I have washed my hair, my socks, and my et cetera, the first warm water bathing session I've had since we left Yecheng some two eons ago. It is another sky-blue summit day, and I can't resist sitting up on the moraine above camp after my bath, ogling at all of the peaks that line the glacier. There is one with a pure snow dome, a silky line of white etched against the dusty blue sky. Another with striated black-and white summit ridge, folds of granite thrust through the crust of the Earth before the dawn of vision.
Names are a means of possession, of making things a part of our personal realities.
It reminds me of a cartographer I met in the drainage of the Braldu river, on the other side of K2, several years ago. In places of no names, names of places can change, depending on your point of view. The cartographer was frustrated with his Pakistani guides, who were giving him different answers for the same point on the map. Perhaps we should be slightly more tolerant of those climbers two generations ago who chose to simply assign their own names, and their own meanings, to points on the globe. Points like Everest, and K2.