Camille Pissarro The garden at Pontoise 1877 painting

Camille Pissarro The garden at Pontoise 1877 paintingCamille Pissarro Louveciennes The Road to Versailles paintingCamille Pissarro Landscape at Chaponval painting
The class was waiting for her, growing impatient with all this talk of phantoms. They wanted _the_ story, her story. They wanted to stand on the mountain-top. _Do you know how it feels_, she wanted to ask them, _to have the whole of your life concentrated into one moment, a few hours long? Do you know what it's like when the only direction is down?_ "I was in the second pair with Sherpa Pemba," she said. "The weather was perfect, perfect. So clear you felt you could look right through the sky into whatever lay beyond. The first pair must have reached the summit by now, I said to Pemba. Conditions are holding and we can go. Pemba grew very serious, quite a change, because he was one of the expedition clowns. He had never been to the summit before, either. At that stage I had no plans to go without oxygen, but when I saw that Pemba intended it, I thought, okay, me too. It was a stupid whim, unprofessional, really, but I suddenly wanted to be a woman sitting