True Summit

by David Roberts

  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.

  FOUR

  Breakthrough

  THE INDIAN SURVEY 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:

  At 4:30 the following morning Lachenal and I once more formed the partnership which had so often brought us success. . . . We were back on our old semi-divine form, each reacting to the other so as to double his normal skill and strength almost in defiance of the laws of nature. In this supercharged state we literally played with the obstacles, running up them like cats.

  The climbing, however, was harder than either man had anticipated, and snow flurries and clouds
made the going all the more tricky. One pitch that Lachenal led, on steep rock coated with a skin of ice called verglas, was rated, both men agreed, Grade V—a very stiff pitch for that era in the Alps, and almost certainly the hardest passage that had ever been climbed at an altitude of more than 18,000 feet. At the end of the day’s probe up the spur, the indomitable Terray wanted to bivouac and continue on the morrow, but Lachenal talked him into descending.

  Lachenal’s own diary entry for May 18, written that evening or the next morning, rather than after an interval of eleven years, bears none of the ebullience of Terray’s account. No hint of any nostalgic glow at the reuniting of the old cordée emerges in Lachenal’s laconic phrases. Instead, he is fretful and dubious. A chilling sleet makes the rock-climbing more hazardous, and a traverse across rotten slabs seems “extremely exposed.” On the descent, Lachenal notes, the pair make three dangerous rappels, two of them anchored by bad pitons. The sleet turns to steady snow. The two men regain their camp on the moraine “completely soaked.”

  Given the difficulty of the climbing, Lachenal wanted no more of the Northwest Spur. But the stubborn Terray had only grown more optimistic in the face of the severe pitches he and Lachenal had so skillfully led. Against Herzog’s objection that the team could never get the Sherpas up the spur, he argued that (in his own words) “with the aid of eight or ten fixed ropes it would be perfectly possible to get Sherpas up to the point we had reached, and probably also to Point 19,685 ft., since the snow ridge did not look particularly difficult.”

  Herzog was evidently convinced, for after a rest day, he spent the next three days climbing with Terray to push the route up the Northwest Spur. Both men grossly underestimated its difficulty. “In the event,” wrote Terray ruefully in 1961, “it took Maurice and me three days of top-class climbing to reach even the first pinnacle of a fantastic ridge of purest snow lace, utterly invisible from below.” Four days of brilliant gymnastics had pushed the Frenchmen only into a cul-de-sac nearly 7,000 feet short of the summit. “We were beaten again. Days of mortal combat had led us to no more than an unheard-of little summit.”

  In 1961, with his decade of big-range mountaineering behind him, Terray could see his pigheaded enthusiasm for the Northwest Spur as the folly it was. In Conquistadors, he was unsparing: “What ignorance of Himalayan conditions! What an accumulation of errors of judgment!”

  Yet for all that, Terray retained a certain pride in his effort on the spur: “Nothing will ever surpass those desperate days when I gave myself up to the struggle with all the strength and courage at my command.” To this day, the full Northwest Spur remains unclimbed.

  HERZOG’S OWN ACCOUNT of the five days of wasted effort exemplifies his penchant for the retrospective I-told-you-so. In Annapurna, he presents himself as skeptical from the start about the Northwest Spur. In the face of his demurrals, “Lachenal and Terray stormed away at me. They thought we ought to decide to attack at once, and kept on insisting that this was the right route.” The leader chalks up the pair’s “wild enthusiasm” to “a very excitable state after their day’s climbing.”

  “I’ve no intention of hazarding the whole strength of the expedition on a route we know so little about,” Herzog quotes himself as saying. Yet as if to humor Terray, he agrees to the three days’ push on the spur. In his detailed account of the fierce climbing the duo performed, Herzog seems to lapse into the same blithe enthusiasm as the headstrong guide. Yet at the high point, staring at their defeat, he concludes: “No long discussion was necessary. Even if no other obstacle cropped up to hinder our progress . . . it would have been madness to launch an expedition on this route.”

  The true skeptic regarding the Northwest Spur was undoubtedly Rébuffat. Despite his lanky, acrobatic grace on vertical rock, the guide from Marseille saw the spur as a seductive distraction from the start. To him, the self-evident best hope of attaining the relatively low-angled north face of Annapurna was to climb the glacier that sprawled west from unseen basins to the very foot of the spur. Even as Terray and Herzog flailed away at the difficult pitches on the spur, Rébuffat set off with a now-disillusioned Lachenal to scout a route among the crevasses and seracs. The choice of line of attack was Rébuffat’s, and it turned out to be a sublimely canny piece of route-finding, leading without major difficulties up to a snowy plateau from which the north face began to unfold.

  For the rest of his life, Rébuffat harbored a bitterness toward Herzog for not sufficiently acknowledging the critical jump-start in the expedition’s fortunes that his reconnaissance up the glacier had provided. Writes Ballu, his biographer:

  Rébuffat felt a great satisfaction at his discovery of this “favorable and rational” itinerary. Thanks to his instincts, he had, he thought, perfectly exercised his métier as guide, by finding this route that, on the face of it, would become the route.

  Indeed, in Annapurna, Herzog seems to appropriate the intuition of the glacier route from Rébuffat, crediting himself with ordering the reconnaissance:

  As I looked once more at the glacier, and the enormous icefall down below, I felt in my bones that if there were a way up Annapurna, that was where it lay. So another plan began to take shape in my mind. Rébuffat and Lachenal . . . [would] attempt to force a way—which to all appearances would be found along the right bank—up the glacier to the plateau.

  Having topped out on the plateau at 11:15 A.M. on May 22, Lachenal and Rébuffat immediately scribbled a note for the Sherpa Adjiba to carry down to Herzog. Though it is not clear which man wrote the note, Lachenal gives its whole text in his diary, and the impatient exhortations of its closing lines sound like that most driven and impetuous of climbers:

  Come up, and bring supplies as quickly as possible, for we are expecting good weather and a solid route almost certainly climbable in a few days. Come en masse with all the Sherpas and the maximum food and gear. We think we need to act very fast.

  So too does Lachenal’s voice speak in the single ironic sentence the note contains: “The sluggards are ready to dash.” The context of the remark is obscure. Had Herzog earlier denigrated some of his teammates as “sluggards”? No epithet could have more sharply insulted Lachenal, who seemed to run on sheer nervous energy, and it would have been like the man to throw the derogation back in Herzog’s face.

  Immediately after quoting the text of the note, Lachenal wrote in his diary, “We are very happy. Today is the first day in the Himalaya that I felt this much pleasure.”

  During the previous week, in fact, Lachenal had often been in a terrible mood, wracked with annoyance and irritation, lashing out at what he perceived as the idiocies of his teammates. On May 19, he noted of a campsite ordered by Herzog: “A huge waste of time, which disgusts me.” Of a parallel reconnaissance of the glacier along its left-hand side, ordered by Herzog and undertaken by Schatz, he remarked, “an exploration that seemed completely ridiculous to me.” (Both passages were suppressed in the 1956 edition of Carnets.)

  Over another campsite that Lachenal favored but Herzog disdained, a “bitter altercation” raged. On May 20, still bent on attacking the Northwest Spur, Terray and Lachenal had hiked up through a snowstorm to find Rébuffat and Herzog lolling in their tent at the foot of the spur at 10:00 A.M. Lachenal exploded in fury: “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “Can’t you see the snow?” one of the “sluggards” rejoined.

  “We’ve seen it as much as you! More than you, since we’ve been climbing since dawn to get here.”

  Lachenal persisted in his tirade, calling his teammates “a bunch of schoolgirls” and “weaklings.”

  Rébuffat protested, “It would be crazy to go up in this. I have no desire to ‘come off’ here.”

  “We’ll show you who’s going to ‘come off’!” Without another word, Lachenal flung himself at the dangerous first pitch, climbing with a reckless abandon born of his anger.

  Curiously, this scene appears not in Lachenal’s diary, but in Annapurna. Though Herzog m
arvels at Lachenal’s skill, he is dismayed by his fury. “I wasn’t at all happy,” Herzog writes: “it seemed to me that it was wrong to take such risks in the present conditions.” In the end, the tableau, which on the surface of it takes the chance of painting the author and his fellow sluggard Rébuffat as not as tough or daring as the stalwart cordée of Lachenal and Terray, serves to build up a portrait of Lachenal that subtly accretes through the book—of a genius-madman of ascent, unmatched at sheer ability but nearly devoid of judgment, his impetuous rages driving him beyond reasonable human limits.

  MARCEL SCHATZ AND JEAN COUZY were a cordée as well, though a far less experienced one than Terray and Lachenal. Only a couple of years younger than the three stellar Chamonix guides, these two were “amateurs” like Herzog. Couzy, who hailed from the Southwest of France, was a promising aeronautical engineer; Schatz, a Parisian, was a physicist who earned his living as manager of one branch of his father’s tailoring business.

  Schatz would quit mountaineering altogether less than a year after Annapurna. After turning thirty, he returned to his research, which he performed so capably that he eventually had a hand in the development of the French atom bomb.

  Couzy, on the other hand, went on to become one of the greatest mountaineers of his generation. On Makalu, the world’s fifth-highest peak, in 1955, he was the “tiger,” the climber whose will drove the whole party to success on the only other 8,000-meter peak first climbed by Frenchmen.

  In 1950 on Annapurna, however, these two alpinists played a largely supporting role, accomplishing important reconnaissances (including the key penetration of the Miristi Khola), but leading virtually none of the pitches on the mountain itself. (They would, to be sure, participate in a heroic act of rescue on the descent.) Perhaps the pair were simply in awe of the three great guides; perhaps they were further intimidated by the strong personalities of their four elders. (Along with the others, moreover, they had sworn unflinching obedience to Herzog.) Couzy in particular never seemed fully to acclimatize. In all the accounts of the expedition, he lurks in the background, a silent collaborator who gets along with his teammates by never thrusting his own character to the fore.