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ON  May 22, 2019, pre-dawn, somewhere on the icy shoulder of the world’s highest mountain, he must have overtaken me without either of us knowing it. I stood on the summit of Everest at 7.30 am, one climber among many, overwhelmed and grateful simply to have arrived, after 43 days of negotiations with the Sagarmatha. Two hours earlier, on that very same day, a Nepali climber named Nirmal “Nims” Purja stood on that same summit, then turned around and, in 10 hours and 15 minutes, stood on the summit of neighbouring Lhotse as well — a transition so fast it rewrote what the climbing world believed was possible.