Read Online Snowblind by Daniel Arnold - Free Book Online Page B

stumbled around, just remembering how to breathe. The LO, whose name was Shafiq, but who we all called Captain, ambled next to me.
    â€œMister Chase,” he said. “Are you not very small?” I admitted that I was undersized. “But should you not be a large strapping man like Mister Bill in order to climb mountains?” I told him that Bill would make a bigger target when the mountain started throwing things at us. He chortled, and just for a moment, the buffoon look vanished off his face and he said, “Mister Bill makes a very fine target for a mountain, does he not?” Then it was like he caught himself, and his eyes went dumb and happy again, and he twirled his ridiculous stick and walked away whistling.
    Skardu isn’t Boulder, but it could be Moab. Restaurants. Gear shops. Guide companies. Tour groups. We had journeyed into deepest northern Pakistan, but it was the least foreign place I’d seen yet. It looked like it should be foreign—up on the hills above town, there were homes that were basically dugouts closed up with sticks—buttown was filled with white people and badly translated Urdu in a bunch of European languages. Eight Norwegian women with short shorts, ponytails, and sunglasses propped on their heads sat in a teahouse on the center street. A German expedition headed the same way as us was making a lot of noise and not very much progress packing porter-loads. An American expedition to Masherbrum was just leaving. Four French snowboarders were planning a first descent on Broad Peak. Some scruffy Poles sat on the ground against a wall smoking cigarettes, and I thought of what Gregor had said and wanted to go join them. But I still wanted to play my part, too, I guess, so I didn’t. There were Spaniards walking around arm-in-arm singing soccer anthems—I think that’s what they were singing. Big raindrops came down in bunches. There was concrete along the main road, but everything behind was dirt, and then the foothills jumped up into the clouds.
    Everything on the main road looked hasty. People and buildings. Unfinished concrete. Jury-rigged electrical wires strung roof-to-roof, hanging down in the street. Back from the road, time ran backward. Go one block, and you stepped back a century. Two blocks, two centuries. Much further, and you lost a thousand years.
    With all the foreigners around, there were guys lined up to sell stuff to us—expedition pimps, basically, which is what we called them. Food, porters, gear, vodka, hash. There were porters milling around—hundreds of them, and there still weren’t enough. Bill planned on using a hundred and forty porters just for our expedition, and there was no way we were going to find that many in Skardu with all the other expeditions there too.
    Nick took out the Pelican laptop case and got to work updating the expedition blog by satellite. Bill ruffled his hair, watched over his shoulder, dictated. He was pleased. “One hundred and eighty-two hits since yesterday,” he announced, which was our cue to clap. Here was a man who owned a goddamn empire, but he was slumming for a couple hundred bored armchair mountaineers to read about his expedition and wait for the mountain to start killing people. Here was one of his principles at work: “The only thing that matters is that it’s happening right now .” That’s Bill. He was always performing, and there was more than one audience. He could be vicious, too. Sometimes he got slit-eyed and furious, and I never knew whether he was playing that or not.
    Gregor and I, with Captain Shafiq, had the job of buying porter rations. Hundreds of pounds of dahl, ghee, rice. And six goats. That was important, Frank told me, for morale. What the hell did I know about choosing goats? If expedition morale was going to ride on my goats, I’d have preferred a more experienced goatherd. I had a pouch around my neck uncomfortably stuffed with rupees.