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It’s a tribute to Bonatti’s coolheadedness that both men survived that night. Other climbers, including Hornbein and Unsoeld on Everest, would later get through even higher bivouacs in one piece (though Unsoeld lost his toes to frostbite), but in 1954, most climbers would have said that to attempt to survive a night without shelter at 26,000 feet was to invite certain death. And just as I admire Wiessner for not abandoning Pasang Lama in 1939, I admire Bonatti, who could have saved his own skin by going down to Camp VIII in the dark, for not abandoning Mahdi.

At first light on July 31, Compagnoni and Lacedelli prepared for their summit push. In Desio’s Ascent of K2, the short chapter covering the events of July 30 and 31 bears the footnote “As described by Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli.” The narrative veers awkwardly between the first and the third person. Sometimes it is “we” who act, sometimes “Compagnoni” or “Lacedelli.” But even though Desio must have edited the chapter, it remains the principal source for Compagnoni and Lacedelli’s side of this unhappy story—or would remain so until 2006. In a small book he published that year, called K2: The Price of Conquest, Lacedelli insisted that he had nothing to do with the contents of the chapter in Ascent and that it was based entirely on Compagnoni’s diary.

In that chapter, on July 30 the two men installed at Camp IX see a pair of tiny figures approaching from below, far too late in the afternoon. In the first person, the narrative says, “As dusk was falling we heard shouts. At once we came out of the tent. In the semi-darkness we could not see Bonatti and Mahdi, but we recognized their voices. Unfortunately, the high wind made conversation extremely difficult.” At last Lacedelli thought he understood Bonatti to be yelling that although he “could manage by himself,” Mahdi wanted to return at once to Camp VIII.

“Go back!” we shouted. “Go back! Leave the masks! Don’t come any farther!” It did not occur to us that our colleague could be thinking of spending the night at such an altitude without a tent or even a sleeping-bag.

Now Bonatti’s voice was no longer audible. “Obviously,” we thought, “he’s taken our advice and gone down below.”

The two men in the cramped tent spent a miserable, sleepless night. At first light they emerged to see “an ominous carpet of mist” creeping up from below.

We searched the snow-covered slope below for the oxygen-masks which Bonatti and Mahdi were supposed to have left there the evening before. Suddenly, to our amazement, we caught sight of a figure receding into the distance. Who was it—Bonatti or Mahdi? … We called out to the man at the top of our voices. He stopped and turned around, but he did not answer, and after a moment he resumed his halting progress down the precipitous slope.

We were simply flabbergasted…. How could we suspect the truth—namely that two men had survived the rigours of a whole night spent in the open at an altitude of more than 26,000 feet?

Is this account completely fictitious? It’s true that high wind can make shouted conversations extremely difficult to understand. In 2005, when Veikka Gustafsson and I were camped at 22,000 feet on Annapurna, waiting for the wind to die down so we could go for the summit, our three Italian friends were in a tent only fifty feet away. Especially with the language barrier, shouting to each other over the wind made communication difficult at best. Eventually we resorted to hand signals, like thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

I suppose it’s possible that Lacedelli and Compagnoni sincerely believed that the two men who had brought up the oxygen had descended in the dark, and only realized in the morning that they must have bivouacked. (Bonatti swears that no one called out to him in the morning.) But the obvious reason for Lacedelli and Compagnoni to have yelled out, “Go back!” was that they would have been extremely reluctant to share their cramped two-man tent with the refugees from the arduous load carry.

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