into the sun
Reaching for my head-torch, peering at my watch, I see that it's four thirty in the morning. I must clear my mind and leave the shelter of the sleeping bag.
Clumsy fingers - mind switched off – automatic actions – aching hands fitting crampons, skin sticking to metal. Maybe I should have left it for a couple of hours and waited for the sun. But now is safer; loose ice frozen into place.
Slow steps take me across the col to the final mass of the south peak.
My feet, they should have warmed up by now, I can’t feel them – why isn’t the sky lightening – oh come on, sun, I need to see you now.
The snow crunches under foot. A small world of light from the head-torch keeps the darkness and fear from engulfing me. Fading stars show weakly through the thin air.
Find a rhythm – two axes – ignore the sickness that grips my stomach – kick the crampons in.
I count the steps until I have to stop, gasping for breath. The crampons grip.
Once the rhythm is established my mind can retire. The condition of the snow is good and everything holds. The air cuts at the back of my throat. I feel the blood pumping around, muscles warming to their work.
I’m not going strongly. I count the steps and rest: ten steps, then lean over the axes, panting, eyes closed.
The sky lightens. Space appears below me, a long way down to the col.
Think of the next steps. Can’t think of the top, it’s all so far away. I wonder if I’ll get there? – almost detached – thoughts – breaking up – another ten steps.
Steep ice – no rope – don’t think of a fall, the ice is good and everything holds – imagine I’m only six feet above the ground.
Only front points now, excitement and fear and the blood pounds in my head.
One hundred feet of steep neve and then the angle eases. Breathe in the thin air in rasping gasps.
It seems there is one false summit after another.
I feel so weak – I know it’s the altitude – so helpless. I tell my body what to do but it doesn’t respond.
I will it to go upwards but I can only rest. And another ten steps.
There are the wind-torn remains of two red flags the Swiss left earlier in the season.
I stand on top of the highest mountain in Peru.
The summit reaches towards the outer limits of the world through a cloudless sky. The air, so often roaring around the summits, is still. There is a calm and the most complete silence.
I sit and gaze over the Andes, lying below me, northward to Huandot and Alpamayo and south to Yerupaja and tears wet my face. I don’t think why. For this brief moment, all the futile worries, the unalterable or unattainable also lie dead below me. This place doesn’t touch the emotions, it’s too inhuman. I’m a brief visitor who has been allowed a rare vision.
Later, resting at the bivouac on the Col, I look at two passages I had written in my notebook.
One was told to Hemingway in Africa by the great hunter Philip Percival.
The Masai call the western summit of Kilimanjao "Ngaje Nga", the house of God.
Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard.
No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
The other was a fragment of a poem by T.S. Elliot.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end to all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we first started
And know the place for the first time.