"The ink-black wedge of the summit pyramid stood out in stark relief, towering over the surrounding ridges. Thrust high into the jet stream, the mountain ripped a visible gash in the 120-knot hurricane, sending forth a plume of ice crystals that trailed to the east like a long silk scarf" (pg. 30)
Here Krakauer juxtaposes violent imagery with elegant imagery to capture the way in which Everest is both terrifying and beautiful: at the same time that it rips a gash in a hurricane, it also creates a beautiful scarf-like trail of ice crystals.
"And then I found myself atop a slender wedge of ice, adorned with a discarded oxygen cylinder and a battered aluminum survey pole, with nowhere higher to climb. A string of Buddhist prayer flags snapped furiously in the wind. Far below, down a side of the mountain I had never laid eyes on, the dry Tibetan plateau stretched to the horizon as a boundless expanse of dun-colored earth" (pg. 180)
Krakauer combines a multitude of diverse images in this moment of arrival on the summit: discarded climbing materials; religious iconography; vast empty terrain. This mosaic of images suggests that Everest—monolithic, sublime entity that it is—unifies a broad set of human and non-human experiences. This is what of what makes the mountain a timeless object.
"The first six days of the trek went by in an ambrosial blur. The trail took us past glades of juniper and dwarf birch, blue pine and rhododendron, thundering waterfalls, enchanting boulder gardens, burbling streams. The Valkyrian skyline bristled with peaks that I'd been reading about since I was a child" (pg. 48)
This "ambrosial blur" imagery deftly establishes a stark contrast between Krakauer's initial, child-like expectations of the expedition with the later, brutal realization of how serious and unforgiving the ascent of Everest truly is.
"The ad hoc village that would serve as our home for the next six weeks sat at the head of a natural amphitheater delineated by forbidding mountain walls. The escarpments above camp were draped with hanging glaciers, from which calved immense ice avalanches that thundered down at all hours of the day and night. A quarter mile to the east, pinched between the Nuptse Wall and the West Shoulder of Everest, the Khumbu Icefall spilled through a narrow gap in a chaos of frozen shards" (pg. 59)
Krakauer's use of imagery captures a sense that the "ad hoc village" he and the other climbers use as a base of operation is artificial and out-of-place in the broader context of Everest: it is surrounded on all sides by natural land masses and forces of nature, in which it plays no direct part. This description of the village thereby reflects the broader theme that the human presence on Everest is somewhat unnatural, in tension with the natural state of the mountain.
