everest

An Inspirational Figure
Lisping Waves …

Here is a piece of writing that had to do for English. It is long overdue for me to give you something that I wrote in return for all those neat short stories you wrote and offered for my perusal, so here it is. You may recognise a phrase from a certain fantasy series (which will remain nameless).

There is a saying, 'Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain'. And on this day I faced both. Or was it night? It didn’t matter. Thoughts of night, automatically triggered memories of curling up by the fireplace back home on a soft, furry wolf pelt where I would eventually fall asleep, the muted snowstorm that would have been raging outside our hut's strong carapace lulling me into deep sleep. Chessy, but thoughts of heat, warmth, they are what you need to think about when conquering Everest.

I guesstimated that I was perhaps two hundred metres from the summit, and that was being pessimistic. A necessary, no, vital precautoin when attempting to brave the extreme furies of nature. If I hadn’t been pessimistic in the amount of rations I would have needed, I would have been a week dead, as I had lost half of it (along with my remaining companions) down an ominous, pitch-black abyss, a contrast to the continual blanket of white ice, but just as cold. As cold as I was, physically and emotionally. The death of my companions along the way would have had me bawling my eyes out on water-level but it seemed the frigid conditions had frozen my feelings and emotions. Only one thought shone in my mind, the only source of warmth that drove me on when I was supposed to have turned back: my duty.

I was disobeying the main rule of mountain-climbing that my father had taught me: never go solo, but even half-dead, frost-bitten at my extremities and no one else to provide the peremptory body beat, I didn’t care. I was to die. Even though a child could run two hundred metres in less than half a minute, the conditions I had to do the same feat in were horribly worse, and that it self was a horrible, horrible understatement. I knew I wouldn’t reach the apex with the cold vice of death gripping harder and harder, but to me death would be wonderfully warm, rest (though eternal) at last.

But I went on. At a rate that would put a snail to shame. A snail dragging weights. I laughed at the thought and almost choked with the effort. I was going mad. My body shrieked at me, louder than the perpetual blizzards to stop and let death's gentle grip take me, but my sense of duty overcame it. Again. And again. And yet again …

My father, the last person to attempt Mt. Everest, failed, dying on its desolate slopes so close to Heaven in the wintry Hell. He was an inspirational figure who greatly influenced my life, and he told me in my early stages of mountain-climbing that I was to one day conquer Mt. Everest. 'It is your duty,' his exact words. But duty is heavier than a mountain, and Everest is the heaviest of them all.

By Mouse