Commandment Two
Thou shalt all suffer from altitude headaches and anyone who doesn’t shall be beaten about the head until they know what it feels like, for this is no ordinary headache. Imagine a vice getting a good grip around your temples and being squeezed tighter and tighter until the body becomes divorced from the mind and decides it will just do its own thing. Altitude in general does strange things to the body. The third and final hut on Kilimanjaro, at about 5000 metres, can be seen from several kilometres away but it is like wading through treacle to get to it which is very confusing for the brain as there is no visible sign of resistance. The question of food at altitude is also problematic. You may be starving but put so much as a piece of four day old bread in your mouth and your stomach will instantly heave. There is nothing for it but to go to bed, at 4.30pm, and wait it out till it is time to get up to begin the final push to the summit. As you wait it out in your tent or hut it is decreed that one by one people will begin to keel over. Someone will throw up in their balaclava and all over the hut floor, and someone else will collapse in the corridor and have to be carried out for some fresh air. In this instance it was so cold outside he had to stand in the toilets for 20 minutes. The toilets are sensibly situated some distance from the huts: they are pits, they stink and altitude does funny things to your stomach and your aim. So imagine how bad you must feel to choose to stand in a latrine until you feel better. Altitude sickness induces a certain amount of passion; mostly a desire to get off a mountain as quickly as possible.
Thou shalt all suffer from altitude headaches and anyone who doesn’t shall be beaten about the head until they know what it feels like, for this is no ordinary headache. Imagine a vice getting a good grip around your temples and being squeezed tighter and tighter until the body becomes divorced from the mind and decides it will just do its own thing. Altitude in general does strange things to the body. The third and final hut on Kilimanjaro, at about 5000 metres, can be seen from several kilometres away but it is like wading through treacle to get to it which is very confusing for the brain as there is no visible sign of resistance. The question of food at altitude is also problematic. You may be starving but put so much as a piece of four day old bread in your mouth and your stomach will instantly heave. There is nothing for it but to go to bed, at 4.30pm, and wait it out till it is time to get up to begin the final push to the summit. As you wait it out in your tent or hut it is decreed that one by one people will begin to keel over. Someone will throw up in their balaclava and all over the hut floor, and someone else will collapse in the corridor and have to be carried out for some fresh air. In this instance it was so cold outside he had to stand in the toilets for 20 minutes. The toilets are sensibly situated some distance from the huts: they are pits, they stink and altitude does funny things to your stomach and your aim. So imagine how bad you must feel to choose to stand in a latrine until you feel better. Altitude sickness induces a certain amount of passion; mostly a desire to get off a mountain as quickly as possible.
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