Were Stephen’s experiences the result of being at a high altitude, were they hallucinations – or was what he saw really there? I was never sure and that was part of the horror. The isolation, a sense of ‘otherness’, the extreme cold and the immense scale of the mountain with its towering pinnacles, deep crevasses, and above all the silence dominates. So it is only in the later part where the terror hinted at before sets in. It’s not a long book, 240 pages, and almost half of it describes the mountain itself and the route the climbers took to get to the start of the climb and setting up their base camp. Under the most extreme weather conditions, the constant fear of an avalanche and the increasing effects of mountain sickness Stephen’s paranoia rises. He fears someone is following them and when he finds a rucksack left behind by the earlier climbers he fears he is loosing his mind. Things start to go wrong almost straight away and Stephen is full of foreboding. The brothers have always been rivals and this continues as they make their way up the mountain. Stephen Pearce, accompanying his older brother, Kits.
The group in 1935, led by Major Cotterell, attempted to follow the 1907 route up the south-west face. An unsuccessful attempt had been made in 1907, led by Edmund Lyell, when only two men had returned. Held to be a sacred mountain, it is one of the most dangerous mountains in the world – believed to be the haunt of demons and evil spirits.
Kanchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, had claimed many lives and no one had reached the summit.
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