...'The song floated up out of his childhood as it so often did, keeping pace with his steps. "Yesu ni refiki Yangu, Ah kayee Mbinguni" (What a friend we have in Jesus, He lives in Heaven), he sang in Swahili, the language they have used in the plain church building, with its distant views of Kilimanjaro, at services every Sunday. The tune was too ingrained for Mortenson to consider the novelty of this moment-an American, lost in Pakistan, singing a German hymn in Swahili. Instead , among this moonscape of boulders and blue ice, where pebbles he kicked would disappear down crevasses for seconds, before splashing into subterranean rivers, it burned with a nostalgic warmth, a beacon from the country he had once called home.'....
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