Three Cups of Tea

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To the safer place," he said, with the aggrieved air of a man forced to explain the obvious.†

1 use

Bands of farmers blanketed the slopes, planting poppies on every arable surface.†

1 use

Changazi stood as beatifically still as a portrait of a revered prophet.†

2 uses

They were speedy and graceful, bequeathed the genetic wherewithal to sprint up technical pitches at high altitude.†

1 use

And she believes that toxic injection of live bovine virus marked the beginning of Christa's brain dysfunction.†

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It seemed to Mortenson that Abdul, like most Muslims, had an internal compass permanently calibrated toward Mecca.†

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Only they had chosen the West Ridge, a circuitous, brutally difficult route, littered with land mine after land mine of steep, technical pitches, which had been successfully scaled only once, twelve years earlier, by Japanese climber Eiho Otani and his Pakistani partner Nazir Sabir.†

1 use

The stench in the back of the truck wasn't conducive to hunger, but eventually, rolling slowly through the night, his animal instincts won out.†

1 use

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At seventy-six miles from snout to snout, it forms the longest contiguous glacier system outside the Earth's poles.†

1 use

From the Hushe Valley, a hundred miles east, Mouzafer had made his way to this convivial table with his friend, an old-time porter and base camp cook of wide renown known as "Apo," or "Old Man" Razak.†

1 use

With each defeat of a larger, better equipped force that arrived in Waziristan, the region's infamy grew.†

1 use

Perhaps, he thought, the explosives could clear up obstacles more intractable than a road covered with rocks.†

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For the second time in Greg Mortenson's life, a gas station proved pivotal to his involvement with Islam.†

1 use

And the photographer Galen Rowell, a member of the expedition, wrote a book about the group's travails, documenting one of the most rancorous high-altitude failures in history.†

1 use

Earlier, Mortenson had smoothed antibiotic cream into the hands of a twelve-year-old boy whose stepfather had pressed them to a stove, then redressed his bandages.†

1 use

But much as he enjoyed the first fond soliloquies about Pope John Paul, Mortenson learned that, after enough vodka, Dudzinski simply spoke to no one in particular.†

1 use

A sonorous rumbling led him to kneel underneath the truckbed, where three figures lay suspended in hammocks, two snoring in languid concert.†

2 uses

"These are the elders of my village," he said, motioning to the five wizened men.†