Niaux

The charcoal lines begin to dance:
Horned things, monstrous footprints,
Ochre and scarlet
Stained fingers claw at cavern walls,
Flicker in and out of existence.
The echo of the Magdalenian man
Is in my bones


The Pleistocene was only yesterday;
Tomorrow, the mammoth extinction.
The limestone cave glistens with sweat
Like summer skin
Or polished antler points.


The ominous hominin on the wall
Winks under electric torches:
Each flickering trick of the light—
An eyelid’s flutter—
All of human history.


I wink back and ten thousand years go by.

Stella Point, elev. 18,871 ft

The loose scree gives way to scattered snowdrifts as we near Furtwängler glacier. Here they are at last: the snows of Kilimanjaro. There’s no real path now. We pick our way around the rim of the crater, skirting boulders, following Godlisten’s footprints as he packs down the snow.

“How you doing?” Godi asks me.

“Kichizi kama ndizi ndani ya friji,” I reply. He grins. It’s a phrase he taught me: Swahili for cool as a banana in the fridge.

The sky is striated now, black and grey and yellow and red; the earth hidden beneath a sea of black clouds below us. We sit for a moment, snap photos that don’t quite capture the sunrise. The German girls and their guide have fallen off the back, leaving only three of us: me, Godi, and Alex. I pull my gloves off, take a couple of grainy pictures of Alex on his phone. My fingers are numb and clumsy.

“Look,” calls Godi. We turn, look back towards the eastern horizon. The sun has surfaced. It casts the ice in bronze, halos our silhouettes. It feels warmer already.

We’re less than an hour from the summit.

Gilman's Point, 18,640 ft

I’m stepping up into the stars.

They’re so close I could brush them with my fingertips, if only I had the strength to lift my arm. They’re painted on a vaulted ceiling, like an astronomy book from the middle ages, like the Sistine Chapel. Every leaden step, every coppery breath, takes us closer, until we can look out and see stars below us, pinpricks of light outlining the curvature of the earth like an airport runway.

“I’m fuckin’ knackered,” says Alex, his Liverpool accent sticking in his throat. He doesn’t turn around. His jacket is a blinding white in front of me, reflecting the light of my headlamp back into my eyes. There are legends, I think, about ghosts who lead travelers up mountains and over cliffs. Still I follow his boots, cautious of the places where he stumbles on the loose scree, stepping in time with him. We set a rhythm, slow and faltering as a dying man’s heartbeat.

I'm breathing through a snorkeling mask: never quite enough oxygen. For a moment I'm back in the aquarium-blue water of Zanzibar. But here, there is only cold and dark and Alex's boots, one rocky step in front of me. And all around us, the stars.