Three Cups Of Tea Part 15

"Thanks," Mortenson said, sincerely, shaking his hand, before folding the bill and placing it into the empty manila envelope he'd brought along to collect contributions. Mortenson picked up the last few pamphlets and crammed them into his overnight bag with the others, sighing over the extra weight he'd carried halfway across the country for ten dollars, and would now have to carry home.

On the seat of the last chair in the last row, next to the display of digital watches, Mortenson found an envelope torn from the back of a CAI newsletter. Inside was a personal check for twenty thousand dollars.

Mortenson didn't face a sea of empty seats every week. In the Pacific Northwest particularly, the outdoor community had begun to embrace him, especially after the details of his story began to trickle out to the public. In February 1999, the Oregonian Oregonian became the first major American newspaper to tell Mortenson's story. Outdoor writer Terry Richard drew his readers' attention to the former climber's unlikely success scaling a different sort of peak from the physical kind. "It's a part of the world where Americans are mistrusted and often hated," Richard wrote, "but not Greg Mortenson, a 41-year-old resident of Montana whose life's work is to build schools in remote villages of Pakistan's mountain valleys." became the first major American newspaper to tell Mortenson's story. Outdoor writer Terry Richard drew his readers' attention to the former climber's unlikely success scaling a different sort of peak from the physical kind. "It's a part of the world where Americans are mistrusted and often hated," Richard wrote, "but not Greg Mortenson, a 41-year-old resident of Montana whose life's work is to build schools in remote villages of Pakistan's mountain valleys."

Richard related Mortenson's mission to his readers, arguing that aid work half a world away was having more of an effect on their lives than most Americans realized. "A politically volatile area, rural Pakistan is a breeding ground for terrorists who share anti-American sentiment," Richard explained. "Illiterate young boys often wind up in [terrorist] camps," he quoted Mortenson as saying. "When we increase literacy, we substantially reduce tensions."

"In one of the world's most volatile regions, "[Mortenson's] work already is making a difference," Richard concluded.

The following month, San Francisco Examiner San Francisco Examiner travel editor John travel editor John Flinn wrote a piece promoting Mortenson's upcoming lecture in the Bay Area by summarizing his remarkable life story, concluding, "It's something to think about the next time you ask: What difference can one person make?" That winter, when Mortenson gave his slide show in Portland and San Francisco, event organizers had to turn hundreds of people away from packed venues. Flinn wrote a piece promoting Mortenson's upcoming lecture in the Bay Area by summarizing his remarkable life story, concluding, "It's something to think about the next time you ask: What difference can one person make?" That winter, when Mortenson gave his slide show in Portland and San Francisco, event organizers had to turn hundreds of people away from packed venues.

By the millennium, Mortenson and the CAI had become a cause to which many of America's leading mountaineers were rallying. Before his October 1999 death in a freak avalanche on Nepal's s.h.i.+shapangma, Mortenson's neighbor and friend Alex Lowe, at the time perhaps the world's most respected alpinist, introduced Mortenson at a Montana fundraiser. "While most of us are trying to scale new peaks," Lowe told an audience of climbers, "Greg has quietly been moving even greater mountains on his own. What he has accomplished, with pure tenacity and determination, is incredible. His kind of climb is one we should all attempt."

Lowe's message echoed throughout the mountaineering world. "A lot of us think about helping, but Mortenson just does it," says famed climber Jack Tackle, who donated twenty thousand dollars to help CAI establish the Jafarabad girls' elementary school in the Upper s.h.i.+gar Valley.

But the more beloved Mortenson became in Pakistan, and the more admiration Mortenson inspired among the mountaineering community, the more he frustrated the people who worked with him in America.

When he wasn't bouncing down dirt roads in Pakistan or hauling his bags to slide shows in his own country, Mortenson jealously guarded his time with his family in Bozeman and cloaked himself in the silence of his bas.e.m.e.nt.

"Even when he was home, we often wouldn't hear from Greg for weeks," says former CAI board chairman Tom Vaughan. "And he wouldn't return phone calls or e-mails. The board had a discussion about trying to make Greg account for how he spent his time, but we realized that would never work. Greg just does whatever he wants."

"What we really needed to do was train a few Greg Juniors," says h.o.e.rni's widow, Jennifer Wilson, "some people Greg could delegate projects to. But he refused to do that. He said we didn't have enough money to rent an office or hire staff. And then he'd just bog down in the details of one project and neglect another. That's why I decided to distance myself from CAI. He accomplished a lot. But I felt we could do so much more if Greg agreed to run CAI more responsibly."

"Let's be honest," says Tom Vaughan. "The fact is the CAI is Greg. I didn't mind rubber-stamping whatever he wanted to work on. But without Greg, the CAI is finished. The risks he takes in that part of the world I understand-that's part of the job. But I began to get angry about the terrible way he took care of himself. He stopped climbing and exercising. He stopped sleeping. He began to gain so much weight that he didn't even look like a mountaineer anymore. I understand that he decided to pour everything into his work," Vaughan says, "But if he drops dead of a heart attack what's the point?"

Reluctantly, Mortenson agreed to hire an a.s.sistant, Christine Slaughter, to work with him a few hours each day organizing his bas.e.m.e.nt, which even he could see was becoming an embarra.s.sing mess. But throughout the winter of 2000, Mortenson was too alarmed by CAI's dwindling funds-their bank balance had dipped below one hundred thousand dollars-to expand CAI's American operations any further. "I mean, I'd gotten to the point where I could put up a school that would educate a village for generations for about twelve thousand dollars," Mortenson says. "Most of our staff in Pakistan were thrilled to make four hundred or five hundred dollars a year. It was hard to imagine paying someone an American salary when that money could do so much more over there."

Mortenson was then earning an annual salary of twenty-eight thousand dollars. Coupled with Tara's meager income as a part-time clinical psychologist at Montana State, they were just managing to tread water with their monthly expenses. But with CAI under serious financial strain, Mortenson says he couldn't, in good conscience, have accepted more, even if the board had offered him a raise.

The idea of a single rich donor solving all his problems with one flourish of a pen lodged in Mortenson's mind. Wealthy people aren't easily pried apart from their fortunes. He had learned that much since the comedy of the 580 letters. But Jean h.o.e.rni had also taught him how much difference a single large donation could make. When a potential donor in Atlanta began calling CAI's office dangling monetary bait, Mortenson bit down on the hook and booked a flight.

"I've been saving money all my life," the elderly widow explained to Mortenson on the phone. "I've acc.u.mulated a fortune with at least six zeros behind it and after I read about the work you're doing I know what I was saving it for. Come down to Atlanta so we can discuss my donation."

At the Hartsfield International Airport arrivals hall, Mortenson switched on his cell phone and retrieved a message instructing him to take a shuttle to a hotel fifteen minutes away, then walk to a remote parking lot at the edge of the hotel's grounds.

In the lot, he found seventy-eight-year-old Vera Kurtz hunched over the wheel of her elderly Ford Fairlane. The trunk and rear seat were jammed with old newspapers and tin cans, so he climbed into the pa.s.senger seat and wedged his carry-on bag between the dashboard and his chest. "She'd sent me on this goose chase so she could avoid paying a few dollars to park at the airport. And when I saw that she couldn't even bear to part with the papers and cans in her car, I should have turned around and taken a plane home, but that line about the six zeros messed up my judgment. It made me get in and close the door."

While Mortenson squeezed the handles of his bag, Vera drove the wrong way down one-way streets, shaking her fist at the drivers who honked at her in warning. In her 1950s ranch home, Mortenson sidestepped through towering rows of decades-old magazines and newspapers until he reached Vera's kitchen table, beside a plugged sink full of filmy gray water. "She unscrewed a few of those minibottles of whiskey that she'd been collecting on airplanes for years, poured us a drink, and presented me with a bouquet of roses that looked recycled," Mortenson says. "The flowers were brown and almost completely dead."

After a decent interval, Mortenson tried to steer the conversation toward Vera's donation to the CAI, but his host had her own agenda. She laid out her plans for the next three days-a visit to the High Museum of Art, a stroll through the Atlanta Botanical Garden, and three talks she had arranged for Mortenson at a local library, a community college, and a travel club. Seventy-two hours had never offered such a bleak prospect to Mortenson before. He was weighing whether to stick them out when a knock on the door announced the arrival of a ma.s.seur Vera had hired.

"You work too hard, Greg," Vera told him, as the ma.s.seur set up his folding table in a clearing at the center of her living room. "You deserve to relax."

"They both expected me to strip naked right there," Mortenson says, "but I excused myself and went into the bathroom to think. I figured I'd been through enough getting CAI up and running that I could just roll with whatever Vera did for the next three days, especially if there was the chance of a big donation at the end of the tunnel."

Mortenson fished around in her cabinet for something large enough to wrap around his waist. Most of the towels Vera had stockpiled bore the fading logos of hotels, and were too small to cover him. He pulled a graying sheet from the linen closet, tucked it as securely as he could around his waist, and shuffled out to endure his ma.s.sage.

At 2:00 a.m., Mortenson was out cold, snoring on Vera's sagging mattress, when the lights flicked on, waking him. Vera had insisted on sleeping on her couch and offering Mortenson the bed. He opened his eyes to the phantasmagorical vision of the seventy-eight-year-old Vera standing over him in a transparent negligee.

"She was right there in front of me," Mortenson says. "I was too shocked to say anything."

"I'm looking for my socks," Vera said, fis.h.i.+ng interminably through the drawers of her dresser as Mortenson pulled a pillow over his head and cringed beneath it.

Back on the airplane to Bozeman, empty-handed, Mortenson realized that his hostess had never intended to donate any money. "She didn't even ask one question about my work, or the children of Pakistan," Mortenson says. "She was just a lonely woman who wanted a visitor, and I told myself I'd better be smarter in the future."

But Mortenson continued to snap at the bait wealthy admirers of his dangled. After a well-attended speech at the Mountain Film Festival in Banff, Mortenson accepted an invitation from Tom Lang, a wealthy local contractor, who hinted at a large donation he was prepared to make, and offered to hold a CAI fundraising party at his estate the following evening.

Lang had designed his ten-thousand-square-foot home himself, down to the faux marble paint on the walls of the great room where guests mingled with gla.s.ses of the cheap wine so often served by the very wealthy, and the twelve-foot-high white plaster statues of poodles that sat vigil at both ends of his twenty-foot fireplace.

Lang displayed Mortenson to his guests with the same pride of owners.h.i.+p with which he pointed out his custom bathroom fixtures and the fireplace poodles. And though Mortenson placed a large stack of CAI pamphlets prominently on the buffet table, at evening's end, he hadn't raised a cent from Lang for CAI. Having learned his lesson from Vera Kurtz, Mortenson pressed his host for details about his donation. "We'll work all that out tomorrow," Lang told him. "But first you're going dogsledding."

"Dogsledding?"

"Can't come to Canada without giving it a whirl," Lang said.

In a warming hut an hour west of Banff, where they sat after Mortenson had been dragged by a team of huskies on a cursory loop through the woods by himself, Mortenson spent the better part of the following afternoon listening to the man's self-aggrandizing epic about how a plucky contractor, armed only with grit and determination, had conquered the Banff housing market.

Mortenson, whose mother, Jerene, had flown from Wisconsin to hear his speech, hardly saw her son during her three-day visit. Mortenson, unsurprisingly, returned to Montana empty-handed.

"It just makes me sick to see Greg kowtowing to all those rich people," Jerene Mortenson says. "They should be bowing down to him."

By the spring of 2000, Tara Bishop had tired of her husband's flitting across the country on fool's errands when he wasn't away in Pakistan. Seven months pregnant with their second child, she called a summit meeting with her husband at their kitchen table.

"I told Greg I love how pa.s.sionate he is about his work," Tara says. "But I told him he had a duty to his family, too. He needed to get more sleep, get some exercise, and get enough time at home to have a life with us." Until then, Mortenson had left home to be in Pakistan for three or four months at a time. "We agreed to set the limit at two months," Tara says. "After two months things just get too weird around here without him."

Mortenson also promised his wife he'd learn to manage his time better. The CAI board set aside a small budget each year for Mortenson to take college courses on subjects like management, development, and Asian politics. "I never had the time to take cla.s.ses," Mortenson says. "So I spent the money on books. A lot of the time, when people thought I was just sitting in my bas.e.m.e.nt doing nothing, I was reading those books. I would start my day at 3:30 a.m., trying to learn more about development theory finance, and how to be a better manager."

But the lessons he'd learned in the Karakoram had taught him there were some answers you couldn't find in print. So Mortenson designed a crash course on development for himself. From his reading, he decided that the two finest rural development programs then running in the world were in the Philippines and Bangladesh. For a rare untethered month he left Pakistan and Bozeman behind and flew to Southeast Asia.

In Cavite, an hour south of Manila, Mortenson visited the Inst.i.tute of Rural Reconstruction, run by John Rigby, a friend of Lila Bishop's. Rigby taught Mortenson how to set up tiny businesses for the rural poor, like bicycle taxis and cigarette stands, that could quickly turn a profit on a small investment.

In the country that had once been called East Pakistan, Mortenson visited BARRA, the Bangladesh Rural Reconstruction a.s.sociation. "A lot of people call Bangladesh the armpit of Asia," Mortenson says, "because of its extreme poverty. But the girls' education initiative is hugely successful there. I knocked on doors and visited NGOs that had been in the business of educating girls for a long time. I watched as amazing, strong women held village meetings and worked to empower their daughters.

"They were following the same philosophy as I was," Mortenson says. "n.o.bel Prize winner Amartya Sen's idea that you can change a culture by giving its girls the tools to grow up educated so they can help themselves. It was amazing to see the idea in action, working so well after only a generation, and it fired me up to fight for girls' education in Pakistan."

On the b.u.mpy Biman Airways flight from Dacca to Calcutta, Mortenson had his notion of the desperate need to educate rural girls confirmed. The lone foreigner on the flight, he was shepherded by stewardesses to first cla.s.s, where he sat among fifteen attractive Banglades.h.i.+ girls in bright new saris. "They were young and terrified," Mortenson says. "They didn't know how to use their seatbelts or silverware and when we got to the airport, I watched helplessly as corrupt officials whisked them off the plane and around the customs guards. I couldn't do anything for them. I could only imagine the kind of horrible life of prost.i.tution they were heading to."

From the headlines of newspapers on stands at Calcutta International Airport, Mortenson learned that one of his heroes, Mother Teresa, had died after a long illness. He had a brief layover in Calcutta before heading home and decided to try to pay her his respects.

"Has.h.i.+sh? Heroin? Girl ma.s.sage? Boy ma.s.sage?" the taxi driver said, taking Mortenson's arm inside the arrivals hall, where he wasn't supposed to have access to pa.s.sengers. "What you like? Anything, no problem."

Mortenson laughed, impressed by this shady wisp of a man's determination. "Mother Teresa just died. I'd like to visit her," Mortenson said. "Can you take me there?"

"No problem," he said, waggling his head as he took Morten-son's bag.

The driver smoked furiously as they rolled along in his black and yellow Amba.s.sador cab, leaning so far out the window that Mortenson had an un.o.bstructed view of Calcutta's doomsday traffic through the winds.h.i.+eld. They stopped at a flower market where Mortenson gave the driver ten dollars' worth of rupees and asked him to select an appropriate funeral arrangement. "He left me sitting there, sweating, and came back at least thirty minutes later, carrying a huge gaudy ma.s.s of carnations and roses in his arms," Mortenson says. "We could hardly squeeze it into the backseat."

At dusk, outside the Missionaries of Charity Motherhouse, hundreds of hushed mourners crowded the gates, holding candles and arranging offerings of fruit and incense on the pavement.

The driver got out and rattled the metal gate loudly. This Sahib has come all the way from America to pay his respects! This Sahib has come all the way from America to pay his respects! He shouted in Bengali. He shouted in Bengali. Open up! Open up! An elderly An elderly chokidar chokidar guarding the entrance stood up and returned with a young nun in a blue habit who looked the dusty traveler and his explosion of flowers up and down before waving him inside. Walking distastefully ahead, she led Mortenson down a dark hallway echoing with distant prayer, and pointed him toward a bathroom. guarding the entrance stood up and returned with a young nun in a blue habit who looked the dusty traveler and his explosion of flowers up and down before waving him inside. Walking distastefully ahead, she led Mortenson down a dark hallway echoing with distant prayer, and pointed him toward a bathroom.

"Why don't you was.h.i.+ng up first?" she said in Slavic-accented English.

She lay on a simple cot, at the center of a bright room full of flickering devotional candles. Mortenson gently nudged other bouquets aside, making room for his gaudy offering, and took a seat against a wall. The nun, backing out the door, left him alone with Mother Teresa. wall. The nun, backing out the door, left him alone with Mother Teresa.

"I sat in the corner with no idea what to do," Mortenson says. "Since I was a little boy she'd been one of my heroes."

An ethnic Albanian born to a successful contractor in Kosovo, Mother Teresa began her life as Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. From the age of twelve, she said, she felt a calling to work with the poor, and began training for missionary work. As a teenager she joined the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto, an Irish order of nuns, because of their commitment to provide education for girls. For two decades, she taught at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta, eventually becoming its princ.i.p.al. But in 1946, she said, she received a calling from G.o.d instructing her to serve the "poorest of the poor." In 1948, after receiving the special dispensation of Pope Pius XII to work independently, she founded an open-air school for Calcutta's homeless children.

In 1950, the woman by then known as Mother Teresa received permission from the Vatican to found her own order, the Missionaries of Charity, whose duty, she said, was to care for "the hungry, the naked, the homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for throughout society, people that have become a burden to the society and are shunned by everyone."

Mortenson, with his affection for society's underdogs, admired her determination to serve the world's most neglected populations. As a boy in Mos.h.i.+, he'd learned about one of her first projects outside India, a hospice for the dying in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. By the time she was awarded the n.o.bel Peace Prize in 1979, Mother Teresa's celebrity had become the engine that powered Missionaries of Charity orphanages, hospices, and schools around the world.

Mortenson had heard the criticism of the woman who lay on a cot before him ratchet up in the years before her death. He'd read her defense of her practice of taking donations from unsavory sources, like drug dealers, corporate criminals, and corrupt politicians hoping to purchase their own path to salvation. After his own struggle to raise funds for the children of Pakistan, he felt he understood what had driven her to famously dismiss her critics by saying, "I don't care where the money comes from. It's all washed clean in the service of G.o.d."

"I sat in the corner staring at this shrouded figure," Mortenson says. "She looked so small, draped in her cloth. And I remember thinking how amazing it was that such a tiny person had such a huge effect on humanity." says. "She looked so small, draped in her cloth. And I remember thinking how amazing it was that such a tiny person had such a huge effect on humanity."

Nuns, visiting the room to pay their respects, had knelt to touch Mother Teresa's feet. He could see where the cream-colored muslin had been discolored from the laying on of hundreds of hands. But it didn't feel right to touch her feet. Mortenson knelt on the cool tiled floor next to Mother Teresa and placed his large palm over her small hand. It covered it completely.

The nun who'd showed him in returned, and found him kneeling. She nodded once, as if to say, "Ready?" And Mortenson followed her quiet footfalls down the dark hallway and out into the heat and clamor of Calcutta.

His taxi driver was squatting on his heels, smoking, and jumped up when he saw his payday approaching. "Success? Success?" he asked, leading the distracted American through a street thick with rickshaws and back to the waiting Amba.s.sador. "Now," he said "you like some ma.s.sage?"

Safely back in his bas.e.m.e.nt, during the winter of 2000, Mortenson often reflected on those few rare moments with Mother Teresa. He marveled at how she lived her life without long trips home, away from misery and suffering, so she could rest up and prepare to resume the fight. That winter, Mortenson felt bone-tired. The shoulder he'd injured falling on Mount Sill, the day Christa had died, had never fully healed. Fruitlessly, he tried yoga and acupuncture. Sometimes it throbbed so unignorably that he popped fifteen or twenty Advil a day, trying to dull the pain enough to concentrate on his work.

Mortenson tried just as unsuccessfully to get comfortable with the process of becoming a public figure in America. But the endless ranks of people wanting to squeeze something from him sent him scurrying to his bas.e.m.e.nt where he'd ignore the endlessly ringing phone and e-mails that piled up by the hundreds.

Climbers contacted him, wanting help arranging expeditions to Pakistan, miffed when a former climber wouldn't drop whatever he was doing to help them. Journalists and filmmakers called constantly, hoping to tag along with Mortenson on his next trip, wanting to exploit the contacts he'd made over the previous seven years to win access to restricted regions before their compet.i.tors could. Physicians, glaciologists, seismologists, ethnologists, and wildlife biologists wrote lengthy letters, unintelligible to laymen, wanting detailed answers to academic questions they had about Pakistan.

Tara recommended a fellow therapist in Bozeman whom Mortenson began talking to regularly when he was home, trying to mine the root causes of his desire to hide when he wasn't in Pakistan, and strategizing about ways to cope with the increasing anger of those who wanted more time than he was able to give.

His mother-in-law Lila Bishop's house became another of Morten-son's havens, especially its bas.e.m.e.nt, where he would spend hours poring over Barry Bishop's mountaineering library, reading about the Balti migration out of Tibet, or studying a rare bound volume of the exquisite black-and-white plates of K2 and its accompanying peaks that Vittorio Sella shot on his large-format camera with the duke of Abruzzi's 1909 expedition.

Eventually, as his family gathered for dinner upstairs, Mortenson would permit himself to be coaxed away from his books. Lila Bishop, by then, shared her daughter's opinion of Mortenson. "I had to admit Tara was right, there was something to this 'Mr. Wonderful' stuff," Lila says. And like her daughter, she had come to the conclusion that the large, gentle man living two blocks away was cut from unusual cloth. "One snowy night we were barbecuing, and I asked Greg to go out and turn the salmon," Lila says. "I looked out the patio door a moment later and saw Greg, standing barefoot in the snow, scooping up the fish with a shovel, and flipping it, like that was the most normal thing in the world. And I guess, to him, it was. That's when I realized that he's just not one of us. He's his own species."

The rest of that winter, in his own bas.e.m.e.nt, Mortenson obsessed about reports he was receiving detailing a calamity developing in northern Afghanistan. More than ten thousand Afghans, mostly women and children, had fled north ahead of advancing Taliban troops until they'd run out of real estate at the Tajik border. On islands in the middle of the Amu Darya River, these refugees scooped out mud huts and were slowly starving, eating gra.s.ses that grew by the riverbank out of desperation.

While they sickened and died, Taliban soldiers shot at them for sport, firing their rocket-propelled grenades up in great arcs until they'd come cras.h.i.+ng down among the terrified refugees. When they tried to flee to Tajikistan, paddling logs across the river, they were shot by Russian troops guarding the border, determined not to let Afghanistan's growing chaos spill over into their backyard.

"Since I started working in Pakistan, I haven't slept much," Mortenson says. "But that winter I hardly slept at all. I was up all night, pacing my bas.e.m.e.nt, trying to find some way to help them."

Mortenson fired off letters to newspaper editors and members of Congress, trying to stir up outrage. "But no one cared," Mortenson says. "The White House, Congress, the UN were all silent. I even started fantasizing about picking up an AK-47, getting Faisal Baig to round up some men, and crossing over to Afghanistan to fight for the refugees myself.

"Bottom line is I failed. I couldn't make anyone care. And Tara will tell you I was a nightmare. All I could think about was all those freezing children who'd never have the chance to grow up, helpless out there between groups of men with guns, dying from the dysentery they'd get from drinking river water or starving to death. I was actually going a bit crazy. It's amazing that Tara put up with me that winter.

"In times of war, you often hear leaders-Christian, Jewish, and Muslim-saying, 'G.o.d is on our side.' But that isn't true. In war, G.o.d is on the side of refugees, widows, and orphans."

It wasn't until July 24, 2000, that Mortenson felt his spirits lift. That day, he knelt in his kitchen and scooped up handfuls of warm water to dribble down his wife's bare back. He laid his hands on Tara's shoulders, kneading the taut muscles, but her mind was miles from his touch. She was concentrating on the hard labor ahead of her. Their new midwife, Vicky Cain, had suggested that Tara try an underwater birth for their second child. Their bathtub was too small so the midwife brought them a huge light-blue plastic horse trough she used, wedged it between their sink and kitchen table, and filled it with warm water.

They named their son Khyber Bishop Mortenson. Three years earlier, before the Korphe School inauguration, Mortenson had taken his wife and one-year-old daughter to see the Khyber Pa.s.s. Their Christmas card that year featured a photo of Greg and Tara at the Afghan border, in tribal dress, holding Amira and two AK-47s frontier guards had handed them as a joke. Beneath the photo, the card read "Peace on Earth."

Two hours after his son floated into the world out of his horse trough, Mortenson felt fully happy for the first time in months. Just the feeling of his hand on his son's head seemed to pour a current of contentment into him. Mortenson wrapped his brand-new boy in a fuzzy blanket and brought Khyber to his daughter's preschool cla.s.s so Amira could dazzle her cla.s.smates at show-and-tell.

Amira, already a more comfortable public speaker than her father would ever be, revealed to her cla.s.smates the miracle of her brother's tiny fingers and toes while her father held him bundled in his big hands like a football.

"He's so small and wrinkly," a blonde four-year-old with pigtails said. "Do little babies like that grow up to be big like us?"

"Inshallah," Mortenson said. Mortenson said.

"Huh?"

"I hope so, sweetie," Mortenson said. "I sure hope so."

CHAPTER 19.

A VILLAGE C CALLED N NEW Y YORK.

The time of arithmetic and poetry is past. Nowadays, my brothers, take your lessons from the Kalashnikov and rocket-propelled grenade.

-Graffiti spray-painted on the courtyard wall of the Korphe School "What is that?" Mortenson said. "What are we looking at?"

"A madra.s.sa, madra.s.sa, Greg Sahib," Apo said. Greg Sahib," Apo said.

Mortenson asked Hussain to stop the Land Cruiser so he could see the new building better. He climbed out of the jeep and stretched his back against the hood while Hussain idled behind the wheel, flicking cigarette ash carelessly between his feet, onto the wooden box of dynamite.

Mortenson appreciated his driver's steady, methodical style of navigating Pakistan's worst roads and was loath to criticize him. In all their thousands of miles of mountain driving the man had never had an accident. But it wouldn't do to go out with a bang. Mortenson promised himself to wrap the dynamite in a plastic tarp when they got back to Skardu.

Mortenson straightened up with a grunt and studied the new structure dominating the west side of the s.h.i.+gar Valley, in the town of Gulapor. It was a compound, two hundred yards long, hidden from pa.s.sersby behind twenty-foot walls. It looked like something he'd expect to find in Waziristan, but not a few hours from Skardu. "You're sure it's not an army base?" Mortenson said.

"This is the new place," Apo said. "A Wahhabi madra.s.sa Wahhabi madra.s.sa."

"Why do they need so much s.p.a.ce?"

"Wahhabi madra.s.sa is like a..." Apo trailed, off, searching for the English word. He settled for producing a buzzing sound. is like a..." Apo trailed, off, searching for the English word. He settled for producing a buzzing sound.

"Bee?" Mortenson asked.

"Yes, like the bee house. Wahhabi madra.s.sa Wahhabi madra.s.sa have many students hidden inside." have many students hidden inside."