Against all the evidence, Mr. Maestri, now 85, has held his ground, defiantly so, lashing out at his “detractors” and refusing to address the myriad issues surrounding his claim. He remains a hero in northern Italy, though lost in the crossfire has been another question: What happened to his climbing partner?

Sometimes a photograph can speak for the dead.

In Mr. Maestri’s 1961 book “Arrampicare è il Mio Mestiere” (“Climbing Is My Job”), a photograph bears a caption identifying Toni Egger climbing the lower flanks of Cerro Torre. The problem is, the photo wasn’t taken on Cerro Torre. Recently, in his tiny cabin in the village of El Chaltén, Argentina, where Cerro Torre and the other peaks of the Chaltén Massif soar above the horizon, Rolando Garibotti cracked the case.

Mr. Garibotti, 43, is himself one of Patagonia’s greatest climbers. After a dozen hours studying maps and photos and scouring his memory banks, he pinpointed the location shown in the photo. Then, late last month, he climbed, alone, to the exact location — a needle in a haystack among the massive spires — and replicated Mr. Maestri’s photo.

It’s a perfect match, and it reveals a place never before mentioned in an otherwise thoroughly documented expedition. It’s dangerous to reach and distant from Cerro Torre. No one knew they had ventured there during their only time together in Patagonia.

Did they realize they were outgunned and went to investigate other climbing options? Could the photo — the last known image of Mr. Egger — hint at the actual location of his death? Each new turn takes us further from Mr. Maestri’s impossible story.

Memories are subject to distortion, of course, as scientists have pointed out in the wake of the Brian Williams story. But there is a vast difference between coming to believe what began as a lie, and the honest malleability of memory. An Italian journalist recently contacted Mr. Maestri, who denied and deflected, then recalled visiting the vicinity of the image.

If he remembers events differently than the evidence suggests, he should be generous enough to deliver his photos from those seven days — photos that now seem to exist — and help un-puzzle what really happened to his dead partner. Mr. Egger’s remains have emerged in bits and parts over the years from a glacier below both Cerro Torre and the dangerous approach to the location of the recently revealed photo. Was he swept away by an avalanche? Did he fall into a crevasse? Only Mr. Maestri knows.