The summit fell away steeply. Slip, and you die

Here, in an extract from The Black Ridge, Simon Ingram describes an unforgettable moment as he reaches the highest summit in the Cuillins with his guide, Matt Barratt.

He began to move again, and I followed before the rope went tight. And then very quickly the last block underfoot became the last block on the mountain. We stepped out on to the highest rocks of the Cuillin ridge, of Skye, and the Hebrides.

The clouds were thin and painfully bright. Behind them I could see the ghosts of mountains, shadows beyond the grey-white. There was no real view just impressions of shapes, slender ridgelines, steep drops, the occasional glimpse of a summit, everything white and deep. It could have been three thousand feet high or twenty thousand feet – there was no visual anchor, just us, the summit, the cloud and its shadows. This mountaintop, 3,255 feet above the sea, was a weather-sharpened point in silhouette, hard-angled and solid, against empty are. The summit of Sgurr Alasdair, as I had read

and feared, fell away briskly on all sides. Slip into a fall, and you’d die. But it wasn’t a fearful moment. For the first time that morning, the air seemed motionless. And I was grateful to discover that there was in fact a secure place to stand, and a bit of rock to hold on to. Somewhere to just stop, and soak it in…

And then, just as quickly, it faded. The invisible sun dimmed. The shadows of the mountains around and beneath lost their veil-like appearance and disappeared into the grey. Matt looked around, picked up his bottle, and the summit was once again a naked, unadorned top. His movements had lost their unhurried slack, and became purposeful and brisk.

“Time to go,” he said. The sky had hardened, as if somewhere a huge pair of curtains had just been swept shut and – with frightening speed – bright white became heavy, cindery grey. In less than 30 seconds, we were on a different mountain on a

different day.