In what can only be described as a desperate shuffle against the ticking clock of mortality, a band of oxygen-starved mountaineers is now locked in a grimly comic struggle with a monstrous ice block on the slopes of Mount Everest. The block, a chunk of glacial indifference the size of a double-decker bus, has parked itself across the route to the summit, forcing climbers to engage in a high-altitude game of ‘pound the frozen foe before it pounds your expedition budget’. Reports from Base Camp suggest that guides are now wielding ice axes with the fervour of men trying to dig a swimming pool in a snowstorm, while clients shiver in expensive down suits and wonder if their life insurance covers ‘death by icy bureaucratic obstruction’.
This is not a race against time, it is a race against the slow, grinding truth that Everest has become a queue on a ledge in the death zone, a traffic jam in the sky where the only thing moving is your heart rate and the speed at which your extremities cease to function. The Sherpas, as ever, do the heavy lifting while Western climbers take selfies and pretend they are conquering nature rather than being allowed passage by a committee of literal mountain gods. The ice block itself is a metaphor for something, probably the frozen heart of the climbing industry, but for now, it is just a big, solid ‘no’ sitting on the path to a place that is already a cemetery.
The climbers will win, of course, because money and stubbornness defeat physics in the headlines, but the real story is the absurdity of this enterprise. Up here, the air is thin, the ethics thinner, and the only thing racing is the speed at which the story becomes a punchline for the bored gods. Biff Thistlethwaite, reporting from a bar at 5,000 metres where the gin is warm and the news is cold as ice.
