hours and they would be under the summit ridge.
As the afternoon dragged on, he felt the pace starting to slow even further. He could hear himself grunt each time he pulled his body upwards and his forearms felt swollen and numb. There was a strange, cramping spasm in his right leg that he knew wasn’t from the cold. He wondered, almost clinically, how much longer his body could bear it.
Longer, he knew, than Bill’s could. Over the course of the last few hours, as Luca had tried to move forward, the ropes would often snap taut at his waist, jerking him to a standstill. He would wait for a minute, allowing Bill to catch his breath, but when he tried to press on, they still wouldn’t budge.
Fifty feet below, Bill could feel sweat mingling with the thin veil of ice across his face before running down into his eyes. Beneath his jacket, his chest rose up and down in ragged bursts and, whenever he stopped to try and steady his breathing, he was hit by a protracted bout of coughing which left him feeling even shakier. He tried to kick in his crampons and get a better grip, but his legs felt wooden and unresponsive, his front points just scraping over the smooth ice. In each hand, the axes felt unbearably heavy, and as he swung against the wall he knew his movements were becoming increasingly desperate.
He stopped again, bracing himself for another fit of coughing. Looking up through his fogged goggles, he could see the outline of Luca waiting above.
‘You all right?’
As the words floated down to him, Bill went to respond, but another bout of coughing tore through him. When it had finished he tilted his head back and, clenching his jaw in anticipation of the pain, yelled out a single word.
‘Rest.’
Even from the distance, Luca could hear the strain in Bill’s voice — you didn’t climb for seven years with someone without being able to instantly gauge their level of discomfort. Judging by the jerky rhythm of the last hour or so, Luca guessed that Bill was now running on empty.
About twenty feet above his head, Luca had spied an outcrop of rock that might be big enough for the two of them to sit on. He had been working his way towards it for the last half-hour. Waiting for enough slack in the rope, he climbed the last few feet and, with trembling arms, hauled himself over the lip. With his back wedged against the ice and his legs dangling over the edge, he heaved back on the rope to take some strain off Bill.
‘Fifty feet more,’ he yelled down. ‘We’ve got our own private balcony up here.’
For hours Luca had had his nose pressed against the mirror of ice, totally absorbed in the climb. Now he sat back in the sunshine, blinking at the world that was spread out beneath him.
Every view was different and no matter how much he climbed, the experience of having a new perspective was always breathtaking. As the sheer scale of the surroundings came into focus, his personal struggle with the mountain seemed to fade, shrinking him to what he was: a tiny human, clinging to a giant aberration of land.
Except that this time the aberration had a strange sense of order to it.
Luca squinted in the bright light, trying to take it all in. To his right stood a ring of snow-capped mountains, flawlessly aligned. His eyes followed the peaks as they curved round in a perfect circle. It was the symmetry that was so extraordinary, as if they had been positioned with a pair of compasses. At the centre lay a blanket of cloud, impenetrably thick.
As he watched, the cloud started to shift. It began to part slowly, changing and reforming, before something began to take shape at its centre. Luca felt his grip slacken slightly on the rope as he leaned forward involuntarily.
Light poured in through the gash in the clouds, illuminating one side, then the next. As the shape beneath finally broke free of its swirling cover, Luca realised that he was staring at a pyramid so perfectly proportioned it had to be man-made.
Except that it couldn’t be. Surely. What else could be in the middle of the Himalayas except a mountain? Looking out across the horizon, he realised it was smaller than the surrounding peaks, but only fractionally. That would make it nearly seven thousand metres high. Absurd to think that humans could build anything so big.
A trembling hand appeared over the ledge beside him.
For a split second Luca just stared at it, his thoughts still on the pyramid mountain. Then, shaking himself awake, he lunged forward to grab Bill’s wrist. He pulled as hard as he could while Bill struggled to gain purchase, his crampons clawing over the dark rock. Long seconds passed before he managed to worm his way far enough on to the ledge. Then he collapsed, flat on his back, the only sound the heaving of his chest.
‘Mate, are you OK?’
Even behind his goggles, Luca could see the sick exhaustion in Bill’s eyes. He looked pale and utterly spent, as if each hour’s climb had gradually leached a little more colour from his blood.
‘You OK?’ Luca repeated, automatically gathering up the last few coils of rope. Already he felt his gaze being drawn back to the pyramid. ‘You’ve got to check out this mountain, Bill. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Bill opened his mouth to answer, but was suddenly hit by a bout of hacking coughs. Luca turned back in time to see his head loll to one side, a string of bloody spittle stretching from his lips. The lack of oxygen in his blood had started to turn his lips mauve.
‘Shit,’ said Luca softly, and then as he saw Bill slowly close his eyes, he raised his voice.
‘Bill… you have to stay awake.’
Bill remained motionless, his eyes shut tight.
The throbbing in his head was unbearable, even the smallest movement threatened to split his temples, paralysing him with pain. For hours he had tried to fight it, but now even his vision was starting to blur.
‘Head is killing me,’ he managed. ‘The altitude… we’re climbing too fast.’
‘How bad is it?’
It took Bill a few seconds to muster the energy to speak. When he did it came out as little more than a murmur.
‘I can’t see so well.’
Luca swore before turning and looking up the sheer wall of ice.
The summit ridge was no more than half an hour’s climb above them. The weather was absolutely perfect — low winds, good visibility. This expedition had been months in the planning, and now here they were in the perfect position — the mountain was offering itself on a plate.
‘Bill, listen. I’m going to tie you to the ledge just here, only for an hour or so, and go for the summit. You’ll be all right, I promise.’
Somewhere in his exhausted brain, Bill processed these words. He raised his head to speak then another bout of coughing convulsed through him, his chest rising and falling like a fish thrown on to dry land.
After a moment his body went limp and he slowly turned his head aside to spit a thick globule of phlegm on to the nearby rock.
‘You… can’t leave,’ he hissed.
He opened his eyes, squinting through the pain.
‘Don’t… fucking… leave,’ he repeated.
Bill tried to focus through the fog of his thoughts. He had to stay awake, had to fight the crippling lethargy. The seconds stretched. He felt his consciousness dip and the darkness drag at him. For the longest time, nothing happened. All he could hear was the noise of his own chest, heaving up and down. There was nothing except the blackness clouding the edges of his vision, slowly sinking in on him.
‘Luca… please.’
Bill’s voice was nothing more than a pathetic murmur, his last thoughts fading on his swollen lips. Then, somewhere through the haze, he saw Luca’s silhouette move closer until he was standing directly overhead. Bill felt a hand on the front of his climbing harness and his body being hoisted forward towards the edge of the cliff.
He reached up, trying to grab on to Luca’s arm. He was balanced right over the long drop of the cliff beneath.
When Luca finally spoke, frustration thickened his voice.
‘Come on then. Let’s get the hell out of here.’
