'If you trip on the summit ridge you're gone'

In a further extract, Grania Willis describes the joy and fulfilment of reaching her grail and the realisation the descent would present fresh hazards

I dragged my exhausted body up the rocks to join Karsang, who had his back to me and was leaning against a massive boulder. He turned as he heard me approach and watched as I heaved myself up the last step. "Summit," he said, pointing to the right. I turned and there, not much more than 200 metres away, was the highest point on earth. A snow dome draped with Tibetan prayer flags, which dripped down its side like a multi-coloured version of the drizzle icing my grandmother used to put on her lemon cakes. It was magical.

I was totally stunned by the sheer beauty of the mountain and the unexpected proximity of my goal.

As I set off up the final summit ridge behind Karsang, I remembered Russ's warning to be careful here. Kiwi guide Dean's words also echoed in my head. "If you trip on the summit ridge you're gone". Without the comfort of the fixed lines I felt vulnerable and exposed. Beautiful scalloped cornices marked the edge of the ridge, but there was no temptation to inch closer and peer over.

The cornice could break away at any moment and send me hurtling down the Kangshung face. And the massive North Face plunged into oblivion to my right. There was a well-trodden track going straight for the summit and I made sure not to stray from it.

As I inched my way towards the grail, I realised with surprise there were two climbers on the summit itself. Even though I remembered Russ asking me earlier if I'd seen Paul, it hadn't crossed my mind that he was ahead of me. It wasn't until I got closer to the pair that I recognised the familiar outline of one of them. Unless there was another one-armed climber that I didn't know about, it had to be Australian Paul Hockey and his Sherpa Nima.

I dragged myself up the final few snow steps and suddenly, dramatically, I was there. Paul and I were hugging and kissing, but I was almost in a trance. I couldn't quite believe that this was it. After the interminable weeks of waiting, I was finally standing on the summit of Mount Everest. I radioed through to Russ, but discovered later that the waning batteries meant I could only receive, not transmit. My Himex team-mates waiting for news farther down the mountain were becoming increasingly anxious about my welfare.

The 15 minutes I spent on the highest point on earth were both the shortest and the longest minutes of my life. Like a drowning man, life flashed before me. But it was my nephew Joe's life that I saw, not my own.

As I waited for Nima to finish taking what seemed endless pictures of Paul with various sponsors' logos, time stood still. The fog cocooned us from the world outside. If there had been any sounds up there they would have been muffled.

Despite the wind, the place seemed hauntingly still. And hauntingly spiritual.

And I cried. Big, fat tears welled up in my eyes and spilled down into my goggles as I remembered why I had done this, why I had gone through the months of exhaustive training and why I had pushed myself to my physical and emotional limits and beyond. It was for Joe. And although I felt his loss even more keenly in this beautiful but lonely place, I could sense his presence. He was with me on that summit, just as he had been with me every step of the way on the ascent. And I was comforted.

As I sat down in the snow I saw an oval memorial plaque to a dead climber.

It was a salutary reminder of just how many others had paid the ultimate price in their bid for the ultimate high, but it was also a reminder that we still had a long descent ahead of us before we were safe.

As I thought about the climbers that hadn't made it back down, I watched Nima taking pictures of Karsang with his Nepali flag, marking Karsang's seventh trip to the summit and the flag's 17th. I needed pictures to record my first.

As soon as Nima had finished with Karsang, I pulled my digital camera out from the warmth of my down suit and asked him to do a picture of me with the Irish flag. I also got him to take the requested shot of me with one of my sponsors' SORD Data Systems logo, before I took the camera and snapped one of Paul with the Australian flag. It was one of those lucky shots that captured the very essence of big mountain climbing.

He still has his oxygen mask on, but has pushed his goggles on to his forehead and the picture shows him with a heavy frost fringing his eyelashes. There is a thick white cord of ice tumbling out of his mask where the condensation from his breath has frozen. The Australian flag is fluttering in front of his body and the backdrop is a white infinity. The photograph was to feature on the front page of one of the Australian papers a couple of days later when the press got wind of Paul's incredible achievement and how close he had come to death on the descent.

I then handed the disposable camera to Nima and he took several shots of me and Paul and one of Karsang with the Nepali flag before giving the camera back. I have absolutely no recollection of where I put it after that. I assumed I'd stuffed it into the front of my down suit but, as I stood up to leave, I had a niggling feeling that I didn't have it with me. I gave a cursory glance back at where I'd been sitting, but saw nothing on the snow.

The SORD Data Systems poster had gone, presumably taken by the wind. There was no sign of the camera. It was only when I checked inside my down suit on my return to camp III much later that day that I discovered I had disposed of my disposable camera somewhere on the summit.

Thankfully, my digital camera produced the goods, although the weather meant that any landmark that would confirm the picture's validity as a summit shot had disappeared in the mists. Like the moon landing photographs, my summit picture could have been taken in a studio. An orange down-suited climber, goggles and oxygen mask obscuring the face. An Irish Tricolour whipped away in the wind. No mountain backdrop gives a clue to its location.

The background is a blue-tinged mist. But the three photographs that survived on my digital camera will always be precious to me because they are reminders of the day I stood on the highest point on earth and thought of my nephew Joe and the terrible waste of a young life.

But the photographs also bring back memories of Paul's struggle to descend and how lucky he was to survive the ordeal. "Summitting is mandatory, getting back down is optional," he'd joked at base camp and ABC, turning the old climbing adage on its head. His words came scarily close to being prophetic on summit day.

Paul's Sherpa Nima was anxious that we shouldn't delay any further once the photographs were done. If there had been any sort of view I would probably have wanted to stay longer, to extend the moment and to feast on the 360-degree panorama of the surrounding peaks, to marvel at the curve of the earth on the distant horizon. But it was pointless to remain in such poor conditions and I was conscious of how demanding the descent was going to be on our already exhausted bodies.

I had been surprised to see Paul without his goggles on when I first reached the summit, but his decision to take them off for his photographs turned out to be a big mistake. Instead of putting them inside his down suit, he had simply pushed them up on to the top of his head. The condensation that had formed inside them from his body heat had rapidly frozen over. Initial attempts to clean off the skim of ice had only partially worked and Paul just couldn't see through the goggles properly.

I looked more closely at Paul, who was sitting back down on the snow while Nima tried cleaning the goggles again. His skin looked grey and his frost-rimmed eyes had a terrible, lifeless look about them. I was concerned about snow blindness. Paul was already looking completely wasted.

He didn't need any other issues to compound the problems he was going to encounter trying to descend with only one arm. He needed to get down off the mountain without delay. I'd seen how quickly Charlie (Kiwi team mate Charlie Hobbs) had deteriorated at ABC and Paul looked like he was heading rapidly in the same direction.

He got to his feet wearily and started moving slowly down the summit ridge, stumbling in Nima's wake. I was immediately behind him and could empathise with Paul's faltering gait. The adrenaline that had got me to the summit had totally gone now and been replaced by a hollow feeling of sheer exhaustion.

I didn't feel completely in command of my own legs. It was a totally alien sensation. I needed far more concentration now to keep going but, even though I was focused on my own descent, I couldn't help noticing that Paul seemed to be struggling more than I was.

When we reached the big boulder at the top of the dohedral (the rocky outcrop at the top of the Great Couloir), the yellow-suited Sherpa I had thought was a corpse was sitting there, obviously waiting to help get Paul down. Nima stopped and Paul immediately flopped down on to the snow for a rest. I sat down beside him, grateful for the chance of a break, no matter how brief.

Paul held his oxygen mask away from his face so that I could hear him and asked me to get a small bottle out of the top of his backpack. When I unzipped the bag I found a white plastic medicine bottle almost totally covered with black heavy-duty duct tape. I passed it to Paul, who tried, without success, to open it.

He gave it back to me and asked me if I could open it for him. "What's in it?" I asked, as I tried to remove some of the masking tape so that I could unscrew the top of the bottle. "Ashes," Paul answered and I remembered that he had told me something early on in the expedition about scattering someone's ashes on the summit. "Nima wouldn't let me do it on the summit," Paul said, as though he'd read my mind.

I gave up trying to take off the tape. Without removing my gloves I couldn't find the end of it, so I told Paul there was a Swiss army knife in the top of my backpack. As he rummaged around trying to find it I racked my brains trying to think whose ashes these were. I knew Paul had told me about it and assumed they were the remains of his mother, who had died of cancer the previous September.

He told me several days later that they were the combined ashes of the parents of a woman who had contacted him before his departure from Cairns, offering to pay 5,000 Australian dollars to his children's cancer charity if he would take them to the summit.

Paul eventually found the knife and I opened out the largest blade and tried to lever off the tape. It wouldn't move. I held the bottle and knife up to each of the three Sherpas in turn, but they refused to even try. I couldn't decide whether they were just being uncooperative or whether - if they were aware of the identity of the bottle's contents - their superstitious natures wouldn't let them touch a canister containing human remains.

I attacked the bottle with renewed fervour, but the effort required was substantial. Then, just as I started to make inroads into the plastic tape, I realised that the way I was holding the bottle meant that the slightest slip would send the blade straight through my gloves and into my wrist.

Bleeding to death so soon after summitting Everest would be more than mildly ironic, I thought to myself, as I moved the bottle to a safer position. My efforts finally bore fruit and I ripped off the tape and opened the bottle. I handed it to Paul and he awkwardly got to his feet. He walked about a metre or so away from me and then I could see rather than hear him muttering something.

His words were whipped away by the wind before I could identify them, but I imagine they were prayers for the souls of the couple, both climbers, whose remains he now threw into the air. A gust of wind caught them and they disappeared like smoke towards the heavens so close now above our heads.

I could see that Paul, for all his rough-and-tumble exterior, was moved and knew he would be thinking of his mother and the other members of his family, including his father and his step-father, that had been lost to cancer. It was a hugely emotional moment.

Total High: My Everest Challenge (Red Rock Press) priced €14.99, is available from Tuesday.