bearer acolytes wait in silence. But no one leaves. The three generations of the Ngawang Tenzin family—the Breakers of the Dead—have stayed respectfully removed from the stone circle, barely visible in the shadows, through the entire ceremony.
“Is that
“I don’t think so,” my friend whispers in turn. I sense something ominous in his voice.
The Ngawang Tenzins open several tanned leather bags and black cloths that are filled with sharp-edged tools: long, curved filleting knives, meat cleavers, handsaws, a small axe, a large hatchet, and other blades as well as massive stone-headed hammers.
Immediately they set to work.
They pull off the white shroud to show poor Babu Rita naked beneath the sheet. His brown form, lying on his back, palms down, eyes already somewhat sunken into their sockets, looks very small indeed. J.C. and I instinctively look away, trying to afford our Sherpa friend a shred of dignity. We needn’t have bothered.
The grizzled grandfather Ngawang Tenzin works quickly with a long filleting blade in one hand and a large hatchet in the other. In less time than it takes to write about it, he’s cut off both of Babu’s hands, then both feet, and then decapitates him with two strong blows of the hatchet.
The middle-aged Ngawang Tenzin hacks and saws off what is left of Babu Rita’s arms and legs. The sound of the saw cutting through bone and joints echoes off the high boulders. The teenaged Ngawang Tenzin now gets busy, using a smaller hatchet to cut off the dead Sherpa’s fingers, then using one of the stone hammers to smash those fingers into even smaller pieces. And then the pieces are pounded into pulp.
The three older men are now working on Babu’s torso. Our Sherpa comrade’s heart, lungs, liver, intestines, and other internal organs are unceremoniously scooped out and tossed into a stone bowl. The grandfather Breaker of the Dead uses a metal bar to crack the ribs into pieces. Flesh is flensed from bone. The Ngawang Tenzin men and boy turn what’s left of Babu Rita onto his front and pry and chop and leverage away what had been his vertebrae. These they also smash and mash. The sounds these efforts make are…unique.
When all the morsels are small enough and pulverized enough, the boy has the honor of tossing the pieces, one at a time, to the waiting vultures. The ugly carrion eaters will flap down to a piece that’s dropped between their high boulders, but there’s none of the usual vulture fighting and flapping associated with their dining on the dead I’ve heard described in Africa or somewhere. It’s as if these bearded vultures, old veterans of sky burials, know that there will be enough to go around.
When Babu Rita has been reduced to bite-sized pieces—including his head and skull pounded flat, the eyes gouged out and thrown to the waiting vultures, his brain mashed to a gray gruel by the teenaged Breaker of the Dead—they wash off the worst gore from the butcher’s stone with several pails of water thrown across it.
And then the four Breakers of the Dead leave. The eight monks and acolytes from the monastery have already left—sometime while J.C. and I were watching the butchers’ work in silent horror.
Jean-Claude nods and we also leave, making a wide arc around the monastery proper, silently joining Norbu Chedi down the hill a bit, where he waits with our three ponies. No one says a word as we begin kicking the little ponies in the ribs to hurry them back north toward Base Camp and into the maw of a coming storm.
In the past, the trip between Rongbuk Monastery and Base Camp on our little ponies has taken us less than two hours. But today in the whirling, blinding snow, even with the strong, cold wind at our backs, it takes us more than three.
Neither J.C. nor I speaks during the first half of the trip home.
Finally Norbu Chedi says, “I have seen several sky burials, Sahibs. I did not wish to see another.”
Jean-Claude and I have nothing to say to that.
In the last hour, as we approach the half-frozen river not far below the moraine and Base Camp, J.C. says to me, “I suppose it makes sense, culturally, practically, since the ground in most of Tibet is frozen solid ten months of the year.”
“Yeah,” I say. But I don’t really mean it.
After a long silence, Jean-Claude turns to me. When he’s sure that we’re out of earshot of Norbu Chedi, who’s gone ahead, he whispers, “If I buy it on this mountain, Jake, make sure I’m buried in a crevasse or just left where I lie. All right?”
“I promise,” I say. “And you do the same for me, okay?”
J.C. nods and we say nothing else during the last fifteen minutes of our snowy pony ride to Base Camp.
Base Camp is almost deserted when we arrive there before noon.
Dr. Pasang is still there, of course, with both his frostbite patients resting in their tents. Pasang carried out the amputations when everyone returned from the monastery yesterday: all ten toes for Ang Chiri, four toes and three fingers on the right hand for Lhakpa Yishay. Normally, Pasang told J.C. and me, he would have waited much longer before operating, but the rot from Ang Chiri’s toes was spreading to his entire foot, and gangrene also threatened Lhakpa’s right hand and left foot.
Jean-Claude and I look in on both men; Ang Chiri is more cheerful than ever and, he says, is looking forward to trying the new wooden wedges in the toes of his hiking boots to see how well he can walk with no real toes. Of course, J.C. and I think but do not say aloud, a Sherpa spends most of his life at home in sandals, not wearing English-made hiking boots. But evidently Ang isn’t worried about that fine distinction.
Lhakpa, who’s lost less than Ang, is far gloomier. Both men have their feet bandaged with yellow-red iodine stains leaking through. He is cradling his now two-fingered right hand and all but weeping and repeating the mantra—according to Pasang’s interpreting—that he’ll never find work again.
Outside the tents, J.C. and I comment on Ang Chiri’s high morale and Pasang says softly, “Never discount the power of a little post-surgical opium to cheer one up.”
There are only about five other Sherpas in Base Camp, and Pasang tells us that yesterday Reggie and the Deacon assigned most of the men carrying tasks—hauling loads to the “upper camps,” Camp III at the base of the last ice slope and Camp IV on the North Col. Also according to Pasang, a messenger brought word today that high winds and heavy snow up there were keeping everyone except the Deacon, Reggie, and two Tiger Sherpas lower than the North Col, and Pasang guesses that even those four may have retreated to Camp III by now. At least Camps II and III now have plenty of tents, sleeping bags, and food for the mobs moving in and through.
Pasang tells us that he is eager to get to the higher camps himself, once his two patients are better. That freedom for him, of course, depends upon no more injuries so severe that he has to take the injured man or men all the way back down here to Base Camp. My own guess is that Pasang doesn’t like being separated from his employer—Lady Bromley-Montfort—for such long periods.
Jean-Claude and I decide that we’re going to do a carry to the highest camp we can reach today, despite the relatively late hour for departing from Base Camp. I think we both need some high, clean climbing and carrying to get rid of the terrible taste of that dawn’s “sky burial.” I know I do.
While many of the oxygen rigs have already been transported higher by Sherpas, J.C. and I test the tank integrity of two such backpack-frame rigs—almost no leakage in any of the six tanks—and we shrug into the harnesses to haul the O2 sets up as high as we can get by nightfall.
With the Irvine-Finch-modified oxygen rigs on our backs—we won’t be breathing any of the English air today, so the masks and valves are tucked into the metal frame there—we’re hauling close to the Deacon’s guideline carry-load total of 25 pounds, but we also have to haul some personal stuff up with us if we’re going to be staying at any of the high camps—perhaps stay there until the summit bid itself. So we grab two off-the- shoulder, hang-in-front “carry bags”—actually gas mask containers (minus the masks) from the Great War which the Deacon had purchased both cheap and by the dozens. They’re perfect for cramming in our personal effects of some extra clothing, shaving kit—which I haven’t used for a week, since I hate shaving in cold water—camera gear, toilet paper, and all the rest. It’s probable that there are extra sleeping bags waiting at the high camps, but J.C. and I aren’t going to take any chances: we roll the bags tight, put on their protective waterproof covers, and tie them onto the outer metal bars of the oxygen rig frames.
We have our assortment of odd-sized ice axes (keeping only the long axes out and unlashed) as well as two
