arrived in Rawalpindi, it had never been so cool. I felt like a king sitting on a throne. It worked out like it was sitting on top of my school. I brought everything I needed and it was all within budget and not even Dr. Gene Horney could fault it. I was looking forward to Well, in a few weeks, the school will be finished, and then I can go home and think about the rest of my life. I've never seemed more content." Suddenly Muhammad slammed on the brakes and pulled the car to the side of the road. Mortenson grabbed the chicken coop so hard that he didn't fall off the roof of the car.He bent down and asked in Urdu, "Why did you stop suddenly?" Mohammad pointed to a small white mosque on the edge of the tobacco fields, toward which the crowds were rushing.After the music was turned off, the muezzin's clear call could be heard in the quiet air.He didn't expect that the driver who was in a hurry along the way would be so devout that he stopped the car to say evening prayer.He knew that in this place, there were too many things that he couldn't understand.He told himself that at least it would give him a chance to find a place next to the car to practice his prayers. After dark, he drank a cup of strong green tea and ate three plates of soybean curry bought from a roadside stall. Mortenson lay back in his little nest on the roof of the car, looking at the stars in the velvety sky. At Taxila, thirty kilometers west of Rawalpindi, they left Pakistan's main road and began turning north into the mountains.Hundreds of years ago, Taxila was the religious center where Buddhism and Islam collided; but for Mortenson's teetering "school" on wheels, the region's collision of tectonic plates millions of years ago , is more worthy of concern. Here, the plain meets the mountain, the ancient Silk Road turns steep and the road becomes unpredictable.Isabella Burt was a British Victorian female explorer. During her travels in 1876, she recorded the arduous journey from the subplate plain of India into Pakistan. "The traveler who desires to reach the plateau cannot go by horse-drawn cart or cart," she wrote. "Most of the way must be walked. If the traveler cares about his horse, he must dismount and walk on the rough and steep descent. And there are quite a few of them.” "'Roads,'" she continued, "were built with great labor and expense, for Nature compelled the builders to follow her lead, along the narrow valleys, ravines, and the abyss to build the road. Sometimes the 'road' is just a ledge suspended over the roaring torrent, and it is several kilometers long. When two caravans have to meet, one of the caravan's animals must crowd the side of the mountain to make way, while they stand The place is usually dangerous. Once, when meeting a convoy, my servant's horse was jostled off a cliff by a laden donkey and drowned." The Karakoram Highway, which the Bedford trucks meandered, was an expensive modified version of the mountain road Burt and his party traveled.As early as 1958, Pakistan, which had just become independent and was eager to establish a transportation link with China, began the most difficult plateau road construction project in human history.The Karakoram Highway was essentially carved out of the rugged Indus River gorge, and four hundred workers were sacrificed to build the 400-kilometre road.When building this "highway", engineers had to disassemble the bulldozer as a whole before carrying out heavy machinery work, and then used a team of donkeys to carry the parts up the mountain, and then reassembled the bulldozer on the mountain.The Pakistani army tried to send a bulldozer up the mountain with a Soviet-style MI-17 helicopter, but during its first flight mission, the helicopter crashed after hitting a cliff due to strong winds and the canyon was too narrow, killing all nine members on board. In 1968, China proposed to build a thoroughfare to Central Asia. The Chinese side was responsible for supervising, planning and providing funds to complete the 1,300-kilometer international highway from Kashgar, China to Islamabad.After more than a decade of hard work, mobilizing enough road builders to form an army, the road, called the Friendship Highway, was finally declared complete in 1978. Mortenson wrapped a wool blanket around his shoulders and head as the altitude began to pick up a hint of early winter chill in the air.For the first time, he began to worry about whether he would be able to build the school before the winter season.Soon he was shaking his head, determined not to be bothered, resting his head on the hay, falling asleep to the regular vibrations of the truck. When the first rays of sunlight appeared, a rooster crowed mercilessly in a chicken coop less than two meters above his head.Mortenson was numb from sleep, cold and wanted to go to the toilet.He bent over to the window to ask the driver to stop, but he saw the bear-like co-pilot next to the driver sticking his head out of the window to look down. , the brown river is rushing through the rocks.Mortenson turned his head and looked up. On both sides of the river bank were straight granite walls with a height difference of several thousand meters. The Bedford truck was struggling to climb an extremely steep slope, and Muhammad frantically shifted gears back and forth. Finally, he even used brute force to cut into first gear, but the car still slid backwards powerlessly.Mortenson leaned over the edge of the roof and looked down, and found that the rear wheels of the truck were less than one meter away from the edge of the canyon. When Muhammad stepped on the accelerator desperately, the gravel picked up by the rear wheels fell into the deep valley.As long as the wheels get too close to the edge of the cliff, the co-pilot's sharp whistle will sound, and then the wheels will turn back in reverse. Mortenson, not wanting to disturb Muhammad, retreated to the roof seat.When he came to climb K2, he was so focused on getting to the summit that he completely ignored the route up the Indus River; on the way back, he was preoccupied with plans to raise funds for the school.This time, he came to the desolate and precipitous mountainous area again, and watched Bedford struggle on this "highway" at a speed of about twenty kilometers per hour. new experience and understanding. When the opening of the canyon was big enough to accommodate a small village on the rim, they got out of the car and had a breakfast of chapati and dubadi, a black tea with milk and sugar.Muhammad was even more insistent than the night before, insisting that Mortenson sit in the cab, and he had to reluctantly agree. Mortenson sat between Mohammed and the two co-pilots.Compared with the huge truck, Muhammad is extremely thin, barely reaching the gas pedal.The co-pilot of the big bear was smoking the marijuana hookah one after another, and blew smoke at the other young co-pilot. The interior of this Bedford is as wild as its exterior: twinkling red light bulbs, Kashmiri wood carvings, 3-D photos of Bollywood stars, a bunch of shiny silver bells, and a bunch of bouquets if Mohammad brakes too hard. would poke the plastic flower in Mortenson's face. "I feel like I'm sitting on top of a brothel that's slowly rolling," Mortenson said. "It's moving so slowly, it's like a caterpillar crawling." On the steepest sections, the co-pilots hop out of the car and place a large rock on the rear wheel, wait for Bedford to stagger a few centimeters, and then move the rock to the new rear wheel.They repeated this laboriously and monotonously until they reached the flat road.During this period, although there are occasional jeeps that overtake them, or a bus roaring onward, most of the time they are alone on the road. The sun disappeared early into the steep rock face, and in the evening, the bottom of the ravine was dark and difficult to discern.The car was winding on the dark and winding road, and Muhammad suddenly slammed on the brakes.It turned out that they almost hit the bus ahead, and there was a line of hundreds of cars in front of the bus - jeeps, buses, Bedford trucks - all stuck in front of a concrete bridge.Mortenson climbed out of the truck with Mohammad to find out. They walked to the bridge and found that the roadblock was obviously not the rockfall or avalanche that often happened on the Karakoram Highway, but more than 20 rough men with black turbans and beards guarding the bridge.Their bazookas and Soviet-made submachine guns were casually pointed at a group of Pakistani soldiers, whose weapons were sensibly holstered. "Not good." Muhammad squeezed out a blunt English word. A man in a black hood lowered his bazooka and beckoned Mortenson over.With the smell of two days of driving and the wool blanket wrapped around his head, Mortenson was sure he didn't look like a foreigner. "Where are you from?" the man asked in English, "American?" He raised the gas lamp in his hand to study Mortenson's face. Mortenson saw the man's crazy blue eyes, surrounded by black paint "suma", these people belong to the militant "Taliban" group, which has been pouring into the Pakistani border since 1994. "Yes, American," Mortenson replied cautiously. "America, first." The interrogator put down the bazooka in his hand, lit a local Tander cigarette and handed it to Mortenson.Mortenson doesn't usually smoke, but he felt that he should accept the kindness of others at this time, so he took a few puffs.Mohammed came over, apologized for interrupting them, nudged Mortenson suggestively, and led him back to the truck, all the while not making eye contact with the man. Muhammad was simmering tea in the back of the car, where he planned to spend the night.He shared the gossip he had heard from other drivers.These people have been blocking the bridge all day, and a small group of soldiers has just been trucked to the Patan military base, thirty-five kilometers away, to ask for instructions before deciding whether the bridge should be reopened. Mortenson's limited Urdu, and Muhammad's somewhat contradictory explanations, left him uncertain whether he understood the driver.But he can at least be sure that the village they are in is called "Dasu", which is located in the most desolate Kohistan area on the northwestern border of Pakistan.Kohistan has always been known as a bandit. It is "nominal" affiliated to Islamabad, but in fact it does its own thing and has never been controlled by the central government. After the "9.11" incident, the remote and rugged valley here became the best hiding place for Taliban and Al Qaeda supporters during the US government's war to destroy the Taliban regime.Terrorists are familiar with the terrain here and can easily escape from the desolate mountains. Those who guard the bridge with guns live in villages on the nearby hills. They claim that a government contractor from as far away as Islamabad came with several million rupees and said that the hunting trails on the hills will be widened into forestry roads so that the hills Residents sell trees.But that contractor didn't improve the road and ran away with the money, so they are going to block the Karakoram Highway until the guy is caught and then hang him from this bridge as an outrage. After tea and the biscuits Mortenson had brought out, they all decided to go to bed.Despite Muhammad's advice to Mortenson to sleep in the safety of the driver's cab, he decided to climb up to the alcove on the roof.From there, he could see the situation on the bridge, the bushy, Pashto-speaking Kohistan radicals under the gas lamps.The Urdu-speaking, gentle-looking Pakistani soldiers from the plains, wearing blue berets and ammunition belts tied tightly around their slender waists, looked like another race. He lay on his back on the haystack, his thoughts were so confused that he finally gave up the idea of ​​going to sleep and planned to stay out until dawn.Suddenly there was a gunshot, and Mortenson sat up in shock. The first thing he saw was a pair of confused pink rooster eyes in the chicken coop, and then he saw the Kohistan man standing on the bridge holding an AK-47 rifle Shoot into the air. Mortenson felt the Bedford truck move suddenly, exhaling forcefully from the twin exhaust pipes.He leaned over to the window next to the driver's seat. "Good!" Mohammad said to him, smiling, stepping on the gas pedal. "Shooting for pleasure, Allah bless!" He shifted into gear. A group of masked women poured out from the entrance of the village and the alleyway, and hurried back to their cars. They should be the female passengers who got off the car and hid in a hidden place during the long wait the night before. Climbing slowly in the long traffic, the truck passed the Dasu Bridge amidst the dust and smoke.Mortenson saw the Kohistan man who had bought him a cigarette last night and his colleagues raised their fists and fired indiscriminately with automatic rifles.Mortenson had never seen such intense firepower, even on an army shooting range.The soldiers on the other side of the bridge pier did not come out to stop them, presumably they acquiesced in this behavior. Continue to climb, the rock wall of the canyon covers the sky, leaving only a white steaming slit.The truck detours along the west side of Nanga Peak.Nanga Peak is the ninth highest peak in the world, with an altitude of 8125 meters, located at the western foot of the Himalayas.This peak completely enveloped people in the depths of the Indus Valley—whether it was an illusion caused by staring at the mountain for too long, Mortenson felt that the mountain seemed to be approaching from the east.In order to test his idea, Mortenson turned his attention to the river: countless streams carried the snowmelt from the Nanga Peak Glacier, jumped down the gully, climbed over the mossy pebbles, and flowed into the Indus River, giving the original muddy and dirty river There are circles of high mountains and clear blue. As they approached Gilgit, the most populous city in northern Pakistan, they left the Karakoram Highway and headed east along the Indus River towards Skardu.If they continue along the Karakoram Highway, they will reach the Khunjerab Pass at an altitude of 4,730 meters and enter China. Although the air was getting colder and colder, Mortenson was warmed by a familiar emotion—between the mountains with an altitude of more than 6,000 meters and too many peaks to name, there was a river he was familiar with, which was the entrance of Baltistan.The lunar-like boulders of the western Karakoram range are among the most dangerous places on Earth, but for Mortenson, they feel like home. The dusty gloom of the canyon's depths, and the sun high in the sky over its granite peaks, were more Mortenson's natural habitat than Berkeley's pastel-and-stucco houses.His episodes in the United States during this period, including his estranged relationship with Marina, his struggles and efforts to raise funds for the school, and his disturbed sleep while working night shifts in the hospital, this moment seemed to be a fading dream.And here the ledges and cliffs held him steady, allowing him to fly over despair. Twenty years ago, a nurse named Davela Murphy listened to the call of the distant mountain and started a mountaineering journey.With the same courage and fearlessness as Isabella Burt, she completely ignored the advice of previous explorers that Pakistan was impassable during the snow season.In the harsh winter, Murphy and her five-year-old daughter rode across the Karakoram Mountains on horseback. In the book "Where the Indus Is Young" that records this journey, the original writer Murphy is completely at a loss when describing this experience, and can only squeeze out the following words: "Everything used to describe the mountain scenery None of the adjectives are suitable, in fact, even the word 'scenery' seems ridiculously inappropriate. 'Spectacular' or 'majestic' can't explain the feeling of being there. The endless, Long and intertwined ravines, darker, wilder, deeper, not a leaf, not a blade of grass, not a clump of trees to remind you of the vegetable kingdom, only the occasional sparkling foam of the emerald-green Indus, for This piece of gray-yellow cliffs and monotonous steep rocky cliffs add a little vivid color." As Murphy traveled slowly along the Indus River on horseback, he had guessed that if this place was converted into a road in the future, traveling by car would still encounter terrifying conditions. "Here, the driver must leave everything to fate," she wrote, "or never muster up enough courage to drive an overburdened, poorly balanced, mechanically imperfect Jeep on such roads. A few hours. As long as a small mistake, people and cars may be rushed hundreds of meters below the Indus River to die. This river squeezed out the only way among the terrifying rocks, Cars have no choice but to follow it. The breathtaking majesty and majesty of the Indus Valley cannot be imagined unless experienced firsthand, and the best way to cross it is on foot." On the heavily loaded, poorly balanced, but fortunately mechanically well-designed Bedford truck, Mortenson wobbled like a candle in the wind, along with the hill of school building materials.Every time a truck rolls over a pile of loose rockfall, it's close to the edge of the canyon, a few hundred meters below the crumbling bus shell, resting in rust.Next to the mileage sign along the way, you can see the white "Heroes Monument" to commemorate the road workers of the "Frontline Work Organization" who unfortunately died while fighting on the rock wall.There are also thousands of Pakistani soldiers who have contributed greatly to the improvement of the road to Skardu since troops were allowed to go up the mountain to support the war against India.However, due to falling rocks and avalanches, long-term disrepair of the road surface, and limited space, there are dozens of accidents in which vehicles fall into the abyss every year. More than a decade later, in the so-called post-9.11 period, Mortenson was often asked by Americans whether he faced threats from terrorists there. "If I had died in Pakistan, it would have been in a traffic accident, not a bomb or a bullet," he always told them. "The real danger there is the mountain roads." Before Mortenson could get his bearings, the light was already very different.In the evening, the sky lit up as they drove a long downhill with the screech of brakes continuing.The claustrophobic rock walls of the deep valley suddenly opened up and closed again, quickly receding to become a group of giant peaks surrounded by the Skardu Valley and covered with snow all the year round.By the time Muhammad accelerated on the flat road at the bottom of the mountain, the Indus had stretched out into a muddy river as wide as a lake, winding its way forward.The bottom of the valley is covered with sand dunes of different sizes and shapes, which glow yellowish-brown in the afterglow of the setting sun. The apricot and walnut orchards on the outskirts of Skardu marked the end of this arduous journey.Sitting on the school building materials and entering Skardu, Mortenson waved to the locals wearing white wool caps, and the people busy with the harvest also grinned and waved to him.The children ran after the Bedford truck, yelling at the foreigners sitting in it.This was the return he had dreamed of ever since he sat down to write those five hundred and eighty letters.At this moment, Mortenson is sure that his story will soon reach a happy ending.