Sitting on top of the world isn't much fun when you're clinically dead. Ask Lincoln Hall. The experienced climber's lifeless body had no pulse when Sherpas who accompanied him to the summit of Mount Everest came to the depressing and arguably logical conclusion he had breathed his last.
Not even a sharp poke in the eye provoked a response, and the guides finally obeyed radio orders to abandon Hall and save themselves.
As darkness fell on the dizzying oxygen-deprived ledge more than 8km above sea level, the 50-year-old seemed destined to join the ever-increasing ranks of corpses that litter the world's tallest mountain.
But what happened next has confounded medical science, and provided Lincoln with the jaw-dropping tale that, on the night of May 25, 2006, he did indeed die on Everest.
'I imagine you're surprised to see me here,' he quipped to a group of climbers on their way up to the peak the following morning.
Dumbstruck barely describes their reaction. No one had survived a night alone so high up without oxygen. Hall had been crippled by altitude sickness, hypothermia, hypoxia and dehydration - all potential death sentences on their own. He was even partially stripped.
The climbers had been half expecting to stumble upon his frozen body. Before setting out on the final leg of their Everest conquest, people such as Hall's wife and children in Australia - that he had died.