is only one God. Do you worship Allah? Or this kafir?”
Haji Ali clapped his hand on Mortenson’s shoulder. “No one else has ever come here to help my people. I’ve paid you money every year but you have done nothing for my village. This man is a better Muslim than you. He deserves my devotion more than you do.”
Haji Mehdi’s men fingered their clubs uneasily. He raised a hand to steady them. “If you insist on keeping your kafir school, you must pay a price,” Mehdi said, the lids of his eyes lowering. “I demand twelve of your largest rams.”
“As you wish,” Haji Ali said, turning his back on Mehdi, to emphasize how he had degraded himself by demanding a bribe. “Bring the chogo rabak!” he ordered.
“You have to understand, in these villages, a ram is like a firstborn child, prize cow, and family pet all rolled into one,” Mortenson explains. “The most sacred duty of each family’s oldest boy was to care for their rams, and they were devastated.”
Haji Ali kept his back turned to the visitors until twelve boys approached, dragging the thick-horned, heavy-hooved beasts. He accepted the bridles from them and tied the rams together. All the boys wept as they handed over their most cherished possessions to their nurmadhar. Haji Ali led the line of rams, lowing mournfully, to Haji Mehdi, and threw the lead to him without a word. Then he turned on his heel and herded his people toward the site of the school.
“It was one of the most humbling things I’ve ever seen,” Mortenson says. “Haji Ali had just handed over half the wealth of the village to that crook, but he was smiling like he’d just won a lottery.”
Haji Ali paused before the building everyone in the village had worked so hard to raise. It held its ground firmly before Korphe K2, with snugly built stone walls, plastered and painted yellow, and thick wooden doors to beat back the weather. Never again would Korphe’s children kneel over their lessons on frozen ground. “Don’t be sad,” he told the shattered crowd. “Long after all those rams are dead and eaten this school will still stand. Haji Mehdi has food today. Now our children have education forever.”
After dark, by the light of the fire that smoldered in his balti, Haji Ali beckoned Mortenson to sit beside him. He picked up his dog-eared, grease-spotted Koran and held it before the flames. “Do you see how beautiful this Koran is?” Haji Ali asked.
“Yes.”
“I can’t read it,” he said. “I can’t read anything. This is the greatest sadness in my life. I’ll do anything so the children of my village never have to know this feeling. I’ll pay any price so they have the education they deserve.”
“Sitting there beside him,” Mortenson says, “I realized that everything, all the difficulties I’d gone through, from the time I’d promised to build the school, through the long struggle to complete it, was nothing compared to the sacrifices he was prepared to make for his people. Here was this illiterate man, who’d hardly ever left his little village in the Karakoram,” Mortenson says. “Yet he was the wisest man I’ve ever met.”
CHAPTER 13
“A SMILE SHOULD BE MORE THAN A MEMORY”
The Waziris are the largest tribe on the frontier, but their state of civilization is very low. They are a race of robbers and murderers, and the Waziri name is execrated even by the neighboring Mahommedan tribes. They have been described as being free-born and murderous, hotheaded and light-hearted, self-respecting but vain. Mahommedans from a settled district often regard them as utter barbarians.
—from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica
From his second-story hotel room in the decrepit haveli, Mortenson watched the progress of a legless boy, dragging himself through the chaos of the Khyber Bazaar on a wooden skid. He looked no older than ten, and the scar tissue on his stumps led Mortenson to believe he’d been the victim of a land mine. The boy made grueling progress past customers at a cart where an old turbaned man stirred a cauldron of cardamom tea, his head level with the exhaust pipes of passing taxis. Above the boy’s field of vision, Mortenson saw a driver climb into a Datsun pickup truck loaded with artificial limbs and start the engine.
Mortenson was thinking how badly the boy needed a pair of the legs stacked like firewood in the pickup, and how unlikely it was that he’d ever receive them, because they’d probably been pilfered