Little Princes (27 page)

There was nothing we could do. I had no clear idea where we were. I rested my head in my hands, closing my eyes and wishing it would all go away. We were already freezing; it was an especially cold night, even for December, even for Humla. Sleeping outside would be foolish. But without food we would not have the energy to trek up the steep trail to Unapani, and the next village was many hours away.

I switched off my flashlight to preserve the battery. Everything disappeared. For just over three weeks, I had been looking up at the same night sky in Humla. Living under the bright lights of the city, you forget about stars; it seems strange to think they are always there, above the fray. In my first days in Humla, I loved the fact that I was in that wilderness and could finally appreciate how heavenly it all was.

But now, I wanted very badly to be able to see that blank, smoggy sky over the city. I wanted the pollution and the noise and the electric lights blocking out the stars. I wasn’t meant for this, I thought. I pretended I was, but I wasn’t. I was meant for heated apartments and new car smells and high-caloric appetizers and friends with beers in their hands, inviting me over to watch college football. I wanted to be anywhere in the world except here.

Then, from up the trail, I heard voices in the distance. I must have imagined it. I turned my head, then stopped moving so as to not rustle my down jacket. I heard them again. We had been sitting there for maybe forty minutes. As terrible as our situation had been, it suddenly turned worse. The only men I knew to walk at night in Humla were drunk Maoists, perhaps armed. We scrambled off the path, into the field and crouched down to keep from sight.

I counted nine of them by their flashlights. They were speaking loudly and carelessly. I glanced back at my men, crouching behind me. They were straining so hard to understand the voices that they were practically holding their breath. The din got louder.

Suddenly I didn’t care who it was. Our situation couldn’t get worse. Nobody was going to shoot us. If they threatened us, so be it. I had nothing for them to steal. They were going somewhere, to shelter nearby, and they would eat. That was all that mattered right now. I wasn’t staying in that field any longer. The convoy came closer and I heard the man in front laughing. I dropped my bag and rushed at them, crashing onto the path, landing five feet in front of the leader.

“What the
shite
!” he screamed, arms suddenly pin-wheeling backward as if trying to reverse time.

He was Scottish. I would have been less surprised had he been a porpoise. I had not seen a foreigner in weeks, let alone walking at night, let alone right there, right then. I stretched out my arms instinctively to catch him, but he crashed into the man behind him, who caught him. My porters burst out behind me. The other men yelled and tensed, ready to counter our ambush.

“Wait! Wait, no—wait, wait . . .” It seemed the only word I could come up with—I just wanted to say it enough times so they recognized that under this dirty beard and black fleece hat, I was American.

The Scotsman was back on his feet, still tensed. “Where th’ hell did
ye
come from?” he shouted.

“I was here, in there—back there,” I pointed to the field, my voice cracking. “We’re a nonprofit, we’re working with children.” I fought to get out helpful words as quickly as possible so they would understand, so they would relax.

“A
wot
?”

“Nonprofit! I’m American!”

The man straightened up slowly, dusting himself off. He stared hard at me for a few long seconds, taking me in. Then he took one large step forward and held out his hand jovially.

“Right, then. I’m David.”

They were part of a humanitarian mission, working for a Dutch antihunger organization. They had been delayed that day, and thought they could stay all together in Upper Unapani. Their contact there told them about this hut. It was a shelter for travelers, and he had convinced them to make the hike down to it in the dark, as it could sleep a dozen people. The owner of the hut was with them; he removed the padlock and swung open the door.

“Listen, would ye care te join us, then? We’ve got enough rice and daal to feed the lot of us and more. The lads back there from Unapani, they’re makin’ a fire and all. Ye and yer guys can stay here if ye like,” David said. “Unless ye prefer to stay outside . . . though it’s brutal cold, ain’t it? Yer not one of them extreme types, are ye?”

“No—no, I’m not—we’d love to stay here, that would be great. You sure?” I asked in my American instinctive politeness that did not match the situation.

“Course! We’d be happy for the company!” he bellowed, waving us inside. He took my arm as I passed him. “It’s a bloody riot though, ain’t it? Meetin’ here like this?”

A riot. That’s what he called it. The whole thing was impossible. The hut was open, food was being cooked, a fire was made, and we hadn’t moved a muscle. It was a miracle, wrapped in a Christmas bow and laid in my lap.

I
sat outside with David, my new best friend, feeling full and rested and warm by the fire. I leaned back against a log. My two porters had befriended the porters from the other group, and together they sat on the other side of the bonfire, staring into it and speaking energetically. One of them was lighting some kind of pipe that he held cupped in both his hands. The other men from David’s group, foreigners like us, gathered on the porch of the hut, hands buried deep in the pockets of their down jackets, laughing over some story that I couldn’t hear, their pale, foggy breath bursting from their lips like small steam engines.

I was telling David about my weeks in Humla, about the parents I had found and how stunned they were. That they seemed to have given up all hope. I told him I wanted to do something about it, though it would be difficult to reunite the children quickly, with such poverty in the region.

Poverty was something David’s group knew about, having studied the region for some time before arriving for this fact-finding mission. They had only arrived three days earlier, and were also trying to leave in the next few days. But they had a radio with them in case things went bad, if they couldn’t get back to Simikot or they needed a helicopter. David told me just in his few days there, he loved Humla—the people and the landscape. He loved the honey, which was a specialty of the region, he told me. And the apples. Everybody had told him about the apples. The apples were a highlight, he said.

“You tried the apples?” I asked him. “I know a boy—he’s from a village a few days from here called Jaira—he never stopped talking about the apples.”

“He’s right, they’re fantastic. I actually have a bag full of them—here, hang on,” he said, and he walked over to his bag, grabbed one, and tossed it to me. I caught it, rubbed it on my dirty sleeve, and took a large bite. It was delicious.

“Was I right?” David asked, watching my expression. “I got a ton of ’em—ye want to bring one home for yer friend?”

I considered that. It was an incredible coincidence, having the opportunity to bring the boy an apple; it was the first apple I’d come across in Humla. But it occurred to me that it wasn’t the apples Jagrit was always talking about. It was the memory of the apple, a five-year-old’s memory of savoring that sweet taste, the only real memory he had left of this place. I wanted to help him keep that memory. No apple could ever live up to that. Besides, the letter from his father in my bag would be a far greater gift than an apple could ever be.

That night, we slept on the hard floor, softened a bit by scattered straw. I set the alarm on my watch for 3:30
A.M.
We could only sleep three hours before having to set off again. We were not out of the woods yet. Simikot was still a good fifteen hours’ hike from our hut. Fifteen hours in Humla meant two or two and a half days of hiking, due to the difficulty of the terrain. We didn’t have that long if I want wanted to get back in time to meet Liz. We would need to cover that two and a half days’ hike in a single day. We had to reach Simikot that evening.

I woke five minutes before my alarm went off. Climbing out of my sleeping bag, I woke my men, piled on several layers of clothing, and we quietly left the little hut. David had insisted I not pay them for the food. I scrawled a note of thanks and left it in his boots. Then we continued through the dark, still a long way from safety.

While the likelihood of snow had increased with each passing day, we had another deadline as well: we had to make it to the final river crossing, a day’s walk from here, by 5:00
P.M.
Because there was no bridge, we had to make sure we got there when men were still working who could ferry us across in that steel crate attached to a cable. I remembered from our first days in Humla Rinjin telling me that they worked from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon. If we got there and nobody was there to pull us across, we would be trapped for yet another day, and be forced to retrace our steps back to the lean-to at Bokche Ganda to sleep that night. Every day we delayed was a day the long overdue snow could finally arrive, sealing us into Humla.

The porters fell farther behind in the dark. I fought to control the panic rising in my throat during the long moments when I could no longer hear them, when I feared they had abandoned me, taken my backpack, which alone was worth more than these men could earn in a year. If that happened, I would be lost. In the end, my paranoia won; I waited for them. Looking for a place to rest, I could make out a kind of overhang in a cliff wall to my left, off the path. I started toward it.

As I approached it, I slipped on some loose stones, sending them tumbling off the path. Instantly, two pairs of narrow yellow eyes appeared beneath the overhang. Then low growls. Adrenaline pounded through me—I swung up a walking pole like a baseball bat, dizzy with fear, and stumbled backward, away from the growls, knocking more rocks down the path. The clamor broke the silence and a man shouted. Under the overhang, a hundred pairs of eyes snapped open. I heard my porters, behind me, shout to the man, and he shouted back, all drowned out by vicious barking.

It was a shepherd and his dogs, protecting his flock. The dogs were soon calmed by the man, and the rumbling of a hundred nervous sheep soon quieted. Their eyes, pair by pair, blinked out, and silence fell again like a thick blanket.

We arrived at the cliffs. There were several sets of cliffs, but these were different. The terrain was unmistakable, even in the dark. We had crossed a wide stream earlier where the path ended, and we clamored over stepping stones, large boulders strewn haphazardly. I could feel the terrain change then, too, emerging out of the forest and hearing the stream, feeling a cooler breeze from my left. It was the same kind of change now. The river had reemerged, but far down below us. To my right the world dropped away, and I felt myself instinctively leaning left, into the uneven granite wall.

I remembered this part of the path from my journey south. I had been nervous to walk it then, even during the day with Rinjin standing behind me, my own personal tether to the path. There were times when the trail simply fell away, destroyed by rains. You clung to the wall and leaped across small chasms. Rinjin would take one end of one of my poles as I jumped, lest I lose my footing on the gravel and end up a hundred feet down.

I was scared. I could handle heights, but I didn’t like them. Rock climbing on sheer walls, even tied onto the rock, puts me into a glaze of sweat, but I can do it. But the height plus a slippery surface? Well, that is the stuff of nightmares for me. I wanted to wait until it was light to attempt this pass. It was one thing to be up against Maoists and dogs and the chill of the night; it was quite another to slip wordlessly off a wall and into the freezing white water far below, thousands of miles from home and family, and disappear without a trace.

But I couldn’t stop, or I wouldn’t be walking at night in the first place. It would be stupid to give up now, after everything I’d been through. With my left hand, I made sure to stay as close to the wall as possible. With my right, I used my pole like a blind man, testing each step before I took it. And when I reached those small chasms, I controlled my breathing and imagined I was on a sidewalk in New York City, stepping casually over an indentation in the concrete. An hour later, we were past it. My jaw was sore from clenching my teeth the entire time.

The sky brightened, too slowly to notice at first, the dark blue giving way to a cold, dim gray. We still had many hours to walk, we were still exhausted, but the daylight rinsed the fear away, especially along the later cliff walls. Then, just after 4:00
P.M.
, I saw it: the bridge. The cable, the steel box. And the men sitting beside it, waiting to ferry people across. For the first time in days, I began to relax. It was still a steep ascent up to Simikot, ten thousand feet above sea level, but I knew at last, with certainty, that I would make it. Even if I had to crawl.

We strolled, unnoticed, through the village. I was covered in enough filth and scruff to be almost camouflaged. We headed straight to the guesthouse. Rinjin was not there, but his sister was. She said Rinjin had returned for a day, but had to leave again. I was disappointed—I had very much wanted to see my friend, to tell him everything that had happened since we parted ways. But I accepted the mug of tea from her, paid my porters, and sat in an old plastic garden chair, looking back down the valley, until she called me inside for daal bhat.

As exhausted as I was that night in Simikot, I couldn’t sleep. I would catch a plane in the early morning, but only if it didn’t snow that night. The clouds had arrived the day before, bearing more snow. Rinjin’s sister stated this as a fact, in the same breath telling me I was very welcome to stay with them through the winter. I wanted her to take those words back, to suck them out of the air and incinerate them. The snow was here?
Now?
After all this? I looked at the sky. I hadn’t noticed the dark clouds—I hadn’t looked up in two days. But there they were, resting on the high mountains that separate Nepal from Tibet, black thoroughbreds quivering in the starting gate.