Shenadun

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He had hammered the piton into a crack in the unthinkably aged rock. By rights the last hundred feet of the ascent should have been gentle, easy. Here on the roof of the world, on the white shining summit of Shenadun, the bitter wind hammered at him, screamed shrill warnings in his ears. There should have been a gentle slope.

He wanted to weep. It was unthinkable that he, Gowan Mitchell, should weep in frustration — and at a stubborn mountain.

As, buffeted by the wind, he threaded the rope through the eye of the piton, he thought of other tears and other mountains. Peaks in the Swiss Alps, the Canadian Rockies. But those had been tears of joy, tears to express the deep, throbbing emotion that had always filled him when he stood, alone and free on the top of a mountain. The first hill, for it was but a hill, he had climbed had been in Scotland when he was twelve, twenty-seven years ago. That had been the beginning of the disease.

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