OUR SUMMIT BID, which began around midnight, did not unfold elegantly. With a turgid GI tract, Emeka was sloshing his way up the mountain when, at 16,800 feet, he quietly divulged that his stomach was "bubbling." Concerned with his health, he hadn't filmed much and was keeping a slow pace.

When I peeled away to catch up with Levine and Barkeley, who had left camp a half-hour earlier, Brown admonished me again: "Go slowly." A half tab of Diamox had helped ease my crushing headache, but after I pushed to reach Levine and Barkeley, it roared back. Levine wasn't feeling any better, and his motivation to film was "not there at all."

At sunrise, everything hurt. Wind blasted across Gilman's Point, 90 minutes and 700 vertical feet from the summit. I had no motivation to shoot either. Brown knew the quandary well. "I have lent cameras to three people climbing Everest, and none of them filmed at the summit," he had warned. While this wasn't Everest, the air atop Kilimanjaro contains about half the oxygen of that at sea level. "You'll be tired, and you won't be thinking clearly, so plan out how you're going to shoot the summit ahead of time," Brown had advised. "Somehow find something inside of you that forces you to get that camera out and make a shot." Sharing images with applauding audiences motivates Brown; pain prompted me. From suffering would spring something beautiful—or at least mildly entertaining.

I shot the new day. Barkeley, guided by Evans, trucked up the mountain as if he had an outboard motor strapped to his back. Levine staggered behind. He was going to miss Barkeley reaching the top—the butterfly moment. I was nearby. Levine yelled to Ross, who screamed to me, "Thayer, will you please shoot Bill at the summit?" The painful para­dox of shooting a film in rarefied air hit me like 1,000 pounds of feathers. The first rule of climbing Kilimanjaro: Don't rush. The first rule of adventure filmmaking: Sometimes you have to rush. With caterpillars pupating all over the mountain, I staggered to the top and let the camera roll.

Barkeley, standing before a ten-story-high glacier he could hardly see, embraced Evans, crying. Then Levine finally reached the top. He was disappointed he hadn't gotten the summit shot, but with Brown, Ross, and me all filming, he'd have plenty of footage. As Brown had told us, "Part of being a director is that you have to ask other people for help."