At midnight one evening in June, I slipped out of Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, heading north in a white Toyota minibus on a journey to find the second tallest mountain on earth, K2.

My purpose was to write a book about the mountaineers who dared challenge its deadly slopes - to get a taste of the danger myself. In the end, I got more than I bargained for, and not from Nature alone.

K2, which towers 8,611 meters above the border between Pakistan and China, is considered one of the most beautiful but also one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. By the opening of this climbing season, only 296 people had ever conquered its summit and 77 had died trying.

But this year, just reaching the mountain had become perilous. I had to travel a long and treacherous road that skirted Pakistan’s Swat Valley. There, at that moment, the Pakistani Army and the Taliban were fighting for control.

The British Foreign Office and the United States State Department had warned sternly of kidnappings, and at gas stations along the highway, guards brandished Kalashnikovs. In Besham, the town closest to the troubles, men in smoky roadside bazaars met my gaze defiantly.

After two days I felt safer in the zone I had sought - the high mountains where I joined climbers beginning the hike east toward the valley of the Baltoro glacier and the terrifying mountains of the inner Karakoram range.

At Askole, a village of basic wooden homes where children played shoeless in the dirt, we hired eager Balti porters who jostled for our business.

In contrast to the porters’ cast-off clothes and sandals, these mountaineers wore expensive high-tech walking gear. A 39-year-old engineer from Germany, Dirk Grunert, obsessively drank liters of boiled water daily to cope with the altitude. A fit couple from Portugal maintained via satellite phone a Web site of their adventures.

They all had stories of near-death experiences in these mountains. Dirk turned back in deep snow near the top of Nanga Parbat. Another year, he was pinned for three nights by a whiteout just below the summit of Broad Peak and, yet another time, was narrowly missed by falling ice. Paulo Roxo, one of the Portuguese, related tumbling dangerously when his rope once failed. “I never can say why I climb, though danger is part of it and the unplanned nature of it, he said.

I had come as a mere observer, intending only to trek to K2 base camp. Listening to the real climbers I could only reflect on the scale of their ambition to tempt fate and return to the perils, again and again.

At night, as we slept in our clothes in our tents on the ice and rocks, Nature reminded us of its power. Water bottles froze. The glacier cracked loudly and eerily, sounding like gunshots, as it shifted beneath us.

Finally, after eight days of trekking and wheezing, my lungs feeling emptied of oxygen in the rarefied air, I sprang across a crevasse to reach K2 base camp at 4,880 meters. The base camp itself was a long stretch of rocks that snaked around the bottom of the peak. It was stark - but not, it turned out, as isolated as I had expected from the political problems plaguing Pakistan. Last year, I was told, the camp was covered with the tents of more than 20 expeditions. This year, in addition to us, there were only two parties; only a few more were expected in the coming weeks.

The next day, as we began our descent, there was one more surprise. A hundred meters down, my 30-year-old traveling companion and photographer, Andrew Ensslen, collapsed; the problems were exhaustion and serious altitude sickness. Other climbers urged us to lose altitude quickly, but he could hardly walk. Even at base camp level, it turned out, the mountain could have proved fatal for us. I called for rescue on my satellite phone, and four hours later two green military helicopters dropped out of the sky.

Two days later, at the airport in Britain, my friend was recovering from his illness, and I could only reflect on the intensity of the experience.

One part of me remembered the words of Dirk Grunert, who had tried to explain the life-changing qualities of climbing: “On the mountain there is the focus, the total absorption of mountaineering, he said. “Then the return, the coming back is the best. In a way, I felt cheated; my return had been cut short.

But there was also the angry immigration official who greeted me in Britain with an upbraiding - not for approaching the mountain, but for braving the war zone below. “Graham, the official said, “you don’t know how lucky you were.




K2, part of the Karakoram range, is the second tallest mountain in the world. The route to the mountain passes the Swat Valley, where fighting between the Pakistani Army and the Taliban has deterred many climbers.