True Summit

by David Roberts

  Similarly, at age fourteen I had gone on a hike with Charley Houston, an Aspen physician who was a friend of my father’s. Houston, I knew, had led the 1938 and 1953 American K2 expeditions, gallant failures on the world’s second-highest mountain. And with longtime partner Bob Bates, Houston had written an account of the latter journey, called K2: The Savage Mountain, that would become a classic. Houston would later serve as a mentor to me—but never as a hero in the sense that Rébuffat became on first reading.

  I was hardly alone in my infatuation with the men of Annapurna. As I grew into my mountaineering prime, I encountered one American climber after another who confessed that reading Herzog’s book as a teenager had turned him irreversibly toward alpinism. After 1959, Rébuffat published a series of gorgeous picture books, such as Neige et Roc (On Snow and Rock), Entre Terre et Ciel (Between the Earth and Sky), and Mont-Blanc, Jardin Féerique (Mont Blanc, Enchanted Garden) that by themselves created a kind of cult. The photos of Rébuffat in action—always wearing the same patterned pullover, caught in profile against a vertical cliff, rope dangling from his waist into the void, hands resting gently on wrinkles of granite while toes clung to invisible holds—adumbrated an alpine acrobatics far more graceful than any climbing his readers had performed. The dreamy lyricism of the text elaborated further on the radical aesthetic of the Alps as an “enchanted garden” that Rébuffat had invented.

  It was the poet of the mountains who had inspired me at sixteen, writing, in Starlight and Storm, “I am immensely happy, for I have felt the rope between us. We are linked for life.” That the same man could have penned, in his private notebook, “Depersonalization . . . a certain Nazification,” after the oath-swearing at the CAF, would have utterly surprised me.

  All his life, even as his books made him mildly famous, Rébuffat kept his other side—the skeptical individualist, distrustful of all things grandiose and chauvinistic; the satirist, armed with a gift for the mordant phrase—under close wraps. His friends knew that side, but not the public, and so it came as a great surprise to learn, with the publication of Ballu’s biography in 1996, just how disenchanted Rébuffat had been on Annapurna.

  In April 1999, pursuing the “other Annapurnas” that Michel Guérin’s confidences had alerted me to, I met Françoise Rébuffat, Gaston’s widow, in Paris. Rébuffat had died in 1985, a rare male victim of breast cancer, after an agonizing deterioration stretched over ten years. Françoise had remarried, but she continued to guard her husband’s legacy with a fierce loyalty.

  In her chic apartment high above Montparnasse, I encountered an elegant and forceful woman of seventy-five. Françoise had met Gaston rather improbably one day in 1946 in Chamonix, in the salon de thé of the Hôtel des Alpes, a favorite hangout of both climbing guides and modish tourists that doubled as a dance parlor. The daughter of an architect from the Côte d’Azur, studying fashion at an elite school, she was on holiday with her friends. At twenty-two, Françoise was a great beauty.

  “I’d like to meet a mountain guide sometime,” she impulsively told her friends.

  One of them pointed out the tall, angular Rébuffat, who was dancing with a Dior model. “That’s one there,” she said.

  Françoise thought her friends were teasing her, the méditerrannéenne ignorant of the mountains. In her conception, a guide would be dressed in ragged trousers, wearing hobnailed boots, his visage leathery with exposure to sun and wind, sporting perhaps a fine mustache—not that young man in elegant tweeds with his face expressive of urbane character. “That one,” she said with a laugh, “he must be a guide d’opérette”—a vapid know-it-all.

  Thus Françoise and Gaston met, fell in love, and married. He took her climbing; she introduced him to her world of artists and aristocrats and fine restaurants.

  As we talked on in her Paris apartment, and later, as I read a moving unpublished memoir Françoise had written about her husband after his death, I realized that despite the social inequality in their upbringings, theirs had been that rare union of two souls as devoted to one another thirty years after they met as when they had first plunged into the delirium of courtship, a pair who had never begun to fall out of love.

  As he headed off to Annapurna at the end of March 1950, Gaston was twenty-eight years old, Françoise twenty-six. She had given birth to a daughter, Frédérique, two years before. Supporting the couple with his earnings as guide, Gaston had begun, if rather tentatively, to realize his ambitions as a writer. In 1946 he had published a book for aspiring climbers called L’Apprenti Montagnard; in 1949, a picture book about the Calanques.

  Two days after the press conference at the CAF, culminating in the pledge of unquestioning obedience to their leader, the Annapurna team met at Orly airport to board the first of a series of planes that would eventually disgorge them in New Delhi. Françoise, there to see her husband off, remembered the moment vividly.

  “I was standing behind a glass window. Just before they got on the plane, I saw Maurice [Herzog] hand Gaston a contract to sign. I saw Gaston read it, then I saw them arguing.”

  If the oath of obedience had come to Rébuffat as a shock, the contract seemed a far more stunning blow. With rising incredulity, he read the legalese that forbade him from utilizing his Annapurna adventure for “publication in any form, public speeches, radio or television broadcasts, books, articles, interviews, conferences, official statements, published photos or films.” It was this coerced abnegation, designed by Devies and Herzog to keep the story of Annapurna the property of the expedition’s patron and its leader, sprung on the team at the very last moment, that Herzog obliquely alluded to in the pages of Annapurna as if it demonstrated the voluntary altruism of his teammates: “From the start every one of them knew that nothing belonged to him and that he must expect nothing on his return. Their only motive was a great ideal.”

  “Gaston came very close to turning around and leaving, right there, in the airport,” said Françoise. In the end, with the deepest reluctance, he signed.

  So, even before the expedition members left France, the team was torn by conflict and resentment. Lachenal was similarly disenchanted. It was a hardship for the three Chamonix guides to give up a season’s earnings to join the expedition. With two small sons of his own, Lachenal, and his wife, Adèle, felt the pinch. According to Françoise, the wives of all three guides were promised a pension of 400 francs a month for the duration of the expedition, but none of them received a sou.

  On April 2, in New Delhi, the climbers attended a reception at the French ambassador’s house. “High society dinner in a high society apartment,” Lachenal wrote dryly in his diary. “Bored me to tears.” In the Carnets du Vertige edited by Gérard Herzog and published in 1956 after Lachenal’s death, the latter sentence was suppressed.

  Rébuffat’s melancholy funk persisted during the long hike through the lowlands toward Annapurna. In a letter to Françoise, he complained: “I don’t even have a friend. I’ve sacrificed a lot for friendship, and today, in this adventure, in The Adventure, I am alone.”

  Remembering the silent pantomime she had witnessed through the glass window at the airport, as her husband and Herzog had vehemently argued over the contract, Françoise told me, “Everything went badly after that moment.”

  THREE

  Looking for Annapurna

  AS THEY SET OFF from the Indian border to trek north across Nepal toward the distant Himalaya, Herzog’s team faced a quandary that effectively doubled the difficulty of their mission. Unlike such mountains as K2, first attempted in 1902, or Nanga Parbat, even earlier, in 1895, Annapurna had never been reconnoitered (let alone attempted) by Westerners. As mountaineers had found out the hard way on other Himalayan peaks, simply sorting out an 8,000-meter peak’s defenses could exhaust the resources of the strongest expedition. Mount Everest, for instance, would be the goal of three full-fledged reconnaissances and seven all-out attempts before its summit fell to Hillary and Tenzing in 1953.

  Between 1950 and 1964, all fo
urteen 8,000-meter peaks in the world were first climbed, beginning with Annapurna in 1950 and ending with Shishapangma in 1964. One measure of the quality of the French achievement is that, within that roster of first ascents of the world’s highest mountains, only Annapurna would be climbed by the first expedition to reach its foot.

  Knowing how vexsome merely approaching an unknown mountain could prove, Devies and the Himalayan Committee had defined the team’s mandate as an attempt on either Annapurna or its neighbor, 26,811-foot Dhaulagiri (also previously unreconnoitered). Once they had acquainted themselves with the topography surrounding these two towering peaks, the team was to choose the easier of the objectives. For much of April and May 1950, Herzog’s men bent their best efforts toward getting to Dhaulagiri. Annapurna came almost as an afterthought.

  The approach to the mountains was fraught with setbacks. The usual porter strike materialized, to be solved by the Gurkha officer deputed by the Maharajah of Nepal to accompany the expedition, who beat a particularly obstreperous “coolie” and sent him fleeing as a lesson to the others. The Sherpas, who would prove so vital on the mountain, were more loyal. “It thrilled me,” wrote Herzog, with the unconscious condescension of his day, “to see these little, yellow men, with their plump muscles. . . . The expedition was to give them plenty of opportunity to show what they were made of.”

  Terray was afflicted with a persistent stomachache, Rébuffat with lassitude, headache, and insomnia. As they gained altitude, eventually surpassing the height of Mont Blanc (the highest any of the men except Ichac had been before), Herzog seemed to acclimatize better than his teammates.

  After fifteen days of trekking, the team reached the mountain village of Tukucha, equidistant between Dhaulagiri and Annapurna. Four days before, they had caught their first sight of Dhaulagiri, “an immense pyramid of ice, glittering in the sun like a crystal,” its remote summit 23,000 feet above their lowland trudge. The sight was both joyous and discouraging. “Just look at the east arête, on the right,” one team member blurted out. “Yes, it’s impossible,” rejoined another. (In Herzog’s text, which is rich in dialogue, the identities of the speakers often go unspecified.)

  The team used Tukucha as base, setting out, usually in pairs, to untangle the lay of the land and try to find a way to the foot of Dhaulagiri. It was now that they began to realize that their Indian Survey maps were seriously in error. On the map, the valley of the Dambush Khola, bent like an arm around a sharp elbow, led directly from Tukucha to the northeast face of the great mountain. In reality, a high ridge blocked the river’s headwaters, barring all access to Dhaulagiri from this side.

  In Annapurna, though suffering from various ailments and driven to distraction by their failures, the men keep up a jaunty banter and an unflagging optimism. Here, the art of Herzog’s writing serves the tale well. Clearly he has made up the copious dialogue that laces the pages; in his hospital bed months after the expedition, he cannot have remembered every exchange down to the exact word. Yet this dialogue has an air of authenticity; it sounds like climbers talking:

  “Good Lord! Look at that! A valley starting here—”

  “It’s not marked on the map,” said Ichac. “It’s an unknown valley.”

  “It runs down toward the north and divides into two great branches.”

  “No sign of Dhaula! It couldn’t be that pale imitation, that fake mountain, in front of us, could it?”

  (This version of the passage, retranslated literally from the French to capture its colloquial ease, avoids the arch Anglicisms of the 1952 English translation.)

  Does it matter that, in Herzog’s concocted dialogue, no individual voice emerges? That all nine climbers sound alike? Not to most readers, for the chat serves as it should, to advance a story that gains momentum with every page.

  Herzog does not entirely whitewash the personal conflicts that marred the weeks of reconnaissance. Rather, he presents a series of vignettes that all resolve in the same fashion: with the wisdom of his own leadership prevailing over the impetuous antics of the others. On an attempt to climb through an icefall toward Dhaulagiri, Herzog, Rébuffat, and Lachenal, each roped to a Sherpa, blunder into a nightmare, as a violent hailstorm hits and the seracs around them creak and shudder. Both Rébuffat and Lachenal counsel retreat. Then, with his characteristic wild haste, Lachenal starts tearing down the slope, dragging his Sherpa with him.

  Herzog, alarmed, yells after him: “Watch out for the Sherpas! Don’t let them fall off.” Lachenal does not slow down.

  Later, in safety, Lachenal laments only the missed opportunity to reach a benign plateau above the icefall: “We were so close!”

  His leader admonishes: “You can’t push on when it’s like that.” Then Herzog moralizes: “I realized that even if we had reached the plateau, it would have been madness to try to bring the main body up this way. The risk was far too great.”

  What takes the edge off these scoldings and I-told-you-sos is Herzog’s magnanimity. At every turn, he acknowledges his teammates’ skill on rock and ice. Of Lachenal and Terray, for instance, he pauses to observe: “This celebrated partnership, which had conquered all the finest and most dangerous of our alpine faces, was today living up to its reputation.” Terray’s stoic perseverance particularly impresses Herzog. “The next day,” he writes of an early march, “Lionel Terray set a rapid pace from the start. During his illness he was so weak that he had only been able to walk with considerable effort, but now it was as much as we could do to follow him.”

  The chapters in Annapurna that cover the demoralizing search for an approach to either Dhaulagiri or Annapurna subscribe to an old, deeply satisfying narrative convention. Like Odysseus’s shipmates, Herzog’s partners dodge one lethal trap after another. They are headstrong individualists and brilliant climbers, but what holds the team together is its common pursuit of a goal as precious as life itself.

  How different sounds the kindred musing of Rébuffat, in one of his letters to Françoise:

  [The others] have the air of being completely at ease in their egotism. Among us there is no team spirit, only a necessary politeness. What hypocrisy! . . . So, I live, I exert myself, I give, and I receive. But here, we are not on the same shore as one another. Here, we are reunited to bag an 8,000-er. The rest doesn’t matter.

  Rébuffat was homesick: he missed Françoise and his small daughter badly. With him he carried his wife’s last letter, pausing to reread it now and then. It seemed to him that the other married men on the team—Lachenal, Terray, and Couzy—hardly suffered at all from the absence of their wives.

  Back home on his native turf, Rébuffat could be a gregarious and charismatic companion. As a self-made intellectual, he loved to discuss philosophical and artistic matters. Here on the expedition, however, he withdrew into his melancholy privacy. Despite his deep friendship with Terray and Lachenal, he could not find on Annapurna that distillation of perfect comradeship that had floated him through the cold bivouacs on the Walker Spur and the Cima Grande.

  In his own very different way, Lachenal marched, during the weeks of reconnaissance, along a similar gauntlet of irritations and disappointments. His diary, always plainspoken, clipped, and pragmatic, never blinks at the tensions and follies of the group’s effort. Early during the approach, after he had settled in at the night’s campsite, Lachenal impatiently waited for the rest of the entourage—porters, Sherpas, and fellow “sahibs.” Finally the caravan arrived. “They had the courage to come all the way up to here on ponyback,” he wrote sarcastically, “which seemed to me at first grotesque, then completely contra-indicated, since most of the other team members are totally lacking in conditioning.”

  On April 9, Lachenal dryly recorded Easter Sunday: “For us, a day like all the others, except a few more hassles than usual.” The sentence was suppressed in the 1956 Carnets du Vertige.

  Even the most laconic daily jottings (“Evening, the eternal chicken and potatoes”) were excised from the Carnets, as edited by Gérar
d Herzog. Yet the sentence, “At noon, we opened a bottle of white wine, which devilishly reminded us of our native land, truly the most beautiful we have seen to date,” was preserved.

  On April 11, Lachenal witnessed an eerie rite:

  I am going to attend the burial of a young girl who was carried on a stretcher. A hole is dug near the river, the girl put inside it, and after a little ceremony, covered with stones. The body will be carried away by the floodwaters to fertilize the plains of Nepal. [Suppressed]

  Lachenal’s record has the virtues of a true diary, in that it notes the homely, quotidian verities by which the party measured out its progress. From Herzog alone, for instance, the reader would little guess how constantly beset the team was with annoying ailments and illnesses.

  18 April. Everybody has been sick, except Schatz and Noyelle [the liaison officer]. Tonight Lionel [Terray] had really bad indigestion with diarrhea. I woke up feeling fine. I ate and then I took off. En route the urge to vomit and diarrhea made me stop several times. . . . Today was for me the most terrible since we started.

  23 April. Lionel was sick all night, with constant stomachache.

  25 April. . . . Always I have a bit of diarrhea. This morning I shat in my pants—not pleasant.

  29 April. . . . I have a boil that started on my sternum. I just hope it’s the only one.

  30 April. . . . My boil only gets bigger, and I already have some ganglions under my arms.

  (All these passages were suppressed, as if to admit to developing a boil on one’s chest were unworthy of the crème de la crème of French mountaineering.)

  Likewise Lachenal’s candid observations of the native Nepalis the team passed daily. “The women seem to have very small breasts—even, if I’m not mistaken, not to have breasts at all.” (The second half of the sentence was suppressed.)