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Reinhold Messner and his brother Günther reached the summit of Nanga Parbat in June 1970. They were the third mountaineering team ever to do so. Nanga Parbat, located in Northern Pakistan, is the ninth-highest mountain in the world, and the deadliest after Annapurna. On their ascent, the brothers climbed up the Rupal face, one of the highest mountain faces on earth. It rises 4,600 meters above its base, and its peak fades into cold, distant clouds. Reinhold Messner later wrote a novel about their fateful ascent, which he called The Naked Mountain. The title is a literal translation of Nanga Parbat, but it resonates on other levels, too—the climber is always defenseless, at the mercy of 8,000 meters. 

Nanga Parbat wasn’t merciful to the two brothers. Reinhold and Günther’s climb was tough and rushed. The Naked Mountain is taut, like traditional climbing narratives, but with one difference. Messner’s story ends with the loss of his brother.

Messner would go on to become one of the world’s most prolific climbers—arguably, the best climber of all time. In 1978, he was the first man to successfully reach Mount Everest’s summit without bottled oxygen. By 1986, he had scaled all of the world’s eight-thousanders. He is an advocate of climbing “by fair means,” that is, using minimal tools and equipment on extraordinarily dangerous climbs. This also means that Messner frequently faces death, yet has somehow emerged with only a few lost toes (six, frostbitten during his delirious descent of Nanga Parbat). 

Many years after climbing Nanga Parbat, Messner became friends with an Austrian named Christoph Ransmayr, and they began traveling and climbing together. Also an adventurer, Ransmayr harbors an inexplicable fascination for ice. He organizes expeditions to the Arctic Circle, as a leader for a company called Poseidon Arctic Voyages.  He is also one of Austria’s greatest living writers. Our path not only leads into foreign territory, but into the interior of the world itself, in a language that knows both the real and the possible, he writes. Storytelling is much like exploring. Ransmayr and Messner make a good team. They inhabit the realms of the real and the possible at once—Messner through climbing, Ransmayr through writing. They find foreign territory, then claim and change it through their journey.

Being from Austria means a couple of things—you are in a country so close to the Alps that mountains are inevitably on your mind. But Austria is also a nexus of European culture, a country marked by Enlightenment thinking and still pining for its lost empire. Ransmayr writes about the two side by side—what happens when exploration and conquest merge. Messner, who is from South Tyrol (technically a part of Italy), is a cultural Austrian. He climbs and conquers intuitively.

The two men recognize that mountaineering is a blatantly symbolic act. The ascent to the summit is a sign of triumph over the impassive world through reason and will. Alexander von Humboldt, the Enlightenment explorer who founded the field of biogeography, thought that “other laws of a more mysterious nature rule the higher spheres of the organic world. A physical delineation of nature terminates at the point where the sphere of intellect begins, and a new world of mind is opened to our view.” Mountain climbers struggle against nature, not for the sake of a world of mind, but to create a world of will. Yet this is not always a process of rational conquest. As the mountaineer climbs higher, moving away from the topography of the mountain and into his inner landscape, something surreal and indefinable happens to human and world. The climber passes into an intermediate space—neither wholly real nor imagined—in which man and nature are no longer at each other’s mercy. Each suspends the other in order to examine it, and in doing so, the boundaries of mind and world extend beyond the real, into the poetic. 

This poetic process is something Ransmayr intuitively grasps—he doesn’t put much stock in understanding the world through Enlightenment rationality. When Alexander von Humboldt traveled through South America, he did not expect to fully explain the world he was discovering, but allowed himself to be overwhelmed by forests, meteor showers, electric eels. Nature has to be given the opportunity to unfold to the explorer on its own terms. 

Messner believes in giving nature its due. In 1971, he wrote a manifesto on bare climbing entitled “The Murder of the Impossible.” In it, he rails against people who rely completely on their equipment to climb by drilling holes and rigging hooks into the mountainside. He flippantly writes, “‘Impossible’: it doesn’t exist anymore. The dragon is dead, poisoned, and the hero Siegfried is unemployed.” Others have killed the mythology of the mountain through technology—it is Messner’s job to return the impossible to the mountain.