Put that glacier on a hillside and everything is accelerated; the living creature becomes a dragon. The ice of the glacier breaks up into immense blocks and shards, and these shift regularly, then balance on a point or edge, then fall and smash to fragments, or crack open to reveal deep fissures. As we threaded our way up through the maze of the Lho La’s icefall, we were constantly moving underneath blocks of ice that looked eternal but were actually precarious—they were certain to fall sometime in the next month or two. I’m not expert at probability theory, but I still didn’t like it.

“Freds,” I complained. “You said this was a piece of cake.”

“It is,” he said. “Check out how fast we’re going.”

“That’s because we’re scared to death.”

“Are we? Hey, it must be only forty-five degrees or so.”

This is as steep as an icefall can get before the ice all falls downhill at once. Even the famous Khumbu Icefall, which we now had a fantastic view of over to our right, fell at only about thirty degrees. The Khumbu Icefall is an unavoidable part of the standard route on Everest, and it is by far the most feared section; more people have died there than anywhere else on the mountain. And the Lho La is worse than the Khumbu!

So I had some choice words for our situation as we climbed very quickly indeed, and most of them left Laure mystified. “Great, Freds,” I shouted at him. “Real piece of cake all right!”

“Lot of icing, anyway,” he said, and giggled. This under a wall that would flatten him like Wile E. Coyote if it fell. I shook my head.

“What do you think?” I said to Laure.

“Very bad,” Laure said. “Very bad, very dangerous.”

“What do you think we should do?”

“Whatever you like.”

We hurried.

Now I like climbing as much as anybody, almost, but I am not going to try to claim to you that it is an exceptionally sane activity.