The group starts from the hotel at a brisk pace. Little children from nearby villages walk with us, chatter in broken English, beg. The sun is shining; the warm morning carries an air of expectation, of adventure. I am terrifically excited. I have never done anything like this in my life and I am sure it will be rewarding.
In less than an hour my enthusiasm is gone. The begging children have become reminders that we are not trailblazers, but more like commuters en route to a well-established tourist destination. I find their cuteness irritating, because it has been honed on my predecessors and thus reminds me that thousands have gone before me.
The atmospheric haze has closed in; we can no longer see the mountain that is our destination. We are walking up a dusty road through poor farming villages, the views are not attractive, and the day has turned from warm to hot. I am sweating profusely. My clothing chafes at waist and crotch and armpits. What’s worse, I feel blisters on my feet, though I have not been walking for an hour.
I stop by the side of the road, pull off my boots, and inspect my feet. Loren tells me I should have worn two pairs of socks, a thin inner one and a heavy outer one; I dismiss this double-sock camping lore with a wave. My feet will be all right; I’ll put Band-Aids on them in the evening. Paul walks by, mentions he has some moleskin if I need it; I say no thanks, wondering to myself what moleskin is. I have never heard of moleskin.
I keep walking.
We enter the rain forest on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. It is a beautiful and lush setting, gurgling streams and hanging moss on huge trees that arch overhead and block the sun. It is cooler here, and the trail follows a fresh stream. Monkeys chatter in the trees. I feel renewed enthusiasm. However, before long the humidity, the moisture trapped beneath the canopy of the trees, the dripping of water like a constant rain, gets on my nerves. My clothes are now entirely soaked. I no longer appreciate the beauty, no longer enjoy the clear water tumbling over the smooth rocks. And my feet hurt more and more.
It was a relief to enter the rain forest, and it is a relief to leave it in early afternoon, emerging into an open meadow of grass six feet high. However, by now I am very tired—astonishingly tired—and the path up the meadow is steep. I am wondering how much farther I must go. There are no signposts to tell me how I am doing, how far before we reach the huts. Unable to plan, unable to pace myself, I find my fatigue feels extreme. Do I have an hour still to go? Two hours? Then I see, on a ridge above the high grass, the brown geometric A-frames of the Mandara huts. They are very close. It is only four o’clock in the afternoon. I am not really so tired after all.
We have afternoon tea. Paul and Jan have been here for an hour, so much faster was their pace. The Mandara huts are at nine thousand feet, so I have a chance to feel the altitude. It doesn’t seem to make much difference. My spirits are good as I walk around the huts, looking around.
The only problem is my feet. They hurt considerably, and when I remove my boots I find that I have large blisters on the heels and on the small toes of both feet. I put Band-Aids on them, eat an early dinner of bread and canned beef stew, and go to sleep. Paul says he never sleeps well at altitude. I sleep badly.
I’m nervous about the coming day.
The second day is strikingly different. On the first day, the landscape was varied—from desert savanna to rain forest to mountain meadow—but there was never any wider view, never any orientation, any sense of where you were on the mountain. You were just climbing.
On the second day, the landscape is unchanging alpine meadows. An hour from the huts, we suddenly see the peak of Kilimanjaro with perfect clarity, the sides of the volcano streaked with snow. I am excited. We stop for pictures. Here, in a field of low grass, with open topography, I can see where I am—moving on the flank of an enormous wide cone. But so wide is this volcano, and so gentle its slopes, that soon we cannot see the peak any more; it is somewhere ahead, hidden behind deceptively gentle ridges. Once again, deprived of a view of my destination, I am discouraged, and ask the guides when we will be able to see Kilimanjaro.
They invariably point to the ground beneath my feet and say, “This Kilimanjaro.” When I make myself clear, they shrug. They don’t seem to understand my anxiety about seeing the mountain when I am walking on it. Finally our guide, Julius, says, “You see the top with snow tomorrow, all day tomorrow. Not today, but from tomorrow.”
I walk on. It is never really hot today, and the walking is pleasant, the ground dark and spongy underfoot. Occasionally the trail is a knee-deep trench dug by all the feet that have passed before. And we are seeing more people on the trails, too: apparently climbers from other hotels. All sorts of people, all sorts of ages. I am encouraged by the diversity.
All in all it is a pleasant day. My only concern is my feet, which are painful. Today I am wearing sneakers instead of boots, but the damage is already done. And I am often winded; I stop to rest every fifteen or twenty minutes. Loren never seems to tire, but I am thirty-three, she is twenty-two. Even so, as the day goes on, I notice she appreciates my frequent stops.
In the absence of the peak, I am looking for the lobelia trees, which I have been told characteristically appear at the eleven-thousand-foot level. I don’t know what lobelia trees look like, and since we are above the tree line, every kind of odd plant receives my scrutiny. I ask the guides, “Lobelia? Lobelia?” and they just shake their heads.
Finally, when we break for a late lunch, we find ourselves sitting next to a light-green plant about four feet high with puffy, bulbous leaves. Julius points it out as lobelia.
At every break, the guides and porters sit and smoke cigarettes. I can’t believe they are doing this. I am gasping and wheezing and stopping for breath every fifteen minutes. The lobelias at eleven thousand feet mean, I remind myself, that I am barely halfway up.
I begin to wonder if I can make it to the top, after all.
During the rest of the day, I have nothing left to look for except the Horomba huts where we will stay the night. When we reach them, I am extremely tired, and my feet are very painful.
The location of the huts is spectacular, A-frames set on a ledge of black lava at 12,300 feet, looking down on a bank of clouds. At sunset, the air is pink and purple. I feel I am walking around at an altitude normally reached only by airplanes; it is exhilarating. It’s also making me lightheaded. Now that I am just strolling around the camp and not pushing along the trail, I realize how severely the altitude affects me. I can’t breathe comfortably, even sitting down. A term comes back from medical school: “resting dyspnea,” shortness of breath while sitting down. I never appreciated how panicky it feels not to be able to catch your breath.
I wonder about altitude sickness, which starts to be a problem at this height. Altitude sickness makes your lungs fill up with water. The cause is unknown, but if you have a dry cough or a headache, you must head back down at once or you may die. I give an experimental cough. I don’t have altitude sickness.
My feet are my real concern. I am reluctant to take my sneakers off and see the extent of the damage. When I finally do, I find that the Band-Aids have shifted and done little to protect me; the blisters are larger than yesterday and they have burst, exposing red, inflamed, exquisitely tender skin.
It’s sufficiently bad that I abandon my pride and ask Paul for help. He takes one look and calls Jan, who is, after all, a surgeon. Jan gets out his moleskin—moleskin turns out to be a thin, padded cotton sheet with adhesive on one side—and cuts pieces to fit my blisters. We use all his moleskin fixing me up. He stands back and pronounces himself satisfied with the dressing.
I thank him.
“Yes,” he says sadly, “but it is too bad.”
“Why?”
“Well,” he says, looking at my feet, “now you must go back.”
“No,” I say.
“I think,” he says judiciously, “that you cannot go on with your feet this way. You must go down the mountain tomorrow.”
“No,” I say. ??
?I’ll continue.” I am surprised at the strength of my own conviction, sitting there with my feet bandaged and my breathing labored. But it doesn’t really feel like conviction, it just feels like logic. I’ve already walked two days. If I go back, it will take two days. That’s four days. Whereas, if I push on an extra day, in a total of five days I will have reached the summit and returned.
I’ve gone too far to turn back, at least in my own mind.
Jan leaves. Pretty soon Loren comes over. “I talked to Jan. He’s very worried about your feet.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Jan says you could get a bad infection. He says the dirt from the trail gets ground into your open skin and you could get a serious infection.”
I wonder where she is leading with this.
“I’ve already talked to the guide,” she says, “and it’s no problem. They do it all the time. They’ll send one porter back down with you, so you don’t need to worry about getting lost. And don’t worry about me; Paul and Jan will keep an eye on me, and I’ll be fine.”
Her whole attitude is so casual. Climbing this mountain just doesn’t mean that much to her. I wonder why it means so much to me.
“I’m not going back,” I say. Even as I say it, I realize I am being unrealistic. We are at 12,300 feet on the side of a mountain. I have very bad blisters. She’s right: I should go back.
“Your feet look so awful. Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay,” she says. “I guess you know what you’re doing.”
“I do.”
“They say tomorrow is the worst day,” she says.
“That’s fine,” I say. “I’ll be ready.”
We start early on the third day. The terrain turns abruptly vertical; for an hour we scramble hand over foot up lava ledges. The air becomes much colder; we start out in sweaters but soon we are wearing parkas; then gloves, then hoods.
After two hours, we break out of the narrow lava ledges onto the saddle. It is an abrupt and startling view; at last I can see the geography.
Mount Kilimanjaro is actually two major peaks. Kibo is a broad cinder cone with snow on its southern flanks. A few miles to the east, an older volcanic peak, Mawenzi, presents a different appearance—jagged, harsh vertical lines and streaks of snow over crumbling, rocky pinnacles. Mawenzi is about 16,900 feet high, and Kibo 19,340. The two peaks are separated by a distance of seven miles, and between them lies a sloping desert plateau averaging about thirteen thousand feet in altitude, called the “saddle.”
It is here that we have emerged, at the base of Mawenzi, looking across the windswept saddle toward Kibo, its blunt summit cloudless in early morning. The view is spectacular in a bleak way. For the first time on the trip, I appreciate my vulnerability in a hostile environment. I am standing on a desert plateau two and a half miles high. There are no trees, no plants, no life at all, just red rocks and sand and freezing wind. Ahead of me, at the base of Kibo, I see a sparkling dot—the tin roof of tiny Kibo Hut, where we will spend the night before making the ascent in darkness up the cinder cone the following day.
The clothing that was once too hot, that clung and chafed, is now flimsy as paper before the wind. I am chilled; I put on everything I am carrying in my day pack, and Loren and I set out across the saddle.
Even walking on flat terrain is difficult at this altitude, and Loren calls for a rest—the first time on the trip she has done so. After midday, clouds appear around the peaks, and cast swift-moving shadows on the desert floor. We are now on a gentle rise up to the hut at 15,500 feet. Distances are deceptive here; the hut looks only about an hour distant, but after an hour it still seems no closer.
We walk slower and slower, and when we finally come up to Kibo Hut to greet Paul and Jan, who have been here for a while, we feel as if we are moving in slow motion. Paradoxically, the thin air makes us behave as if we were underwater, in a dense medium.
Paul and Jan have lost their usual good spirits. In fact, everyone is distinctly irritable as they trudge up to the hut. People complain—about the wind, the bunks, the food, the weather. The general mood is grim. Paul says, “I’ve seen it before. It’s the altitude. Makes you irritable. And, of course, everyone’s wondering.”
“Wondering?”
“Whether they’ll make it to the top.”
That’s certainly what I am wondering, but Paul is an experienced climber who’s been on several trekking expeditions in Nepal. “You’re worried about it?”
“Not really. But it crosses your mind. It has to.”
The accommodations at Kibo Hut are reminiscent of a Siberian prison camp. Triple-decker bunks line all four tin walls; in the middle of the room, a central pit for eating. The wind whines through the cracks in the walls; nobody removes any clothing indoors. We have dinner at 5:00 p.m., porridge and tea. Nobody can eat much. We are all thinking about the ascent. We must reach the top before ten the next morning, because after that the weather is likely to sock in, closing off the views and making the summit dangerous. If we climb too slowly, we risk being turned back from the summit because of the weather.
One of the guides tells us the plan: we will be awakened with tea (no coffee at these altitudes) at 2:00 a.m., and we will begin our ascent in darkness. One lantern for every two people. We will stay together, so as not to get lost in the darkness. It is six hours from here to the summit; after three hours, there is a cave where we can stop and rest, but otherwise there is no shelter until we reach the summit, and come back down to Kibo. It will be very cold. We should wear all the clothing we have.
I’m already wearing all the clothing I have. I’m wearing long Johns and three pairs of pants, two tee shirts, two shirts, a sweater, and a parka. I wear a wool balaclava on my head. I wear all these clothes to bed, removing only my boots before climbing into my sleeping bag. Everyone else wears their clothes to bed, too. We’re in bed by 7:00 p.m., silent, listening to the wind whine.
Sleep is impossible. Every time I begin to drift off, I snap awake, suddenly fearful, convinced I am suffocating, only to realize that it is simply the altitude.
I am not the only one with this problem. Inside the darkened hut, I hear groans and curses in a half-dozen languages throughout the night. It is almost a relief when the guide shakes me, and hands me a plastic cup filled with smoky hot tea, and tells me to dress.
All around me, people are pulling on boots and gloves. Nobody speaks. The atmosphere is, if anything, even more grim than before. Paul stops by to wish us good luck on our ascent; he hopes we make it. I wonder if it’s some sort of mountaineering tradition, this last-minute wishing of luck. After all, we’ve come so far, there is so little left, who would turn back now? Nobody in his right mind. After all, I think, how bad can it be?
We take our lanterns and leave the tin hut, and climb the mountain in darkness.
Very quickly it becomes a nightmare. The lantern is useless; the wind blows it out; the darkness is total. I cannot see anything and continually stumble over rocks and small obstacles. I am sure this would be painful if I could feel anything in my feet at all, but they are numb with cold. Even when I wiggle my toes in the boots, I feel nothing. As I stumble up the mountain, the numb cold creeps up my legs, first to the shins, then the knees, then the mid-thigh. The trail upward is steep and exhausting, but the cold is so penetrating we stop for only a few moments at a time, just enough to catch our breath in the blackness, and stumble on. I feel rather than see the presence of the guides, the porters, the other hikers. Occasionally I hear a grunt or a voice, but for the most part everyone trudges along silently; I hear only the wind and my own labored breathing. As I walk along, I have plenty of time to wonder whether I am getting frostbite in my numb feet. It’s my own fault—I was completely unprepared for this trip, I didn’t bring the right equipment, including the right boots; it was a serious oversight; I may be penalized now. Anyway, frostbite or not, I am having real trouble. I frankly don’t think I’ll be able to make it. I can go on for a
while, but I doubt I can last much longer.
Somewhere around me, I hear Loren. “Is that you?”
“Yes,” I say. “Can you feel your feet?”
“I haven’t been able to feel them for an hour,” she says. There is a pause. “Listen: what are we doing here?”
The question takes me by surprise. I don’t really have an answer. “We’re having an adventure,” I say, and laugh cheerfully.
She doesn’t laugh back.
“This is crazy,” she says. “Climbing this mountain is crazy.”
Her words enter my consciousness directly. I have no doubt in my mind she is right. It is crazy to be doing this. Yet I feel protective toward the decision to make the climb, as if it were a friend I don’t want criticized.
I am trudging onward in the darkness, tired, numb, gasping for air, freezing cold, a prisoner on a forced march. I put one foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. I try to set a rhythm, to keep moving forward in that rhythm.
To consider whether or not this is crazy does not help my rhythm right now. I ignore her statement and concentrate on walking in my rhythm. How long I continue in this way I am not sure; it is too much trouble to look at my watch: clumsily peeling away layers of clothing to expose a glowing green dial that is hard to read through chilled, tearing eyes. After a while the time doesn’t matter any more; I just keep walking.
The arrival at the cave at the halfway point is a surprise. The cave isn’t warm, but it’s out of the wind and so seems warmer. We are all able to light our lanterns, so we have light. We can look at one another. People huddle together, talking quietly. I see the shock on many faces. I am not the only one who finds this climb a nightmare.
Loren sits next to me, whispers, “I hear the English couple is going back.”
“Oh?”
“She’s sick. She’s throwing up from the altitude.”
“Oh.” I don’t know who she is talking about. I don’t really care.
“How do you feel?” she says.
“Terrible.”