Meanwhile, our team climbed up to Camp 3 (c.7100m) on 25 April for our final cycle of acclimatisation. It was blowing across the face and very windy. That night the tents shook like sails in a storm. Mild headaches and loss of apatite accompanied us all night long, but in the morning we felt we had achieved an important landmark. The final bit of acclimatisation was over. Now it would be all descent, rest and then the real thing. We were high on the Lhotse Face. We were happy. At 8 am Kenton's voice came over the radio.

“There is a dead Sherpa at the bottom of the Face.”

The accident was not in the ice fall but at the bottom of the Lhotse Face; a normally safe place, the place where everyone clips in to the fixed ropes. What had happened? There were no witnesses. Probably the man was killed around an hour before Kenton arrived at the bottom of the Face.

“He was still clipped into the rope “ Kenton said. “Massive head trauma... No chance. No chance”

The man was called Dawa. He was from Solu Khumbu, a little below Lukla, where he lived with his family of four small children. They would recuperate his body, to be cremated at home; the pyre of sacred juniper, cymbals, drums and brass hand bells calling out to the local gods, the anguish of his family calling out to him. In mountains tragedy cannot be avoided.

We were a sad little procession walking down from base camp where the night time temperature inside our tents was minus nine Centigrade. As we lost height, we passed from winter through spring. The world was thawing. First came the flowers, then a flock of wild mountain goats (they were the Himalayan Thar; a silky brown haired animal with short curved horns), and then the first brood of baby yaks; they were the size of small sheep and curious about new world they had just been born into.

And so on to the warmth and safety of the wonderful Sonam Lodge in Pangboche. The owners are Gurmin (I have stood at the summits of Everest, Cho Oyu and Amadablam at his side) and his his wife Nima Lamu (we shared expeditions to Amadablam and Ombigaichen). Nima Lamu is the niece of Kame Nuru my current base camp sirdar, sister of Ang Nuru who once came third in the Everest Marathon and who also helped UK vice consul, Serena Brocklebank, to the summit of Everest last year. The extended family tree in Pangboche is complex and interwoven. Similar villages in western Europe might be the subject of the pointing finger and jokes of cretinism, but here, where one in three young men have climbed over 8000m and one in four have summitted Everest, such humour holds no weight.

Our team was joined by Kenton's team; Ben, Tori, Greg and Omar (www.everest2007.net) and the ten of us proceeded to watch no less than fifteen videos in the next three days. We were also joined by Jean Clemenson, aged sixty nine and three quarters. Jean is my old friend and ex-neighbour from Argentiere and for years has been telling me about his friend, a certain Henri Sigayret, author of the Le Khumbu and other titles. Noticing that the menu in Sonam Lodge was in French, Jean asked Gurmin why this was so.

“My sister, she is married to a French man; Henri Sigayret.” Jean was temporarily lost for words.

The next day the entire team, in twos and threes, climbed up the short hill to Upper Pangboche where Lama Geshe said a small prayer for the soul of Dawa. And the day after that we began our slow haul back to base
camp.

Everest expeditions break down into three phases. Phase One: Acclimatisation, Phase Two: Weather Anxiety, Phase Three: Climb. We are in Phase Two, we examine weather forecasts everyday poring over them
like priests examining the entrails. Soon it will be time time to decide. But for now we are waiting for the right moment.