The hut sits just below the pass, a stone building with a tin roof and twenty bunks in two rooms. You reach it after five hours of walking, and the first thing you do, before you take off your boots, is sit on the bench outside and look back at the way you came.

Dinner is at six, and everyone eats the same thing: soup, bread, a stew, something sweet. Conversation happens in four languages and mostly in gestures. Someone always has a map spread out on the table, and someone else always has an opinion about tomorrow’s route.

At sunset the whole hut goes outside. Nobody arranges it; it just happens. People who have been talking all evening stand in silence while the light leaves the peaks one by one.

Lights out is at ten. The alarm, for most people, is the clatter of the first walkers leaving in the dark.