Melting

Few clouds in the sky. And an already weak troposphere that tends towards consumption. The sun dominates the slope of Everest, then, and the command of its radiations. Some of the snow gets exhausted and creates a liquid epidermis over the mountain. The two Sherpas have accepted that melt: it is time. (And in any case their eyes are on the immobile body of the Englishman.) But, glimpsed from a different distance, the thaw is no less virulent because it happens daily: the inapprehensible energy, the frenzy of those molecules, the degradation of atomic alliances defeated by heat…

The young Sherpa’s trousers get damp at the knee that’s on the ground, and in that moment, he says to his partner:

‘Shall we get up?’