Minus 30 degrees Celsius. Snow, whipped along by winds of 150 kilometres an hour, is blinding, cutting, brutal. You are 8,000 metres above sea level on the world's most dangerous mountain, without oxygen, struggling for breath, cold to the bone. And you have been like this for five days, with dwindling food, water and gas.
In 1986 these conditions killed world-famous mountaineers Julie Tullis and Alan Rouse, along with four others, during a tragic climb on K2, the second highest mountain on Earth, on the Chinese-Pakistani border in the Karakoram range.
The world's media assumed the blizzard had killed all eight in their mountaineering team. Yet Kurt Diemberger, nearly 20 years older than Rouse and seven older than Tullis, managed to crawl his way down along with a fellow Austrian, Willi Bauer.
'We were almost dying,' he now says. 'It was a miracle that one could just lift one's feet, one's hands . . .' On this bearded, stout but strong 65-year-old, those hands are now the only physical sign of his ordeal: frostbite meant three fingers had to be amputated at the first joint. But his memories have left an obvious mental mark.
He saw Tullis, 47, his mountaineering and filming partner for five years, die in her sleep after three days trapped in a freezing, overcrowded tent with 'all hell breaking loose' outside. 'You meet someone like her only once in your life,' he says.
He had to leave 35-year-old Rouse - covered by Tullis' sleeping bag and alive but too exhausted to move - in the tent to face death alone while he and two others made a last attempt to escape the mountain's clutches.