At midnight one evening earlier this month, I slipped out of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, heading north in a white Toyota minibus on a journey to find the second tallest mountain on earth, K2.
My purpose was to write a book about the mountaineers who dared challenge its deadly slopes — to get a taste, if not a full draught, of the danger myself. In the end, I got more than I bargained for, and not from Nature alone.
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At Askole, a village of basic wooden homes where children played shoeless in the dirt, we hired eager Balti porters who jostled for our business and streamed by on the hot, dusty paths beside waters churning down from the glacier. The porters bent under our rucksacks and tents, heavy blue food barrels, paraffin stoves, kitchen chairs and tables, as they ushered chickens, goats, yaks and donkeys onto the trail.
In contrast to the porters’ cast-off clothes and sandals, these mountaineers wore expensive high-tech walking gear. A 39-year-old engineer from Germany, Dirk Grunert, obsessively drank liters of boiled water daily to cope with the altitude. A fit couple from Portugal maintained via satellite phone a Web site of their adventures. There were also three Polish mountaineers, including a loud man named Jacek Teler, on his sixth trip in the Karakoram, who conferred with the porters in broken Urdu, performed kung-fu exercises in the mess tent, and was clearly seeking a chance to live a role distant from reality as most of us know it.
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I wondered if Jon Krakauer would be writing this book. Guess not. Graham Bowley is.
I always wondered does the magazine or newspaper share any type of profit/royalty with a reporter/journalist when they publish a book?
