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mountaineering. I’m going to do something fun, something safe. I want to paraglide more. You should try it again. It’s different now.’
    ‘No, I don’t want any more broken legs, thanks.’
    ‘Less likely now,’ Tat said. ‘Why not give it a go when we get home? You’ll get your pilot licence back in no time.’
    ‘Maybe,’ I said uncertainly. ‘Sounds a bit like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire if you ask me.’
     
    Within twenty-four hours we were on a flight home. Tat looked relaxed and content on the way back. He was at peace with his decision.
    I, on the other hand, couldn’t make up my mind. I couldn’t shake off the uneasy sense of being a traitor for even considering giving up on the mountains.
    I knew Tat loved the newly-embraced thrills of paragliding. His enthusiasm was infectious. John Stevenson had already given up climbing in favour of flying. Richard Haszko, now a paragliding instructor, had done virtually the same. Highly talented climbers such as John Sylvester and Bobby Drury were now world-class paragliding pilots who had taken their taste for extreme mountain adventure into the booming thermals in the skies above the Himalayas. Perhaps there was more to life than mountains, which was something I could never have admitted only a few years ago.
    I wondered whether writing Dark Shadows Falling had made me cynical, a bit more jaded with some aspects of modern mountaineering. Certainly the ethics and morality of mountaineering on Everest in particular had nothing to do with the motivations that had spurred my friends and me on to our various climbing adventures. No, the Everest circus had no bearing whatsoever on us. We had no desire to be anywhere near that mountain. Most of our friends were making extraordinary ascents on spectacularly difficult mountains and climbing new routes all over the world – from big walls in Patagonia and Baffin Island to alpine-style ascents in the Himalayas and beyond. Standards in mountaineering had never been higher. It should have been a time of great anticipation and ambitious plans. What had made me lose the passion? The loss of friends, too many accidents, a cumulative building up of fears that I now found hard to deal with? As Mal and Brendan had been picked off I experienced a growing certainty that it was simply a matter of probability before I, too, would end up crushed beneath a mound of icy debris.
    I looked out of the oval window at the blinding white beauty of the Cordillera Real wheeling past as we carved an arc through the sky above La Paz and wondered where it had all gone wrong.

3 High anxiety
     
    ‘Paragliding is totally different now,’ John Stevenson insisted as he passed me a pint of Black Sheep Special. ‘The wings today are amazing.’
    ‘Wings?’ I was puzzled. ‘I thought they were canopies?’
    ‘Same thing. It’s just that a wing is a better description. It is what it does. It flies like a wing, unlike a parachute canopy which simply lowers you to the ground …’
    ‘Not always so gently.’
    ‘But these wings go up. They want to fly. It’s not like those tanks we were flying ten years ago.’
    ‘Good God! Was it that long ago?’
    ‘Yeah, we’re getting old, lad.’
    ‘Tell me about it,’ I replied thinking of my fortieth birthday. ‘So how long have I been away from flying then?’
    ‘After you smashed your leg on Pachermo. 1990?’
    ‘1991,’ I said. ‘I decided that flying was a bit risky with two knackered legs and no undercarriage.’
    ‘There was more to it than that,’ John interrupted. ‘I mean, I gave up flying for a couple of years as well. The wings were useless back then and to get anywhere we had to sacrifice safety for performance. Some would collapse for no good reason.’
    ‘Yeah, a lot of people were hurt,’ I agreed. ‘I always thought it was like using a climbing rope that had a 50–50 chance of snapping.’
    ‘I know, but it was the only way for the sport to progress.