Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day Read Online Free

Valley to the east, but some Rolwaling Sherpas were offered jobs, including Hrita Sherpa , who broke trail for Tenzing Norgay and Hillary days before their first ascent.
    Rolwaling never underwent development like the Khumbu, where Everest-bound tourists injected money and jobs and Hillary built schools, a hospital, and an airstrip. During Chhiring’s childhood in the 1970s, Rolwaling was the “ most isolated, traditional and economically backward of all the Sherpa communities in Nepal.”
    Traders seldom passed through, and beasts of burden could barely scramble up the banks of scree. The Sherpas relied on local materials and their own labor to feed and clothe themselves. No one owned a cotton T-shirt; yak wool was woven into cloth. Chhiring’s father dressed in a chuba , a wool robe secured by a sash over his trousers. In the winter, he wore buffalo leather boots that were padded with dried moss. His mother wore an ungi , a sleeveless tunic draped with a blue-striped apron that covered her front and back. To signify her unmarried status, Chhiring’s younger sister wore an apron only on her back.
    Chhiring was born in 1974 on the floor of a room that served as his family’s kitchen, barn, and bedroom. The boy—said Chhiring’s father, aunt, and uncle—was a slacker who loved to sneak away and explore the mountains. His relatives still tell the story of his gravest transgression: the time when, as an eight-year-old playing with fire, Chhiring set the hills ablaze. The flames burned the winter reserves of feed, and the animals went hungry. Chhiring’s father beat him with a stick, and, twenty-six years later, still hadn’t forgiven him.
    It was a childhood disrupted by death. Chhiring’s younger sister returned from the fields one afternoon with red blisters crawling up her skin. As the pustules clustered on her tongue, she suffocated. Another sister was carrying water from the river when a rock dropped off a cliff and crushed her internal organs. No one could figure out what happened to Chhiring’s two-year-old brother. Perhaps he ate something toxic. One day, his gut inflated. With his stomach painfully distended, the child soon died. A third sister’s birth left Chhiring’s mother, Lakpa Futi, hemorrhaging. Mother and infant died.
    Chhiring watched the lama perform the death rites on his mother, yanking her hair to let her spirit leave through the head, whispering into her ear advice about the afterlife. Chhiring tried not to cry, believing it could cause a veil of blood to cover her eyes and obscure her way into the next life. He was too young to go up the hill for the cremation, so he sat in the room where he was born and watched his mother’s smoke lift into the sky. His father, Ngawang Thundu Sherpa, returned home and collapsed.
    From then on, Ngawang passed out several times a day. Villagers suspected that a demon possessed him. As the fainting became more frequent, Chhiring’s father stopped caring for the four remaining children. He fell mute and forgot to eat and bathe. When he slept, he woke crying, and sobbed until he fainted again.
    The fields withered, the animals strayed, and the house fell into disrepair. The family ran low on food. The children’s shoes and clothing wore out. No matter how hard he tried, Ngawang could not motivate himself to work. When able to rouse himself, he spent all his effort praying, trying to appease the gods. “I didn’t understand what I had done to make them punish me,” he recalled.
    Chhiring, then twelve years old, became head of the household. He sold off livestock and bartered for food to feed his siblings but soon ran out of things to trade. In exchange for potatoes, he worked for other families, fetching water, gathering firewood, and sweeping. His sister, Nima, cared for their father and the two youngest children. Chhiring didn’t make enough to afford shoes, but he and his family didn’t starve, and relatives helped when they became desperate.
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