True Summit

by David Roberts

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  Contents

  Map

  ONE: June 3

  TWO: Resistance

  THREE: Looking for Annapurna

  FOUR: Breakthrough

  FIVE: Deliverance

  SIX: The Woods of Lété

  SEVEN: The Meditation of Rébuffat

  EIGHT: The Silence of Lachenal

  NINE: The Passion of Terray

  TEN: Une Affaire de Cordée

  Note on Sources and Acknowledgments

  Index

  In memory of

  Gaston Rébuffat

  Lionel Terray

  Louis Lachenal

  ONE

  June 3

  IN THE FIRST LIGHT OF DAWN, at 6:00 A.M., the two men left their tent at 24,600 feet and headed up the broad, glaciated slope, their crampons biting crisply into the hard snow underfoot. The summit of Annapurna gleamed in the morning sun, only 1,900 feet above them. The wind that had raged all night had died with the dawn, leaving a piercing cold to rule the stillness.

  For Louis Lachenal, a brilliant, impetuous mountaineer of twenty-eight, and Maurice Herzog, three years older and the expedition leader, it had required a long struggle that morning simply to jam their feet into frozen boots. Herzog had managed to lace up the gaiters that covered his ankles, but Lachenal had given up trying to fasten his. Neither man had slept a minute through the terrible night, as the gale threatened to rip the tent from the pitons and ice axes that anchored it to the 40 degree slope and send the men hurtling down the mountain. Through long hours in the darkness, they had clung to the tent poles, in Herzog’s words, “as a drowning man clings to a plank,” just to keep the fragile shelter from being torn apart by the wind.

  The evening before, Herzog and Lachenal had brewed a few cups of tea for dinner, but they had been too nauseated by the altitude to eat. In the morning, even making tea proved too arduous a task. At the last minute, Herzog stuffed a tube of condensed milk, some nougat, and a spare pair of socks into his pack.

  It was June 3, 1950, and the monsoon would arrive any day, smothering the high Himalaya in a seamless blanket of mist and falling snow, prohibiting human trespass. For the past two months, the French expedition had wandered up one valley after another, simply trying to find Annapurna. The maps were all wrong because no Westerners had ever before approached the slopes of the tenth-highest mountain in the world.

  At last, in late May, with less than two weeks left before the monsoon, the team had discovered the deep gorge formed by the torrential current of the Miristi Khola. Having breached its defenses, they had emerged beneath the north face of Annapurna. Racing up glacier-hung corridors, menaced at every hand by massive avalanches that thundered over the cliffs, the team placed four camps in a leftward crescent that followed a cunning line up the mountain. On June 2, Lachenal and Herzog, aided by Sherpas Ang-Tharkey and Sarki, slipped through a notch in the ice cliff the team had named the Sickle and crossed a steep, dangerous slope to pitch Camp V beside a broken rock band. Herzog offered a place in the summit team to Ang-Tharkey, the sirdar or head Sherpa, but the man, frightened by the cold that had already numbed his feet, declined. The two Sherpas headed back to Camp IVA, leaving Lachenal and Herzog to their windy ordeal.

  Now the two men clumped slowly up the interminable slope, shrouded in silence. Wrote Herzog later, “Each of us lived in a closed and private world of his own. I was suspicious of my mental processes; my mind was working very slowly and I was perfectly aware of the low state of my intelligence.”

  It did not take long for both men’s feet to go numb. Abruptly Lachenal halted, took off a boot, and tried to rub his stockinged foot back into feeling. “I don’t want to be like Lambert,” he muttered. The great Swiss climber Raymond Lambert—a friend of Lachenal’s—had lost all the toes on both feet to frostbite after being trapped in winter on a traverse of the Aiguilles du Diable, near Chamonix, France.

  The climbers emerged from the mountain’s shadow into the sunlight, yet the iron cold persisted. Again Lachenal stopped to take off a boot. “I can’t feel anything,” he groaned. “I think I’m beginning to get frostbite.”

  Herzog too was worried about his feet, but he convinced himself that wriggling his toes as he walked would ward off frostbite. “I could not feel them,” he would write, “but that was nothing new in the mountains.”

  The men marched on, at a pitifully slow pace. Herzog’s dreamy isolation reclaimed him: “Lachenal appeared to me as a sort of specter—he was alone in his world, I in mine.”

  Suddenly Lachenal grabbed his companion. “If I go back, what will you do?” he blurted out.

  Unbidden, images of the party’s two months of struggle flashed through Herzog’s mind: lowland trudges in the jungle heat, fierce rock-and-ice pitches climbed, loads painfully hauled to higher camps. “Must we give up?” he asked himself. “Impossible! My whole being revolted against the idea. I had made up my mind, irrevocably. Today we were consecrating an ideal, and no sacrifice was too great.”

  To Lachenal, he said, “I should go on by myself.”

  Without hesitating, Lachenal responded, “Then I’ll follow you.”

  Herzog lapsed back into his private trance. “An astonishing happiness welled up in me, but I could not define it,” he would later write. “Everything was so new, so utterly unprecedented. . . . We were braving an interdict, overstepping a boundary, and yet we had no fear as we continued upward.”

  THERE ARE FOURTEEN MOUNTAINS in the world higher than 8,000 meters (about 26,240 feet)—all of them in the Himalaya. The first attempt to climb one came in 1895, when Alfred Mummery, the finest British climber of his day, attacked Nanga Parbat. Radically underestimating the size and difficulty of the mountain, Mummery and two Gurkha porters vanished during a reconnaissance of the west face. Their bodies were never found.

  By 1950, twenty-two different expeditions had tackled various 8,000-meter peaks, yet not one had succeeded. The boldest efforts during the 1920s and 1930s, on Everest, K2, Kanchenjunga, and Nanga Parbat, had been launched by British, American, and German teams. Although France counted among its climbers some of the leading alpinists of those decades, the country had made no great showing in the Himalaya, with only a single expedition to Gasherbrum I to its credit. For fourteen years, the highest summit reached anywhere in the world had remained that of 25,645-foot Nanda Devi in India, climbed by an Anglo-American team in 1936. The Second World War had interrupted the Himalayan campaigns, and it was not until 1949 that Europeans again turned their attention toward the highest mountains in the world.

  Despite the fact that only one member—cinematographer Marcel Ichac, a veteran of Gasherbrum I—had ever been to the Himalaya before, the 1950 Annapurna expedition comprised as strong a party as had ever been put in the field in Asia. Herzog himself was an accomplished mountaineer, with a number of daring climbs in the Alps under his belt. The two junior members, Marcel Schatz and Jean Couzy, showed great promise (Couzy would go on to rack up a roster of first ascents equaled by only a handful of his contemporaries).

  But the heart of the Annapurna expedition—its core of competence so assured as to verge on genius—lay in Lachenal and his two fellow Chamonix guides, Lionel Terray and Gaston Rébuffat. Throughout the 1940s, even during wartime, these men had pulled off one blazing ascent in the Alps after another. By 1950, they were unquestionably the three finest mountaineers in France, rivaled in the rest of the world only by a handfu
l of German, Italian, and Austrian peers (no American or Briton was even in their league).

  Yet through most of April and May 1950, as the team wandered aimlessly trying to sort out the topography and find its way toward 26,493-foot Annapurna, the expedition threatened to collapse into utter fiasco. With the solving of the Miristi Khola, all the expertise embodied in the team’s six principal climbers came to the fore. The choice of which pair would make the summit bid had seemed to depend as much as anything on the luck of who happened to reach the right camp on the right day. That luck put Lachenal and Herzog in Camp V on the morning of June 3.

  Now, well above 25,000 feet, sometime after noon, the pair traversed toward the right beneath a final rock band that blocked the way to the summit. Suddenly Herzog pointed, uttering a single word: “Couloir!”

  “What luck!” rejoined Lachenal. In front of the men, a steep snow gully angled up through the rock band.

  “Let’s go, then!” Herzog urged, and Lachenal signaled agreement. “I had lost all track of time,” Herzog later recalled. Facing the couloir, he felt a moment of doubt: “Should we have enough strength left to overcome this final obstacle?” Kicking steps in the hard snow, their crampon points biting well, the men trudged upward.

  Herzog later described those climactic moments:

  A slight detour to the left, a few more steps—the summit ridge came gradually nearer—a few rocks to avoid. We dragged ourselves up. Could we possibly be there? . . .

  Yes! A fierce and savage wind tore at us.

  We were on top of Annapurna! 8,075 meters. . . .

  Our hearts overflowed with an unspeakable happiness.

  “If only the others could know . . .”

  If only everyone could know!

  As he stood on the summit, Herzog was awash in a mystical ecstasy:

  How wonderful life would now become! What an inconceivable experience it is to attain one’s ideal and, at the very same moment, to fulfill oneself. I was stirred to the depths of my being. Never had I felt such happiness like this—so intense and yet so pure.

  Lachenal, however, was in an entirely different state of mind. He shook Herzog, pleading, “Well, what about going down?”

  His companion’s impatience puzzled Herzog. “Did he simply think he had finished another climb, as in the Alps?” he wondered. “Did he think one could just go down again like that, with nothing more to it?”

  “One minute,” Herzog spoke, “I must take some photographs.”

  “Hurry up!”

  Herzog fumbled through his pack, retrieving his camera and several flags. For long minutes, he posed with one pennant after another attached to his ice axe, as Lachenal snapped photos. Then Herzog changed from black-and-white to color film.

  Lachenal exploded: “Are you mad? We haven’t a minute to lose: we must go down at once.”

  Vaguely, Herzog sensed that his friend was right. Glancing at the horizon, he saw that the perfect day had deteriorated. A storm was moving in—perhaps the leading edge of the monsoon itself. Yet Herzog stood there, unwilling to let go of his transcendent moment, lost in a whirl of emotions and memories.

  “We must go down!” Lachenal cried once more, then hoisted his pack and started off. Still Herzog lingered, drinking a bit of condensed milk, taking a reading with his altimeter. At last he put on his own pack and followed Lachenal.

  Of all the qualities that had made Lachenal such a matchless climber, it was his speed on difficult terrain that was paramount. Now Herzog watched his friend dash down the couloir, then hurry along the traverse beneath the rock band. Stumping downward far more carefully, Herzog saw the gap between him and Lachenal grow.

  At the base of the rock band, Herzog stopped to catch his breath. He took off his pack and opened it, then could not remember what he was about to do. Suddenly he cried out, “My gloves!”

  To open his pack, Herzog had laid his gloves on the snow. As he watched, dumbfounded, they slid, then rolled toward the void below. “The movement of those gloves was engraved in my sight,” he later wrote, “as something irredeemable, against which I was powerless. The consequences might be most serious. What was I to do?”

  THUS THE FIRST CONQUEST of an 8,000-meter peak began to take its toll on the victors. In his trance, Herzog forgot all about the spare pair of socks in his pack, which he could have used as gloves: instead, he descended barehanded. The two men regained Camp V only just before dark, in the middle an all-out storm that severely reduced their visibility. Lachenal had slipped and fallen past the tent before scrambling back up to the shelter. Left to their own devices, Herzog and Lachenal would probably have perished there. But during the day, Rébuffat and Terray had climbed to Camp V, hoping for their own summit push on the morrow. As Terray seized Herzog’s hands to wring them in congratulation, he was struck with horror. “Maurice—your hands!” he cried out.

  “There was an uneasy silence,” Herzog later recalled. “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.”

  Forgoing their own chance for the summit, Terray and Rébuffat stayed up all night brewing hot drinks for their comrades and whipping Lachenal’s bare toes and Herzog’s toes and fingers with rope ends, in an effort to restore circulation. (Because of the damage it does to frozen tissue and cells, the treatment is now known to cause more harm than help.)

  The next day, as the storm increased its fury, the four men staggered down toward Camp IVA, just above the ice cliff of the Sickle. But in the lashing whiteout they lost their way. With dusk approaching, carrying no tent and but one sleeping bag among the four of them, the men circled helplessly looking for a familiar landmark. A night without shelter would undoubtedly prove fatal.

  Then Lachenal broke through a snow bridge and plunged into a hidden crevasse. The mishap turned into salvation. Unhurt, Lachenal called out to the others to join him. The snow ledge at the bottom of the crevasse would serve for an emergency bivouac.

  Huddled together for warmth, shivering against the snow that relentlessly filtered into their clothes, rubbing each other’s feet to ward off further frostbite, the four men spent as miserable a night as mountaineers have ever endured in the Himalaya. After two nights in a row without sleep, Herzog and Lachenal had neared the end of their endurance. In the morning, Rébuffat was the first to poke his head out of the crevasse. Terray anxiously inquired about the weather. “Can’t see a thing,” Rébuffat answered. “It’s blowing hard.”

  But after Lachenal thrashed his way to the surface, in Herzog’s words, “he began to run like a madman, shrieking, ‘It’s fine, it’s fine!’ ” The day before, trying to find the route down, Terray and Rébuffat had removed their goggles. Despite the storm that smothered them, at an altitude above 24,000 feet the sun’s ultraviolet rays had penetrated the murk and left the two men snow-blind. Rébuffat had mistaken the gray smear of his blindness for a ceaseless storm.

  The weather was windy but clear. Yet now the four men faced a cruel fate: the blind could not lead the lame down the mountain. Pitifully, Lachenal began to cry out for help. The others joined in. And then they heard an answering call. It was Marcel Schatz, who had come out from Camp IVA to look for the companions he feared he would never see again. As Schatz clasped Herzog in his arms, he murmured, “It is wonderful—what you have done.”

  Though the men were saved, the rest of the descent unfolded as a grim ordeal. At one point, Herzog and two Sherpas were swept 500 feet by an avalanche and partially buried. As the survivors approached Base Camp, even Terray—the sahib whose strength had made him a legend among the porters—had to be helped down the mountain like a baby, his arms around the shoulders of a pair of Sherpas who held him up and guided his steps.

  Herzog and Lachenal could no longer walk. During the next month, a succession of Sherpas and porters carried the men through mile after mile of lowland ravine and forest. Jacques Oudot, the expedition doctor, gave them agonizing daily abdominal inject
ions of novocaine in the femoral and brachial arteries. It was thought at the time that the drug could dilate the arteries and, by improving the flow of blood, forestall the ravages of frostbite; today, the procedure is known to be worthless. As their digits turned gangrenous, Oudot resorted to amputations in the field. Eventually Lachenal lost all his toes, Herzog all his toes and fingers.

  The team members arrived at Orly airport in Paris on July 17, where a huge crowd hailed them as heroes. Paris-Match, which owned exclusive periodical rights to the story, rushed into print a special issue, with a cover photo of Herzog hoisting the Tricolor on the summit, that broke all the magazine’s sales records.

  As he recuperated in the American hospital at Neuilly, Herzog, who had never before written a book, dictated his account of the expedition. Published the next year by Arthaud as Annapurna: Premier 8,000, the book at once became a classic. The story Herzog had brought back from the mountain was a stirring saga of teamwork, self-sacrifice, and—in the two-week push to the summit—brilliant mountaineering against long odds. The descent and retreat from Annapurna figured as a tragic yet heroic coda, which Herzog narrated in a peroration saluting the highest ideals of loyalty and courage.

  What moved readers beyond all else in Annapurna, however, was the transcendental optimism of the book. The euphoric trance that had seized Herzog on the summit persisted through all his convalescent tribulations. With only stumps left where he had once had fingers, for the rest of his life Herzog would find the simplest tasks—tying his shoelaces, buttoning his shirt—almost beyond him. Yet not a trace of bitterness or self-pity emerged in the pages of his book.

  Quite the opposite. In the foreword, he wrote of his ordeal, “I was saved and had won my freedom. This freedom, which I shall never lose, has given me the assurance and serenity of a man who has fulfilled himself. . . . A new and splendid life has opened out before me.” Of his brave teammates, he wrote, “My fervent wish is that the nine of us who were united in face of death should remain fraternally united through life.” And in the book’s last pages: “Annapurna, to which we had gone emptyhanded, was a treasure on which we should live the rest of our days.”