True Summit (13 page)

T
HE CENTRAL MYSTERY
of the 1950 Annapurna expedition is what happened on June 3.

For the time being, let us pass the question by, and follow not Lachenal and Herzog as they press through the cold, thin air toward the summit, but Rébuffat and Terray as they climb out of Camp IV, planning a second summit foray the next day. Upon arriving at the serac-sheltered camp the night before, the two Chamonix guides had encountered Schatz and Couzy, who had at last
completed their assigned task of hauling loads in support of the summit duo.

Throughout the expedition, it had been Terray who was the stickler for early starts. In that respect, he was ahead of his time, often rousing his teammates at 3:00 or 4:00
A.M.
, thereby boldly applying the Alpine gambit of the predawn start to the Himalaya, a range where his predecessors had by and large been too discouraged by cold and altitude to brave a launch in the dark.

Happily assuming the lead on June 3, Terray plowed through chest-deep snow as he angled toward a notch in the Sickle. Higher up the soft snow gave way to ice, in which Terray chopped steps for the teammates who followed him. The plan was for all four Frenchmen and two Sherpas, Pansy and Aila, to carry to Camp V, then reassess the situation in light of what they might find out there about Lachenal and Herzog.

Topping out above the Sickle, the climbers soon came to the solitary tent at Camp IVA, where they found Ang-Tharkey and Sarki, who recounted in detail the establishing of Camp V the day before. “They had frostbitten feet and seemed in poor shape,” noted Terray. “Our own two Sherpas were also complaining about their feet and lost no time scrambling into the tent to get warm.”

On the bare slope above the Sickle, the four Frenchmen took turns breaking trail, the footsteps from the day before having drifted in during the storm in the night. Pansy and Aila followed gamely in the track. All six men felt their feet go numb, and their progress was slowed by the necessity of stopping to take off boots and rub their toes back into feeling inside the protection of a
pied d'éléphant
—a half sleeping bag normally used for bivouacs. Though the men had come to Nepal with the finest footgear money could buy, the best leather boots in the world in 1950 were inadequate for the cold and lack of oxygen above 8,000 meters. (It would not be until the invention of plastic double boots in the 1980s that footgear equal to the task of preventing frostbite at such altitudes would become available.) Bottled oxygen had been used on Everest as early as 1922, but the French team had chosen to do without it. This purist decision in turn contributed to the problem of cold feet, for a climber breathing supplemental oxygen
above 24,000 feet normally has far better circulation than one without.

With Terray doing the lion's share of the trail-breaking, the six men reached Camp V around midday. There they found a single tent half buried in snow. There was no note from Herzog or Lachenal. Laboring mightily, the men hacked out a second platform and erected their tent. Terray chopped away with his axe in an efficient fury: “At times I would force so much that a black veil began to form in front of my eyes and I fell to my knees, panting like an overdriven beast.”

The day had deteriorated into a gathering storm. Even before the second tent was pitched, Terray sent Pansy and Aila down to Camp IV, counting on their being able to follow the trail before wind and snow could fill the steps again. At last Rébuffat and Terray crawled into one tent, Couzy and Schatz into the other.

It seemed obvious that Lachenal and Herzog must be making their summit bid, despite the storm. “Time went by without our seeing anything,” recalled Terray. “Outside the furies of the storm were in full cry, and we began to get seriously worried.” As the afternoon waned, it became apparent that it would soon be too late for anyone to go down to Camp IV. With the return of Lachenal and Herzog, there would be six men crammed into two two-man tents—an intolerable prospect in a storm. Couzy and Schatz, both altitude-sick, offered to head down to IVA. As soon as they had parted, Terray moved to the empty tent and started melting snow to brew up malt drinks for his teammates. “As time went by we became more and more anxious,” he later wrote. “I kept on sticking my head out of the tent to see if I could see anything, but there was nothing but the pitiless blizzard.”

At last, toward the end of the afternoon, Terray heard the crunching of footsteps in the snow. He thrust himself outside the tent and saw Herzog, alone, his beard and clothing coated with rime. “We've made it,” the expedition leader said. “We're back from Annapurna.”

What happened next appears in both
Annapurna
and
Conquistadors of the Useless,
in passages that strikingly agree. Wrote Herzog,

Terray, who was speechless with delight, wrung my hands. Then the smile vanished from his face: “Maurice—your hands!” There was an uneasy silence. I had forgotten that I had lost my gloves: my fingers were violet and white and hard as wood. The other two stared at them in dismay—they realized the full seriousness of the injury.

In Terray's telling:

I seized him by the hand, only to find to my horror that I was shaking an icicle. What had been a hand was like metal. I cried out: “Momo, your hand is frostbitten!” He looked at it indifferently, and replied: “That's nothing, it'll come back.”

“What about Biscante?” Terray anxiously asked, using Lachenal's nickname.

“He won't be long,” Herzog answered. “He was just in front of me!”

Rébuffat got Herzog into his tent, while Terray started heating water on the stove. Lachenal's failure to appear deeply troubled Terray. Once more, he thrust his head outside the tent to look for any sign of his friend in the deepening murk of the storm.

Then the raging wind carried a faint but unmistakable “Help.” I got out of the tent and saw Lachenal three hundred feet below us. Hastily I dragged on my boots and clothes, but when I came out of the tent again there was nothing to be seen on the bare slope. The shock was so terrible that I lost my self-control and began to cry, shouting in desperation. It seemed that I had lost the companion of the most enchanted hours of my life. Overcome with grief I lay in the snow unconscious of the hurricane that howled around me.

Abruptly, the clouds cleared for a moment. Terray saw Lachenal once more, seemingly even farther below the tent than he had been at first sighting. Without even putting on his crampons, Terray seized his axe and launched into a high-speed glissade, sliding on his boot soles. The crust was so hard that the ski champion from Grenoble had trouble stopping.

It was evident that Lachenal had taken a long fall. He was missing his ice axe, one crampon, his hat, and his gloves. In a state of near hysteria, Lachenal had only one thought. “My feet are frozen stiff up to the ankles,” he told Terray. “Get me down to Camp II quickly, so Oudot can give me an injection. Quick, let's get going.”

To try to descend now, with darkness gathering, in full storm, would have meant certain death. Yet Terray could not reason with his friend.

When he heard me starting to argue, he suddenly grabbed my ice axe and started running across the slope. His single crampon impeded him, however, and he crumpled onto the snow weeping and screaming: “We must get down. I've got to have some injections or I'll be ruined for life. They'll cut off my feet.”

At last Terray wore down his partner's resistance. Chopping steps with desperate energy, he cut a staircase back up toward the tent. Lachenal followed, literally crawling on hands and knees.

Inside the tent, Terray tried to unlace Lachenal's boots, but they were frozen and intractable. Eventually he had to cut them open with his knife. “My heart sank at the sight of his feet inside, white and utterly insensible.” Eleven years later, Terray recalled his thoughts at that moment:

Annapurna, the first eight-thousander, was climbed, but was it worth such a price? I had been ready to give my life for the victory, yet now it suddenly seemed too dearly bought.

Thus the account in
Conquistadors.
Once more, Herzog's version dovetails closely with Terray's. “My feet are frostbitten,” he quotes Lachenal raving to his friend. “Take me down . . . take me down, so that Oudot can see to me.” Lachenal, Herzog confirms, “was obsessed by the fear of amputation.”

Lachenal's own account of his fall (written, apparently, within two or three days) is vivid in its details:

A little before arriving at Camp V, I took a fall of 150 meters, due to what cause, I don't know. Throughout the fall, I had time to say to
myself, “This is it, this time I've wiped myself out.” After turning over and over again in the air, getting stripped of one of my crampons, my ice axe, my gloves, and my hat, for no reason I stopped, stupefied. Completely transfixed with cold, my hands frozen. I still had my pack. I thrust my hands inside it and started yelling for help, incapable as I was of climbing by myself back up to the tents.

No one came! It was a long time. The occupants of the tents had to put their boots back on. Between two patches of fog I saw Lionel descending toward me. I wanted to descend at least to the next camp [Camp IV]. He convinced me that I wasn't in good enough shape for that. I had a great fear that in the morning we wouldn't be able to find the route. Finally, I climbed back up with a great deal of trouble.

With darkness upon them, the four survivors huddled in their tents. Terray brewed hot drinks long into the night, as he and Rébuffat tirelessly performed what was then considered the necessary torture prescribed for saving frozen digits. Each took the stiff end of a rope and lashed away for hours, Terray whipping Lachenal's toes, Rébuffat Herzog's toes and fingers. All they accomplished, as medical science would later learn, was to exacerbate the damage.

I
N
A
PRIL
1999, I interviewed Maurice Herzog in Paris. He had turned eighty just two and a half months before. By now, he and Francis de Noyelle, the expedition's liaison officer, were the only surviving French members of the 1950 expedition.

We met in Herzog's posh office on the Rue de Louvre. Traffic delayed his arrival, and as I waited for some forty minutes, having been ushered by Herzog's assistant into his inner sanctum, I noted the furnishings. The huge brown desk behind which Herzog habitually sat had a brass nameplate perched on it. On the floor, before the black-and-white marble fireplace, spread a luxuriant potted orchid. An original painting by the alpine artist and cartoonist Samivel hung on one wall, a framed and signed photo of de Gaulle
on another. One bookshelf was wholly given over to editions of
Annapurna
in various languages.

Herzog arrived, nattily dressed in suit, vest, and tie. As he offered his apologies for being late, he shook my hand vigorously, and I had an instant of squeamishness as I clasped the shortened stumps of his fingers. Herzog installed himself behind his desk. Through much of our hour together, he laid his hands on the desktop facing me, or brought them together in a low arch, as if praying.

Remarkably handsome in his ninth decade, Herzog spoke lucidly in French and without hesitation. A jackhammer tearing up the sidewalk outside drowned out some of his responses, which I had to ask him to repeat. He seemed patient, open, sincere, as though his only wish were to answer my questions. An old-fashioned courtesy radiated from this dignified man.

It had been three years since the publication of Ballu's biography of Rébuffat and Guérin's edition of Lachenal's diary, three years of controversy and reexamination. Had the furor troubled his sleep?

Not at all, he maintained. “I have a clear conscience,” he said, “and the experience of the truth. No one has doubted what I wrote.”

The remark puzzled me. In the wake of the recent publications every mountainering journalist who had taken up the issue had expressed doubts about the whole truth of
Annapurna.

Gradually we edged back toward the events of June 3, 1950. On the summit, as Herzog had made plain in
Annapurna,
Lachenal had been consumed with a frenzy to descend at once, while he himself lingered, awash in his beatific trance, attaching the various flags to his ice axe for summit photos, staring at the horizon.

Now Herzog said something that dumbfounded me. “The hour on the summit didn't exacerbate the frostbite. We were well protected. Losing the gloves didn't cause it. The journalists always say that, but they're wrong. I just put my hands in my pockets as I descended.

“No, it was digging in the crevasse for our boots [two days later, on the morning of June 5] that caused the frostbite. Raking
with my fingers in the snow. I knew I would freeze my hands. But we had to find the boots—otherwise we would have died.”

What was going on here? I wondered. After forty-nine years of remembering that fateful day, had Herzog changed his story? In
Annapurna,
he had seemed unequivocally to blame the loss of his gloves (and his failure to remember to use the spare socks he had stashed in his pack) for the frostbite that would cost him his fingers. The sentence recording Terray's and Rébuffat's shock at seeing his frozen hands—“The other two stared at them in dismay—they realized the full seriousness of the injury”—said it all.

In
Annapurna,
there had been no mention of sticking his hands in his pockets. Later, I read the opening chapter of
L'Autre Annapurna,
Herzog's memoir that had appeared only the year before. In those pages, he retold the events of June 3, 4, and 5, and the story had indeed changed. No mention of dropping his gloves and watching them roll away. (In
Annapurna,
“The movement of those gloves was engraved in my sight as something irredeemable, against which I was powerless. The consequences might be most serious.”)

Instead,
L'Autre Annapurna
contained a long passage about searching through the snow at the bottom of the crevasse, where the four men bivouacked through the night of June 4–5, as Herzog looked for the boots that alone would ensure his and Lachenal's survival, frantically raking the snow with his fingers: