Aye Cayambe!

So here is a little piece on Cayambe, or how I felt when climbing it. We didn't make it to the top of the volcano; you can probably tell that I am a little disappointed by that. However, while we sat on the shoulder at 5400 metres, we saw a sight that we wouldn't have seen at the summit, and I felt extraordinarily lucky to be there.

A bedtime before sunset,

Furlongs of restlessness rolled into the down bag,

and woke up in the brightening blackness to hear

The ecstatic sound of a liberated waterfall

And the short-sighted cataracts in my eye visualise the summit

While an injunction pounds in my head: climb the mountain, do it now.

After a sleepless sleep, we rise

Strap on our equipment to do battle,

Take a strategical vomit

And fortify ourselves against milque-toast thinking

With soft white bread and dreams of planting the flag

In the purest flour of summit snow.

Troops assemble outside the refuge;

Now our band of three appears rather small.

Into the night we go:

Above the studded palm of a town, told in fortune-teller's lights;

Stars falling ahead, luminary lovers crossed with snow that scuttles past

On its way to bedrock. 

Still, to our left, a tangential slope of ice, the angle remaining a theorem

as we tackle the intermediate problem

Calculating the physics by which crampon strikes ground.

And still, still ahead, the great white wall rises, a wall projected, waiting to be vandalised. 

The time must go

And the night also rises, the swell of its hand

As it stretches to swat:

Blocking out the stars, not one by one

But in sweeps and washes of a black paintbrush.

We can't see it, but we are walking on the beast:

the great grey back of the glacier, the ancient creature with

A cracked and misshapen mantle as though it were shedding its skin

Crevasses that yawn and shake off the night's white sleep

A wide grin, narrowing off to a dimple that we trace

And tenaciously, jump

the grimacing gap.

Through the waves and undulations of our fear, sickness, fatigue

We pass to find the perfect storm frozen at the shoulder

And stayed a while, to watch the crest 

Of a new dawn rise behind the sleeping monster

See: Lilliputian workers measure their strength

in lengths of pick-axe, marks staggered up the hill;

Crampons put the force behind their words: I am here to take you on, beast

And as I watch them climb the peak

See my summit recede before me

Overland ants climb into the rosy dawn

We turn, exhausted, to begin the descent

Back to the ground, where words are needed

Strength measured in sheets not pick-axes

And where moles make mountains I don't want to climb

We get a surprise: gift-wrapped in myth and meteorology

For being there, forsaking the summit

It appears this is the right place and time

For the hills to the south are spun with gold

That mantles here and there their deepening green

The peaks rise as tree-tops through the mist while

Skeins and spools of clouds twist on the loom of the wind

And yet we can see the rivers of cloud to the west

That fill in that whitening blue

And begin to scribble the story of the coming day;

They wouldn't have this view, up there.