ON MAY 25, McBride and I decided it was time to hit the trail, and it occurred to me that some of the finest moments in Base Camp were days like this. Each night, all the prayer flags froze, and in the morning, when the sun's first rays hit these bright little squares of cloth, the ice crystals inside would evaporate and little puffs of steam would waft into the air in a way that made the flags look like they were breathing. Then the light would hit the Khumbu Icefall and start bouncing among the seracs, shimmering and coruscating until that entire jagged mass of blue ice seemed to levitate on the iridescent force of its own beauty. Base Camp seemed like a notch below paradise at such moments, and I recalled something the Energizer Bunny had said.

"Everything is so concentrated up here," she'd told me. "Survival and death, suffering and happiness, ambition and humility. During these two months in Base Camp, you sometimes feel as if you've lived an entire lifetime in this place—don't you agree?"

I did. Because, more than any other feature on Everest, Base Camp seemed to offer up a set of ideas that suggested, at least to me, that Sir Edmund Hillary's condemnation of what this mountain has become might be profoundly mistaken.

First, there was the notion that every person connected with the place—the Ice Doctors and Poop Doctors, the Butter People and "slaves"—was both a hero and a victim in a drama of his own making, and that the hunk of rock at the center of that drama neither ennobled nor diminished those attempting to climb it but instead was simply there. And because it's there, looming along the outer edges of human physiology and imagination, Everest had somehow distilled the essence of those drawn into its orbit—their courage and ludicrousness, their foibles and fears—and reflected those qualities back in ways that were both stark and urgently compelling.

Most climbers probably knew this already or learned it on the mountain. Because you simply can't return from the most exalted place on earth without acknowledging your bottomless frailty, your utter insignificance, and the awkward fact that your life represents a bestowal of grace that you've done nothing to deserve. Nor can you fail to consider the prospect that one reason—maybe the reason—why the world, despite its many desolations and depravities, sometimes vibrates with such harrowing beauty is that horror and levity might be linked inside the human heart in the same ineffably mysterious way as sadness and love.

Finally, there's the notion that these things may balance on a blasphemous paradox: the possibility that the act of climbing Everest might be rather superfluous. Because the most bewitching feature of the world's highest peak may not, in fact, be located anywhere near the top. Instead, it may be folded into the absurd, oddly redemptive chaos of Base Camp—right down at the bottom of it all.

Which, in the end, is where the most interesting forms of truth abide. Don't you agree?