AT AROUND 5 A.M. ON MAY 15, 2006, Dawa Sherpa's luck took a turn for the worse. The 30-year-old Nepali was 28,215 feet up Everest's Northeast Ridge, working as lead Sherpa for an expedition to put the first Turkish woman on the summit. Burçak Poçan, a 36-year-old university lecturer, seemed poised to reach the goal—she'd already made it halfway up the Second Step, the treacherous cliff just 800 feet shy of the top. But suddenly, as she inched up the fixed ropes, Poçan slumped over and lost consciousness. Half a dozen Sherpas lowered her slack form down the rock, and nearly an hour later she awoke and was able to stand. That's when their troubles really started.

"After she is coming alive again, I carry her," Dawa told me, explaining in broken English as we sat in a Kathmandu café weeks later. He and another Sherpa, Phurbu Temba, began half lifting, half supporting the woman down the ridge, above dizzying drops of thousands of feet on either side. Then, just below the Second Step at a spot called Mushroom Rock, Dawa's exertions brought on a coughing fit so violent that it tore muscles in his chest. Every breath left him wincing with pain.

For the next three hours, Dawa and Temba helped Poçan down the rocky spine to the bottom of the First Step, the technical pitch above a system of frozen gullies leading to the comparative safety of high camp, at 27,000 feet.

"I say to my friend, 'This look like new body, man,'" Dawa told me. "And my friend, he say, 'No, this one die long time ago.' And I say, 'No, no, he is another body, a new body.' I go and look, and he is alive!"

Then something caught Dawa's eye. He expected to come across one dead body here: an Indian climber, presumably Tsewang Paljor, who lay curled under an overhang, a victim of exposure in the storm that hit Everest on May 10, 1996. Twelve climbers died that spring—eight of them on that single day in May—fixing the mountain in the public imagination as a place where rich, inexperienced clients tried to buy their way to the summit, often with deadly consequences. Paljor's plight had been noticed by two Japanese climbers, but they'd trudged past to snag the summit, leaving him to become a macabre landmark now known simply as Green Boots.

This morning, however, Dawa saw two bodies where only Green Boots should have been, the second tucked against the corpse's feet. "I say to my friend, 'This look like new body, man,' " Dawa told me. "And my friend, he say, 'No, this one die long time ago.' And I say, 'No, no, he is another body, a new body.' I go and look, and he is alive! He can speak nothing, but he is still watching with his eye, and I ask him, 'Where you from? Which group? You have a Sherpa?' And he didn't answer me."

The man was David Sharp, a 34-year-old British climber scaling Everest alone. A quiet and determined engineer who'd recently decided to shift careers and become a teacher, Sharp had failed in two previous Everest summit bids, in 2003 and 2004. This year, going the budget route, he'd arranged a climbing permit through the Kathmandu-based Asian Trekking, and used the company's no-frills food-and-shelter services at the north-side base camp. He'd chosen to climb without a guide or Sherpas, relying on two bottles of oxygen he'd bought, instead of the standard five. He didn't even have a radio to call for help.

Dawa said Sharp's condition was shocking: "Legs just like wood. Face already gone. Black, black." The Sherpa pulled long icicles from the climber's nose and unzipped his down jacket to feel his chest. Sharp's trunk was icy cold, an indication that hypothermia and lack of oxygen had almost done their work. It appeared he had spent the night in the deadly cold and thin air above 26,000 feet.

"We feel very bad, but we can do nothing there," Dawa told me. "It was very hard." If half a dozen fresh Sherpas had been on hand, they might have been able to drag Sharp to high camp, some two hours below. But Sharp's legs were frozen stiff. Dawa and Temba were exhausted. Each time Dawa moved, he felt as if there were a knife between his ribs. And Poçan was still near collapse. The Sherpas agreed to leave Sharp and continue on.

Moments later, Poçan's husband, Serhan, and another Turkish climber, Bora Mavis, arrived at the overhang. They stopped to give hot water to Sharp, who wasn't responsive, but moved on when Serhan's wife collapsed again farther down the ridge. Within an hour, by about 9:30 a.m., as climbers straggled down from the summit, Sharp also got help from Turkish-team members Soner Büyükatalay and Lhakpa Sherpa, and from Phurba Tashi, the lead Sherpa for the France-based Himalayan Experience (Himex), a guiding company run by New Zealander and veteran expedition leader Russell Brice. The climbers gave Sharp oxygen and dragged him from the shade of the overhang to sit him in a patch of sunlight. They tried to get him moving, but Sharp could not stand up, and they couldn't carry him. They continued on.

Burçak Poçan, shepherded by Dawa and Temba, reached high camp at 11 a.m. She'd suffered hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, after having problems with her supplemental oxygen, said her husband. After several days' rest, she went back up the mountain and reached the summit on May 24. Dawa's injury stopped him from joining her. But climbing with her was Serhan, who walked up to pay his respects to Sharp. The body looked ancient to him, he said, as if it had been lying there for years. When Sharp's possessions were packed up at base camp, a scrap of paper told more about the real story of Everest than all the yards of newsprint that would follow. It was a receipt for $7,490, the entire cost of his final climb.