Killer peak

Imagine you have been walking up into the sky for four days on end, until you reach a frozen plateau as high as Mont Blanc. Only now does the serious business begin. Starting at midnight, you climb continuously for six hours in the dark up what seems like a near-vertical scree slope the height of Snowdon, at 20 degrees below zero while gasping for breath at 50 per cent oxygen. You have reached the crater rim of the highest free-standing mountain in the world, capped with cliffs of ice, only a few miles from the equator.

The map of Africa includes three physical features more familiar to Europeans than any other: at the top, the pyramids; at the bottom, Table Mountain; and between them that mighty volcano nearly 20,000 feet high whose name is best known from a short story by Hemingway which is not about the ‘snows of Kilimanjaro’ at all. I had three reasons for wishing to mark my 65th birthday by climbing it. I did not want to leave this life without attempting one serious world-class mountain. Now that my sons Nicholas and Alexander have reached their twenties, I wanted to complete their education by introducing them to the wonders of Africa. Finally, my mad friend Robin Page, the farmer and author to whom I was introduced years ago by Laurens van der Post, told me that climbing Kilimanjaro, twice, was the most enjoyable thing he had ever done and promised that, if I came along, he would organise a party to do it for the third and last time.

The physical preparation – weeks of cycling up and down the Mendip hills – was easy. The mental preparation, as what we had taken on loomed ever closer, was harder. A Somerset neighbour who had just driven round the base of Kilimanjaro kindly told me they had seen two corpses being brought down (it kills more people a year from altitude sickness than any other mountain in the world).