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It's the early hours of September the 24th, 2005.

On the slopes of Nanda Kot, a peak of some 22,500 feet, in the Himalayas of northern India, a savage snowstorm has taken over the world.

The clear night sky and blazing stars are gone, the constellations swallowed up by the maelstrom. Even the light from the waning half-moon

has vanished, engulfed in a vortex of thick white flakes and ice pellets. The wind howls with a wild,

primal anger, as if it were the voice of the mountain itself. Every so often an avalanche cascades down the rocky, ice-encrusted inclines,

sending thick clouds of snow billowing into the opaque sky.

With each new avalanche, Nanda Kot purges itself of any sign of human activity,

obliterating the footsteps left by recent climbers.

A few thousand feet below the summit, a narrow crevasse cuts deep into the side of the mountain, like a wound.

Its entrance is completely concealed, covered over by a recent avalanche, and inside, four shocked climbers

stare into the darkness towards the place where their exit used to be.

The silence is broken only by their shallow, anxious breathing and the muffled roar of

the storm outside. Forty-one-year-old Pete Takeda gropes to switch on his head torch,

trying to quell the nausea and the dizziness caused by his ever-w worsening altitude sickness.

The scene he illuminates doesn't make him feel any better.

All you see is this wall of avalanche debris.

...