Summit Fever by Andrew Greig

Author:Andrew Greig [Andrew Greig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847677501
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2009-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

The sword of Damocles was nothing to the rocks of Lilligo. Our camp site that evening was below sheer walls of mud studded with boulders roughly the size and shape of television sets. I was too tired to worry much about sitting with Abdul round the fire he’d lit directly at the base of them – until there was a slithering, a clattering, a shout, and we scattered like crows from a shotgun as a rock slide ploughed into the packed earth where we’d been sitting.

We rebuilt Abdul’s fire a safe distance away.

That night I was lethargic yet restless and jumpy. The shit, the flies, even Kathleen’s proximity irritated me. Altitude gain. The mind can recognize the symptoms but not prevent them.

Then next morning was pure joy. I set off early on the rising track that snaked across the hillside above the glacier. It was clear and cold, the rising sun levelled mile-long shadows across the valley, the great peaks stood frozen to attention against the high-altitude dark-blue sky. I was out in front, the only living being in sight. I felt like an arrow, moving further and further away from the tension that set me going, getting nearer and nearer to my destination. After the uncertainties and setbacks of the last weeks, nothing could stop me getting there now.

Oh, yes? I looked at the mud pinnacles above me. They were studded with rocks between the size of cricket balls and semidetached villas. The trail was in their direct line of fire for a full hour or more Any one of those missiles could stop me from the Mustagh Tower – from meeting any future appointments at all for that matter, other than the one my father had now kept.

But I was alive. I put Bob Marley on the Walkman and carried on singing, trusting my fate. This blue flower my boot brushes past, the grey glacier river below, the chough drifting soundlessly by, the early sun lighting up the pinnacles one after another like a row of flares – they all happen once only, but that once is perfection enough. Inside and outside, the world is one rarefied upthrust of joy.

(Mal told me later that that section was probably the most dangerous of the entire walk-in. He had heard a whirring above him, ducked instinctively behind a ledge, a boulder crashed down 15 feet away from him. It is not a good place to put on headphones.)

I came down to a glacier river where the trail ended. There I sat and waited for the others to catch up. Our next move was to wade across the river. It was stunningly cold and painful. We staggered carefully across, the water up to our thighs. Watching Shokat cross was our biggest laugh since the oxygen cylinder blew up in Askole. Abdul was red in the face trying to hold back his giggling; this was one unpleasant task Shokat couldn’t hand to someone else.

We set off again, suffering shooting pains as the circulation came back to our feet.

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