The Everest Files E-Book

Matt Dickinson

• Herausgeber: Vertebrate Digital
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A thrilling journey to the dark side of Everest. In the deepest Himalaya a story is spreading like wildfire. The story of an Everest expedition unlike any other. An expedition that ended in lies, betrayal, mysterious disappearances … and death. At the heart of it all - rumours of dark forces at play. This is the mystery that eighteen-year-old Ryan Hart sets out to solve. Ryan is on a gap year adventure, working for a medical charity in Nepal. In his own words he is 'up for anything' and when a local girl begs him to investigate why her sixteen-year-old friend Kami never came back from Everest, Ryan cannot resist the challenge. A solo journey takes Ryan deep into the mountains where his detective work finally pays off. What emerges is a shocking story of fatal human errors, a twisting tale in which life and death decisions are distorted by ambition, ego and greed. All played out on the lethal slopes of the highest mountain in the world. Kami's story seems like an open and shut case but something has changed in Ryan and it turns out the adventure isn't over. Everest is calling ... and Ryan may not be able to resist.

Leseprobe

The Everest Files

The Everest Files

.

Matt Dickinson

www.v-publishing.co.uk

Dedication

This book is dedicated toLhakpa Gelu Sherpa Mingma Dorje Sherpa Phur Gyalzen Sherpa

Steadfast and courageous companions on my Everest North Face ascent. Together we survived the killer storm that cost twelve lives. The summit photograph above shows (L-R) Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, Phur Gyalzen Sherpa and author Matt Dickinson.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3 – Kami’s Story

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

With thanks to …

About the Author

Chapter 1

We must have been about eight hours into the flight when the captain came on the tannoy.

‘Good morning ladies and gentlemen.’

I was awake anyway, much too stoked to sleep.

‘For those of you who are interested, there’s a remarkable view of Mount Everest on the starboard side of the aircraft. Cabin crew, ten minutes to landing.’

I flipped open the plastic window blind and drank in the view. All the other gap year volunteers sitting around me were doing the same and I wished they’d stop yelling dumb stuff like ‘awesome!’ and enjoy it in the silence it deserved.

Because the captain was right: Everest really was some-thing else; bigger and more stunning than I could ever have imagined. The whole plane was alive with it – there was this sort of jet-lagged electric crackle of excitement fizzing about the cabin.

I wondered if the face I was looking at had ever been climbed, and, if so, what type of superhuman hero/nutter would have taken such a risk. It looked insanely dodgy, razor sharp ridges pumping out clouds of billowing ice crystals. Unforgiving chunks of dark rock soaring in vertical steps.

‘Extreme,’ muttered the girl sitting next to me.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are now on our final approach into Kathmandu. At this time we ask you to ensure your tray table is stowed away, your seat belt fastened and your seat in the upright position. Please note that the toilets are no longer in use.’

The engines started to lose power. I felt my stomach lurch as the aeroplane went into a sharp turn. Now we could see detail in the dark terrain beneath us; wild, forested valleys which were deep and forbidding.

There were hardly any villages. Hardly any roads.

The mood around me shifted quite a bit in that moment; this was the type of wilderness we would all be trekking into over the next six weeks, paired up in teams of two and delivering medical supplies to remote areas of Nepal.

We’d all felt so grown up when we got on the flight back in London. But now it was all real I think we just felt like a bunch of eighteen-year-old kids who had no idea what they were getting into.

As for me, what was I expecting? An adventure? A challenge? A chance to give something back before I went off to uni to study to be a vet?

Well, all of those things, and more. I was up for anything, basically.

The aeroplane lost height. The wilderness gave way to patchwork squares of water, I guessed they must be paddy fields of rice glittering in the early morning sun. We touched down gently and walked down the steps into the humid, smog-filled air of the Kathmandu valley.

A massive wall of grey cloud had already swept across the far mountains.

There was no sign of Everest at all.

A ‘shake-down’ week followed in Kathmandu and we got into the mood of the place. A lot of those early nerves were snuffed out by the realisation of just how friendly and kind the Nepali people are.

The charity put us up in a dormitory place not far from ‘Freak Street’ – the city’s legendary hippy zone, so we were right in the heart of the action.

They taught us how to barter for stuff in the bazaars, never accepting the first price but always haggling it down. We were warned about rabid dogs (carry a big stick), taught how to filter our drinking water, and given a crash course in the local language.

Then, a few days before we were due to start the mountain journeys, my trek partner Liam got sick. He’d been eating kebabs from street stalls so no one was very sympathetic. The head guy at the charity reckoned he’d be ‘all right in twenty-four hours’, but he wasn’t.

In fact it turned out to be amoebic dysentery so that was Liam off the trip.

For a while it looked like my whole mission might be cancelled. There was no one to take Liam’s place. But it really was urgent that the medical supplies got out to their destination and, finally, the head of the charity asked me if I was prepared to do the journey on my own.

‘It’s a big responsibility,’ he warned.

I told him I had no problem with it. I’d grown up on a dairy farm in Northumberland, and, since I was fifteen, my parents had left me in charge when they went on holidays. If I could cope with that, I told him, I reckoned I could cope with anything.

Secretly I was kind of pleased. It meant the whole thing was much more of an adventure.

Four days later I set off on a 6 a.m. bus ride from Kathmandu. It was an amazing feeling to finally be on the road; the world I had come from seemed a million miles away. Cramming for A levels; jamming my head with facts and figures; turning out for the first XV rugby team on wet Saturday mornings. It was all behind me now; I was heading on my own, deep into the Himalaya, to a village called Tanche that I couldn’t even find on Google Earth.

It felt pretty outrageous.

Sepagat was the end of the road, a steamy shanty town which was so plastered with mud that it looked like a muck spreader had gone crazy. It had been raining for twenty-four hours and fast-moving trucks had splattered everything with filth: the people, the street dogs, the tatty goods in the roadside shacks.

A hungry-eyed group of men clustered around me.

‘You need porter, my friend?’

With the amount of baggage I had, there was no way I was going anywhere without some help.

‘I have donkey, mister, very strong donkey.’

The scrum was getting a bit lively. So, needing to sort the situation out before things got out of hand, I picked the strongest looking man for the task.

His name was Dhorjee.

We agreed on a price of two thousand rupees to transport the supplies to Tanche. More or less twenty dollars. Dhorjee and I would each carry a rucksack. The heavy barrel of medical equipment would, he said, go by donkey.

‘How many hours trekking is it to Tanche?’ I asked him.

‘Plenty hours,’ he replied vaguely. ‘Up and down, up and down!’

Dhorjee proposed a quick visit to a local bar and, not wanting to offend him, I agreed. Three beers later (I stuck to Sherpa tea), we quit the bar and put on the rucksacks ready for the trek.

‘Where’s the barrel?’ I asked him, seeing no sign of the heaviest luggage.

‘Gone ahead,’ he told me. ‘Donkey very fast! Very strong.’

‘OK.’

We set out into the early afternoon, the trail quickly getting steep as we began the haul up the valleyside. I soon began to overheat. After just ten minutes my T-shirt was already soaked with sweat.

‘How far did you say it was?’ I asked Dhorjee again.

‘We will be there before night,’ he replied. Then he slapped me on the back with a meaty fist. ‘You have cigarette for me, my friend?’

‘No.’

The lack of tobacco seemed to put Dhorjee in a bad mood and he gradually pulled ahead of me, never looking back. I soon lost sight of him and there was no sign of the promised donkey. Or my barrel. Still, I kept on up the side of this huge valley, quite enjoying the trail as it punched through the forest.

A couple of hours went past and I was surprised not to have made it to the village and even more surprised that Dhorjee seemed to have totally vanished. The path had changed in a bad way, the stones becoming treacherously slippery and sharp.

At 5.30 p.m. it began to rain. A nasty wind kicked off and, to my surprise, I found I was starting to feel chilled. The temperature had dropped a lot with the gain in altitude and a cold front had swept in.

If I’d had my extra clothes I could have done something about it but, stupidly, my personal gear was in the bag that Dhorjee had on his back.

Where was the village? What was going on? I was beginning to wonder if I had made a big mistake with this dodgy porter.

The antibiotics alone would be worth a fortune on the black market. I could just see myself returning to Kathmandu, my tail between my legs, having blown the whole mission.

Finally, after a climb that had to have been a thousand metres or more, I reached a high col and was able to see ahead. I was pinning my hopes that Tanche would now be in view but instead there was this second vast valley, perhaps even wilder and deeper than the one I had just got across.

And still there was no sign of Dhorjee.

I was starting to get stressed, fearing that the situation was getting out of control. Briefly I thought about turning round, but it was too far to go back.

I would just have to keep going.

I started trekking again but the track quickly became a muddy mess.

Then I saw a splash of red.

Blood.

Someone ahead of me was bleeding and it was only natural for me to wonder about it.

Was it Dhorjee? If so, what had happened to him?

I started walking faster, curious to catch up with whoever it was. A short while later I saw an even bigger splash of red, as if the wounded one had rested there for a bit.

A few more switchbacks on the trail. Six or seven more bloodspots and I had the wounded one in sight; well at least I had a blurred vision of a small figure dressed in a blue cape. It looked like a kid carrying a massive load and it was obvious they were exhausted.

‘Hey!’ I called. ‘Are you OK?’ The figure stopped and I saw it was a girl, sixteen or seventeen years old at a guess. She was wearing a pair of worn-out canvas sneakers which were totally ripped and torn. She had a deep cut on her ankle and it was still bleeding.

On her back was a massive load. She was literally staggering under the weight of it and I realised with a hot flash of rage that it was my fifty-kilo barrel of medical supplies that this poor girl was carrying on her back.

She took off the barrel as I got closer, sitting heavily on the ground, looking completely done in. Her face was streaked with mud and sweat.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked her.

‘Yes.’

‘Who gave you that barrel?’ I demanded.

‘Dhorjee.’

‘And how much is he paying you?’

The girl looked at her hands and did not reply.

‘It’s all right,’ I told her wearily, ‘I’m not angry with you. I’m angry with him for giving you that load.’

I sat down next to the girl, suddenly seriously tired. I found a last muesli bar in my pack and split it in two to share. She smiled briefly as she took the snack, her face coming alive.

‘My name’s Ryan. What’s your name?’ I asked her.

‘Shreeya.’

‘You’ve hurt your foot.’

‘Yes.’ She stared down at her bloody ankle, shivering a bit with the cold.

‘I can put a bandage on it if you like.’

‘Thank you.’

I cracked open the seal on the barrel and found some disinfectant and a bandage. I’d done plenty of first aid training on the charity course so this was easy stuff. Five minutes later I had the wound nicely cleaned although I reckoned the dressing wouldn’t last too long in the rain.

Then the million-dollar question.

‘How far is it to Tanche?’

‘A few hours.’

‘A few hours? Then we’d better get moving. I’ll take the barrel.’

I gave her my rucksack, reducing her load by fifty per cent at a stroke.

The girl had been carrying the barrel in the local way, with a leather strap around her forehead. I decided to try it and managed to get it up on my back as she had done. The weight was unbelievable. The bones in my spine felt like they were grinding to dust with every step.

The more it went on the more I cursed that idiot Dhorjee. My thoughts about him were turning ugly and getting uglier with every passing step.

I wished I hadn’t paid him in advance.

The rain had cranked itself up into a deluge; it was driving down with amazing force, smashing the ground to submission. Fist-sized rocks started to tumble down the slope above us and at one dicey place the path had been swept away completely by a landslide. We crossed that one hand-in-hand, Shreeya moving sure-footedly despite the terrible state of her shoes.

When I next checked my watch it was a few minutes before 10 p.m. We shared a few dried apricots and made no effort to try and find shelter. There was no point; we couldn’t get any wetter. Or colder. My teeth were chattering like mad.

Finally we saw a light flickering in the distance.

‘Tanche,’ Shreeya said.

Not a moment too soon.

We entered the village and I stared at the dark buildings which were clustered on either side of the trail, wondering why no one was there to greet me. My mind was so messed up I could hardly remember what they had told me back in Kathmandu.

‘It’s OK,’ Shreeya said kindly, ‘you can stay with us.’

We plodded up a series of steps cut into the hillside until we came to a sturdy timber building which was journey’s end.

Inside was an elderly woman with long dark plaits.

‘My aunt,’ Shreeya said.

I greeted her with a ‘Namaste’, seeing the flash of gold teeth in the thin smile she returned. She didn’t look best pleased to have an unexpected house guest.

I dumped the barrel in with the goats and chickens on the ground floor and followed my hosts up a wooden ladderway.

‘You can sleep here.’ Shreeya showed me to a store room. Piles of potatoes were stacked in one corner, hessian sacks of some sort in another. But there was plenty of space for me to set up my sleeping stuff and the floor was dusty rather than dirty.

‘Is OK?’

‘Is perfect.’

I climbed into the sleeping bag and lay there, thinking about the day. I was bone tired but a smouldering core of anger about the stunt that Dhorjee had pulled kept me awake for a while.

Mice were scratching around in the potato pile. Some kind of owl was crying outside.

Down in the kitchen I could hear Shreeya and her aunt talking. The aunt seemed to be complaining about something. Her voice went on and on, droning away at Shreeya who seemed to have little to say in return.

It was strange but I just couldn’t get warm, even after I put on an extra fleece and wrapped a woollen scarf around my neck.

The last thing I remember thinking before I fell asleep was ‘I hope I don’t get sick’.

It was still dark when the dawn chorus kicked off; the air rang with cockerel cries, yapping dogs and clucking chickens. Soon I heard the clatter of pans from the kitchen and the metallic squeak of the hand pump as Shreeya drew water from the well.

I dozed until daylight then went to the yard and found a bucket of water for a wash. Getting the mud and sweat off my body was sheer heaven and I felt much better.

At that moment Shreeya came back into the yard. She was wearing a red silk kameez and carrying a brass tray which held flower petals, a bowl of water and a little saucer of cooked rice. What a contrast to her rain-soaked appearance of the previous night. She really looked beautiful; incredibly graceful in those fine clothes.

‘I’m going to do the puja ceremony,’ she said. ‘Have you heard of it?’

I had. At least I had read about it in my Lonely Planet.

‘Do you mind if I watch you?’ I asked.

‘OK.’

She led the way out of the front door and I saw the family shrine for the first time. It was set on a plinth in a shady corner, a sort of mini temple about the size of a doll’s house.

Shreeya began by chanting a few mantras, inviting the gods to attend the ritual. While she sang I noticed that there were several photographs stuck inside the shrine, faded snapshots of old folk – presumably relatives.

But one of the photographs was different and Shreeya paid it special attention as she performed the ritual, unpinning it to hold it tightly in her hand.

The picture was a colour print showing a handsome young Sherpa boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old. He was pictured wearing mountain gear, standing in a place which looked snowy and wild.

He was a climber. No doubt about that. But what were the prayers Shreeya was offering for him?

Prayers for a soul already gone? Or prayers for his safety as he climbed?

When the chanting had ended Shreeya picked up a small brass hand bell with a carved wooden handle.

‘The shrine bell,’ she told me. ‘The ceremony isn’t over until the bell is rung.’

The bell rang clear as she shook it, the sound telling everyone that the puja had been successfully performed.

She pinned the photograph of the young climber back and I couldn’t hold my curiosity any longer.

‘Shreeya, can I ask you something?’

She nodded.

‘Who is the boy in the picture? You seemed to be praying for him.’

Shreeya went silent for a while, then said, ‘He is my friend. His name is Kami.’

‘Ah. Well I hope I will meet him.’

Shreeya thought about this carefully, a strange fleeting confusion clouding her eyes.

‘I don’t know if that is possible. You see I do not know if any of us will see him again … nobody really knows if he is dead or alive.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

I didn’t want to push it further; Shreeya was clearly reluctant to talk about her friend and I didn’t want to upset her. But what had she meant? Had he left the village? Gone to study in India perhaps? Or had he been lost on a mountain trip?

It was a mysterious thing to say.

We spent the rest of the morning getting the medical gear down to the clinic. Dhorjee had dumped his rucksack there the previous evening so, miraculously, everything had arrived in one piece.

I was shocked by the state of the place. Paint was peeling from every wall, there was abundant mildew, and two of the windows were cracked.

We spent a couple of hours cleaning dead beetles out of the cupboards before a bunch of local dignitaries turned up to welcome me.

The speeches began.

The sun blazed harder.

It was during this ceremony that I began to feel rough. I shivered as my skin became chilled. The faint desire to vomit began to nag away but I knew I could not interrupt the ceremony and nor could I move out of the sun.

I kept smiling and gritted my teeth.

I was asked to say a few words but my tongue was swelling horribly, my spit thickening in that repulsive way it does just before you are sick.

I stopped the speech and sprinted for the nearest bushes where I retched long and hard.

‘I think I might have picked up a bug in Kathmandu,’ I told the villagers as I stumbled back out into the blazing sun.

It was a bit of a downer to say the least.

By nightfall I was back in my room at Shreeya’s house, wrapped up in my sleeping bag and feeling pretty sorry for myself.

‘You are shivering,’ Shreeya said that night. Her aunt’s watchful eyes stared at me without sympathy.

‘Just some virus,’ I told her. ‘I’ll be all right in the morning.’

I wasn’t all right in the morning. In fact the fever had got worse and I now had deep muscle aches.

Shreeya watched over me as I lay there sweating in the sleeping bag. I treated myself with paracetamol and decided that it was probably a virulent case of flu. Or perhaps a gastric infection I had picked up during the week in Kathmandu.

Then, having been feverish for twenty-four hours, it suddenly got much worse and a stabbing pain started up in my chest.

‘Maybe you need to go back to Kathmandu,’ Shreeya suggested. ‘Go to hospital.’

I knew she was right but there was no way I could trek back out along that path.

The high point that second day on my thermometer was 39.8 degrees, which felt pretty extreme. Shreeya was getting more and more concerned about the state of me and from that moment on she never left my side, holding cool damp cloths to my forehead in an attempt to break down the fever.

The pain in my chest was a give away and I now realised I had pneumonia, a lung infection almost certainly caused by the freezing rain and exhaustion of the trek. Every time I breathed I got this dagger stab of pain which felt like someone was twisting a Kitchen Devil into my ribs.

I was gobsmacked to be so sick. I was young. I was fit. I had never had a serious illness in my life. But my travellers’ medical handbook put me right; you can get pneumonia at any age, it said. Sometimes these things happen.

That night was the crisis. I was really in a state.

It got so bad that Shreeya actually put up a small shrine next to my bed. Incense was lit and she sat cross-legged in prayer as she watched over me.

Then, at the height of the fever, when I was almost delirious, Shreeya did the strangest thing.

She took the photograph of her friend Kami and put it to my chest. Like it was some sort of charm, or held some sort of spiritual power. She held it there tightly, still muttering a prayer as I struggled to breathe.

And the strangest thing of all was that it did have a result. At the very moment she was pressing the photograph to my body I sensed the pain in my chest beginning to ease off. For the first time in many hours I found myself able to breathe properly and the feeling of relief was almost overwhelming.

Shreeya took away the photograph and placed it on the makeshift shrine. Her eyes were glittering with an internal light. She rang the small shrine bell as a way of communicating thanks to the gods and she told me gently, ‘I gave this shrine bell to my friend when he went to Everest. It was returned to me after the expedition, with no explanation about what happened to him.’

Her words haunted me for hours. It seemed terrible not to know the fate of a loved one.

At long last I fell into a weird sleep, filled with bad dreams. In one nightmare I was engulfed by an avalanche on some huge mountain. Buried in the snow I heard scraping sounds. Then came a face, smiling at me. My saviour.

It was Kami – the boy from the picture.

I woke with a start, sitting up fast as my chest muscles tightened up.

I leaned over and picked up the photograph of Shreeya’s friend. I felt an odd connection to him now, and was much more curious than before.

That morning the daily routines of the house went on around me. The buffalo were taken to the fields. The fire was lit in the room next door, the tinder crackling as it flared up. I heard the swish of Shreeya sweeping the floor with a hazel broom.

I thought about how generous Shreeya had been to me. I was a stranger to her really but she had shown me the most incredible hospitality and care, even if her aunt had shown little interest in my problems.

That night a nasty argument flared up between Shreeya and her aunt. I had no idea what it was about but it ended with the sound of a slap or two and I heard Shreeya sobbing. Later, when things had calmed down a bit, I was strong enough to join them for supper.

Shreeya had a dark bruise on her cheek.

‘You’ve been so kind,’ I told her. ‘What can I ever do to repay you?’

Shreeya looked at her aunt, a stare of pure defiance. The aunt just gave her a poisonous look by return and swept out of the kitchen.

‘I want you to make a journey,’ Shreeya told me earnestly. ‘I need you to find out the truth about Kami.’

Chapter 2

It took me quite a few days to recover from my illness, but over the next four weeks the work at the village was done. We did a total refurb on the clinic, whitewashing the whole building and fixing the dodgy tiles on the roof.

From time to time I had been asking around amongst the elders of the village, checking whether they knew anything about the fate of Shreeya’s friend Kami.

But all I got was rumours and half-baked theories. Some had heard whispers about a Sherpa boy that had been kidnapped by ‘djinns’ – the spirits of the mountains. Others repeated the rumour that he was ‘neither dead or alive’.

It was strange how many people believed that.

I questioned Shreeya further about it but didn’t get anything new. Her friend Kami had gone to Everest, something terrible had happened and she had been immediately spirited away to this remote corner of Nepal by her parents.

‘I caused them shame,’ she told me, ‘and they have made me a prisoner here.’

I was pretty sure there was a side of the story that she was keeping from me. To be honest, I was beginning to give up on the idea of helping Shreeya find her friend. Of course that was the exact moment when Shreeya surprised me by producing a scrap of paper with the name ‘Nima Gyaltsen’ written on it.

A clue.

A lead.

‘He lives in Aiselukharka village,’ Shreeya told me. ‘They say he was on the expedition with Kami.’

That was more like it. At least I had something to go on. That night I checked my map and found that the village mentioned in Shreeya’s note was two hard days’ trekking away.

I was planning to use my free days for a trek anyway, so I reckoned I might as well find a porter, head out to that village, and see if I could track down this Nima Gyaltsen character.

I packed up my rucksack and left the next morning, but only after Shreeya and some of the others blessed my journey with a long and touching puja ceremony. I had only been there for a short while but I was genuinely fond of her and the other villagers.

‘I hope you will be back very soon,’ Shreeya told me, ‘with news of my friend.’

‘I hope so too.’

As the friendly farewell calls of the watching villagers fell away, I soon found I had a real spring in my stride. Getting to the village where I would find the contact would involve a spectacular trek through amazing Himalayan scenery. Even better, I had a great porter with me this time. His name was Pasang and he seemed trustworthy and kind.

One of the main reasons I liked him was that he had a pair of red tartan socks that poked out of a gaping hole in the front of his boots.

At that point I was pretty sure of cracking the mission quickly. This guy Nima had actually been on the expedition with Kami. Surely he would be able to fill me in on what had happened and where he was? All I had to do was find Nima and the mystery would be solved.

At least that was what my brain was telling me.

On the first day we passed through quite a few small villages, almost all of them devoted to forestry and all of them poor. There were no rice mills here, no plump-looking water buffalo, just skinny chickens, fields of stunted beans and bad-tempered feral dogs.

We slept that night in a small tea house on mattresses that were infested with fleas. I itched my way through the night, regretting that I hadn’t pitched my little one-man tent and slept outside. It would have been a better night.

Next day I really felt like we were walking off the edge of the map. The land became even more thickly forested, the valley sides steep and scarred with landslides.

The trek was long and it stretched me, just like the one to Shreeya’s village, but not in such a brutal way. When we finally found the village where this man Nima lived, it was only the second place we had seen that day.

It was a bit of a dump really, an old army patrol post which had been abandoned by the military and squatted in ever since by hunters, berry pickers and brewers of chang – the local rice wine.

Pasang asked around for Nima and we quickly found someone who knew him. ‘He’ll be in the bar,’ a friendly old woman told us, ‘drinking, drinking.’

My heart sank as I heard this; I had already seen the damage that cheap alcohol could do in these small rural places and it seemed I was now in for another boozy encounter.