True Summit

by David Roberts

  If in Herzog’s text, the nine climbers blur together, all hearty team players, all knights of the sky, the occasional passages in Lachenal’s diary hinting at interpersonal conflict or quirks of character bring his comrades to individual life. “The night was pretty short, because in our tent Lionel held forth at length on his youth, his love life, and a bit about his career as a skier. We had to go to sleep at last at 1:00 A.M.” “I took two sleeping pills to try to sleep, which gave me very funny dreams: I caught Thivierge [a fellow Chamonix guide] and Momo [Herzog] stealing cans of food!” (Both passages suppressed.)

  One of the most interesting entries in Lachenal’s diary hints at a serious argument between Rébuffat and himself. “With Gaston, discussions take on a macabre character,” he wrote, softening the conflict with an edge of irony. “It’s important not to have them too often, because they engender a certain melancholy, a nostalgia for our return, which puts a bad aspect on the adventure.” Referring to their dispute, he writes, “We talked again about the business on the central spur of the Grandes Jorasses with the College. Gaston stuck to his position. He’s wrong.”

  With typical bluntness, Lachenal thus brought up a painful episode in the men’s shared past. In 1947, Lachenal and Rébuffat had led a group of five aspirant guides from the Collège des Praz, an elite guides’ school near Chamonix, on a climb of the central spur on the great north face of the Grandes Jorasses—a route only marginally less serious than the Walker to its left, of which Rébuffat had made the second ascent two years before. On the descent, the team bivouacked just below the summit on the south side of the mountain. Just as the team settled in to sleep on their ledge, a huge block of rock came loose thirty feet above. Rébuffat and the aspirant Georges Michel were knocked from their perch. Michel plunged 1,500 feet to his death. In mid-fall, Rébuffat miraculously jammed himself into a chimney thirty feet below, saving his life at the cost of a broken foot, kneecap, and rib.

  In Starlight and Storm, Rébuffat narrated that accident in an oddly dreamy passage. For the poet of the Alps, death was not easy to countenance: on the following day, the guides found their protégé’s corpse lying face up on the glacier.

  The expression on his face was serene. The morning before, as we started up the spur, he had said to me, “Gaston, think of doing the north face of the Grandes Jorasses! I’ve dreamed of this all my life.” And he added with a laugh: “After, I don’t mind dying.”

  What Rébuffat neglects to mention is that at the last minute, he had talked Lachenal out of an easier route. The central spur had been climbed only four times before, never by Frenchmen. Apprised of the formidable objective Rébuffat proposed, the aspirants were at first taken aback; then, swayed by their faith in their tutors, they voiced wholehearted enthusiasm.

  The passage in Lachenal’s Annapurna diary seems to indicate that, three years later, he held Rébuffat at least indirectly responsible for the death of Georges Michel. Perhaps he felt his friend had let personal ambition get the better of his judgment. Whether other peers—including the school’s director, the premier alpinist Jean Franco—were of like mind has escaped the record. (All mention of this debate on the night of April 28, 1950, was expunged from Lachenal’s Carnets published six years later.)

  The posthumous censoring of Lachenal’s diary is so extreme that it cannot be explained simply as stemming from a concern that Lachenal’s version might contradict Herzog’s. Many of the most vivid vignettes having to do with native peoples have been excised. One day Lachenal attends a funeral of another young native girl, at the culmination of which a priest cuts open her corpse “from the vagina to the breasts”; extracts, Lachenal thinks, her liver; then sews the body closed again before burning it on a pyre. In a remote village, the sahibs are offered girls for four rupees apiece. When they turn down the proposition (mainly, Lachenal indicates, “because these were very dirty Tibetans”), the locals offer them young boys. Both scenes were left out of the Carnets as originally published.

  One might argue that such raw vignettes would have been routinely excised by publishers in the 1950s. Yet it is not merely such shocking episodes as the sahibs being offered children for sex that were censored in the Carnets. Most of the common fleshly details that underline the human vulnerability of the teammates—their boils and headaches, their diarrhea and vomiting—were expunged as well. Knights of the sky do not suffer from diarrhea. And any hint of interpersonal conflict, such as Lachenal’s quarrel with Rébuffat over the Grandes Jorasses, was similarly left out.

  On the typescript of the diary that Michel Guérin rescued from oblivion appear the marginal jottings of Lucien Devies and Maurice Herzog. Most of the excision marks bear Devies’s hand. The final pruning and rearranging were done by Gérard Herzog, who was a professional editor.

  When the unexpurgated Carnets appeared in 1996, journalists demanded of Maurice Herzog an explanation of the censoring that took place four decades before. “If none of those passages were published,” he told Montagnes magazine, “it’s because they didn’t interest the editors.”

  One passage “the editors” did not suppress gives the lie to Rébuffat’s intuition that he was the only married team member to miss his wife. On May 16, nearly seven weeks gone from France, Lachenal paused beside a pretty stream in a calcite gorge. “I filled my hand with water, looked at it carefully, then threw it back into the torrent, telling it to evaporate and transport itself in a cloud all the way to Praz where this bit of water might fall on the head of my wife.”

  By May 14, however, such private, happy moments were few and far between for the beleaguered team. They had spent most of those seven weeks trying to get to Dhaula (as the team had nicknamed the great mountain) and find a feasible route up it, only to be thwarted at every hand. “Morale is really low,” Lachenal noted as early as May 5. Terray had came back disgusted from a reconnaissance up the Dambush Khola: “Lionel’s first words were of Dhaula: ‘You can just stick it up your ass.’ ” (Needless to say, this outburst appears not in Annapurna but in Lachenal’s unexpurgated diary.) Terray went so far as to venture the opinion that Dhaulagiri would never be climbed. (The mountain finally succumbed in 1960 to a Swiss team led by Max Eiselin.)

  Impressed by his power on the trail and his ability to carry very heavy loads, the porters had nicknamed Terray “the strong man.” Throughout those seven weeks, even while ill, he had pushed the search as vigorously as any of his teammates. Now even the strong man seemed ready to throw in the towel.

  The monsoon could arrive within as little as two weeks, and the expedition had accomplished nothing grander than sorting out the errors on the Indian Survey maps. The team faced the prospect of returning to France empty-handed, without even having set foot on either of the 8,000-meter peaks that Devies had sent them off to conquer.

  WHEN TERRAY HAD MET LACHENAL five years before Annapurna, one of the great partnerships in mountaineering history was born. Its inception, however, was far from auspicious. During the last months of the war, in the spring of 1945, Terray was changing trains in Annecy. A “poorly dressed young man,” as Terray later recalled, came up to him, pushing a bicycle with one hand and holding a can of milk in the other, and said, “Aren’t you Lionel Terray?”

  When Lachenal offered his name, Terray realized that the two had been briefly introduced on the streets of Chamonix three years before. Then Lachenal had been wearing his Jeunesse et Montagne uniform, which made him “a rather more dashing figure” than the apparent vagabond in the train station (“The youth’s rather pitiful condition made me wonder if he was out of work”).

  Lachenal’s reputation as a climber had reached Terray’s ears. The two adjourned to a bistro for a beer. Yet at the outset of their chat, a fundamental difference in values nearly quashed any chance of friendship. Though no Gaullist, Terray was a patriot. With Germany in retreat, he had joined the underground Compagnie Stéphane, a crack outfit devoted to guerrilla warfare in the mountains. Terray would later recall, “The eight mon
ths I spent in [the company] were among the most wonderful in my whole life.” In the middle of winter, Terray and his comrades climbed technical routes in the Alps to gain aeries from which they might direct grenades and bullets against high Nazi outposts. Several of his friends were killed, and he had a number of close calls.

  Now, in the bistro, as Terray later put it, “I extolled the thrilling life we were leading on the Alpine Front.” Instead of agreeing, Lachenal “vehemently proclaimed his horror of war and of the army.” Lachenal was a pacifist, who, rather than face the compulsory labor service his country demanded, had fled to Switzerland.

  Terray left that first meeting with Lachenal with mixed feelings: “I liked his uncomplicated passion for the mountains, but his way of talking and his anti-militarism rather irritated me.”

  Terray himself, however, harbored a deep ambivalence about the war. The mountain campaigns he pursued so skillfully seemed in an important sense to corrupt his beloved climbing. Even as he prepared to fire upon a company of Germans who, unaware of the French patrol that had climbed above them, sunbathed and skied around their outpost, his feelings were torn. “After a few minutes of this cruel game,” he later wrote, “we grew weary of shooting at men who were unable to defend themselves and withdrew, satisfied at having carried out our mission.”

  After a pivotal alpine battle at Pointe de Clairy, Terray “went back down to the valley through the peaceful forests full of disgust.” The battle had given him an epiphany.

  Spring was beginning to burgeon. Creamy snowdrops speckled the ground, and the air was full of odors evoking peace and love. As I descended through this poetic landscape I realized that the hell I had just left, in which so many men had meaninglessly lost their lives, could never again have anything in common with the naively sporting game I had played through the winter months. The whole abomination of war was suddenly and overwhelmingly apparent to me.

  In the summer of 1945, with Europe at peace for the first time in six years, Terray went climbing with Lachenal. On the very first route they shared, Terray was awestruck at Lachenal’s technique:

  I began to admire his extraordinary ease of movement. Whether on ice or on snowed-up, loose rocks, he already gave proof of that disconcerting facility, that feline elegance which was to make him the greatest mountaineer of his generation.

  The first major accomplishment for the pair came the next day, with the second ascent of the east face of the Moine. To their surprise, Terray and Lachenal reached the summit by midday. They basked in sun on top, staring across at the 4,000-foot north face of the Grandes Jorasses. That very day, they knew, Rébuffat was attempting the second ascent of the Walker Spur with Edouard Frendo.

  They discussed Gaston’s chances on the imposing route, rating them at well less than fifty-fifty. They spoke in hushed tones of the dazzling deeds of Ricardo Cassin, who had pioneered the Walker in 1938. At the time, both Terray and Lachenal were twenty-four years old.

  If Rébuffat succeeded, Terray tentatively mused, he might be interested in having a crack at the Walker himself. “But the great problem is to find someone to go with . . . would you be interested?”

  Lachenal was dizzied by the idea. “Are you kidding? The Walker’s my dream. But do you think I’m up to it? I haven’t done much yet.”

  “You may not have done much, but I’ve been watching you these last two days. You’re a natural, it’s enough to make anybody jealous. Done. If they get up, we’ll have a shot.”

  In that moment, the partnership was forged.

  LIONEL TERRAY WAS BORN IN 1921, the same year as Rébuffat and Lachenal, in Grenoble. His parents were grands bourgeois with instinctively aristocratic tastes. Terray’s father had started a chemical engineering business in Brazil, grown modestly rich, and at the age of forty chucked his job in industry for a career in medicine. Terray’s mother had studied painting and made some ambitious horseback trips into the Brazilian wilderness.

  The family house, a ramshackle three-story château in the oldest part of Grenoble, backed up against the limestone spur at whose foot the town spreads. It made a halcyon playground for young Lionel. “I grew there almost without constraint,” he wrote in 1961, “running through the woods, clambering the rocks, trapping rabbits, foxes, and rats, shooting blackbirds, thrushes, sparrows and sparrowhawks.” Using guns and knives his parents had brought back from Brazil, Lionel played cowboys and Indians with his schoolmates in the woods. With one friend, Terray skinned the rats he had trapped, dried and tanned the hides, then sewed them into “picturesque costumes which, we hoped, resembled those of Attila’s Huns.”

  Terray’s parents had been avid skiers, his father the first Frenchman to master the telemark turn. But when Lionel showed an interest in climbing, they voiced a withering disapproval. “It’s a stupid sport,” said his mother, “which consists of dragging yourself up rocks with your hands, feet and teeth!” His father inveighed, “A man must be completely crazy to wear himself out climbing a mountain, at the risk of breaking his neck, when there isn’t even a hundred franc note to be picked up on the summit.”

  A cousin of Terray’s had been crippled in a climbing accident. His parents held up this tragedy as a lesson for their son. Seeing German students hung with gear in the streets of Grenoble, Terray père would sneer, “Take a good look at those idiots. A lot of good they’ll have done themselves when they’re walking on crutches like your cousin René!”

  Such vehement opposition only reinforced the young Lionel’s interest in climbing. When he was twelve, his mother took him for the school holidays to Chamonix. The boy was stunned by his first close encounter with really big mountains, as opposed to the limestone préalpes near Grenoble. One of his friends, the housekeeper’s daughter, Georgette, three or four years Lionel’s elder, belonged to a hiking club. The ambitious young montagnard talked Georgette into a secret attempt on the Dent Gérard, a fairly serious climb in the Vercors. “Perhaps I have never come as close to death as I did on that day,” recalled Terray at the age of forty, after two decades of extreme climbing all over the world. On the crux of this desperate ascent, Lionel used his rope to haul Georgette bodily up a pitch he had just almost fallen off himself, succeeding “despite the sobs and protests of my half-suffocated companion.”

  At boarding school, Terray became a champion skier, though in his own estimation, “I was a very bad student. . . . [T]he trouble came from a complete incapacity to concentrate: I was at the school physically, but my mind could not succeed in settling there.” Addicted to a vigorous outdoor life, Lionel grew up strong, rugged, almost burly. Though a family legend reported that as a baby he had such a full head of hair that his parents had to call in a barber at the age of four days, by the time he was twenty-one he was going bald. By late adolescence, Lionel had a round, powerful countenance and a piercing gaze; he was quite handsome, with a certain Italianate sensuality about his mouth and eyes.

  Having survived his ordeal on the Dent Gérard, Lionel more sensibly hired a guide on his next trip to Chamonix. There followed some stiff classic climbs, including the traverse of the Grépon. By now, his parents had separated, and his mother had moved to Chamonix, where she owned a small chalet. Lionel was installed in a boarding school in town, but he devoted all his efforts to skiing and climbing. His schoolwork had been so poor that he had to repeat a year, and he knew the chances were all but nil of his ever gaining his baccalauréat. The turning point came when he was invited to the French national ski championships in the Pyrenees in the middle of the school term. The “juvenile prison” in which he was incarcerated refused to give Lionel leave, so he went to the championships anyway, knowing the school would expel him.

  At this point in Terray’s life, his father in effect disowned him. Writing in maturity, Lionel could afford to treat this breach with irony: [M]y father, by now completely dispirited at having engendered such a monster, seemed not to take much further interest in my fate.” At the time, however, his father’s disdain sorely cost th
e young man, and Terray would devote an inordinate effort after he became a guide and famous climber to proving to his distant father that he had after all amounted to something.

  After the war broke out, Terray joined Jeunesse et Montagne, in whose ranks, in 1942, he met Rébuffat. To Terray’s astonishment, this tall, craggy Marseillais had become at the same age a mountaineer even more ambitious than himself. They talked of wild projects, then climbed together, their efforts culminating in the perilous but brilliant first ascent of the Col du Caïman.

  It would have been logical had Terray and Rébuffat formed the perfect partnership that Terray later formed with Lachenal. Yet temperamentally, the men were not a good match, and that disparity emerged on snow and rock. “The climbs we did together,” Terray reflected in 1961, “. . . were quite good for those days but not really exceptional . . . [E]ven taking into account poor conditions and equipment our times were quite slow.”

  Rébuffat “was an extremely good rock climber,” Terray later wrote.

  By contrast, however, he was deficient in some of the qualities which distinguish the mountaineer from the climber, such as a sense of direction and ease of movement on mixed ground and snow and ice. I was completely his opposite. I was rather nervous and lacking in confidence and, apart from occasional flashes, a very mediocre rock climber. But I had an unusual sense of direction and was completely at my ease on all types of high mountain terrain.

  Quixotically, instead of forming the ideal cordée, or rope team, during the middle years of the war, Rébuffat and Terray bought a farm together in Les Houches, a hamlet just down the Arve valley from Chamonix. Their bizarre experiment in pastoralism was an attempt, as Terray put it, “to find a way of living in the mountains, so that I could continue climbing and skiing.” But Rébuffat had had, since childhood, a mortal fear of cows. In addition, both men were far too restless to settle down to the grinding discipline of farm life. The agricultural lark ended in 1944.