TWO HOURS AFTER lunch on the brilliantly clear afternoon of May 17, cheers erupted on the edge of Schmoozistan. A British commercial team had just become the first of the season to tag the top from the south side. The Brits were followed by a group of South Koreans, a group of Filipinos, and a Swiss climber named Benedikt Arnold. This signaled the start of the spring summit frenzy. Up on the South Col, more than 100 climbers were primed to launch their final assaults, starting around midnight.

First thing the next morning, McBride and I strolled over to Bunnystan to see how Martyna Wojciechowska's summit bid, which was supposed to happen any moment now, was coming along.

Bunnystan's communications tent was run by Wojciech Trzcionka, a funny and mildly deranged reporter for a Polish newspaper who'd had such a great time at Base Camp that he was already scheming to return the following year to open up a hyperbaric oxygen bar. (After repeated failures at pronouncing his name, McBride and I simply called him Vortex.)

We arrived just as Vortex and Patrycja Jonetzko, a Polish physician with short blond hair and blue eyes, were belting out their national anthem to celebrate a minor miracle: Not only had the team summited, but they'd done so on the birthday of the late Polish pope, John Paul II.

"This is so exciting," yelled Vortex, "that I've decided to smoke my last cigarette!"

Vortex's radio was transmitting a blizzard of excited Polish chatter. Patrycja said the entire team was now on the summit, and that Vortex was speaking with Martyna's teammate Tomasz Kobielski.

"So what are they saying?" I asked.

"Believe me, it's not worth translating," replied Patrycja. "Just a lot of bullshit." "Oh, c'mon, what are they saying?"

"Well, Tomasz is saying it feels very strange because they can't go any higher, and Wojciech is telling him that they need to initiate their descent because there are some girls down here waiting for him in the bathtub."

"Bathtub?"

"And now Tomasz is saying that they're going to get the fuck off the fucking summit and come the fuck down."

While talking to Tomasz, Vortex had been surfing the Internet, where he'd just discovered a report that Tomas Olsson, a Swedish climber on the north side, had fallen more than 5,000 feet to his death after a rappel anchor broke loose.

"This is really quite surreal," observed Patrycja. "On the one hand, you have all these people celebrating. On the other hand, all these other people are dying."

Vortex, meanwhile, had switched over to a Polish news site and uncovered another disturbing piece of information. Apparently, the Polish Everest team would be returning home on the very day that JP2's successor, Pope Benedict XVI, was scheduled to arrive on his first visit to Poland—an event almost certain to upstage the press conference Vortex had set up to trumpet the world's first Playboy Bunny summit.

"This is terrible!" Vortex exclaimed, slapping his forehead.

"You have to understand," Patrycja told me, "that in Poland everything—even Everest—somehow always relates back to the pope."

"Pasang!" cried Vortex, addressing his Sherpa sardar through the walls of the tent. "Do you have a cigarette? I need another cigarette immediately!"