As the air thins almost to nothing, time seems to thin as well. Watches and multifunction altimeters tick over at the same rate, but time remains only loosely connected to its measurement. Sure, the process is the same—when I stepped onto the summit and checked my watch, it read 9:00 A.M.; when I was ready to leave, it read 9:20. Yet I knew about the slippery quality of time at extreme altitude. The beauty can be so mesmerizing that huge chunks of time—perhaps half an hour or more—can pass themselves off as five minutes. When beauty of all kinds is absent, the bone-numbing cold of a mountain’s highest slopes can convert a five-minute block into an hour of suffering. When disaster looms, time becomes immeasurable. At this point, I spoke to Alex, letting him know that we had summited and were about to head down. I knew all about the urgency of descent. It was a very long way down to the North Col, which is where I would feel safe. I knew that on this route there were time-wasting bottlenecks where less competent climbers would struggle with minor obstacles the rest of us found easy.
