WHATEVER HAPPENED, from a climber's perspective it's hard to grasp why the Messners, with Günther so ill, would leave the security of a known route, fixed ropes, camps, and the pending arrival of two teammates on the Rupal Face.

"It's illogical," argues Saler. "If you've climbed a tall building by the stairs, and you're exhausted on the roof, you don't climb down the outside of the building."

But as Messner puts it, his teammates have been motivated to "invent" stories about him because they're jealous

Baur recalls how Günther impatiently dumped a rope and sprinted into the Merkl Couloir, a 2,000-foot ice ribbon, to catch up with his brother. It was the last time anyone but Reinhold saw him.

of his success. They have no right to judge his decisions on Nanga Parbat, he adds, because they weren't there with him and they have no idea what he was going through. "How can they know the truth?" he asked me in September.

In Messner's version, he and Günther bivied on their second night at about 19,685 feet, in a section known as the Mummery Rib. By the next morning, June 29—their third day without shelter or water—Günther could only stumble slowly along. Messner walked ahead, through the seracs of an avalanche-prone flank. He was more than an hour ahead of Günther when he reached a spot where glacier water flowed. He sat down to drink and wait for his brother.

Messner says that when Günther failed to appear, he backtracked up the mountain. Despite a frantic day and night of searching and calling, he found only avalanche debris. Over the next few days, Messner would falter downward until he came across villagers, who helped carry him to a road. On July 3, six days after summiting, he encountered the vehicles of the departing team and was rescued.

Günther's death was "where everything ended and everything begins," Messner writes in The Naked Mountain. For many days after, "I still experienced that feeling of increasing remoteness as a feeling of having been abandoned; as a kind of dissociation. Perhaps this was because one can neither cope with, nor indeed survive, such loneliness without suffering lasting damage."