FROM THE ARCHIVE: BACK FROM THE DEAD – JULY 1st, 2000  EACH MORNING he wakes and lies awhile in bed just absorbing the sounds of the house. In those moments of fleeting serenity everything is pleasantly amplified. His wife, Peach, moving about downstairs, the crockery piling up, the dog padding around greeting the day, the cat scratching busily.

The wan Texas sun lights his room. Beck Weathers thinks to himself that this is going to be a good day, another good day.

Maybe he has been dreaming. When he came home first he never had nightmares, but for the longest time he dreamt he was climbing. Night after night he felt that sensation of putting one foot in front of the other, slowly leaving the earth behind him.

Recently he has different dreams, escapes which cast him into bulletproof mode. Everything is possible. Sometimes in his reverie he looks down and he has two hands. Some part of his brain insists that this is dreamtime, but his voice just says “Hey cool!”

Nothing fractures his contentment now. There is pleasure in every sunrise, he lives for the feel of wind on his face, for the pleasure of just contributing, he doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Little aggravations don’t matter.

He misses the sensation of touch, of course. People think maybe he misses doing things he once did, that he yearns to recover some old function. Wrong. It’s the fact of no longer having feeling coming through hands and fingers. A human gets 40 per cent of sensory perception through the hands. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone and being deprived of that is a cruel loss. It hurts relationships. People are tactile beings and having no hands makes an island of a man.

He thinks it a satisfactory trade, what he lost and what he gained. Even as they carried him down Everest with his two hands frozen solid in front of him, he thought so. He remembers saying to Davie Breashears, upon whose shoulder his was leaning, “Hey Dave, before I came here they said it would cost an arm and a leg. I’m getting a bargain”.

Breashears shook his head. Minutes later, as the shuffle downhill continued, Weathers asked was it only him or did anyone else feel like singing. Then he started up with Chain of Fools as they tramped along the worst terrain on earth. Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.

Peach hated him just then. His wife loved him and hated him. Weathers was never an easy man to live with. Depression whipped him. Work and climbing obsessed him. He says it himself, he filched the life from his family. As he came down the mountain, broken but singing, his wife wondered what to do with him. If he’d returned healthy she’d planned to leave him. Now she decided to give her dismantled husband a year.

What he lost and what he gained. Weathers speaks from a perspective that perhaps no other human being has. Man has walked on the moon, man has run four-minute miles, man has mapped the genetic code of the human body, but no man has come out of a hypothermic coma. Except Weathers, the man who was left for dead, twice, Weathers, who has been to that place where a man has nothing left physically or emotionally.

He is frank to the point of nakedness. He stands in the warmth of the American summer four years later wearing a burgundy T-shirt with what’s left of his arms hanging from the sleeves, his big red nose dipping down towards his loopy grin. He confronts you with his dismantled body, encourages you to deal with it.

“Being maimed,” he says, “it’s just something that is. Nothing I can do, nothing I worry about any longer.” He looks at you straight with his fierce brown eyes. This is not some rich goombah who went up a mountain and got into trouble. This is a labyrinth of a man.

Perhaps you know some of Weathers’s story. It’s not the usual, once-upon-a-time spiel from the summits. Big mountaineer gasps up big mountain because it’s there and because he must. Big mountaineer contemplates life from the top. Big mountaineer comes down again.

One day in May 1996, Weathers, running from depression, got to within 1,000 feet of the summit of Mount Everest. He could go no further and, while the rest of his party completed the ascent, he dawdled on the ridge below. By the time they were supposed to come back down a storm had enveloped the mountain. Eventually, with a Japanese woman, Yasuko Namba, and five other climbers (four from another expedition), Weathers began the descent.

The storm worsened. The wind-chill factor was 100 below, Weathers had lost his sight at altitude, but with the blizzard whipping up visibility was like “looking out from the centre of a bottle of milk”.

It was a day of chaos and crisis on the mountain, a day when people found out who had iron in the soul. Noting that there was no morality at 26,000 feet, two Japanese climbers yomped past a couple of dying men on their way up and yomped past them again on the way down. A South African expedition refused to share oxygen with dying climbers. One expedition leader scooted down the mountain hours ahead of his clients who had paid $65,000 a turn for his expertise. Eight people would die before the storm ended.

Coming down the mountain, Weathers’s group strayed dangerously off course. Twenty-five more steps and they would have walked blind over a 7,000-foot drop. Sensing the danger, somehow they opted to stop and the three fittest set off for high camp to get help. Duly alerted, Anatoli Boukreev, the Russian who had come down the mountain ahead of his party, climbed the mountain again, locating the ailing group at a critical time. He rescued the three who were members of his expedition. Yasuko Namba and Weathers, both in critical condition, were left to die.

And die they did. A cardiologist, Stuart Hutchison, and three sherpas came out later to find them. They found Namba and Weathers lying beside each other, buried in snow and ice. They were frozen rigid, eyes dilated. Hutchison had no choice but to leave them there.

It was a day of cruel, heartbreaking decisions, drastic errors, painful mistakes. One climber was misidentified crawling into camp, and his family informed that he was back and safe only to hear the next day that he had perished. Rob Hall, the leader of Weathers’s expedition, clung to the summit in the storm freezing to death despite the pleas of his friends to begin descending.

He made a final radio call to his wife. “I love you. Sleep well, my sweetheart. Please don’t worry too much.” And then all they could hear on the airwaves was his quiet sobbing.

Namba perished quickly. Weathers wandered a little in a state of altitude delirium and passed from consciousness not long afterwards, slumping facedown on the ice. Peach and his children, Meg and Bub, were told of his death.

Peach thought that in a way her husband had willed his demise. Dogged by suffocating bouts of clinical depression since late adolescence, he had been suicidal to the extent of studying the different ways to end it all. One day, shaken by his self-destructive instincts, he had cleared all the guns from his Dallas home, brought them to the police station and turned them in. His obsession with climbing and work had become his solution. It didn’t take away the pain, but just left him too drained to notice it.

Success had made a disaster area of their home. Weathers was an anatomical pathologist, an 11-hours-a-day workaholic who wedged workouts and large mountains into his spare time. He was a hero to everyone except those who knew him.

AFTER 15 HOURS of absence he opened his eyes on Everest. He had been in the storm for 22 hours. He has no explanation for this miracle. His instincts are scientific rather than spiritual, but he has no rational way of explaining what happened. Nobody wakes up from hypothermic coma. Nobody.

When he awoke he saw in front of him his right hand, mottled, gloveless and frozen rock-solid into a grotesque, comic salute. And he also saw his family, their faces looming before him in stark and vivid focus. For the first time in his life it struck him that between depression and obsession he had never been there for them, that he owed them more than the news of his lonely death. He stood up and began to walk.

His Damascene epiphany was almost too late. When he finally came home, with his body ruined and crumbling, Peach damned him for what he had done to her, to his kids. She gave him his year of probation, take it or leave it.

Pretty much from that day he recognised the duty of the “survivor” was compatible with the task of the husband. Eight people were left behind dead on the mountain. Eight people dead, leaving behind them great concentric circles of grief. He owed them a good and decent life, a life not shrivelled by bitterness.

“I knew who to blame anyway. Me. My legs took me there and my decisions kept me there and finding somebody to blame for not saving my bacon is a waste of time. I came back and I made the very deliberate decision not to play the blame game. I didn’t want that bile, not when I was trying to stop myself coming unglued. If you are building a shattered life you have to focus.

“Dyin’ ain’t hard,” he says today in his southern drawl. “If dyin’ was hard there’d be some Bubba stuck out in west Texas who’d live forever because he couldn’t figure it out. Dying is easy. Living is hard.”

On the mountain he did the hard thing. He put one foot in front of the other and dragged himself back to the world. He was almost totally blind, but he deduced from the wind blowing into his face that he was going in roughly the right direction. An hour later he stumbled into camp.

Remarkable as Weathers’s resurrection was it made little impression on those already there. They were each fighting for their own survival.

They placed Weathers in Fischer’s empty tent and left him there to die too. “So having been left for dead it turns out I’m the first person ever to come out of hypothermic coma and after 15 hours of lying face down in the snow in a wind chill of minus 100 I stand up and I stumble an hour later into camp. I haven’t eaten in three days. I haven’t drunk anything in two days. I’m hallucinating. Parts of my body are frozen solid, my hand is like a block of marble in front of me, my nose is about to fall off, my eyesight is totally gone, my suit is full of freezing piss, my wife’s been told I’m dead . . . (pause) but, hey, I’m not discouraged.”

He might as well have been. He lay in the tent all night as the storm gathered its malevolence again. The next morning he was found out of his sleeping bag, tent flaps blowing in the breeze. He was frozen stiff. Sill alive though.

Weathers was helped still further down the mountain. David Breashears, who was leading the Imax Everest expedition, had abandoned filming plans and shared his crew’s resources with ailing climbers all over the mountain. A Taiwanese army colonel, Madan Khatri Chhetri, flew a helicopter higher than any such machine had flown, up and up into the thin air of Everest. Making two death-defying journeys, each using just seven minutes worth of fuel, Madan plucked two dying men off the ice.

Weathers was the second to go, having waved another climber on board before him.

Character is what you do when you think nobody is looking, he says. “There were a lot of people came through for me that day when nobody was really looking. For myself, I just didn’t want to have a life of second-guessing myself if I had gone first and left a man to die.”

That’s his story. The first half of it. He lost his nose and surgeons had to grow one back using skin from his neck and cartilage from his ear. They attached it first to his forehead, where it fed off the blood supply until it grew upside down. Then they twisted it around and made a nose of it. He lost his right arm just below the elbow and lost a lot of his left. What remains is a massively swollen club of a hand with half a thumb that is moveable. Just sufficient to give him independence.

Unknowable things are hardest to fix though. Depression beat him up worse than Everest did. Failing to find the right words to utter to Yasuko Namba’s family when they came to see him still aches his heart. Putting his marriage back together was tougher than his 11 operations.

Now, he awaits the return of that cowled old companion, depression. He has armed himself this time. Weathers grew up in a time which he describes as the John Wayne era. “If somebody ripped your heart out and threw it across the room, well, it’s only a flesh wound, so a mental illness like depression was positively shameful.” Next time, he says, he’ll be open, treat the depression as an organic illness.

You ask him where he’ll be in 10 years, when he is no longer Beck Weathers the man who came back from the dead and walked off the mountain. He smiles and shakes his head. Targets don’t matter. “Me and Peach will be growing old together as comfortable as a pair of old shoes. That’s all I know.”