Barbed wire is not the best material for making crampons. Over 5,000 metres into the sky, facing blizzards and walls of ice, you want the most secure footwear available. Metal spikes snipped from the rusted fences of a prisoner-of-war camp-and hammered into footplates made from spare car parts-are not ideal for the task. But Felice Benuzzi did not have the luxury of choosing his equipment. An Italian soldier in the second world war, he spent half a decade in internment camps after British forces took Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) in 1941. In the years that he passed at P.O.W. Camp 354, just a few days' trek from Mount Kenya, Africa's second highest mountain, its snowy peaks taunted him. Occasionally, inmates would slip past the sentries and head for neutral Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique). But Benuzzi, a climber, dreamed only of standing on the top of Batian, the summit of Mount Kenya, just a few miles away. Hoisting an Italian flag there, where only a handful of mountaineers had ever trodden, would be an act of defiance that no dash to the border could match.
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