In a fog of rage and despair, Bonatti turned to the slope before him and hacked out a ledge with his ice ax. Never before had anyone attempted, let alone survived, an open bivouac at such an altitude.

It was just a year before the Italian K2 campaign, in 1953, that Everest had been ascended, by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, as had Pakistan’s Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest mountain, by the Austrian Hermann Buhl. Still, 11 of the 8,000-ers remained inviolate. K2 would ultimately prove the most difficult of the world’s 14 highest peaks, as well as arguably the most dangerous. Its unique challenge: the extreme steepness of every one of its ridges and faces, the fact that some of its hardest climbing lies very high on its flanks—and a fiendish scarcity of good campsites.

With the bitter echoes of World War II still reverberating, the great expeditions of the golden age took on an intensely nationalistic cast. All the principal players in the war would now meet in a new theater, the Himalaya—even the Japanese, who made the first ascent of Nepal’s 26,781-foot Manaslu in 1956. For the French, who had never before distinguished themselves in the Himalaya, the revolutionary 1950 ascent of Annapurna served as a heroic epic that validated the whole country, still smarting from the shame of its occupation by the Germans.

It was not an accident that the leaders of the Himalayan expeditions of the 1950s tended to be autocrats with military dispositions and backgrounds: Sir John Hunt on Everest, chosen over the blithe vagabond Eric Shipton, who was bumped from the job at the last minute; on Annapurna, Maurice Herzog, who exacted from his teammates formal pledges of unquestioning obedience; and the German martinet Karl Maria Herrligkoffer, who sued Hermann Buhl for violating orders rather than congratulating the climber after he sum- mited Nanga Parbat.

For the Italians, defeated in the war, their duce shot by the conquerors and hung by his heels in a public square, the potential glory of K2 demanded just such a leader: 57-year-old Professor Ardito Desio. And there was no question which team member was likeliest to set the first foot on the summit: Achille Compagnoni was Desio’s protégé. Other members of the party reported that they were treated by Desio with something near contempt. As Lino Lacedelli would tell me in 2003, "We called him ‘Il Capetto’ [the Little Chief]. From base camp, he typed up daily orders. Order 13: ‘Who will not obey my orders will be punished with the heaviest weapon in the world—the press.’ "