Feeling the altitude

Shegar is 4300 metres above sea level and I'm beginning to feel it. There's a woman in the bar who wants to sing for me, but Wangden warns me that if I agree then she'll expect me to sing for her, too. But what Wangden doesn't know is that I'm my mother's daughter: of course I'm going to sing.

But when it's my turn to stand up the altitude goes to my head and I have to sit back down again and catch my breath. My stomach turns over so I stagger outside and try to get some air. It's cold in Shegar. It must be minus 10 out here, and it hadn't felt that much warmer inside the bar.

I find my way back to my room — a stone outhouse — in the dark. There's no electricity, and Sonan comes in with a candle and a hot water bottle. Wangden sits on the edge of my bed. He presses his hand to my forehead, which I find calming, and then he takes my pulse, which I find alarming.

"Is it normal?" I whisper, hoarsely, trying frantically to remember if a slow pulse or a fast pulse is better.

"It's okay," says Wangden, my own personal Buddhist, smiling at me gently. "But if you're still feeling ill after one hour, I think we should go lower."

He goes outside and talks to the guys. I shiver in the bed and listen to Yeshi packing up the jeep again. Sonan had already told me that last summer his whole group ended up on oxygen tanks in hospital back in Lhasa. But I don't want to go lower! I came all this way to see Everest in the sunrise tomorrow morning. I'm 5000 miles from home and only two more hours away from that mountain.

Wangden comes back in and puts his hand to my forehead again. He says he'll stay with me, and I tell him about not wanting to miss the mountain.

"My father is very proud of me," I explain. "He keeps saying to people 'my daughter is going to Everest by herself', even when he's talking to my mum and my best friend, in case they've forgotten who I am."

Wangden laughs. He gets up and finds me yet another blanket and puts it over the bed.

"But you're not by yourself, Annie," he says. "I don't think you ever really will be."

Just having him here is calming. We talk for a while in the moonlight coming in through the window. I show him pictures of my family, and he asks if my mother is an artist. How can he tell?

"She's wearing a peculiar hat," he says, as if it's obvious.

Then he shows me pictures of his own parents, who are also wearing peculiar hats, I point out, but their excuse is that they're Tibetan nomads. I ask him about his childhood and he tells me about travelling the grasslands with their forty yaks. Eventually my legs stop shaking: I think I must have acclimatised because I can breathe again without concentrating.

"Maybe it was just hypochondria," I say, sitting up and drinking some water. But Wangden's never heard of hypochondria so I have to explain it to him.

"You know, it's when you worry that you're ill when you're not ill, and that makes you feel ill?"

Wangden smiles and shakes his head. "I think this must be a Western thing," he says.