In 1953 Hermann Buhl achieved the impossible: a solo first ascent of Nanga Parbat, the ninth-highest peak on Earth, without bottled oxygen and without repeating the feat in the seventy years since. The episode recounts Buhl’s seventeen-hour summit push, the night he spent standing on a tiny ledge at 8,000 meters, and the decades of German-Austrian obsession that turned the mountain into a national symbol of fate and loss.