The Summit Page #8

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from what he

originally came outwith.

He said

that Ger was always ahead,

that Ger abandoned him.

Within a day or two, the stories

were-were rife in the papers.

Marco was

the last living witness

to have seen Ger.

So for to hear these stories

that Ger was always ahead,

he was hallucinating,

his body was splattered

all over the mountain-

this was heartbreaking

for us, like.

He changed his story

several times,

which certainly didn't help

make things clear.

And... and, you know, his story

had a lot of clout

because everyone else was gone,

everyone else had perished.

So you can say

whatever you want.

There's no one there

to contradict what you say,

except for Pemba.

See, all we have is a story

to cling onto,

and-and now all the stories

are different.

And it's very hard, do you know?

Every story's different,

and that's all we have.

We've no body.

But why we are asking...

because now I,

what your story says

is that you were

a little bit lower

than the body of Gerard, so...

Two fresh Sherpas

forcing by Korean leader

reach Korean,

just top section of the couloir.

And then they

are descending together.

I thought

they were already dead,

the three who were hanging,

but probably

they had been moving then.

Yeah, then same time,

three, four times,

the serac fell down.

Multi times serac...

Pemba was the missing piece

of the jigsaw.

He held the key

to a lot of people's questions.

Ger had given his camera

to Pemba at the summit,

so Pemba had (Bar's camera

coming down and all.

And he continued to take

pictures of what was happening.

It was obvious, then,

why Ger refused

to come down the mountain.

There was people in trouble.

Ger was never going to,

never going to leave them after.

It would have destroyed him

to just leave the Koreans.

It would have ate away,

and it would've haunted him day

and night, I think.

At first, we weren't told

that Ger had gone back up.

That came out

a little bit later.

When we met,

Pemba knew something

that we didn't know

at that point-

that second radio call.

Go ahead, Pasang.

I am here with the Korean team.

They met the Koreans

at the top of the bottleneck.

That means they traveled

from where they were stuck,

all the way across the traverse.

Ger freed them.

There was no one else

there to do it.

In our own team,

we would have done everything

for each other.

But what did Gerard-

not only in his own team...

he... he...

he fight for his life

and even for the life

of the Koreans.

Had they made it down

to Camp Four safely,

it would be

one of the most amazing stories

in mountaineering history,

you know?

But instead,

because they got hit by ice,

it's a tragedy,

and then it

becomes a controversy.

Ger was true to his nature

to the very end.

That's who he-

that's who he was.

If it takes 100 years,

the truth

will have to be recognized

by those to Whom the verdict

of history belongs.

Oftentimes,

when somebody does lose a life,

what went down is held,

you know,

up under the microscope.

And some people might say,

"They should have done this,

and they

shouldn't have done that."

Just because you survive

the mountain

doesn't make you an expert,

and it doesn't-

I don't think that it

gives you any right to-

to say that somebody

made a mistake, you know,

because you just-

you know,

when you Weren't there,

you don't know.

Only the mountain knows.

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