Visual Description: Memory images with associated sounds, colours and rhythms

On the mountain, the night is so thick it’s like being blindfolded. Tent flys flap in the breeze like sharp breaths in and out. It smells cold and the air tastes of ice. He daren’t wander too far from his tent for fear of never finding it again. Glaciers sit ghost-blue on the summit overhead and a frosted lake of flat cloud banks out below. He senses his life intruding on the lifelessness of that inhospitable height. His breathing fills his ears: a struggled sucking in and out in time with the tent flys. Tourists ascend well-trodden tracks — like ants on a scent trail — shitting and pissing behind every boulder; the streams descend from the melting glaciers collecting their waste on their way. Water — collected from the streams and insufficiently boiled — bubbles and spits in his stomach, overcrowds his ears with the sound of his breathing. He trips over black rocks on the black ground, scrabbling this way and that. He clenches his stomach, holding the contents inside. A curse accompanies the thud and trip of each toe. He curses the fucker who painted the toilets black on the night’s black canvas. He can find no quiet place to unload his bowels; sound travels on the mountain like birds in flight and tent flys are no noise barrier. He’s running out of time. The tripping, thudding, flapping, breathing, bubbling culminate in his inner ear and he’s hot with panic. He’s run out of choices. He drops his pants and the explosion cracks across the mountain top like thunder after the lightning has bolted.