Day I – new suitors

The mountain thinks: Wilson, eh? Finally he comes. About time. The trucks stop on the north side where the Rongai route begins and Kilimanjaro’s powdered skirt tumbles out of Tanzania into Kenya. Her lower folds are less sensitive, but she still feels us among the thousands. In her stones she weighs our upward love and thinks: How much do you really want me? We start late and pad steadily from 1900 metres on the trail’s seamy musk with no perspective on the summit. Above us, only a shrug of fat hills and cloud. Kilimanjaro’s broad, high face (all ice-lashes and airless hauteur) is a vast four kilometres further up. Emmanuel tells us to walk polepole (slowly, gently). ‘Like walking your girlfriend home,’ he says.

Day II – the feeling begins

We break camp on the mountain’s upper thigh. The desire to see her has grown urgent. ‘Where the fuck is she?’ says Nigel, a train driver with partial sleep apnoea. I’m curious, too, but not that curious. There’s something hard about this mountain.

Our breakfast is porridge and fruit, cold, scorched bread, tea and malaria drugs. Afterwards, we climb through scrub and on bare ridges. Scraps of vapour also climb and pass us with a dank, spectral pat on the arse. Soon we enter the waiting room of cloud, and the route becomes an ugly and broken traverse east. The sound of other people’s breath is pornosonic. Mouths are hung in trapezoids of effort and each white-lit pause, old Bill stands with eyes like a dying horse. To me, the climb itself is no great struggle until a few hours from camp, when the prising edge of an altitude headache cuts in. With headaches all I ask is an allusion from pain to something else. I once had a blinder redeemed by its suggestion of Greta Scacchi’s skull inside my own, trying to get out. But this headache, courtesy of the mountain, is dull and predictable, hinting only at tools (chisels, pliers) and a mouthful of chalk.

The mountain thinks: welcome to the aching ruts of Kilimanjaro (a name, incidentally, that she dislikes. One etymology has it as a compound for ‘little hill’: kilima njaro. The mountain doesn’t think that’s funny, and takes it out on us). She thinks: how much do you love me now, mountaineers? Go on, whisper how much. Whisper it in my mountain ears. Hah! (Puns like this take her decades.)

In the blue mess tent, I guzzle Ibuprofen while Ruve, a seventy-year-old stoic, tells an Everest disaster story. She describes one frostbitten survivor as ‘a gynaecologist without fingers’.

People forget that mountains have a certain sense of humour.

Day III – lovesick

Oh the ripe air of sleeping bags, of socks, of night-breath and night-gas and night-sweat! We emerge from our tents wreathed in it. It is perfume to the mountain.

Today I am unimproved. My blood still lags; still hauls its string bags of oxygen from cell to cell like a charlady with no inkling of proper gas storage. The headache at least switches metaphors and tries animals: a stoat for each eye socket; a skull-bound crab; even two gibbons with pencils. A porter shouts and suddenly there she is – Kilimanjaro! – perving down at our camp from the rim of her dun caldera. Men rub their jaws. Women loosen Goretex. Nauseated, I make first use of the frozen toilet.

Meanwhile, the mountain is taking a good look at us: the lovers (tensed, devotional) and me (occupied). She thinks: Oh, poor baby has a headache. A touch of that bad altitude attitude, eh? Not enough oxy-woxy for his brainy-wainy. Oh, possum. Yet however much she intended to spurn me, there is something in these eyes of mine ... sea-green, lukewarm, brackish. Yes, their marine indifference gets to her. She’s only a mountain, after all, and so she thinks: buck up, climber boy. Come to me. Polepole.

Day IV – in which our hero weeps and walks to the mountain’s throat and fails

Mawenzi Tarn is a bleak divot at 4300 metres. During the night, the mountain holds me close, clutched to her personal gravity, unable to sleep. I have black dreams of my children in danger. These are gifts from the mountain. She’s brutal and, in the morning, for the first time, quite good-looking. I take Diamox, an altitude drug, before crossing the saddle from Mawenzi to Kibo in the alpine desert where nothing can live and even the mint and whey everlastings are gone. For three hours, I am in no pain. Queer, anodyne tears run beneath my sunglasses. It cannot last. It doesn’t. The pointillist gibbons return from who knows where? The pencil sharpener, probably.

At summit camp, we eat soup and go to bed at five p.m.. Everyone is suffering. The group now divides into those longing for the top and those longing for the bottom, via the top. When Emmanuel rouses us at midnight, it is to find the mountain savagely dressed. She wears her frost and velvet shale, and up we go, hard against her nape. Williams Point is where I stop. I could do more suffering, but why bother? She’s too hard to get, this mountain, and we’ve no chemistry. Or I haven’t.

The mountain thinks: Are you kidding? You’re turning me down.

Look, I like you, Kilimanjaro – just not in that way.

Day V – m’illumino d’immenso

Down to Horombo Camp: the name means massive horror. Okay, I made that up, but all camping tends towards abasement and squalor. Visit Horombo if you don’t believe me.

Giuseppe Ungaretti’s poem is a model for responses to the mountain. For example: ‘Kilimanjaro / Sickened by / the immensity.’

The mountain thinks: you weak bastard. You think failure is arty? You’re pathetic.

All I can think is get me off this skull-crushing bitch volcano.

Day VI and afterwards

We go down the Marangu route, also known as the Coca-Cola route, also known as the Stone Cold Idiots route. It’s the fast way up. Few people have blood that stupid. On the other hand, a good deal of blood seems to course in people that stupid. From our group, eleven of fourteen made the summit. The same night, two Marangu teams also climbed, with success in the ratios of 2:12 and 3:11. All the way down, through alpine moor to temperate scrub and into rainforest, we confront the faces of the lovers coming up. So clean they are and so unsuffering. So bloody polepole.

It is three days before I see the mountain again. By then, I’m driving north to Kenya. Suddenly she’s at my window, mooning all high-strung and pale. She thinks: So I came on a little strong! I’m a mountain. Give me another chance. I can be subtle. She doesn’t listen when I explain, ‘It’s not you, Kilimanjaro. It’s me.’

No, she doesn’t listen and instead, against the urge of the post-Gondwana tectonics that have borne her west these last billion years, she begins, obdurate mountain, to inch eastward. Sure, these crushes of hers pass in the end. Some last barely a century. For now, she thinks: dear love, watch the horizon of the Indian Ocean for me. I am coming.