Fairy Meadows is a pine-ringed pasture at 3,300 metres in northern Pakistan, with a wall of ice above it rising nearly five vertical kilometres to the summit of Nanga Parbat. The peak you are looking at, though, is not that summit. It is the mountain's North Peak, 7,816 metres, and the true top stands higher behind it, out of sight from where you are standing. An hour before sunrise the face is the first thing for miles to take the light, and the high snow goes copper while the grass is still in blue shadow. Even in midsummer that hour is close to freezing. There is no electricity on the meadow and no lit valley near it, so the sky fills to the edges and the Milky Way stands in a band over the peak.
Every hut, camp and horse on this grass belongs to Tato, the Shina-speaking village at the head of the jeep track. The villagers cut that track themselves, and only their own jeeps carry anyone up it. They stopped the logging here themselves, and when the government declared a national park in 1995 the village blocked it, arguing that their families had bought this ground in 1868. The walk to Nanga Parbat Base Camp takes you half a day, climbing through dark pine to Beyal, a smaller clearing where shepherds keep earth-roofed huts. Above it the trees give out and the path follows the edge of the Raikot Glacier to the foot of the mountain. Most people arrive having gained two thousand metres in a day, and if you feel it, that walk waits for the day after. In June 1937 an ice avalanche came down on a camp on this face while everyone inside was asleep; sixteen men were lost, the worst single loss Himalayan climbing had seen. Anyone going for the top crosses the Raikot Glacier and works up the northern side of the massif, out of sight of the meadow the whole way.