Review of 'BURIED IN THE SKY'




In a dark moonless midnight, two exhausted men, harnessed to each other, grappled below an icy peak, with just an ice axe holding them from a fall to death in an icy abyss below. Their mind dazed and hallucinating due to lack of oxygen and the air freezing their tongue when they opened their mouth to gasp for breath. Boulders of ice broke off above and hurtled past them as they shuffled and dodged weakly. They knew it was a matter of time before a ice boulder would knock them down. They had given up hope long back. They prayed silently with bowed heads to the mountain goddess. She answered soon. An ice boulder or rock knocked on the head of the lower man and batted him off the snow. The weight of his body on the harness peeled the man above from the slope. Both men hurtled down towards the black darkness of the icy abyss below. They wondered on what they had done to get the mountain goddess so angry. They wondered on how they could have got themselves into this moment as their lives flashed past in their mind.

Above them, several other alpinist, lost equally in the icy darkness and in their own hallucinations, were grappling in the icy slopes. They were all wondering how they, the best of the alpinist from around the world, could have got themselves into this hopeless situation of wandering and falling to death or just sitting down in the icy dark and most likely freeze to death. 

This was the midnight of 1st August 2008, just below the peak of K2, the most treacherous peak in the Himalayas, and it played out the deadliest of catastrophes in the history of K2's climbing history. 11 climbers died in a matter of 27 hours. Two survived. They were sherpas. 

Buried in the Sky' is not just an excellent and a deep reportage of the deadliest of Himalayan disasters but also a full-of-heart life story of the two sherpas who survived. While writing on this, Peter Zuckerman and Amanda Padoan have written an eloquent and moving account of the Sherpa community, whose life and history are entwined with the history of Himalayan climbing. It is both a panoramic and a poignant account of the Sherpa community and their contribution to Himalayan climbing. It is a story of how this ethnic group has been burdened, liberated and defined by this egoistic and adventurous quest of other people from other parts of the world. 'Buried in the Sky' is about mountains and about Sherpas as has never been brought together before, leaving one dazed and moved. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Travel Literature "In Patagonia " Re-visited

Image
--> Travel Literature " In Patagonia " Re-visited I am a lay reader and my writing is just as lay. To top it, I am an uncomfortable traveller. And this is my lay review of an unusual travel book by an unusual author. Whenever I read classic travel books I am humbled by the profound detachment these authors seem to have had, travelling alone to places remote and uninviting. I am humbled by the fact that I am not made of that supreme stuff to attempt such feats. One book that completely disorients me is "In Patagonia" by Bruce Chatwin. It was published in 1977 and it was instantly raved as a minor classic. It seems Bruce Chatwin left a message, "Gone to Patagonia", and abruptly left his job at the London Museum . He took off on a ridiculous journey of quest and came back with a minor classic as his debut into the literary world. "In Patagonia " defies any kind of genre classification. It could be called travel...
Read more

In Arcadia

"He was overwhelmed with a reminder that at some moments the earth seemed like a fabulous stage set for an imortal drama, or initiation. The trees, the arbours, the orchards, the sweeping fields, the abunant heavens, all the astonishing colours of nature, the flwers, the hills, the lakes - it all seemed the most extra-ordinary setting for wonderful events, for the most fabulous adventures in living, for marvellous festivities of the huma spirit. The perfect setting for humanity to perform the most amazing feats of history making, of self-overcoming, of transcending, of momentous 'becoming' . We have the setting, Lao was thinking, we have the consciousness, but the grand event, the luminous illuminaton is missing. It seems we are not up to it. Here we have a world of legends, of pyramids, of oceans, of mountains, deserts, valleys, meadows, volcanoes, waterfalls, colours that bring tears to the eyes, we have trees and flowers and animals of unbelievable variety, we have civi...
Read more

The White Fang - Review

If ever there is a story of wild living spirit set in a cold wilderness, then this is it. “ A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness - a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild - the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.” With this, Jack London immediately plunges the reader into essence of the cold wilderness of the north.  But the effect is not one of being dazed or numbed by it’s cold or remoteness,  but rather the opposite, one’s senses are excited to a sense of a thrill. He then proceeds straight into the deadly  pursuit of humans,...
Read more