THE BUTTER PEOPLE embodied the Everest excess that we all find so deliciously loathsome, so during the next few days McBride and I kept sneaking over to the Texas camp hoping to gather more dirt. Whenever we showed up, however, they wound up doing something nice, like feeding us eggs Benedict or insisting we join them for yet another movie. In the end, their generosity and decency made it impossible to hate them—although the other commercial juggernauts of Luxuristan provoked plenty of rancor, especially among the smaller private groups who were having a harder time of things.

One of the most beleaguered parties was a two-man Czech team. It consisted of an experienced mountaineer with an intense gaze named Martin Minarik who, together with his friend Pavel Kalny, had launched an ascent of 27,940-foot Lhotse without any guides or climbing Sherpas. On May 9, after becoming disoriented and exhausted, Kalny took a fatal fall on the Lhotse Face. Having already forged ahead to prepare tea in Camp IV, Minarik failed to witness the accident. Kalny was found the next day by a group of Chilean climbers who remained with him until he died. His body was then placed in a sleeping bag, and Minarik retreated to Base Camp, where he discovered that his nightmare was just beginning.

Word of the incident had already reached Paul Adler, an Australian client with IMG who was running his own Everest blog. In violation of IMG's policy, Adler fired off an unconfirmed "report," preempting an official announcement by the Nepal Ministry of Tourism, stating that one of the Czechs was dead, without saying who. This threw both climbers' families into a frenzy.

At the same time, having suffered such severe frostbite while searching for his partner that he could no longer walk, Minarik started asking the big commercial expeditions if they would order their climbing Sherpas to retrieve his friend's body. But no one was keen to divert vital resources on the threshold of their own summit pushes. And, in any case, Minarik was either unwilling or unable to fork over the total of $2,000 that the Sherpas would have charged. When I paid a visit to his tent one evening, he lashed out in fury.

"Oh, these fucking commercial expeditions," he fumed, pounding the air with his fists while his blackened toes marinated in a pan of lukewarm water. "They are so busy getting caviar and champagne up to Camp II, they can't even bring themselves to help a fellow human being. It's disgusting!" Minarik's rage evoked both sympathy and exasperation throughout Base Camp's second-biggest neighborhood, Schmoozistan—a hodgepodge of less affluent non-commercial expeditions whose members were devoting most of their pre-summit time to paying social calls on one another. Setting foot anywhere inside this cheerful district, regardless of the hour, triggered a burst of hearty salutations— "Bongiorno!"

"Dobryi den!"

"Yo, dude … Whassup?" —along with a nonrefusable invitation to drop inside for a toast.

Although Schmoozistan's arrangements were more spartan than those of Luxuristan, each encampment took special pride in doing one thing better than the others. The Swiss had the most accurate weather reports. The Spaniards brewed the tastiest cappuccino. The Filipinos boasted the most impressive communications setup—a satellite dish brought in by yak and powered by a 360-pound generator airlifted to Base Camp in a Russian helicopter. And the Indians offered up the best spiritual counseling. (Their leader, Brigadier General Sharab Chandub Negi, delivered elaborate sermons on the benefits of pranayama yogic breathing and Buddhist meditation.)

Schmoozistan's eclectic cast also included the legendary Italian alpinist Simone Moro, 39, a balding and sinewy figure who was hoping to complete Everest's first solo south-to-north traverse from Nepal to Tibet; a grimly obsessed 40-year-old Indian lawyer named Kalpana Dash who was making her third Everest attempt; and Toshiko Ushida, a 75-year-old Japanese woman with a warm smile who was intent on becoming the oldest person ever to summit. Rounding out the mix were teams from Mongolia, Turkey, and South Africa, plus three expeditions from South Korea.

Once you made it through the hospitality gantlet to Schmoozistan's southwestern border, you crossed into Inebria. This cluster of mold-coated canvas tents was home to four ragged Sherpas who built and maintained the climbing route through the ever-shifting labyrinth of the Khumbu Icefall, the biggest graveyard on Everest. The Ice Doctors, as they're known, had one of the most dangerous jobs on the mountain. And when they weren't on duty, they loved to sit in front of their tents bathing in the sun and pounding whatever alcoholic libations they could get their hands on.

A stone's throw away from Inebria sat the tiny municipality of Bunnystan—a group of tents sheltering a team led by National Geographic Poland editor Martyna Wojciechowska, who appeared in Polish Playboy's June 2001 issue and was hoping to become the first Bunny to stand on top of the world. Martyna was Base Camp's favorite topic of gossip, and everyone delighted in trading apocryphal tales about her cosmetics, her narcissism, and the rude manner in which she supposedly treated her Sherpas.

"I've never actually hoped that somebody wouldn't get to the summit," remarked an American climber who, like most people peddling anecdotes about the so-called Energizer Bunny, had yet to even speak to her. "But I've heard so many horrible stories about the woman, I really hope she doesn't make it." Finally, there was the little patch of blackened mud and half-frozen yak dung that Kami Tenzing had reserved for McBride and me. We christened the place Bewilderabad.