Thirty-Six

The old Sherpa seems angry with the Englishman. As if falling from the mountain were a bad idea, an unfortunate occurrence evidently intended to inconvenience others. But, in order for his own bad mood not to grow contagious, he, too, decides to keep quiet, ruminating on his disapproval. Looking out over the snowy peaks of the mountain range, teeth that are decayed despite an excess of enamel.

International relations, why not? the young Sherpa wonders. Until the older man grinding his teeth brings him back to the mountain, and he looks down at the fallen tourist. This is when it starts to dawn on him that he is very close to incurring the first liability of his career. (Liability is one of the translations for the word the Sherpas use to refer to the tourists who perish under their care. And it is the one English-speakers appear to prefer. The French, in turn, tend to speak of ghosts. This might seem strange, since ghost and liability are two words that share almost no lexical paradigm. In Nepali, the original word is hava, which doesn’t mean either of these things. It’s just that the British, trained in utilitarian empiricism, immediately remitted the matter to its practical derivatives, while the French drifted off on the path of misty metaphor.)

Having a death on his record is not, of course, a good thing for a Sherpa. It is a stain on his service record. But nor does it signify the end of a career as a professional mountain guide – far from it. Sherpas are extremely supportive of colleagues who lose their tourists on the mountain. They start out from the certainty that the fault always lies elsewhere, with the foreigner who ventures out onto the slopes without sufficient preparation, or with secret suicidal tendencies. A little liability is understandable. One dead, two dead, three if they died in the same avalanche or were swallowed by the void on the same chain of harnesses. Up to that point, there would not be much cause for concern.

But it is tradition to assume that when the liabilities start to add up on a Sherpa’s résumé, it does get harder and harder for him to make further ascents. It’s not so much an issue of professional discredit. Superstition rules supreme upon these slopes. There’s a long-standing idea that liabilities cling to Sherpas’ boots, weighing them down more and more with every cadaver that piles up upon those precipices. So that, beyond any feelings of guilt (which are not among the most widespread sentiments in the Sherpa community), what worries them is myth: the intangible and intolerable oral account that claims a Sherpa with a lot of liability on his boots will eventually fall a final time, taking with him everyone he can.