Eighteen months have passed since Annabelle Bond reached the summit of Mount Everest. Enough time for the exhilaration of the moment to have dulled, for the emotion to have subsided and the woman to have settled down? She is now sitting in a hotel in South Kensington, touching keys on her laptop, calling up images of her summit day on Everest and resurrecting feelings that still move her.

Tears fill her eyes because these pictures bring it back. The seven weeks she spent on the mountain preparing for one day, the hostility of the environment, the training of her body, the acceptance of hardship, the nurturing of a dream, the sheer beauty of the mountain, the joy of being part of a team, the almost overwhelming fear, and then, that one day, the last climb to the summit.

Actually, it was a night and day. The South American team of which she was a part left their camp on the South Col at 10 o’clock at night, four Chilean men, one Englishwoman and five Sherpas. The South Col is at 26,000ft, the summit is 29,035ft, and it is a long trek. Arrive by 1pm the next day and there is enough time to make the descent in daylight; anything later increases the risk.

At first Bond felt terrible, low on energy and wanting to turn back. Fearful of what lay before her, afraid to tell her teammates she didn’t want to go on. Fear passes. Night turned to day and she believed she would get there. More than that, she started to feel strong and on the summit ridge she was propelled by the certainty that she would get there.

It had all been worth it: the cuts that wouldn’t heal at high altitude, the roof of her mouth burnt by the sun as she panted her way through the toughest part of the climb, the limbs that ached. More than the physical discomforts, for seven weeks she had shared a tiny tent with two men and learnt to pee, in their presence and without inhibition, into a bottle.

You do it because the prize is greater than the indignity.

“It was sweet, the last part of the ascent. For the final 40 minutes I cried the whole way, sobbed into my oxygen mask. ‘I am going to do it; I am going to do it’. Then at the top, looking down on these 8,000-metre giants, Nuptse, Lhotse, Makalu; being able to see the curvature of the Earth. That was mind-blowing.

“From the time I had spent in Nepal, preparing for this ascent, I had become Buddhist in the way I saw things. It is a very spiritual place: the prayer flags, the music, the sense that what goes around, comes around, the belief that there is purpose to our existence and that for all of us there is a predetermined end.”

Bond reached the summit at midday. She had a camera but not much desire to use it: she took just a few photos. An hour or so after her, the rest of the team arrived. They offered her their phone, but she said no; the thought of telling anybody at home that she had made it scared her. The unlucky climbers mostly perish on descents.

“It suddenly hit me, ‘I could die up here’. We had been on the summit for an hour and 45 minutes, I had waited for the team to arrive and time flew. At these altitudes, you think like a child. One second I am there, immersed in the joy and the sense of satisfaction we felt as a team. The next minute I am panicking.

“I grabbed Lhakpa, one of the Sherpas. ‘Lhakpa,’ I said, ‘please, please take me down’. We began descending almost immediately. After a while, I needed to stop. ‘Lhakpa,’ I shouted, ‘I must pee’. He couldn’t hear me or pretended not to hear me, so we kept going. I peed in my suit. We got down really fast, about 3½ hours, and were back at camp on the South Col by five o’clock.”

You think of this woman, 35 years old then, physically wasted but teeming with the sense of achievement. How many of us climb Everest and for an hour or so can look down on the world? Four or five hours later, what was she thinking in her tent on the South Col? It was the thought that her teammates hadn’t yet arrived and it collided with her relief and exhilaration at having made it.

She stayed awake to be sure of hearing them arrive. The hours passed. She told herself not to worry, they were experienced climbers, they had guides, they had oxygen, they were roped together and the weather was good. Still the hours passed. She thought about going back out in search of them, but in darkness that would have been stupid.