[1] The radio operator's last words to me, before her jeep coughed into life and dwindled to a pair of red lamps down the mountain, were entirely practical. ‘Log the readings every two hours. Don't let the stove go out.’ Then she was gone, and the silence she left behind seemed to thicken around the little weather station like settling snow. I was, for the first time in my life, completely alone, eleven thousand feet above everyone I knew.

[2] The station was a single low room of bolted steel, hunched against the ridge as though it expected to be struck. Outside, the instruments murmured on their tall poles: the anemometer turning its patient cups, the wind vane swinging this way and that like an indecisive finger. I had trained for three weeks to read them. Nobody had trained me for the dark, which came early and without apology, pouring down the valley until only my single window glowed in all that black country.

[3] I made tea I did not want, simply to hear the kettle, and I checked the door catch three times. The wind had begun to rise. It did not howl, as I had half expected; it pressed, leaning its whole weight against the walls and testing them, a great invisible animal pacing the building and sniffing for a way in. Each gust found a new gap to play, and the steel sang in a dozen thin, uneasy voices.

[4] At the first reading I went out with my torch, and the cold met me like a wall of clean glass. My breath bloomed and vanished. Above me, freed from every street lamp and every city haze, the stars were not the meek dust I had always known but a riot, a spilled box of brilliant pins, so many and so close that I felt the old human fear of being seen by something vast. The mercury had fallen further than I had ever recorded. I wrote the figure in the log with fingers that would barely obey me, and the simple act steadied me, as if the numbers were a thread tying me back to the warm, ordinary world below.

[5] The long middle of the night was the hardest. I learned that solitude is loud. Every creak of cooling metal was a footstep; every settling of the snow on the roof was someone testing the latch. Twice I stood with my hand on the door, certain I had heard a voice in the wind, and twice there was nothing but the dark and my own foolish heart hammering at my ribs. I began to talk to myself, quietly, the way my grandmother used to talk to her garden, and I was not ashamed.

[6] Then, near four o'clock, the wind dropped all at once, as though a held breath had finally been released. I went outside into a stillness so complete it rang. In the east the black was thinning to a bruised and tender grey, and one early bird — I never saw it, only heard it — let fall three clear notes into all that emptiness. The peaks emerged slowly from the gloom, immense and patient, exactly where they had been all along, and I understood that they had simply been waiting, indifferent and serene, for the small frightened creature in the steel box to finish being afraid.

[7] When the relief jeep climbed back up the track at seven, the operator found me on the step with a mug of cold tea, watching the light come. ‘Quiet night?' she asked. I almost laughed. I had survived nothing; the danger had all been my own. But I had kept the stove alight and the log unbroken, and I had learned that I could sit with my own fear until the morning took it gently away. ‘Quiet enough,' I said. I have wanted, ever since, to go back.