True Summit (9 page)

In “The Brotherhood of the Rope,” that lyrical set piece in
Starlight and Storm,
Rébuffat had sung the virtues of the
cordée
—the pairing of soul mates bound together by a nylon rope. Yet it seemed that Rébuffat himself, while treasuring the companionship of any number of loyal teammates, had never found his ideal partner, the man with whose destiny he wished to intertwine his own. Now Don and I discovered, in the example of Lachenal and Terray, what the
cordée
meant at its most crystalline.

In one canny passage in
Conquistadors
(I think I learned it by heart), Terray analyzed that partnership:

We climbed very much better together than either of us did apart. Our differing characters and physical aptitudes complemented each other, each of us making up for the other's weaknesses.

Lachenal was by far the fastest and most brilliant climber I have ever known on delicate or loose terrain. His dexterity was phenomenal, his vitality like that of a wild beast, and his bravery amounted almost to unawareness of danger. On his day he was capable of something very like genius, but strenuous pitches gave him trouble, and above all he was unpredictable. Perhaps because of his very impulsiveness and incredible optimism he lacked patience, perseverance and forethought. He also suffered from a bad sense of direction.

For myself, I was the less gifted partner on any kind of ground; but I had more stamina and was stronger, more obstinate and more reflective. I suppose I was the moderating element in the team, but it also seems to me that I gave it the stability and solidity necessary for the really major undertakings.

The apotheosis of the
cordée
came in 1947, when Lachenal and Terray made the second ascent of the Eiger Nordwand, the deadliest wall in the Alps. Terray had devoted a long and wonderful chapter in
Conquistadors
to this stunning climb. Don and I each read the chapter again and again.

Inevitably, we began to identify with Terray and Lachenal. The analogy was not perfect, but close enough to allow our fantasy to blossom. Like Terray, Don was stocky and strong, with immense stamina. He was far more deliberate than I, and could wait out any
storm with a placid repose that it was hopeless for me to try to emulate. Like Lachenal, I was thin and relatively lithe. My forte in the mountains was the same as Lachenal's, loose and mixed rock and snow. And, as Don once told me, I was the most impatient person he had ever met.

We climbed together every chance we could get—on spring and autumn weekends at the Shawangunk Cliffs in New York state, in winter on the frozen ice gullies of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, over Christmas on ten-day trips into the high Colorado Rockies, where we made a number of first winter ascents. And in the summer of 1964, we locked fates on a two-man expedition to the unexplored east ridge of Mount Deborah in Alaska. That expedition—a grinding forty-two-day failure in the course of which several times we came close to getting killed—remains the most intense ordeal of my life. Near the end of that demoralizing journey, Don, with his Terray-like perseverance, still longed to head east through the Hayes Range in search of other mountains, while I wanted only to flee south to the Denali Highway and hot showers and cheeseburgers in greasy cafes.

At some point, our identification with Terray and Lachenal took on a power that transcended mere hero worship. Like the kids I had grown up with, playing pickup baseball in the vacant lots of Boulder, pretending to be Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, Don and I started to share the conceit that we
were
Terray and Lachenal. We went so far as to address each other as “Lionel” and “Louis.”

Passages from
Conquistadors of the Useless,
as well as other chronicles we could come across that detailed our heroes' conquests, became canonic mottos on our lips. On the crux move of a route on Cannon cliff, for example, Don might shout out, “Guido, the sardine tin!” In M. A. Azéma's
The Conquest of Fitzroy,
which told the story of the 1952 first ascent of the hardest expeditionary mountain yet climbed anywhere in the world, Terray and Guido Magnone had solved nearly all the technical difficulties, only to be stumped by a short blank wall just below the summit. Out of pitons, they thrashed around, unable to solve the wall, until Terray cried, “Guido, the sardine tin!” Earlier that day, the pair had used a knife-blade “ace of spades” piton to pry open their sardine can. Terray
dug the piton out of his rucksack, pounded it into a thin crack, aided the wall, and sprinted to the summit.

In
Conquistadors,
Terray had devoted a long chapter to Annapurna. By and large, it complemented Herzog's famous story, though Terray performed the invaluable service of following up on the lives and careers of the team members in the eleven years after the expedition. It seemed to Don and me that the
cordée
we idolized ought to have found its paired glory on the first 8,000-meter peak to be climbed. (The ideal plot would have had Terray and Lachenal going to the summit together.) Yet in neither Herzog's
Annapurna
nor in Terray's
Conquistadors
was there much evidence of that legendary partnership playing a pivotal role. The pairs and trios of climbers setting off to look for Dhaulagiri and Annapurna permutated relentlessly, as if Herzog were trying to keep strong bonds from forming among his team. The knights of the sky were in this sense interchangeable.

Only a vignette here and there in the Annapurna chapter of
Conquistadors
hinted at the sense of twinned invincibility Lachenal and Terray had hammered out on the Walker Spur, the Piz Badile, the Eiger. On the long march in to Tukucha, the two guides were designated as the scouting party. Wrote Terray.

Lachenal was also very interested by all that went on around us, but patience was never one of his characteristics, and he found my halts too frequent. When he got tired of waiting he would lope off on his own, and I would find him asleep under a banyan a few hours later.

Seven weeks into the expedition, Terray reminded us, the team was plunged into despair. The most vigorous possible reconnaissance of Dhaulagiri had deemed the mountain virtually unclimbable. Time was running out.

On May 14, the whole team assembled once more in Tukucha. In the mess tent, Herzog presided over what he called “a solemn council of war.” He gave a speech, summarizing the expedition's discoveries. A freewheeling discussion ensued. No one had any heart to pursue further approaches to Dhaula; Terray, the strongest member, was the most vehemently opposed. One by one, the teammates
turned their thoughts to Annapurna, which still lay hidden in a haze of topographical ignorance.

By the end of that discussion, the die was cast. Ever the loyalist, Terray summarized the fateful moment:

Maurice Herzog hesitated before the choice. Should he abandon a prize, however doubtful, in favor of a mystery so insubstantial? Could he expose men who had taken their oath to obey him to mortal danger? In full awareness of his terrible responsibility Maurice chose the more reasonable but uncertain course: we would attempt Annapurna.

T
HE
I
NDIAN
S
URVEY MAPS
were every bit as confused about Annapurna as they were about Dhaulagiri. As the team, running out of time, turned its attention to this second 8,000-meter objective, it had little notion of where to begin. In 1961, Lionel Terray would recall:

Annapurna . . . remained a complete enigma. We had seen the mountain from afar off, lording it over groves of seven-thousanders, but the closer we got to it the hazier our ideas of its topography became, for all our painstaking reconnaissances.

The parties scouting Dhaulagiri had run head-on into one impasse after another. Now, however, Herzog and his companions stumbled upon some good luck.

In late April, as they had ascended the valley of the Kali Gandaki toward the mountain village of Tukucha, they had noticed a savage, narrow ravine entering on the right. The natives called this chasm the Miristi Khola. The valley looked too small to offer a highway into the hidden sanctuary of Annapurna, but the climbers were given pause by the huge volume of water plunging out of the gorge. It looked to the eye as though the Miristi Khola headed against a relatively minor massif called the Nilgiris; but that torrent suggested a massive glacier at its source. The unreliable map, moreover, indicated that the Miristi Khola led straight north of Annapurna to a pass labeled the Tilicho Col. Yet when the Sherpa sirdar Ang-Tharkey questioned the locals, no one had any knowledge of either the Tilicho Col or of any path leading up the gorge.

The lower stretches of the chasm, in any event, looked impossible to traverse. Yet on April 27, Herzog sent Schatz, Couzy, and the team doctor, Jacques Oudot, along with Ang-Tharkey and several other Sherpas off on a foray to see if they could climb to the top of the long south ridge of the Nilgiris and peer over into the Miristi Khola from partway up its course. The steep slope leading up to the ridge was covered with jungle, but the reconnoiterers found a faint path through the trees and thickets, with cairns here and there and even disused terraces. Despite local ignorance of the Miristi Khola, evidently shepherds and farmers over the years had climbed high toward the Nilgiri ridge.

At last the party topped out in a narrow notch in the ridge. The view that greeted them was provocative and confounding. Fully 3,000 feet below, the Miristi Khola plunged through cataracts. In the distance rose Annapurna, magnificent and daunting, but of the map's purported Tilicho Col, they could see no vestige. It looked as
though the Miristi drained at least the west face of Annapurna, and possibly the north face, but all the men could see in the form of a climbing route was a precipitous arête of rock and ice. The Northwest Spur, as the team began calling this arête, looked as though it would present a formidable challenge were it in the Alps, let alone at altitudes above 18,000 feet in the Himalaya. What was more, the men could not tell whether the top of the spur linked up with the summit snowfields of Annapurna, or simply dead-ended in yet another high ridge the map had failed to record.

Couzy and Schatz pushed on from the notch, traversing four miles along the steep southwest shoulder of the Nilgiris. A narrow, broken ledge offered the only possible nontechnical passage, and the exposure—that 3,000-foot drop to the raging river—was giddy in the extreme. Schatz and Couzy managed to work their way down to the river, cross it, and push on to the base of the gigantic Northwest Spur. But as to whether the ravine gave access to the broad ice-fields on the north face of Annapurna—which other team members had seen from the Dhaulagiri reconnaissance, and which seemed the most likely route for an attack on Annapurna—they could not say.

Now, at the conclusion of the May 14 “council of war,” Herzog deputed Lachenal and Terray (guided by Schatz) to lead a committed probe with porters carrying loads along this improbable route. Terray was overjoyed by this call to action, after fruitless weeks trying to sort out the range's topography. As he set out from Tukucha, he remembered later, “I struck up a Chasseur [light infantry] song and led off, twirling my ice-axe over my head like a drum-major's baton.” That evening, the old comrades Lachenal and Terray lay in their tent, counting up, in their amiably competitive way, the number of climbs each had made in the Alps at the level of difficulty of the Grépon or harder. Terray enumerated 157, Lachenal 151.

On May 16, the caravan reached the crossing of the Miristi Khola. Already frightened by the vertiginous slope they had traversed on the narrow ledge, the porters refused to ford the river—or even, Lachenal noted with disgust in his diary, “to make a
one-meter jump” where the stream pinched between boulders. (An observation suppressed in the 1956 edition of
Carnets.
) Instead, the three Frenchmen hoisted the loads themselves and waded the torrent. Even unladen, the porters had a bad time at the crossing, which, Terray noted, “gave rise to some picturesque scenes, with a cowboy Lachenal lassooing coolies as they were swept away.” Eventually the Frenchmen built a bridge of branches.

By May 18, the six principal climbers had at last reached the foot of Annapurna. Here, however, they made a serious mistake, which ended up costing them five wasted days and came close to extinguishing their chances of reaching the mountain's summit. Carried away by the prospect of confronting steep rock and ice after weeks of wandering about the lowlands, Terray pleaded for an attack on the Northwest Spur. Herzog agreed, immediately assigning the task to the “celebrated partnership” of Lachenal and Terray.

At this juncture, the four sources of the story that have come down to us—Herzog's
Annapurna,
Terray's
Conquistadors,
Lachenal's unexpurgated
Carnets,
and the letters and interviews that went into the making of Yves Ballu's biography of Rébuffat—curiously diverge. All agree that Terray, with his limitless energy, was the driving force behind the attack on the spur. During the last few days, in fact, his mood had soared to something like euphoria. Now he was exhilarated to perform the first real climbing on the expedition with his old partner. Looking back in 1961, Terray remembered the joy of reconstituting the matchless
cordée
on Annapurna: