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On July 16, Casarotto headed down once more. He had been on K2 for two months and had come within only about 1,000 feet of the summit, but he had promised Goretta that the third attempt would be his last. Once he got back to base camp, the pair would pack up and head for home.

Slowly and carefully, Casarotto descended the dangerous route. At last he reached the foot of the face and started to trudge across the glacier toward base camp.

Standing beside his own tent, Diemberger saw “a small dot … actually more of a comma” approaching from a little more than a mile away. He continued to watch: “Now the comma was moving forward almost horizontally across the plateau—there! Then, suddenly, it vanished. Wiped out. I rubbed my eyes in amazement and peered again. Nothing. Nothing at all. Yet I hadn’t dreamt it, had I?”

With his decades of mountaineering experience, Diemberger feared the worst—that Casarotto had fallen into a crevasse. Hesitantly, he approached Goretta, who had been waiting for the scheduled evening radio call from her husband. “Ciao, Kurt, what’s the matter?” she greeted him.

“Renato—where is he now?” Diemberger asked.

“Still on the ridge.”

For a moment, I felt relief. Then fear clutched at my heart again: somebody was on the glacier … if not Renato, then who? …

“It’s just that I saw someone, something, further down.” I didn’t want to say more than that.

Diemberger persuaded Goretta to try the radio. “The next moments will stay with me forever,” Diemberger later wrote.

“Goretta, I have fallen …,” said the weak voice. “I am dying … please send help quickly.”

Diemberger and several Italians grabbed ropes and gear and dashed toward the invisible crevasse. Along the way, one of the Italians managed to keep up radio contact with Casarotto. Then the rescuers saw the telltale hole in the glacier. The crevasse was only a couple of feet wide, and the snow bridge that had broken beneath the soloist lay right on a wellbeaten path that many others had blithely hiked during the previous weeks.

An Italian rappelled into the crevasse. Narrow it might have been at the top, but it swelled beneath the surface into a monstrous cavern. One hundred and thirty feet down, the Italian found Casarotto “leaning against his rucksack in total darkness, with water running everywhere.” The two men embraced, and the rescuer put a waist harness on his stricken comrade.

Even with several men hauling on different ropes, it is a very difficult task to pull an inert victim out of a crevasse. Because the ropes tend to cut into the snow on the lips of the fissure, they must be run over ice axes laid flat near the edge. It took several attempts before the men could hoist Casarotto almost to the surface. By then, he was unconscious.

Once they got him onto the level glacier, the rescuers wrapped Casarotto in sleeping bags. An Italian shined a headlamp on the victim’s face. His eyes flickered briefly. He was still alive.

But moments later, he was dead. Internal injuries from the fall had doomed him from the moment he’d landed on the snow ledge in the darkness, 130 feet down.

Word of her husband’s death was carried down to Goretta. She started up the glacier to say good-bye to Renato, but changed her mind halfway there and returned to base camp. Before leaving the scene of the accident, the men who had tried to rescue Casarotto dropped his body back into the crevasse. To nonclimbers, that may seem like a brutal act, but it’s the most common grave for mountaineers in the great ranges. On an 8,000er, it’s almost logistically impossible to carry a dead climber back to base camp, somehow summon a helicopter to lift the body back to the nearest village, and then arrange to ship it home. (It’s been done in a few rare cases, among them that of Chantal Mauduit, my friend from K2, after she died on Dhaulagiri in 1998.)

There are worse places to be buried than in a crevasse at the foot of a great mountain. If I had died on some 8,000er, I wouldn’t have minded