True Summit (14 page)

My hands mattered little, if the boots could be recovered. . . . Each boot that I might recover promised me the life of my comrade or myself. The price, alas, would be my frozen fingers.

Reading on in Herzog's 1998 memoir, I came across another passage that was at odds with
Annapurna.
After Terray had glissaded to the rescue of the fallen Lachenal, late on the afternoon of June 3, the pair struggled back up to the tents at Camp V. Now Herzog recounted what Terray had said to him and Rébuffat on returning.

In broken phrases, Lionel told us that Louis, collapsed in the snow at the edge of a crevasse, had refused to get up. He preferred to die nobly in the mountains in a rage rather than perish in the midst of this army in full rout. Despite his protests, regardless of his delirium, Lionel seized him with force and determination. Throwing caution to the winds, he dragged him up to camp, without hesitating to resort to invectives and even violence.

This version of Lachenal's behavior after the fall cannot be reconciled with the accounts in both
Annapurna
and Terray's
Conquistadors
(which has Lachenal wildly demanding an immediate descent to Camp II to save his toes). It is even further afield from Lachenal's own account, which attributes his frenzy to descend to a quite rational fear that the storm would wipe out the men's tracks and leave them lost on the mountain. (Indeed, this is precisely what happened on June 4.)

In his office, Herzog mused on the difference between his two books. “At one point we had the idea of each of us writing a chapter of the expedition book, each on his specialty,” Herzog told me. “Oudot on medicine, Ichac on cinematography. . . . If we had done that, the book would not have been so interesting. It would have sold maybe one thousand copies.

“Why did it sell fifteen million copies?
Annapurna
is a sort of novel. It's a novel, but a true novel.

“It was easy to dictate it in the hospital. It came straight from my heart. I have a good memory. There were times when I was crying for myself as I dictated it, like at the bottom of the crevasse. As for the dialogue, sometimes I paraphrased, but I knew my comrades well. I could imagine them speaking. Even when I wasn't there, I slipped in some dialogue.”

I was uncertain how to understand this avowal. Did Herzog mean that, as a novel,
Annapurna
was not to be held to the standards of truth of a factual memoir? Or simply that the book read like a novel, which explained its immense popularity?

About
L'Autre Annapurna,
Herzog insisted, “These are the feelings of fifty years later. The first book,
Annapurna,
was for the
whole world.
L'Autre Annapurna
was written for me, to express myself. One is objective, the other subjective. The new book is what I feel now about all my adventures.”

For weeks after my interview, I chewed on the bones of Herzog's strange and provocative remarks. In those two critical discrepancies—concerning the cause of his frostbitten hands, and Lachenal's behavior after the fall—I could discern three possible explanations.

The first was that Herzog had simply started to become forgetful, misremembering events on which he had already gone clearly on record. The second was that the new version, in
L'Autre Annapurna,
was a deliberate attempt to manipulate a whole new generation of readers, many of whom had perhaps not read
Annapurna.

I laid to rest the first hypothesis: in his office, Herzog seemed too lucid to be forgetfully revising his own past. And the second seemed unlikely, too. Surely the discrepancies begged critics to accuse him of dishonesty. The new, more self-serving version might cast a better light on Herzog, but it was an open invitation to readers such as myself to call his rewriting bluff.

The third possibility, I thought, was that this is indeed how memory works, in all its fallible reinvention of the past. After nearly fifty years, Herzog's emotions about those dramatic days high on Annapurna had perhaps restructured his memories into what
should
have been. He should have lost his fingers not because of the stupid mistake of dropping his gloves, but by saving the companion whose diary would later impugn him, as he raked with bare hands through the snow, sacrificing his fingers to find the boots. As for Lachenal's asking to be left to die after his fall—it was the logical culmination of the portrait of the genius-madman Herzog had slowly built up in
Annapurna.
The suicidally reckless climber, who would rather die in a demonic rage than limp pitifully back to ordinary human safety.

These reconstructions need not be cynical, or even fully conscious, on Herzog's part. They could be the fruit of memory's seizing again and again on disturbing, pivotal events, reshaping them with each rehearsal, trying to find meaning where there was only
happenstance. They might exemplify the process so ruefully predicted in Robert Frost's great (and much misunderstood) poem about memory's sentimentality, “The Road Not Taken.” In that poem, the speaker clearly recognizes that the two paths are equally worn: his choice of one over the other is a flip-of-the-coin decision. Yet in the last stanza,

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

T
HROUGH THE NIGHT
of June 3–4, the four men at Camp V got almost no sleep. For the first time, the storm showed no signs of abating toward dawn. For all the men knew, the monsoon had arrived.

Wrote Herzog in
Annapurna,

As the night wore on the snow lay heavier on the tent, and once again I had the frightful feeling of being slowly and silently asphyxiated. I tried, with all the strength of which I was capable, to push off with both forearms the mass that was crushing me. These fearful exertions left me gasping for breath and I fell back into the same exhausted state. It was much worse than the previous night.

According to Terray, the wind was so violent that it threatened to tear the tents loose from their anchors.

At last, in the wee hours, Herzog and Rébuffat drifted into an exhausted sleep—only to be wakened by Terray, that demon of the early start. As Terray tried to help Lachenal get dressed, he ran into a seemingly insoluble problem. Lachenal's feet were too swollen to force back into his cut-open boots. There was no way the man could descend the mountain in stocking feet and survive. But what could be done?

Suddenly the only possible answer dawned on Terray, bringing with it a gust of terror. His own boots were two sizes larger than
Lachenal's. If he gave them to his partner, then forced his own feet into Lachenal's inadequate boots . . . The exchange could easily cost Terray his own feet. He hesitated, then performed an act of supreme self-denial. As he later wrote,

To give way would be dishonor, a crime against the name of friendship. There was nothing else for it, and with the feelings of a soldier going over the top I hauled off my second pair of stockings and stuffed my feet into these new instruments of torture.

Terray and Rébuffat had arrived at Camp V the day before full of hopes of going to the summit themselves. Now there was no possibility of that. Instead, their utmost efforts would be devoted to saving their friends' lives.

For Terray and Rébuffat, there was no other possible course. This was what a mountain guide did. In later life, however, Rébuffat's bitterness about Annapurna was deepened by the sense that Herzog had never fully acknowledged either the two men's sacrifice of their own chance for the summit, or their heroism in saving the frostbitten pair's lives. For all Herzog's considerable magnanimity in crediting the others' achievements on the way up the mountain,
Annapurna
is curiously thin on such benedictions on the descent. In place of any expression of true indebtedness, within moments of his return to Camp V Herzog tries to bathe his partners in his own joy: “This victory was not just one man's achievement, a matter for personal pride . . . it was a victory for us all, a victory for mankind itself.” (That sentence from
Annapurna
seems unconsciously telling, as if, with “one man's achievement,” Herzog had already started to write Lachenal out of the story.)

At this point, Terray seemed once again to take charge. As the men packed up on the morning of June 4, with the storm in full fury around them, he alone had the wits to urge a course that, had it been followed, might have saved the men much of the agony that lay in wait for them. Terray stuffed food and his sleeping bag into his pack, urging Rébuffat and Herzog to do likewise (neither man heeded the advice). Terray then started to collapse a tent and pack it up as well. All his training as a guide told him that to carry a tent
and bag with him would give the team a huge extra safety margin in case the men lost their downward track. But Lachenal's impatience forestalled this canny instinct. Already roped up, Lachenal yelled, “Hurry up! What the hell do you think you're doing with a tent? We'll be at Camp IV in an hour.” Terray allowed his partner's optimism to persuade him.

In the chaos of the previous night, Terray had laid down his ice axe somewhere near the tents. Now he could not find it under several inches of new snow. With time at a premium, he and Rébuffat seized the two remaining axes, and each took charge of a frostbitten teammate, to whom he was roped. Herzog and Lachenal had had virtually no sleep for forty-eight hours, and both men were almost exhausted. With his frozen fingers, Herzog had been unable to dress himself, so Rébuffat had put on his clothes and boots for him.

As the four men started down, Lachenal's apprehension that the track would have disappeared proved true: not a trace of their steps showed in the newly drifted snow. Lachenal led the blind stumble through the storm, his impatience screwed to a new pitch, trying to find the way from his memory of the occasional landmark—a serac here, a crevasse there.

By midday the wind had calmed almost to nothing, yet still the thick flakes of snow fell and piled up alarmingly fast. Terray and Rébuffat now alternated in the lead, breaking trail with painful slowness through first thigh-deep, then waist-deep powder. The mountain around the men turned into a blurry, featureless universe of white. “We kept colliding with hummocks which we had taken for hollows,” wrote Herzog. A heavy despair settled over the quartet, as they recognized they were lost. Now and then, Terray urged a halt so he could take off his boots and massage his feet. “Though ready for death,” he later wrote, “I had no wish to survive mutilated.”

Herzog responded to the party's increasingly dire predicament by lapsing into a kind of robotic apathy, following Rébuffat, as Terray put it, “without a murmur.” Retracing their steps to try to find a landmark, crisscrossing the slopes almost randomly, the men sought a way out of their maze. They sensed they had reached a point somewhere near the great ice cliff of the Sickle, but could see
no hint of it. Camp IVA must lie somewhere hereabouts—a single tent in a miasma of white.

Even in these extreme circumstances, it would suit Herzog to perpetuate the notion that informs
Annapurna
from start to finish—that his was the counsel of reason and deliberation, trying to rein in the rash impulses of his teammates. “Terray, when his turn came, charged madly ahead.” “Lachenal gave him considerable trouble. Perhaps he was not quite in his right mind. He said it was no use going on; we must dig a hole in the snow and wait for fine weather.” “Each in turn did the maddest things: Terray traversed the steep and avalanchy slopes with one crampon badly adjusted. He and Rébuffat performed incredible feats of balance without the least slip.”

In hopes that they were in the vicinity of Camp IVA, and that Schatz and Couzy or some of the Sherpas might be ensconced there, the men cried for help in unison. Only the swish of softly falling snow answered their plaints.

The hours had passed almost unnoticed: night was approaching. The last-ditch suggestion of Lachenal—according to Herzog the whim of a madman—loomed in fact as the men's best hope: to dig a hole in which to bivouac, hoping to survive until the weather changed. Recognizing this fact, Terray started to carve out a hollow with feckless swings of his axe.

As he did so, Lachenal suddenly let out a cry. Terray jerked around, but saw nothing of his friend. Without realizing it, Lachenal had been standing on a thin snow bridge over a hidden crevasse. The bridge had broken, plunging him into the depths of the crevasse, unchecked by any belay. Yet the potential disaster turned out to be a deliverance. Lachenal had fallen a mere twelve to fifteen feet into the hole, checking up unhurt in a perfect nook for an emergency bivouac.

In
Annapurna,
Herzog renders the exchange between the two old friends at the moment of the crevasse plunge:

“Lachenal!” called Terray.

A voice, muffled by many thicknesses of ice and snow, came up to us. It was impossible to make out what it was saying.

“Lachenal!”

Terray jerked the rope violently; this time we could hear.

“I'm here!”

“Anything broken?”

“No! It'll do for the night! Come along.”

Forty-eight years later, in
L'Autre Annapurna,
this dialogue has been revised to make it sound more colloquial. Lachenal curses his friends on the surface as a “bunch of
babotsh
” (local slang for the inhabitants of the valley below Chamonix). Which version better represents the “true novel” Herzog aimed at in
Annapurna
? Both, no doubt, are products of Herzog's memory. For that matter, Terray's
Conquistadors
is equally a partial fiction—as, some would argue, are inevitably all memoir and biography. Even Lachenal's diary is a construct at odds with the whole truth.