The Chord Untouched On 11 May 1996, Rob Hall, an ace mountaineer, trapped in a severe snow storm atop Everest, with no other soul alive for hundreds of miles around, spoke with his wife from just below the South Summit as a connection was established via satellite phone. ‘sleep well sweet heart. Please don’t worry too much,’ he muttered. He was probably suffering from brain dysfunction due to prolonged stay in the extremely low-oxygen atmosphere at an altitude of more than twenty-five thousand feet. He died shortly thereafter. I read about this first in Jon Krakauer’s gripping story of the 1996 Everest disaster, Into Thin Air. Image of Rob Hall and the deep agony of his wife as she heard Hall’s voice proclaiming the imminent disaster thousands of miles away, stuck in a remote, unimaginably desolate and abjectly inhospitable wilderness, haunted my thoughts for days. His anguish, his loneliness, and the knowledge that he would soon perish all alone, was a misery, I could not even