An opaque pale blue hue of light filters through the ice where we have inadvertently carved our refuge close to the outer slope. Outside the storm rages relentlessly as the Jet Stream races in from the west with enormous life threatening force. The wind is screaming over the Terrace causing a huge tail of ice crystals and snow to extend horizontally out over Sikkim. Wind an invisible force, is revealed by the millions of frozen particles of water. Below the normally invisible horizontal line extending out front the cliff top is a chaotic confusion of air with no where to go, trapped between the rocks, lower slopes and the force above.

The atmosphere is deceptively calm in our cramped snow hole dug into the slopes of the north ridge below the buttress known as the Castle. Just above us Iies the deceptively close looking summit pyramid. Two pitches would take us to the perimeter rim of the Great Terrace, and they look easy, my god we would cruise that buttress after all we had already been through over the past few weeks on the NW Face below. And then it’s a walk, just a few hours to the font of the easy angled summit slop, a high altitude stroll on the very edge of heaven. Mark and me have enthused for weeks, months, and even over the past couple of years about this walk. We could make it, I know we could, despite all the work and difficulties with the resultant loss of muscle tissue, it’s still possible if only this damned weather would give us a chance. Inside lurks a realisation, tint a fear, that this walk on the edge of heaven could in these conditions give us an irreversible journey to that place!

Life has been very hard for many weeks, our one and only chance for the summit is slipping through our fingers like dry sand, jeopardised by the rapidly deteriorating weather.

During the night our claustrophobic home has been partly filled with spindrift, blown in through our entrance plug constructed from rucksacks boots and axes. We’ve been half buried in our fitful sleep and most of our equipment and food is lost under a blanket of white powder. Simple tasks and life functions become monumental chores of difficulty requiring extreme mental application just to move, to get things going, to make it happen. We light the stove and fill a pan with snow from the roof of our home. It takes an age for the crystals to produce a pan of hot water. The flame burns the little oxygen that exists and leaves us gasping. I reach up and pull a rucksack from the entrance plug in an attempt to replenish the depleted supply. Tea is hopeless and disgusting, a brew of hot sweet water is far more palatable. We drink. Mark immediately throws his share back into the pan, not wanting to make a mess on the floor of our abode. Most considerate of him in these circumstances. I suspect the same consideration was absent years ago when a student after a session in Glasgow!

It takes almost three hours to finally sort ourselves out. One hour to melt sufficient snow for a brew, one hour to don our protective clothing and boots, and just about another hour to think about it and actually make the moves. I drag myself up the forty five degree entrance tunnel out onto the ridge. Immediately I’m flattened by the fury of the gale force wind, blinded and grit blasted by a million particles of ice in wind chill temperature’s well down below minus fifty degrees. The situation is becoming serious, it could become desperate! and yet I’m more concerned, and even positively mortified by the thought of failure. How after all this time and effort could we be so unlucky? It’s so cruel!

Over the next few hours we lay in wait for an abatement in Kangchenjunga’s fury. We lay in silence. Were unable to look at each ether. Our eye’s are filled with tears and avert to the white blank walls. The warm salty water trickle’s down my face and comes to a rest as ice in my frozen beard. Were afraid of the inevitable truth which exists behind the mask’s which are our face’s. Avoiding the utterance of the words we dare not say.

A decision has to be made.