Above the Clouds

1At four in the morning, the hut on the side of the mountain was so cold that Leila could see her breath even inside her sleeping bag. Outside, her father was stamping his feet and checking the head-torches. “If we leave now,” he whispered, “we’ll reach the summit for sunrise.”

2They had talked about this climb for three years, ever since her father’s operation. Back then, the doctors had said he might not walk properly again. He had spent months learning to climb the stairs at the hospital, one step at a time, while Leila sat on the bottom step doing her homework and counting for him.

3Now they climbed by torchlight, a narrow trail of loose rock that zigzagged up into the dark. Leila’s legs ached and her fingers were numb inside her gloves. Twice she looked back to see her father stopped, hands on his knees, breathing hard. Twice she waited without saying anything, the way he had taught her not to rush someone who was trying.

4“Go on ahead,” he said the third time. “I’ll catch you up.”

5“No,” said Leila. “We started together.”

6The last hundred metres were the steepest. They pulled themselves over a ridge of granite, and suddenly there was nothing above them but sky.

7Below, a sea of cloud stretched in every direction, white and perfectly still, as though someone had poured milk into the valleys. Here and there, the tops of other mountains poked through like islands. As they watched, the eastern edge of the sky turned pink, then gold, and the sun rose so quickly that Leila could almost see it moving.

8Her father sat down heavily on a rock. He did not say anything for a long time. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a small, crumpled piece of paper. Leila recognised it at once: a page torn from her old maths book, with a long column of numbers in her handwriting. It went up to 214.

9“The most stairs I climbed in one day,” he said. “You counted every one.” He pressed it into her hand. “Today, you can stop counting.”

10Leila looked out at the clouds and did not trust herself to answer.