`Inshallah, all members reach summit, then party." Mohammad Ali, base camp cook for the Irish K2 expedition, was optimistic to the very last. Yet even he couldn't whip up the support of the mountain gods when the winter came early in the Karakoram range of northern Pakistan.
And it was in the gods that the Irish climbers finally placed their trust, as they waited, and watched, and waited for an opportunity to make an attempt on the world's second-highest mountain.
"Yes, as if cabin fever and homesickness wasn't enough, moon madness has finally reached the Godwin Austin glacier," Paul Dunlop, a Queen's University Belfast student, wrote earlier this month as he and his companions crouched in tents at more than 5,000 metres.
"Three continuous weeks of bad weather have finally taken their toll", he confirmed. "With all faith in science, satellites and meteo forecasts from Brazil worn threadbare, a rumour that the full moon will bring the spell necessary for a summit bid has been grasped most fervently by nearly all the climbers here. I guess we all need something to believe in."
By this stage, frustration had gripped the K2 base camp like a virus, with none of the international expeditions present able to make much of an impact on the mountain face. The Irish had already acclimatised on, and made a successful ascent of, Broad Peak, the world's 12th-highest mountain at 8,047 metres, when they arrived to join north Americans, Italians, Spanish and Turks.
The Baltoro region of northern Pakistan is "harsh", one of his colleagues had noted several weeks earlier in a contribution to the expedition's website.
"It is a harshness which can be shrugged off when spirits are up, but which can also induce a wearying, vacant ennui when spirits are slack. There is always a buoyancy coming down from any mountain. In the Alps, this will last for a few days, and if weather precludes any further activity, much can be found to distract the mind from boredom.
"Here, novelty is extinct, and if bad weather sets in the inside of one's head is reduced to a series of impulses, seeking solace and comfort. Novels are consumed in a day. One wakes in the morning dreaming of wives, families and home. If this reverie continues into the waking hours after breakfast, the day may become a long internal lament for release. You wonder how you ever thought you could endure three months away."
The most hardened, self-reliant climbers found themselves being driven slowly insane by the conditions, even when still on Broad Peak. "A copy of The Irish Times would be devoured from headlines to small ads," they noted at one stage. "We are so socially starved that a provincial paper from Ballina would suffer the same fate. How are things in Belmullet anyway?"
In fact, even before the relocation from Broad Peak to K2, it became too much for one of the team, who could not bear the separation from his pregnant wife and decided to leave. The dispatches by email became more candid, more painful and perhaps more difficult for those relatives at home to read. Calvin Torrans, the Belfast-born team leader, was injured in a rockfall at 6,500 metres, and suffered concussion. The headaches stayed with him, arousing fears of altitude sickness which can be fatal if not treated in time.
The Irish had set themselves a very ambitious target, not just to climb a peak which is acknowledged to be more difficult, technically, than Everest, but to do so without oxygen and without the assistance of high-altitude porters.
"On Mount Everest, it feels as if you are in the womb, but on K2 you are always out on the edge," Reinhold Messner, the Tyrolean who made the first oxygenless ascent of Everest, has said.
K2, the 28,251 ft mountain first climbed a year after Everest by a group of Italians and Hunza high-altitude porters, is synonymous with death. In 1996 Alison Hargreaves, the first British woman to make an unsupported ascent of Everest, perished on her descent from its summit along with six other climbers. Just a decade before, Julie Tullis and Alan Rouse, the first Britons to climb it, died on its flanks. They were among a dozen mountaineers who lost their lives on K2 that year.
The six-man Irish group from both sides of the Border intended to approach by the Abruzzi ridge. It is named after an Italian duke who made the first attempt on K2's south-east ridge in 1909.
Seven years earlier, in 1902, an Irish adventurer named Aleister Crowley was a member of the first team to make a serious attempt on the mountain. Crowley, a magician with an interest in satanism, dope and other mystical pursuits, was an accomplished alpinist who advised against his leader's approach by a north-east ridge.
He was proved to be correct when the group was forced back in bad weather at 6,000 metres. It appears that he believed in a very direct style of teamwork; at one point, he threatened another climber with a revolver.
Some 96 years later, compatriots made it well beyond 6,000 metres, with some having already recorded personal bests on Broad Peak in July. Eddie Cooper, the group's deputy leader who recorded the Broad Peak ascent, and Paul Dunlop were the only team members to have a real crack at the mountain, however, according to Calvin Torrans, speaking to The Irish Times by satellite phone from Pakistan.
A fortnight ago they set out for Camp Two at 6,800 metres and found themselves crawling into an American tent there to escape the vicious winds whipping around the flanks. So bad were the conditions that they could not pitch their own tent, and were forced to retreat to advance base camp.
No one was to make it up Broad Peak successfully after Eddie Cooper, nicknamed "Cyber Cooper" by his compatriots. High winds and low cloud clung relentlessly to K2. A combined effort by the Turks, Spanish and Italians resulted in fixed ropes being laid to Camp Three at 7,400 metres. Yet everyone knew that the continuous bad weather would make the risk of moving up that far too great. Deep snow would have accumulated on the mountain shoulder.
"Yes, we are disappointed that we didn't have a good shot at it," Calvin Torrans said this week after the long arduous trek out by the Gondolora Pass into the Hushe valley, where the climbers had their first taste of chips after two months of chapatis, dal, rice and corned beef curry. "The Italians had been at Camp Two for eight weeks by the time we got there, and couldn't move up further."
Consoled by the fact that no one set foot on K2's summit this year, they are already making plans for further expeditions although the Government's decision to cut promised funding before their departure is an issue they intend to pursue in the interests of all Irish mountaineers.
"It was a fine achievement, and it shows how bad a year it was that so few people climbed Broad Peak and no one got up K2," Joss Lynam, president of the International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation's expedition commission, says.
Dawson Stelfox, Belfast architect, mountain guide and first Irishman up Everest, concurs. "Yes, it is terribly disappointing, but the experience gained will be invaluable. Climbing on big mountains is totally weather-dependent. You have to work with the conditions rather than your ambitions no matter how good you are."