This book is dedicated to those who have had to carry the unfair burden of lies, having been wrongly accused of being untrue; and to the liars, too. I hope these pages will help them figure out their own motives.

Some seasons are tougher than some others. Struggling as we are to stay afloat, we are unable to even think about the impact that some days, or months, or even years might have on our lives. There are crucial times, no matter how ordinary or dramatic they happen to be, that are bound to affect a person’s future forever.
[…]
I was so keen to pursue my ambitions as a mountaineer that I numbed my inquisitiveness as a journalist. I hushed my own spirit – me, the champion of human rights and freedom of speech. I left for Tibet with the bitter prospect of obeying the Chinese ban on visiting Lhasa and the other rebel cities of the province.
What’s the point of denying it? When you chase after a selfish goal, everything you usually stand for – your morals, your life code – swiftly slip to the bottom of a drawer. A double-lock one, at that.
[…]
One day I read an article on the Internet. A skyrunner, who enjoyed the sponsorship of several major brands of mountaineering gear, announced he had climbed to the top of K2 – on his own. This Pakistani eight-thousander presents even more challenges than its illustrious peer, Mount Everest, and the victorious summitter was determined to conquer the top of each second tallest mountain in every continent. His Asian goal was K2.
However, this wasn’t the real scoop. Upon coming back to Europe, the mountaineer had surrendered to the pressure of the media and had confessed he had lied. Weeping, he told journalists that he had fooled the whole world as well as himself.
It was the picture at the summit that gave him away. It didn’t offer any solid elements to ascertain the exact location of the shot; what it did offer was, in fact, a few suspicious details in the background. As it turned out, the picture hadn’t been taken on the top of K2, but further down.
The news hit me hard. My gut reaction was to blame the mountaineer without appeal. He had brought disgrace upon a sport associated with trust, betraying what should be a cardinal principle of human behaviour: the respect for truth.
[…]
Two issues made me curious: how a lie, or what is thought to be a lie, comes into being; and what happens to the life of the alleged liar.
What is it that starts ticking in our head, I wonder, when we decide to tell a lie? It’s some sort of subtle mechanism at work in our psyche, something that all of us are familiar with. It’s not peculiar to mountaineering.
What pushed me to write this book was the realisation of how immensely life-changing this “True or False” game can be – a vain thing in itself, and yet able sometimes to lead us as far as the dock.
I decided to examine only the most thought-provoking cases in terms of human experience.
[…]
Lies – even the mere doubt of a lie – have often changed a person’s future. My book looks into the lies that affected the existence of several mountaineers of varying renown. Lies are the burdensome shadows that these people had to carry in their backpacks throughout the rest of their days.
The practise of an infallible test in order to ascertain a person’s innocence or guilt – like a DNA test, that has saved many a convicted’s life in the USA – is not a thing in the domain of mountaineering.
Doubt resists, and so does its shadow.

While I was working on this book, my eyes fell on the summit picture that I took on top of Mount Cho Oyu. In the background there’s nothing but clouds and some stripes of blue: no solid, conclusive element to tell where the picture was actually taken.
What if, I wondered, what if somebody wakes up tomorrow and decides to question my feat?
It was then that the burden of shadows plummeted upon my shoulders.