Searching an empty, dangerous room

After a global fundraiser, a plea to Pakistan's Army for help, an ill-timed snowstorm and a daring overnight climb by a team of volunteer rescuers, French mountaineer Elisabeth Revol has been rescued from Nanga Parbat, one of the world's tallest and most dangerous mountains. 
But her Polish climbing partner Tomasz "Tomek" Mackiewicz, whose life she was attempting to save had to be left behind. 

- NPR


Nanga Parbat, even more than K-2 or Everest, is the final boss of the great game of Himalayan alpinism.  It is monstrous, forbidding, sacred, and for a certain kind of adventuresome person, irresistable.
 

Bring it, mortal.

E.R. Eddison gave these words to the narrator in chapter one of the first volume of his Spinozan Zimiamvian Trilogy, Mistress of Mistresses:

I remember, years later, his describing to me the effect of the sudden view you get of Nanga Parbat from one of those Kashmir valleys; you have been riding for hours among quiet richly wooded scenery, winding up along the side of some kind of gorge, with nothing very big to look at, just lush, leafy, pussy-cat country of steep hillsides and waterfalls; then suddenly you come round a corner where the view opens up the valley, and you are almost struck senseless by the blinding splendour of that vast face of ice-hung precipices and soaring ridges, sixteen thousand feet from top to toe, filling a whole quarter of the heavens at a distance of, I suppose, only a dozen miles. 

Before the first person ever got to the summit, in 1953, 31 had died trying.  Dozens more would follow.  Even Messner, one of the few high altitude specialists to survive to retirement age, lost toes and his brother here in 1970. 

Some of the credit or blame for all this must go to Hermann Buhl, the brilliant Austrian who made that legendary first ascent.  It was simple, if not easy:  he woke up and told his climbing partner it was time to go.  His climbing partner sensibly urged him to go on ahead, said he'd catch up later.  So Buhl went on ahead, into the arena, to dice with death.

How hard could it be?

Forty hours later - after an overnight standing bivouac just beneath the summit...

As depicted in the 1986 movie, The Climb

...he staggered, hallucinating, back into camp, having completed the only solo first ascent of an eight thousander without oxygen, ever.

A year later he made the first ascent of Broad Peak, another eight thousander, and died on another climb a few weeks after that.  But the legacy he left behind - climbing by fair means, total commitment to the objective, being willing to take the big risk - inspired a generation of climbers, and got a large number of them killed.

“Mountaineering is a relentless pursuit,” he once said. “One climbs further and further yet never reaches the destination. Perhaps that is what gives it its own particular charm. One is constantly searching for something never to be found.”