Kham, 2004

Four hours up beside a half-frozen waterfall, through thorn bushes that caught my wide rucksack and threw me back. I was dizzy from hunger. Losing consciousness for even a second meant falling thirty or fifty metres into the roaring water, and I was not ready: at home I had a family, a snowboard, a good bike, work I loved and a long life full of joys.

It went on so long that I began to think we had died yesterday on the way down from the pass and simply hadn’t noticed, the way people in some stories cross over without realising. I had dreamed of mountains, and here they were: now I would climb through thorn bushes forever. I lost my sleeping mat and my hat. The mat left exactly when I no longer needed it.