To most of the world it is known as Mount Everest, named for a 19th century official in British India. But the Tibetans who live beneath its mighty shadow call the mountain Chomolungma, or Mother Goddess of the World. They worship it as a giver of life through the rivers that flow from its glaciated flanks. And they fear it as a taker of life, the killer of scores of mountaineers, both Sherpas and foreigners, who presume to ascend the Mother Goddess and stand at the top of the world.

On the night of May 10 the great mountain once again showed its hunger for human life. A sudden storm swept the peak's fearsome "Death Zone" with snow, subzero cold and hurricane-force winds while more than 30 climbers were descending from the summit. Within 24 hours eight had died and three others had suffered severe frostbite. The dead included two of the world's most highly respected mountaineers: Scott Fischer, 40, of Seattle, and New Zealander Rob Hall, 35, owners of firms that offer to guide amateur Alpinists up Everest for fees of some $65,000. Two of Hall's paying clients also died, along with a professional assistant in his group. The other dead were three members of an Indian expedition climbing the difficult north face from Tibet. A ninth climber from Taiwan died in a fall the day before the storm hit. Over 75 years of expeditions, Everest has claimed 142 lives, but never as many in a single 24-hour period.

The mountain had many lives to choose from that day. In all, more than 150 climbers in 13 expeditions had gathered at base camps at the foot of Everest before the storm hit, drawn by the brief two-week window of relatively good weather in early May that is the favorite time to make the ascent. By May 9 many were well up the mountain, and three teams had reached Camp 4 at the 7,986-m level to prepare the final assault--a grueling 12-hour climb up the final 862 m, starting at 11:30 p.m. Two other expeditions--a team of seven Indian border police, and two climbers and three Sherpas of a Japanese expedition--were preparing to ascend from the north side.

By Everest standards it was a lovely day for a climb, the weather clear, the wind light. And by any standard the climbers were splendidly equipped for the attempt. As they approached the summit by noon on May 10, most were in peak physical condition after weeks spent living and working above 5,340 m to acclimatize themselves to the rarefied air. They carried oxygen in state-of-the-art titanium bottles, packed PowerBars and Gatorade for nourishment, and wore six layers of space-age thermal clothing designed to protect them from temperatures even lower than 30 [degrees] C. Hand-held radios beamed progress updates to receivers at the base camp, which was equipped with satellite telephones and computers. The adventurers could call home and send E-mail from the summit. They could also describe the scene for the World Wide Web. "We were very optimistic," said Seaborn Beck Weathers, 50, a Dallas pathologist climbing as a client of Rob Hall, whose New Zealand-based Adventure Consultants has been guiding amateurs to the top of Everest since 1993. "We thought we had one of the strongest teams on the mountain. Rob Hall felt we all had a very good chance of reaching the summit, which would be 15 people, including guides and Sherpas. We had prepared correctly and were climbing at the right time. We knew what we were doing. What occurred later was really a total surprise."

All the more surprising because of the benign and beautiful state of the mountain as the three teams set out just before midnight on May 9. "There was little wind," recalled Makalu Gau, 39, a Taiwanese climber going up with only two Sherpa guides to accompany him. "There were many, many stars. Everyone concentrated on his work." The climbers' headlamps formed a long string of lights snaking up the mountain, casting soft circles of light on the gleaming snow. But the beauty of the scene belied the fact that there were simply too many people in the line.

"There were bottlenecks," said Jonathan Krakauer, a journalist in Hall's team who was covering the ascent for Outside magazine. The lead climbers attached fixed ropes to the steep ridge, while the others followed, one by one. "That slowed us down," said Krakauer. "We probably lost an hour there." Other bottlenecks developed higher up, and by midmorning the first problem appeared when Weathers' vision began to deteriorate. "I decided it was not a good idea to continue climbing," Weathers says. But his vision was also too poor to descend, so Hall told him to wait for their return from the summit. "He told me, 'It would really ruin my day if I come back and find you gone,'" said Weathers. "Unfortunately," he added, "Rob never returned."

Despite Weathers' difficulties, the assault seemed to be going well for those who continued. They moved up steadily, and by 1:30 p.m. the first climbers reached the summit. Within two hours more than 18 had stood in weary triumph on the small patch of ice and snow that at 8,848 m is the highest point on the earth. Fischer and his climbers--five clients, two Western professional guides and four Sherpas--reached it by 2 p.m. Hall made it with two assistant guides and three clients, although three others had turned back earlier, and Weathers was still waiting below. The Taiwanese climber, Gau, reached the top an hour later, and was followed by the three Indian border police coming up the north face. News of the successes reached the World Wide Web within minutes, and organizers began contacting families. Weathers had spoken with his wife Margaret in Dallas on a satellite telephone connection just before setting off, and a later call from New Zealand informed her that he was on his way down. "I felt very confident about everything and began looking forward to him returning home," she said. In Tokyo, Kenichi Namba received a fax from base camp reporting that his wife Yasuko, 47, an officeworker, had reached the top. An experienced mountaineer, Yasuko had already scaled six of the highest peaks of the world's seven continents and saved money to pay the $60,000 fee to conquer the greatest of them all. For the rest of the morning, he beamed at the press cameras as he received congratulations and answered questions at the couple's modest gray home.

But even as the climbers and their families rejoiced, troubles were growing. Clouds began boiling up from the valleys below, and the winds were rising to a scream. The climbers were also running late. Usually people try to reach the peak by 1 p.m., giving them time to return to camp before nightfall. But because of the bottlenecks, most did not arrive that early. Gau, well behind the two large groups, encountered light snow and rising wind, and his Sherpas warned him of deteriorating weather. "But I saw Rob Hall's group go up, so I said, 'If they are going, why not us?'" They trudged on, reaching the summit by 3 p.m. "We rested 10 minutes, then started down, quickly, quickly," said Gau.

But it was already too late. The wind increased to a roaring blast that made it difficult to remain standing. "The storm was like a hurricane, maybe stronger, only it had a triple-digit wind chill," said Krakauer, who was just above the shelter of Camp 4 when its full force hit. "It was chaos up there. You don't have your oxygen, you're out of breath, you can't think. You are incredibly cold." And blind. A driving snow produced whiteout conditions, obliterating landmarks and obscuring the horizon. At one point New Zealander Andrew Harris, 31, one of Hall's assistant guides, appeared out of the gloom walking steadily. Krakauer waved, but Harris kept going. He vanished, and Krakauer believes he simply walked off the edge of the 8,500-m Lhotse Face. His body has not been found.

All were in what climbers call the Death Zone, above 7,500 m where the air lacks oxygen enough to support life for long periods. "A human being does not belong on the summit of Mount Everest," says David Swanson, an experienced mountaineer and former president of the Explorers Club. "Even on oxygen it's extremely difficult to breathe. The body is cannibalizing itself." That soon began happening to the weakest and most exposed of the climbers as they groped blindly through the whiteout, breathing the last of their bottled oxygen. Weathers, still waiting for Hall's return, saw an assistant guide named Michael Groom appear out of the storm with an exhausted Yasuko Namba, and joined them as they descended toward Camp 4. "Unfortunately," says Weathers, "the whiteout conditions were so bad we couldn't orient ourselves to locate the high camp." He and Namba became separated from Groom, he says, and at some point he simply sank into the drifting snow and fell into an exhausted sleep. Gau, just above Camp 4, struggled to stay awake. "I told myself, 'Please don't sleep,'" he says. "If I sleep, I die." He tried to radio for help, but "I found I couldn't open my walkie-talkie. When I touched my fingers together they were like glass."

Up above, at 8,750 m, Hall and one of his clients, postalworker Doug Hansen, 46, of Kent, Washington, were in even greater danger, caught in the open without oxygen or a tent. Hansen was already suffering from frostbite so severe that he could not walk. Hall, tired but in relatively good condition, radioed that he was staying with his client. But Hansen died during the night, and by morning Hall himself was so weakened that he could move no farther. Friends below urged him by radio to gather his strength and continue moving, but he said his worsening frostbite and exhaustion were too much. Two Sherpas made an attempt to go up to him, but the weather drove them back. "We had to tell him that the Sherpas turned around," said Ed Viesturs, a photographer at base camp. "It was quite sad."

Throughout the night the climbers in Camp 4 banged ice picks and shone flashlights in hopes of guiding the others to safety. Krakauer found the camp and crawled, exhausted, into his tent, but by 1 a.m. 16 of the 31 climbers in the three groups were missing, and the others started a search in the howling wind. Stuart Hutchinson, a Canadian climber who had turned back the previous day and reached camp before the storm broke, found Weathers and Yasuko Namba on the South Col at 8 a.m. on Saturday, a 1 1/2-hour walk from the camp. Yasuko's clothes were torn and her mittens were off. She was dead. Weathers lay a meter from a cliff, buried in drifting snow. "I thought Weathers was dead," said Hutchinson. "I unburied him and broke the ice off his face."

Word of the missing and dead was relayed to base camp, and almost instantly the devastating news went around the world. A fax in English to Kenichi Namba told him his wife had been lost in a storm and "her body has been found." The stunned husband read the message to the press corps assembled on his doorstep. His voice choking with emotion, he murmured, "'Her body.' That usually means a dead body, doesn't it?" Margaret Weathers received a telephone call in Dallas. Says she: "A woman in New Zealand said she had terrible news for me. She said that there had been a storm on the mountain and that Beck was dead. She told me they had positive body identification." She broke the news to their two children, Beck II, 17, and Meg, 14, and notified Weathers' brother and parents. "At that point I felt that it was over," she said. "I started thinking about whether they would be able to retrieve the body."

For Dr. Jan Arnold in New Zealand, the call came from husband Rob Hall himself as he lay dying, the storm raging around him. "He told me on the radiophone not to worry about him too much," she said. "He managed to impart some peacefulness to me." They spoke that final time Saturday, and he told her a rescue team would try to reach him. After that he turned off his radio. It was his last call, and he died shortly afterward. Fischer was found dead above the emergency camp, and friends speculated that he had stayed back to act as "sweep" to help those falling behind due to weakness--a critical duty for a good mountain guide.

On the north face, the three Indian border police climbers had started at 8 a.m., and by 3:40 p.m. radioed to the expedition leader at a lower camp that they were still short of the summit. The leader urged them to turn back, but they refused. "At this stage you can't really stop anybody," said Captain M.S. Kohli, a mountaineer who helped organize the expedition. "These were tough men, and they wanted the challenge." But it proved a fatal mistake. All three died during the descent.

There were miracles amid the death and chaos. Weathers suddenly awoke, amazed to be still alive, and walked to Camp 4, arriving at 5 p.m. on Saturday. "Almost no one survives a night on Mount Everest, and I didn't expect to," he said. "I felt very lucky when I woke up and realized that if I didn't try to push forward, I was going to be dead. So I got up and walked back into camp. It was a miracle to be alive." Gau too survived, but both were suffering from severe frostbite and would be unable to make the difficult descent through a treacherous icefall below 6,400 m. Commercial helicopter companies refused to fly that high--it had never been done in the Everest region. But a plucky Nepalese air force pilot, Lieut. Colonel Madan K.C., made the attempt and succeeded in getting both men to Katmandu for medical treatment.

In Dallas, yet another telephone call informed Weathers' grieving family of his survival. But the report described his condition as critical, and the family spent another tense day by the telephone waiting for further news. It was not until she spoke with her husband directly that Margaret Weathers really felt confident of his return. "He sounded great," she said. "He told me that his hands are bandaged, but that he's feeling fine." By the weekend, Weathers was back in Dallas and beginning treatment for his severely damaged hands. "I think I'll hang up my boots on this one," he said. "I was not ready to give up life or my family."

After the relief--and the grief--came recrimination. The Indian team charged that a Japanese team ascending the north face on May 11 encountered the missing Indian climbers--two of them were alive--and pressed on to the summit instead of rescuing them. The Japanese team leader denied the accusation, insisting that they found the Indians during their descent, not while climbing toward the summit, but were unable to do more than leave water and send for help.

Others asked if the practice of shepherding fee-paying amateurs up a mountain as forbidding as Everest contributed to the disaster on the Nepal side. "There is something lost when 30 people can summit in a single day, and 20 of them are paying clients," says Mark Bryant, editor of Outside magazine. "As the mountain becomes more and more commercialized, anyone with some semblance of a climbing resume and who has a pair of good legs can get onto a team." His correspondent, Krakauer, reported to the magazine's World Wide Web site in April about the carnival atmosphere of the base camp: "There are hundreds and hundreds of climbers here with varying degrees of experience, some of the best climbers in the world, some people who don't even know how to put crampons on."

The first Everest conqueror, Sir Edmund Hillary, now laments the crowds that are despoiling the mountain he scaled in 1953 with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay. "If it's a reasonably fine day, it just gets flooded with people going up and down," he says. "They are obviously not pioneering anything." And too many of those in commercially guided expeditions may not even be up to that, Hillary says. "Some of them are inexperienced as far as mountaineering is concerned. If conditions do turn bad and they are not quite up to it physically, then not only do they have a problem in getting down, but the leader and the guides also have the responsibility of trying to get them down." That, he says, may have led to Hall's death. "Rob, in the best spirit of his craft, tried to get the American chap [Hansen] down. By then it was too late for Rob to save himself."

Other mountaineers defended the commercial expeditions. "It's not a matter of dragging people in off the street and taking them up to 8,000 meters," says Australian mountaineer Greg Mortimer. "Most of these clients are really good mountaineers in their own right." Hillary's son Peter, who climbed Everest in 1990 with Hall, says most of the amateurs are good climbers who lack the time to organize an expedition and obtain the necessary permission. "If you're a busy professional or businessperson, you may not want to do all that. You'd rather just pay your $65,000, stay fit, and turn up on the day." Sir Edmund Hillary complains that the Nepalese government is partly to blame by issuing too many expedition permits. "Several years ago they reduced the number who could be on the mountain at any one time," he says. "But last year they decided they wouldn't bother about that. They just wanted the money."

The blame, however, if there is blame to be apportioned, may belong more to the vagaries of fate, the icy blast of the jet stream and the power of a great mountain to humble those who dare to climb it. "People forget the ferocious nature of the mountain," says Jeff Blumenfeld, editor and publisher of Expedition News. "You can be hooked up to a Website, you can call anyone on a satellite phone, you can have the latest high-tech gear, and the mountain can still win. Technology has made Everest more accessible, but it can still kill you."

For the survivors still on the mountain last week, the only remaining duty was to the dead. None were brought down--the task is immensely difficult, and Sherpa custom prohibits removing the mountain's victims. Friends tried to move the bodies away from main paths used by climbers, or to drop them down a cliff or into a crevasse. For mountaineers, that is burial enough. When a close friend of Hall's died in a 1993 accident on Mount Dhaulagiri, Hall lowered him into a crevasse and let the rope slip through his hands. "To be left high with an incredible view of the Himalayas, what more could a mountaineer want?" he said then. Today, at rest 8,750 m up the mightiest mountain on earth, Hall has for all eternity the view he lived for--and died for. --Reported by John Colmey/Katmandu, Jenifer Mattos/New York, Satsuki Oba/Tokyo and Simon Robinson/Auckland