K2 is the second-highest mountain on Earth and it has no name. Every other Himalayan giant carries one, but this peak is hidden from every inhabited valley in the Karakoram, so nobody living near it had anything to call it. In 1856 a British survey mapped these mountains from more than two hundred kilometres off and tagged them K1, K2, K3; K1 turned out to have a local name after all, and the code stuck to the second one. To see it, you walk. From Askole, the last village in northern Pakistan, it is six or seven days up the Baltoro Glacier to Concordia, the junction at its foot. Most of it is moraine rather than clean ice: loose rock lying on the glacier, tipping under your boots, meltwater running in channels below. The route changes every season, because the ice it is drawn on keeps moving.
The first great walls appear at Paiju: the Trango Towers, whose east face drops 1,340 metres in one near-vertical sweep. Concordia is a T — the Baltoro coming in from the west, the Godwin-Austen dropping from the north — with the peaks at the corners. Four of the world's fourteen 8,000-metre mountains stand within about twenty kilometres of it. Nothing is built here. Tents go up on bare ice at about 4,650 metres, the temperature drops below minus ten the moment the sun leaves, and there is nothing to burn. Most parties stay two nights, and you give one day to the walk up the Godwin-Austen to K2's base camp and back. After a 1953 attempt nearly killed the American team, George Bell called K2 a savage mountain that tries to kill you. The porters are Balti men from the villages below, twenty-five kilos each for the week. Every camp on the glacier is put up in the afternoon and struck the next morning: Askole is the last village, and nothing past it stays.