In 1941, an Italian civil servant named Felice Benuzzi was captured by Allied forces and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in East Africa. The camp faced Mount Kenya, 17,000 feet high, and Benuzzi found himself staring longingly at that larger, snow-blanketed world from the smallness of his own. Eventually he couldn’t help himself; he decided to climb the mountain.

Image Credit... Sourced from American Geophysical Union and Project Pressure.

It’s important to know two things about the adventure that followed, which Benuzzi chronicled in his book, “No Picnic on Mount Kenya.” First, Benuzzi did manage to escape the camp and climb to the summit of the mountain’s third-highest peak. (He and two other prisoners spent eight months clandestinely preparing: They made ice-climbing gear from barbed wire, and because they didn’t have a map of Mount Kenya, they consulted an illustration of it on a brand of canned food.) Second, when Benuzzi came back down, after 18 days on the mountain, he apparently felt so rejuvenated — as if he had absorbed enough beauty to sustain him — that he decided to sneak back into the camp and picked up his life again as a prisoner. The mountain was that large and impressive, that sublime.

This past October, the English photographer Simon Norfolk spent 18 days on Mount Kenya, camping in an old mountaineering hut at nearly 16,000 feet. Norfolk was there to document the gradual disappearance of one of the mountain’s many glaciers, the Lewis, which happens to be one of the most thoroughly surveyed tropical glaciers in the world. Its ice mass has been mapped periodically since 1934, and in recent decades, as the earth has warmed, scientists have reported on its catastrophic recession in their own quiet, peer-­reviewed way. In 1979, for example, glaciologists mapped the Lewis from an airplane and discovered ‘'drastic ice loss'’ since the last mapping four years earlier. In 1983, another survey found the same thing. There was similar bad news in a 1995 study (“climatic forcing of the glacier recession has accentuated in recent years”) and, likewise, a decade after that (“a drastic and progressive shrinkage.”) In 2010, scientists found that the Lewis had shrunk by 23 percent in just the previous six years. Worse still, a neighboring glacier — the Gregory — “no longer exists.”