DAVID SHARP'S FATE was barely reported at first, just one on the list of 11 deaths that made 2006 the second-deadliest spring season on record, pushing the total known Everest toll to more than 200 since adventurers first set foot on the mountain in the 1920s. The uproar started on May 22, after Mark Inglis, a 46-year-old New Zealander who'd become the first double amputee to reach the summit, gave post-expedition interviews in Kathmandu to a New Zealand television show and London's Daily Telegraph. "About 40 people" went past Sharp en route to the summit without stopping to help, Inglis declared. Unaware of the Turkish team's efforts, Inglis said the only climbers who offered aid were Sherpas with the Himex team, led by Brice, who was stationed at the North Col below. A few people in the group radioed Brice, Inglis said, and the Himex leader told them to leave Sharp behind, because the man was beyond saving. Brice disputes this and says no one told him about Sharp during their ascent. In any case, the climbers moved on. "It was a very hard decision," Inglis noted. But "at 28,000 feet, it's hard to stay alive yourself."

Inglis has since revised his statements, which he says he made when he was physically and mentally exhausted and in a lot of pain. He'd suffered severe frostbite—he later had five fingertips amputated—and his leg stumps were badly injured from climbing on prosthetic limbs. When he e-mailed me this summer, it was between hospitalizations back home, where he'd undergone additional amputations on both legs.

In truth, Inglis wrote, "I remember little apart from the intense cold and from trying to keep my hands warm"—in temperatures as low as 30 degrees below zero—"as I need to use my hands much more than legged climbers." Inglis now says he can't recall whether, during the early-morning ascent, he himself called Brice or he heard others contact the expedition leader—or whether no one called Brice at all. It's possible, Inglis added, that the radio traffic actually occurred during the descent, the most dangerous part of the climb, when people's strength and oxygen supplies are spent and rescue efforts can easily end badly. "My recollection is unclear," he wrote.

Whatever the circumstances, Inglis soon found himself the target of worldwide media wrath. Never mind that being disabled made him the least likely individual to help Sharp: Editorialists from all corners stepped forward to confirm the moral collapse of climbing, a charge led by Sir Edmund Hillary himself.

"I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mount Everest has become rather horrifying," Hillary told the New Zealand press. "People just want to get to the top. They don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress."

Basque climber Juan Oiarzabal, the sixth man to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks, put it even more scathingly to the adventure site ExplorersWeb.com: "That mountain turned into a circus years ago," he declared, "and it's getting worse."