Hail to the Mountain King!

By Jamie Murphy

As if by fiendish design, the highest points on earth loom tantalizingly at the limits of mankind's physiological reach. Mountaineers and M.D.s agree that above 8,000 m (26,246 ft.), a physical curtain begins to fall. Higher than this, the air is so thin that ordinary people can live for only several hours -- if at all. Trapped in the so-called death zone, says one climber who is familiar with these altitudes, "you can't shout for help anymore. You lose your sense of logic. And you die in euphoria, overestimating your own strength."

Only 14 summits, all of them in the crescent of mountains that runs from northern Pakistan southeast along the Himalayan chain to Sikkim, exceed this mysterious boundary between life and death. To climbers they are known as the eight-thousanders. And many of them, including Mount Everest, were conquered by mountaineers who fudged a little: they used bottled air. No one had ever conquered all 14 -- much less without oxygen -- until last week, when Reinhold Messner, 42, a brash, blond-bearded native of Italy's South Tirol, stood triumphantly atop Lhotse, the world's fourth highest mountain. Having conquered 13 other eight-thousanders in the past 16 years, all without oxygen, Messner had completed mountaineering's grand slam.

The sport's acknowledged master began knocking off the highest mountains in 1970, when he scaled Nanga Parbat (26,657 ft.) in the glacier-shrouded western bastion of the chain. Then he climbed Manaslu (26,781 ft.) in central Nepal and Pakistan's Gasherbrum I (26,470 ft.) with Peter Habeler, a longtime climbing partner. In 1978 Messner and Habeler, now 44, climbed oxygenless to the summit of Mount Everest (29,028 ft.), and the mountaineering world gasped. In 1979 Messner went back to the Pakistan-China border and conquered K2 (28,251 ft.), the world's second highest mountain, and, to top that, lumbered up Everest again in 1980, this time all by himself.

After climbing three more, Kangchenjunga (28,169 ft.), Gasherbrum II (26,361 ft.) and Broad Peak (26,401 ft.), it seemed that he had exhausted the possibilities. Or had he? "It was in 1982," he says, "after my hat trick, after the first time I was able to climb three mountains in one season, that I understood it was easy, or at least it was possible, for one human being to climb all the highest mountains in the world, all 14 eight- thousanders, in a lifetime."

It has not been easy. Last month Messner made three separate attempts to conquer Makalu (27,765 ft.). On his last try, he told TIME in a radio interview from base camp, "you could do 20 to 25 steps, and you had to stop for a while and breath deeply ten to 20 times." Last week's triumph on Lhotse * took only one attempt. Delayed an hour by adverse weather conditions, Messner and Partner Hans Kammerlander gained the summit with a moderating wind at their backs.

In Europe, especially in West Germany, Messner is a media darling, with an ebullient personality to match his outsize ambitions. He is the author (without any ghost) of numerous magazine stories chronicling his exploits, and he usually carries the photo credit as well. In addition, he has written 24 books, which have sold roughly 500,000 copies worldwide.

Messner has been called tactless and egocentric by his critics. After his solo ascent of Everest, for example, he told admiring fellow South Tyroleans, "I do this for myself because I am my own fatherland, and my handkerchief is my flag." On talk-show stints, he tends to shout down other guests. Indeed, a mountaineer who has known him for years thinks fame has been hard on a man who finds peace in solitude: "Everyone wants to get in touch with him. Everybody wants to shake his hand." He is divorced from West German Journalist Uschi Demeter, and lately, says one Messner watcher, "it seems there is a different woman in every base camp."

One secret of his mountaineering successes is that he travels light, as he might to climb an Alpine peak. The legendary pinnacles are, to him, small ascents stacked one on top of another. He scales the earth's greatest heights by what he calls "fair means," avoiding the rope networks, high-mountain camps and bottled air that were part of the historic eight-thousander sieges, which frequently involved ten or more climbers supported by dozens of Sherpas. The minimalist technique has attracted thousands of imitators. Says Swiss Mountain Guide Erhard Loretan, 27, who, with his countryman Jean Troillet, 38, raced to the top of Everest last August and back down again to base camp in an astonishing 43 hours: "The reason we can now climb so quickly and easily is that Messner served as an example for us."

Indeed, his breakthroughs have led many to believe he has a mysterious physical edge over other mountaineers. Not so, says Oswald Oelz, a Swiss physician and one of Messner's former climbing partners, who conducted a series of tests on high-altitude climbers in a hypobaric chamber. Messner emerged with results similar to those of an above-average marathon runner. He and other mountaineers who had successfully penetrated the 8,000-m barrier proved to have what Oelz calls a "rather active respiratory center," meaning that as the air gets thinner, their rate of breathing involuntarily increases. "He's obviously got a superb high-altitude physique," says Chris Bonington, who in 1975 led a successful British expedition to Mount Everest, "but what has given him the edge over everyone is creative innovation. There is a wall called 'impossible' that the great mass of people in any field face. Then one person who's got a kind of extra imaginative drive jumps that wall. That's Reinhold Messner."

With reporting by Ross H. Munro/Katmandu