The Beauty and the Yak

        The beautiful scenery of the mountainous country of Nepal attracts many tourists. In this story, what struck the author was not the scenery but the miserable life of a young girl. Who was she? What happened to her? What did the narrator do for her? Read the following story to find out.

    The entrance door of Mr. Chom Gom Chombi's house in Kumjung, Nepal, is so low that even I, standing barely five feet two inches tall, had to stoop while stepping from bright daylight into the smelly darkness of the straw-covered ground floor, where abundant yak manure left no doubt as to the identity of its tenants. Then I banged my forehead against a beam. A curse died on lips, because we were in a deeply religious Buddhist region and I didn't want to offend the gentle Gautama or his followers.

    When my eyes accommodated to the darkness, three yaks took shape, who were chewing their afternoon snack without paying the slightest attention to me. These usually docile and good-natured Central Asian cattle, who carry fierce-looking horns, play a vital role in the Himalayan economy. People use them as beasts of burden, weave their hair into fabrics, drink yak milk or churn it to butter, eat yak meat, and gather the yak droppings as an excellent fuel.

    For a moment, while my forehead was still throbbing, I stopped to think back to the events of the past few days. Our party of four old-timers, of whom I, at seventy-one, was the oldest, had convened a week earlier in Kathmandu, the capital, and had met our journey leader Nancy Jo there. She is a young American woman who lives in Nepal and speaks the language fluently. For each of us senior citizens it was the first visit to the kingdom of Nepal, which boasts twelve of the world's sixteen highest peaks, including Mt. Everest.(Qomolangma) These peaks all straddle the boundary between Nepal and China or Nepal and India.

    After two days of sightseeing in Kathmandu we boarded an eighteen-seat royal Nepalese airplane for the romantic forty-minute flight to Luka (9286 ft.), the starting point of all approaches to Everest (Qomolangma) from the south. From there, three days of magnificent trekking through great scenery had brought us to the village of Kumjung, where we were scheduled to spend the night at the home of our chief Sherpa's uncle － that is the house I had just entered.

    A wooden stairway, equipped with the luxury of a handrail, led upstairs. The steps were worn and slippery; complete darkness concealed the uppermost steps and the landing. Reaching there I didn't know which way to turn, till voices coming from my left indicated the proper direction. I groped my way to a door, opened it, and instantly began to cough. What smoke! It seemed that the Sherpas knew little, and cared less, about ventilation. A wood fire was burning in the kitchen stove, yet I didn't see a chimney. Daylight filtered in dimly through a dirty window. In the haze I saw two of my trek mates and some of our crew gathered around the stove, helping themselves to boiled potatoes from a huge pot. Our host, a wiry man of approximately my own age, welcomed me, while his wife, a quiet elderly woman with thick glasses, stayed in the background, together with two women members of our crew. I quickly washed up, then joined the boiled potato feast.

    While I was sitting there, munching a delicious potato and trying to get used to the smoke, I felt a pair of eyes resting on me. Looking up, I saw a girl of great beauty, perhaps seven or eight years old, whose big black eyes seemed to take in the scene with curiosity and, I thought, sadness. She was wearing a brown wool scarf over her head, a gray pullover, and a brownish, ankle-length skirt. The others completely ignored her. Our eyes met, I smiled, but she didn't return my smile.

    I finished my potato, ate another, chatted with my trek mates, and for a long time listened to our host who claimed to have discovered the bones of the legendary Yeti (Abominable Snowman), of which he had shown what he called part of the skull on a lecture tour all over the United States. Eagerly I looked at his photos from that trip, yet every few minutes I glanced back at the beautiful child who was standing there, with an unchanged puzzled and sad expression in her eyes.

    Curiosity gripped me; who was this girl? Why did the others pretend she didn't exist? I asked our head Sherpa, who spoke English fluently.

    "She's an orphan," he informed me. "Her name is Pasang Puti. My uncle and aunt took her in a year ago, after her mother died. Her job is to take care of the yaks."

    "Where is her father?" I asked, perhaps unwisely.

    After a moment's silence the Sherpa shrugged his shoulders and answered:

    "Nobody knows anything about him."

    So that's why the others treated her like an outcast! I couldn't suppress one more question:

    "Does she go to school?" There was a school in Kumjung, and another one in nearby Kunde.

    "She never went to school," the Sherpa answered.

    Once more I looked at Pasang Puti. Poor girl, I thought. Without any schooling and without a father in a society where family ties are all-important, she seemed destined to remain a yak-maid all her life. My thoughts returned to my own children, whom I had raised, and to each of whom I had given a good start in life. And then, no doubt, breaking every rule of Sherpa etiquette, I walked over to Pasang Puti, picked her up, put her on my knee, and sang Austrian songs to her, just as I had done, years earlier, to my own children.

    That night sleep confused me; I twisted and turned uncomfortably in my sleeping bag, which I had rolled out on a hard bunk in the room close to the kitchen. The stale air smelled of smoke and unwashed humanity. In the middle of the night nature's call compelled me to visit the outhouse, a task that involved descending the insecure stairs and going across yak territory. I climbed out of my sleeping bag. By the feeble shine of my near-dead flashlight I saw that our entire crew was sleeping on the floor, body next to body, practically blocking access to the door. Gingerly stepping over each sleeper, like a forest hiker over fallen tree trunks, I reached the hall. At this moment my flashlight went completely dead, and neither shaking or cajoling could revive it.

    Groping in black darkness, holding the flashlight in my left hand, I found the top of the handrail with my right hand and promptly banged my wrist hard on a board. I held onto the rail with a feeble grip and began, by touch, to descend the treacherous steps which were caused to become all the more slippery by my wool socks. On the fourth step down I slipped, fell, and was just barely able, with my right hand, to check my slide. I tried to struggle back on my feet, in vain. There I was lying on my back, on the stairs, with a feeble one-hand grip keeping me from sliding all the way down. Then my flashlight banged against a step and, miraculously, the light sprang back to life. Horrified, I saw that a yak was standing at the foot of the stairs, his head lowered, his menacing horns pointing straight at me. If I could no longer hold on to the handrail, those horns would spear me. I shouted at the yak, but he didn't move. What had started as a walk at night to the outhouse had turned into a life and death adventure!

    At that moment my flashlight's beam framed the silhouette of a child, Pasang Puti. She approached the yak and hit him with a stick; the beast walked away. Then the girl came up the stairs, helped me to my feet, guided me to the outhouse, and afterwards escorted me back to my bunk. Later I learned that the girl often came to the ground floor in the middle of the night to check her yaks, which were her world, while the household's humans treated her like a leper.

    Next morning, before leaving with my mates to continue our trek, I told our host how the yak girl had helped me, perhaps saved my life. "She's a lovely and brave girl," I said. "If she were under my care, I wouldn't treat her like an outcast, and I’d certainly send her to school."

    "No clothes," he answered, defensively.

    My party and I spent the next two weeks trekking through one of the world's most spectacular regions. On the way back we stopped once more at the uncle's house in Kumjung. I didn't see Pasang Puti and asked about her.

    "She must be on her way home from school," our host answered. Soon she arrived, wearing a pretty blouse and skirt outfit. Her eyes sparkled when she saw me, and a big smile dimpled her cheeks. I requested our host to ask her what she’d learned at school that day. 

    "About the United States and how they elect a president there; and of course more reading. We'll start writing next month."

    Then my trek mates and our crew came, and soon a boiled potato gathering was in full swing. Pasang Puti participated, a happy, friendly child.

    A thought flashed through my mind; I’d adopt Pasang Puti! After arranging everything in the U.S. I’d come back to Nepal and fetch her. I kept this plan completely to myself. Next morning, just as she was getting ready to leave for school, I hugged her for a moment. Soon afterwards my party and I started out on the final section of our trek, via Namche Bazaar and Lukla to Kathmandu, the trek's end point.

    (1 993 words)