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.