We poke our heads out of the semi collapsed tent and look at the final 1,500 ft of the Granite Wall on the Ganesh Face of mighty Shivling, in the Garhwal Himalayas.
Winds howls high up on the mountain, whipping a snow plume from the summit. Mounds of new snow cling to the towers and cornices around us, as they try to stick to the near vertical stone wall but more often breaking loose in flurries of powder as gusts whiplash across the mountain.
In the north the billowing clouds that had engulfed us ebb back along the Gangotri Glacier retreating into the depths of the Greater Himalayas.
For 76 hours the four of us have been pinned down by a blizzard on a knife edge ridge crest at 20,000ft. Strong winds have pushed and shoved our tents on their tiny ledges, half burying them with snow, twisting them into strange asymmetrical shapes.
Our food and gas are nearly gone, our supply of pitons and slings of rope have dwindled. We don't have enough supplies to go down even if we wanted to. To reverse the serpentine path we'd taken would take days. Days we didn't have. We'd agreed the day before to press on to the summit, but we hash it out again. It's not a decision to be taken lightly.
Questions rise in my thoughts: How many more days to reach the summit and how many to descend? How long till we eat again? Will the weather hold? and if it doesn't what then?
The four of us look down the 5,500 ft of cliffs, ice fields and narrow ridge crests we'd climbed up. But the decision has already been made by the fickle mountain weather . We've got no choice; we've got to get over the top and down over the other side that's the only way to get off the mountain for us..
In front of us the final rock headwall rises steeply to the summit. Beyond the summit lies the west face of Shivling, down which we'll have to descend to the Meru Glacier to safety.
On the northern skyline the jagged peaks of Tibet sit under a clear , cold sky.
As I pan towards the south I see a pall of dust and haze rising from the boiling Terai plains of North India. Down there in the heat -yes that's the real India.
That's where this climb had begun, where the dreams had been sprouted, in a baking city, two hundred and fifty miles away....
In Delhi: That crazy quilt of humanity baking on the plains through a relentless May sun, the air thick and steaming with the combined smell of smog and human sweat.. It was there in that heat that the thought had been born and the germ burst into fruition and now this is that dream's final swan song...
I'd wanted to climb this mountain, but had I bargained for this? Had any of us? As we pack our sacks I feel the hollowness of my stomach and a pang of fear. My heartbeat echoes in my head like a drum spelling inevitable doom, My throat is parched from dehydration, my lips numb and split from the cold, and the first touches of frostbite are evident on my fingertips and toes . I see all this and yet I am detached as if it really is not me, that this is not happening. It is unreal and almost dreamlike.
In fact my whole presence on the mountain feels like a dream..
In that dream home seems far away across many lives and universes. In it's place is a single purpose to keep moving for to stop is to die , for we are approaching the Death Zone where the line between living and dead is quickly blurred, there is just 1/3rd the oxygen which makes your mind wander and causes hypoxia and here the human body starts to feed on itself in order to survive. So no stopping just keep moving for that is the only way back..
As the others start out I take a last look back our route up here and then turning my face away from the known and step into the unknown.
I feel a surge of adrenalin as I attach my harness to the climbing rope,connecting me to the headwall and embracing it and start to climb...
Life has never been so simple, so free of everyday clutter ever before.
