Paolo Cognetti - Without Ever Reaching the Summit

T oward the end of 2017, and my fortieth year of life, I left with some companions for the land of Dolpo, a plateau in northwestern Nepal where we would go over passes at altitudes of more than five thousand meters, trekking for about a month along the Tibetan border. Tibet was a destination that couldnt be reached, and not because of border issues: invaded by the Chinese army in 1950, devastated in the sixties and seventies by the Cultural Revolutions fury, then inexorably colonized by the new capitalist China, that ancient kingdom of monks, merchants, and nomadic shepherds simply no longer exists.

But I was told that there was a little Tibet in Nepalese territory. It had survived somehow thanks to historys forgetfulness. Even on maps Dolpo looks like an anomaly: where Nepals political borders, which normally remain south of the Himalayan chain, extend beyond it and penetrate the immense geographical area of the Tibetan plateau, there is a whole region above four thousand meters untouched by the monsoons or paved roadsthe most arid, remote, and least populated part of the country. Perhaps up there, I said to myself, I could see the Tibet that no longer exists, that none of us can see anymore. This was the journey I wanted for my fortieth birthday, a fitting way to celebrate my farewell to that other lost kingdom: youth.

It wasnt the only motive for going. One equally important was the caravan I would be part of. The Himalayas are not to be taken lightly; to travel hundreds of kilometers among uninhabited mountains a real expedition is needed, with guides, porters, mules, a camp to assemble every evening and dismantle every morning, and fellow travelers.

Of the nine who left with me, one was Nicola, with whom there was a bond of nascent friendship. We had just met, we felt like we were alike, and we were in that phase in which we had everything to discover about each other. But we both believed that you dont just watch friendships happen; they have to be built with a foundation, they need memorable endeavors for the future. So one spring day I described Dolpo on the phone to him and asked, Do you want to go together?

Yes, he responded.

By now it was autumn and neither of us had turned back.

The other companion was Remigio, my dearest and most difficult friend at that point in my life. In the ten years of our friendship I was never able to take him away from the mountain village where he had been born and raised, and where I had gone to live. Not that I wanted to uproot him. I just wanted to share something different with him: a place where we were both foreigners, a sense of remoteness and exploration. I worked on him shoulder to shoulder for months, used every possible technique of persuasion, and all I got were doubts and second thoughts. He always had a bum knee, or was short on money, or his car was breaking down. Eventually he showed up at the airport just when I was resigned to not seeing him.

So youre coming too? I asked.

Well, yeah, he replied, shrugging his shoulders.

I knew that in the mountains you walk alone even when walking with someone, but I was happy to share my solitude with these companions.

We left in early October, when snow was already expected in the Alps, and we landed in a hot and dusty Kathmandu, fresh out of the monsoon season. Since my last visit, the city seemed to have expanded into its wide valley: there were further layers of suburbs, slums, residential neighborhoods, stray dogs, monkeys, beggars, skeletal cows in the middle of the road, children. The Hindu and Buddhist temples in Durbar Square had been damaged or completely destroyed by the earthquake two years before, with rubble strewn around the wooden struts holding up the walls that were still standing. Large billboards announced that the Chinese government was taking care of the reconstruction. China? What was China doing in Nepals most important square?

From home I had brought a fever that increased my confusion, and when a woman convinced me to buy powdered milk for her baby, I let her and her accomplice rob me of all my rupees. In the alleys, butchers displayed dark red ribs, bleeding goats heads; in the little street-corner shrines, devotees left flowers and fruit to decompose. At one of the secondhand shops in Thamel, the tourist district where Western groups leave for Mount Everest or come in search of the Beatles Kathmandu, we bought the last things we needed for the expedition: windbreakers, sweaters, boots piled up on the benches, all the stuff that trekkers give to their porters when they see them at high altitude with short-sleeve shirts and flip-flops, which the porters resell as soon as they come back down to the valley. We wandered through dust, hands, sweaty bodies, horns, and rotting garbage in the gutters, yet there was something about that city that never ceased to enchant me.

The best bars were on the rooftops, from where you appeared to rise above humanitys misery. As we talked about the journey in front of a few beers we always wound up looking north: from Kathmandu you cant see the Himalayas, only the hills and clouds that envelop the valley, but we could imagine them with trepidation. After a while, as happens in Nepal, the sensation of wasting time becomes one of adapting to a different flow of time.

Its only when you surrender that you enter the right spirit for the journey. Then, one morning, the permits to enter Dolpo arrived. We could finally leave for the mountains.

O n the small airplane heading north, facing the Himalayas, which emerged from the dense tropical clouds, I remembered a book received, at nine or so, from my fathers hands, on a day spent home with fever. It was called The Most Beautiful Mountains and Most Famous Climbs. On the cover was Monte Rosa, my first and only so far. I had already tasted its rock and ice in the summer, but by winter the mountain had become a distant memory, so I spent long hours in bed with that book of color photos, to cure myself of the flu and nostalgia. I looked at the profiles of Everest, K2, and Nanga Parbat, I read about the men who had climbed them, I learned names and altitudes with the doggedness of a child for whom memorizing is a magical act that offers the illusion of possession. I dreamed of becoming a mountaineer then, reading about Messner and Bonatti as if they were Stevenson and Verne, and Tibet and Nepal were secret kingdoms, treasure islands.

Thirty years later I still knew the shape of Dhaulagiri, the westernmost of Nepals eight-thousand-meter peaks. The airplane flew below it, grazing the puffs of clouds lit by the sun, and left it to the east. Other dark peaks emerged in front of us, a chain of them at about five thousand meters. As we had hoped, the fog stopped against that wall. Then under the propellers I began to observe sharp ridges, gorges that dropped into the morning shadows, gullies dug by landslides in the rainy season. I looked at Remigio glued to the porthole and thought I knew what he was looking for: a landscape he could read, a script he knew.