THE FEUD STARTED almost at once. In July 1970, Messner was still in an Austrian hospital, with a jar of seven amputated toes on his bedside table, when he complained in a local newspaper article that Herrligkoffer, a doctor, had not properly treated his frostbite.

Herrligkoffer retaliated in an account in a German weekly, in which he described Günther as "too weak for a summit bid" and lionized Felix Kuen and Peter Scholz, who reached the top the day after the Messners.

As the argument intensified, Messner accused Herrligkoffer of abandoning the two brothers and leaving them for dead; Herrligkoffer said at a public lecture that Messner had "sacrificed his brother to his mountaineering ambition"; and Messner, in 1971, filed the manslaughter and "neglected aid" suit, the first of at least a dozen legal actions that he and his former leader would file against one another.

Messner lost the first case—and all the others. Herrligkoffer, meanwhile, won a libel and breach-of-contract suit against Messner, who'd violated a publishing rights agreement by writing a book about the 1970 expedition, The Red Rocket on Nanga Parbat. As to the libel matter, Messner was forbidden from making claims that Herrligkoffer had failed him and Günther.

After Herrligkoffer died, in 1991, the battle momentarily quieted, but it roared back to life again on October 4, 2001, when Messner was invited to speak at a gathering to honor the publication of a biography of his old nemesis, Herrligkoffer. In the middle of his remarks, he threw a grenade.

"I am saying today that not going into the Diamir Valley, back then, wasn't Herrligkoffer's mistake—it was more a mistake of the other expedition members," he announced as TV cameras rolled. "Some of them, older than I, didn't mind one bit that the two Messners never reappeared," he said. "And that is the tragedy!"

Gerhard Baur and Jürgen Winkler stood in the audience, flabbergasted. Was Reinhold suggesting that the team should have hotfooted it nearly 100 miles to search for the brothers, whose whereabouts were unknown?

"For years the enemy had been Herrligkoffer," Winkler told me later. "But on that day Messner turned 180 degrees against the team."

By now, Messner was a celebrity who had parlayed his feats into an empire, becoming a TV personality, corporate endorser, author of some 40 books, and Green Party member of the European Parliament. So when the first major retaliatory salvo came in May 2002—an open letter from Saler excoriating Messner for "truth distorting"—the scrap became big news, recounted everywhere from German newspapers to the Web. "Especially you, Reinhold, are indebted to this team," for its "absolute loyalty over the last 32 years, but for which you do not have a single good word," Saler wrote. "I am convinced that your brother would have reached base camp alive if you would have asked for help."

A year later, Saler and von Kienlin would publish their books and Messner would sue them. Meanwhile, Messner was preparing a retaliatory salvo of his own: In April 2004 he held a press conference in Innsbruck to announce that Günther's fibula had been found during a 2000 journey he'd made to the Diamir Glacier. As Messner described it, Hans Peter Eisendle, a friend of his, had discovered the bone not far from where the three Pakistani men would find Günther's remains five years later. Messner had taken the fibula home and squirreled it away.

Then, in the autumn of 2003, he suddenly brought it to the Austrian Central DNA Laboratory, in Innsbruck, for testing. "There is no reasonable doubt" that the bone belonged to a Messner brother, biologist Walther Parson told the 2004 press conference as Messner—the epitome of feral elegance—looked on.

"This shows everything I said to be the truth, and I consider the case closed," Messner told me after the event.

But his critics had not been convinced. They didn't believe the DNA test results were conclusive. The bone, they added, could have come from anywhere and been dropped on the mountain where Messner claimed to have found it.

Oddly enough, I'd heard the same wild accusation, in reverse, from Messner, who told me he feared that his teammates were combing the Diamir Glacier for bones and offering to pay locals to do the job, too. His detractors' goal, he said, was to plant them on the Rupal Face.

Hearing this, I imagined an alpine version of Groundhog Day, in which Günther reemerges from the ice year in and year out, and the accusations of treachery and calumny go on and on.