High Life: A History of High Altitude Physiology and Medicine

Oxford University Press, £59.50, pp 510 ISBN 0 19 512194 5

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“Now,after the hours of torment … I have nothing more to do than breathe, a great peace floods my whole being. I breathe like someone who has run the race of his life and knows that he may now rest for ever …. In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single, narrow, gasping lung, floating over the mists and the summits.”

Reinhold Messner's description of the first ascent of …