lesson 8 three cups of tea(課文原文)

1、Lesson 8 Three Cups of Tea(Excerpts)CHAPTER 12 HAJI ALI’S LESSONIt may seem absurd to believe that a “primitive” culture in the Himalaya has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that

2、works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned. —Helena Norberg-Hodge The rocks looked more like an ancient ruin than

3、 the building blocks of a new school. Though he stood on a plateau high above the Braldu River, in perfect fall weather that made the pyramid of Korphe K2 bristle, Mortenson was disheartened by the prospect before him.

4、The previous winter, before leaving Korphe, Mortenson had driven tent pegs into the frozen soil and tied red and blue braided nylon cord to them, marking out a floor plan of five rooms he imagined for the school. He’d le

5、ft Haji Ali enough cash to hire laborers from villages downriver to help quarry and carry the stone. And when he arrived, he expected to find at least a foundation for the school excavated. Instead, he saw two mounds of

6、 stones standing in a field. Inspecting the site with Haji Ali, Mortenson struggled to hide his disappointment. Between his four trips to the airport with his wife, and his tussle to reclaim his building materials, he ha

7、d arrived here in mid-October, nearly a month after he’d told Haji Ali to expect him. They should be building the walls this week, he thought. Mortenson turned his anger inward, blaming himself. He couldn’t keep returni

8、ng to Pakistan forever. Now that he was married, he needed a career. He wanted to get the school finished so he could set about figuring out what his life’s work would be. And now winter would delay construction once aga

9、in. Mortenson kicked a stone angrily. “What’s the matter,” Haji Ali said in Balti. “You look like the young ram at the time of butting.” Mortenson took a deep breath. “Why haven’t you started?” he asked. “Doctor Greg,

10、we discussed your plan after you returned to your village,” Haji Ali said. “And we decided it was foolish to waste your money paying the lazy men of Munjung and Askole. They know the school is being built by a rich for

11、eigner, so they will work little and argue much. So we cut the stones ourselves. It took all summer, because many of the men had to leave for porter work. But don’t worry. I have your money locked safely in my home.” “

12、I’m not worried about the money.” Mortenson said. “But I wanted to get a roof up before winter so the children would have some place to study.” Haji Ali put his hand on Mortenson’s shoulder, and gave his impa-tient Ame

13、rican a fatherly squeeze. “I thank all-merciful Allah for all you have done. But the people of Korphe have been here without a school for six hundred years,” he said, Korphe knew the legend of this listing wooden buildi

14、ng buttressed with earthern walls. It had stood for nearly five hundred years, and had served as a Buddhist tem?ple before Islam had established a foothold in Baltistan. For the first time since he’d arrived in Korphe,

15、Mortenson stepped through the gate and set foot inside. During his visits he had kept respectful distance from the mosque, and Korphe’s religious leader, Sher Takhi. Mortenson was unsure how the mullah felt about having

16、 an infidel in the village, an infidel who proposed to educate Korphe’s girls. Sher Takhi smiled at Mortenson and led him to a prayer mat at the rear of the room. He was thin and his beard was peppered with gray. Like m

17、ost Balti living in the mountains, he looked decades older than his forty-odd years. Sher Takhi, who called Korphe’s widely dispersed faithful to prayer five times a day without the benefit of amplification, filled the

18、small room with his booming voice. He led the men in a special dua, asking Allah’s blessing and guidance as they began work on the school. Mortenson prayed as the tailor had taught him, folding his arms and bending at t

19、he waist. ************************************************Haji Ali provided the string this time. It was locally woven twine, not blue and red braided cord. With Mortenson, he measured out the correct lengths, dipped the

20、 twine in a mixture of calcium and lime, then used the village’s time-tested method to mark the dimensions of a construction site. Haji Ali and Twaha pulled the cord taut and whipped it against the ground, leaving white

21、 lines on the packed earth where the walls of the school would stand. Mortenson passed out the five shovels and he and fifty other men took turns digging steadily all afternoon until they had hollowed out a trench, three

22、 feet wide and three feet deep, around the school’s perimeter. When the trench was done, Haji Ali nodded toward two large stones that had been carved for this purpose, and six men lifted them, shuffled agonizingly toward

23、 the trench, and lowered them into the corner of the foundation facing Korphe K2. Then he called for the chogo rabak. Twaha strode seriously away and returned with a massive ash-colored animal with nobly curving horns.

24、 “Usually you have to drag a ram to make it move,” Mortenson says. “But this was the village’s number-one ram. It was so big that it was dragging Twaha, who was doing his best just to hold on as the animal led him to it

25、s own execution.” Twaha halted the rabak over the cornerstone and grasped its horns. Gently, he turned the animal’s head toward Mecca as Sher Takhi chanted the story of Allah asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, befor

26、e allowing him to substitute a ram after he passed his test of loyalty. In the Koran, the story appears in much the same manner as the covenant of Abraham and Isaac does in the Torah and the Bible. “Watching this scene

27、 straight out of the Bible stories I’d learned in Sunday school,” Mortenson says, “I thought how much the different faiths had in common, how you could trace so many of their traditions back to the same root.” Hussain,

28、an accomplished climbing porter with the build of a Balti-sized sumo wrestler, served as the village executioner. Baltoro porters were paid per twenty-five- kilogram load. Hussain was famous for hauling triple loads on