BEFORE the credits roll down at the end of a moving true-life adventure movie, a director will often decide to wind the film up with a black screen on which is written a moving postscript: a bleak synopsis of what exactly happened to the real people portrayed in the film.

This, I suppose, is the journalistic equivalent of that technique; a precis of what happened, in the short term at least, to all the people I have met, liked, admired, derided, annoyed and changed my mind about over the last two months up at 6,400 metres (21,000ft).

On the day of Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s summit attempt last Friday, Martin, the only other Czech on the mountain besides the freeloading Pavel, stumbled into our mess tent, wild-looking and quite mad after spending four nights without oxygen at 8,300m. Partly because we were alone, but predominantly because Martin was severely hypoxic, he fell into my arms on sight and wept hot tears into the grubby folds of my acrylic hat.

A day earlier, Phurba, at 20 our youngest Sherpa, had cried bitterly for an hour and a half on being instructed to guide a rapidly deteriorating American client down the mountain. Phurba wept for himself because he had wanted so desperately to reach the summit. As a Sherpa, his entire future is wrapped up in this yearly event.

But Martin was crying not for himself, but out of sheer horror. Stuck at 8,300m, he had been struck by grotesque and unassailable thoughts. At that elevation, he would not have been able to see even one of the dozens of corpses that litter the North Face of Everest, but just the thought of their rigid forms — the recently deceased Slovenian’s expression of fright, his clawed hands, his lips now pecked away by crows — caused Martin to fall prey to fear and revulsion.

He sat by our collapsable mess table, his head in his hands: “No society, no matter how primitive, leaves its dead like this,” he said. “Even the Tibetan tradition of sky burial has its rituals. In Europe there are scientists trying to trace the DNA of fallen soldiers so that they can be properly honoured in death. Here they lie in the open for everyone to see, and nobody cares and nobody says anything. We have the money to retrieve them but we don’t. Some people take pictures.”

Perhaps Martin will change his mind about the mountain once he gets home — he was terribly thin when I last saw him and clearly not well. But even Tore, our restless Norwegian, fell to his knees and wept when he came across one of these brittle bodies high up in the snow.

Andrey Selinov, my Russian doctor friend who has served in Chechyna, often said to me: “Everest, it’s like in the war.”

And yet Selinov is wrong here. Everest is not a battle field. The three men who have died here in as many weeks are all victims of their own physical vanity — men who assumed that they could manage it alone, or were stronger than the average, or spent more than an hour shooting film at the top without any consequences.

And this often makes me think of a Times legend, Gill Hemburrow, an eagle-eyed secretary who, with one well-calculated glance, can bore into the soul of even the most senior executive and of whom even her bosses are frightened. Gill was the only person who failed to envy me before I set off and said to me then: “Everest? I can’t think of anything worse.”

And there can’t have been a day when I haven’t thought, “Gill was right”. I have racked my brain to think of something worse than being stuck at altitude with a head-splitting migraine, feeling more cold, nauseous and bored than I have ever done in my life. Fiennes said that he used to chant the word “gulag” on bad days during his long traipse through the Antarctic but, on Everest, he began thinking instead of the hundreds of victims of the Nazi Holocaust that he writes about in his book The Secret Hunters. Fiennes and I agreed that to want to climb Everest, you must, to some degree, be a nutcase.

Gill has no time for those who bring misfortune on themselves, and I wonder how she would feel when confronted with the “war-wounded” up here. The men, and occasionally women, whose eyes are bandaged up because of retinal haemorrhages or whose ribs are split in half by an unshakeable bronchial cough. One could doubtless argue that these ailments are self-inflicted.

Had a Sherpa not rescued Sibusiso Vilane as he was sitting, hypoxic, in the snow for three hours, the South African might have frozen there like the German climber who, three days ago, died 50m from his tent. Would he have died a hero? The South African press would have thought so — but would Gill?