True Summit

by David Roberts

  Abruptly, the clouds cleared for a moment. Terray saw Lachenal once more, seemingly even farther below the tent than he had been at first sighting. Without even putting on his crampons, Terray seized his axe and launched into a high-speed glissade, sliding on his boot soles. The crust was so hard that the ski champion from Grenoble had trouble stopping.

  It was evident that Lachenal had taken a long fall. He was missing his ice axe, one crampon, his hat, and his gloves. In a state of near hysteria, Lachenal had only one thought. “My feet are frozen stiff up to the ankles,” he told Terray. “Get me down to Camp II quickly, so Oudot can give me an injection. Quick, let’s get going.”

  To try to descend now, with darkness gathering, in full storm, would have meant certain death. Yet Terray could not reason with his friend.

  When he heard me starting to argue, he suddenly grabbed my ice axe and started running across the slope. His single crampon impeded him, however, and he crumpled onto the snow weeping and screaming: “We must get down. I’ve got to have some injections or I’ll be ruined for life. They’ll cut off my feet.”

  At last Terray wore down his partner’s resistance. Chopping steps with desperate energy, he cut a staircase back up toward the tent. Lachenal followed, literally crawling on hands and knees.

  Inside the tent, Terray tried to unlace Lachenal’s boots, but they were frozen and intractable. Eventually he had to cut them open with his knife. “My heart sank at the sight of his feet inside, white and utterly insensible.” Eleven years later, Terray recalled his thoughts at that moment:

  Annapurna, the first eight-thousander, was climbed, but was it worth such a price? I had been ready to give my life for the victory, yet now it suddenly seemed too dearly bought.

  Thus the account in Conquistadors. Once more, Herzog’s version dovetails closely with Terray’s. “My feet are frostbitten,” he quotes Lachenal raving to his friend. “Take me down . . . take me down, so that Oudot can see to me.” Lachenal, Herzog confirms, “was obsessed by the fear of amputation.”

  Lachenal’s own account of his fall (written, apparently, within two or three days) is vivid in its details:

  A little before arriving at Camp V, I took a fall of 150 meters, due to what cause, I don’t know. Throughout the fall, I had time to say to myself, “This is it, this time I’ve wiped myself out.” After turning over and over again in the air, getting stripped of one of my crampons, my ice axe, my gloves, and my hat, for no reason I stopped, stupefied. Completely transfixed with cold, my hands frozen. I still had my pack. I thrust my hands inside it and started yelling for help, incapable as I was of climbing by myself back up to the tents.

  No one came! It was a long time. The occupants of the tents had to put their boots back on. Between two patches of fog I saw Lionel descending toward me. I wanted to descend at least to the next camp [Camp IV]. He convinced me that I wasn’t in good enough shape for that. I had a great fear that in the morning we wouldn’t be able to find the route. Finally, I climbed back up with a great deal of trouble.

  With darkness upon them, the four survivors huddled in their tents. Terray brewed hot drinks long into the night, as he and Rébuffat tirelessly performed what was then considered the necessary torture prescribed for saving frozen digits. Each took the stiff end of a rope and lashed away for hours, Terray whipping Lachenal’s toes, Rébuffat Herzog’s toes and fingers. All they accomplished, as medical science would later learn, was to exacerbate the damage.

  IN APRIL 1999, I interviewed Maurice Herzog in Paris. He had turned eighty just two and a half months before. By now, he and Francis de Noyelle, the expedition’s liaison officer, were the only surviving French members of the 1950 expedition.

  We met in Herzog’s posh office on the Rue de Louvre. Traffic delayed his arrival, and as I waited for some forty minutes, having been ushered by Herzog’s assistant into his inner sanctum, I noted the furnishings. The huge brown desk behind which Herzog habitually sat had a brass nameplate perched on it. On the floor, before the black-and-white marble fireplace, spread a luxuriant potted orchid. An original painting by the alpine artist and cartoonist Samivel hung on one wall, a framed and signed photo of de Gaulle on another. One bookshelf was wholly given over to editions of Annapurna in various languages.

  Herzog arrived, nattily dressed in suit, vest, and tie. As he offered his apologies for being late, he shook my hand vigorously, and I had an instant of squeamishness as I clasped the shortened stumps of his fingers. Herzog installed himself behind his desk. Through much of our hour together, he laid his hands on the desktop facing me, or brought them together in a low arch, as if praying.

  Remarkably handsome in his ninth decade, Herzog spoke lucidly in French and without hesitation. A jackhammer tearing up the sidewalk outside drowned out some of his responses, which I had to ask him to repeat. He seemed patient, open, sincere, as though his only wish were to answer my questions. An old-fashioned courtesy radiated from this dignified man.

  It had been three years since the publication of Ballu’s biography of Rébuffat and Guérin’s edition of Lachenal’s diary, three years of controversy and reexamination. Had the furor troubled his sleep?

  Not at all, he maintained. “I have a clear conscience,” he said, “and the experience of the truth. No one has doubted what I wrote.”

  The remark puzzled me. In the wake of the recent publications every mountainering journalist who had taken up the issue had expressed doubts about the whole truth of Annapurna.

  Gradually we edged back toward the events of June 3, 1950. On the summit, as Herzog had made plain in Annapurna, Lachenal had been consumed with a frenzy to descend at once, while he himself lingered, awash in his beatific trance, attaching the various flags to his ice axe for summit photos, staring at the horizon.

  Now Herzog said something that dumbfounded me. “The hour on the summit didn’t exacerbate the frostbite. We were well protected. Losing the gloves didn’t cause it. The journalists always say that, but they’re wrong. I just put my hands in my pockets as I descended.

  “No, it was digging in the crevasse for our boots [two days later, on the morning of June 5] that caused the frostbite. Raking with my fingers in the snow. I knew I would freeze my hands. But we had to find the boots—otherwise we would have died.”

  What was going on here? I wondered. After forty-nine years of remembering that fateful day, had Herzog changed his story? In Annapurna, he had seemed unequivocally to blame the loss of his gloves (and his failure to remember to use the spare socks he had stashed in his pack) for the frostbite that would cost him his fingers. The sentence recording Terray’s and Rébuffat’s shock at seeing his frozen hands—“The other two stared at them in dismay—they realized the full seriousness of the injury”—said it all.

  In Annapurna, there had been no mention of sticking his hands in his pockets. Later, I read the opening chapter of L’Autre Annapurna, Herzog’s memoir that had appeared only the year before. In those pages, he retold the events of June 3, 4, and 5, and the story had indeed changed. No mention of dropping his gloves and watching them roll away. (In Annapurna, “The movement of those gloves was engraved in my sight as something irredeemable, against which I was powerless. The consequences might be most serious.”)

  Instead, L’Autre Annapurna contained a long passage about searching through the snow at the bottom of the crevasse, where the four men bivouacked through the night of June 4–5, as Herzog looked for the boots that alone would ensure his and Lachenal’s survival, frantically raking the snow with his fingers:

  My hands mattered little, if the boots could be recovered. . . . Each boot that I might recover promised me the life of my comrade or myself. The price, alas, would be my frozen fingers.

  Reading on in Herzog’s 1998 memoir, I came across another passage that was at odds with Annapurna. After Terray had glissaded to the rescue of the fallen Lachenal, late on the afternoon of June 3, the pair struggled back up to the tents at Camp V. Now Herzog recounted what Terra
y had said to him and Rébuffat on returning.

  In broken phrases, Lionel told us that Louis, collapsed in the snow at the edge of a crevasse, had refused to get up. He preferred to die nobly in the mountains in a rage rather than perish in the midst of this army in full rout. Despite his protests, regardless of his delirium, Lionel seized him with force and determination. Throwing caution to the winds, he dragged him up to camp, without hesitating to resort to invectives and even violence.

  This version of Lachenal’s behavior after the fall cannot be reconciled with the accounts in both Annapurna and Terray’s Conquistadors (which has Lachenal wildly demanding an immediate descent to Camp II to save his toes). It is even further afield from Lachenal’s own account, which attributes his frenzy to descend to a quite rational fear that the storm would wipe out the men’s tracks and leave them lost on the mountain. (Indeed, this is precisely what happened on June 4.)

  In his office, Herzog mused on the difference between his two books. “At one point we had the idea of each of us writing a chapter of the expedition book, each on his specialty,” Herzog told me. “Oudot on medicine, Ichac on cinematography. . . . If we had done that, the book would not have been so interesting. It would have sold maybe one thousand copies.

  “Why did it sell fifteen million copies? Annapurna is a sort of novel. It’s a novel, but a true novel.

  “It was easy to dictate it in the hospital. It came straight from my heart. I have a good memory. There were times when I was crying for myself as I dictated it, like at the bottom of the crevasse. As for the dialogue, sometimes I paraphrased, but I knew my comrades well. I could imagine them speaking. Even when I wasn’t there, I slipped in some dialogue.”

  I was uncertain how to understand this avowal. Did Herzog mean that, as a novel, Annapurna was not to be held to the standards of truth of a factual memoir? Or simply that the book read like a novel, which explained its immense popularity?

  About L’Autre Annapurna, Herzog insisted, “These are the feelings of fifty years later. The first book, Annapurna, was for the whole world. L’Autre Annapurna was written for me, to express myself. One is objective, the other subjective. The new book is what I feel now about all my adventures.”

  For weeks after my interview, I chewed on the bones of Herzog’s strange and provocative remarks. In those two critical discrepancies—concerning the cause of his frostbitten hands, and Lachenal’s behavior after the fall—I could discern three possible explanations.

  The first was that Herzog had simply started to become forgetful, misremembering events on which he had already gone clearly on record. The second was that the new version, in L’Autre Annapurna, was a deliberate attempt to manipulate a whole new generation of readers, many of whom had perhaps not read Annapurna.

  I laid to rest the first hypothesis: in his office, Herzog seemed too lucid to be forgetfully revising his own past. And the second seemed unlikely, too. Surely the discrepancies begged critics to accuse him of dishonesty. The new, more self-serving version might cast a better light on Herzog, but it was an open invitation to readers such as myself to call his rewriting bluff.

  The third possibility, I thought, was that this is indeed how memory works, in all its fallible reinvention of the past. After nearly fifty years, Herzog’s emotions about those dramatic days high on Annapurna had perhaps restructured his memories into what should have been. He should have lost his fingers not because of the stupid mistake of dropping his gloves, but by saving the companion whose diary would later impugn him, as he raked with bare hands through the snow, sacrificing his fingers to find the boots. As for Lachenal’s asking to be left to die after his fall—it was the logical culmination of the portrait of the genius-madman Herzog had slowly built up in Annapurna. The suicidally reckless climber, who would rather die in a demonic rage than limp pitifully back to ordinary human safety.

  These reconstructions need not be cynical, or even fully conscious, on Herzog’s part. They could be the fruit of memory’s seizing again and again on disturbing, pivotal events, reshaping them with each rehearsal, trying to find meaning where there was only happenstance. They might exemplify the process so ruefully predicted in Robert Frost’s great (and much misunderstood) poem about memory’s sentimentality, “The Road Not Taken.” In that poem, the speaker clearly recognizes that the two paths are equally worn: his choice of one over the other is a flip-of-the-coin decision. Yet in the last stanza,

  I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  THROUGH THE NIGHT of June 3–4, the four men at Camp V got almost no sleep. For the first time, the storm showed no signs of abating toward dawn. For all the men knew, the monsoon had arrived.

  Wrote Herzog in Annapurna,

  As the night wore on the snow lay heavier on the tent, and once again I had the frightful feeling of being slowly and silently asphyxiated. I tried, with all the strength of which I was capable, to push off with both forearms the mass that was crushing me. These fearful exertions left me gasping for breath and I fell back into the same exhausted state. It was much worse than the previous night.

  According to Terray, the wind was so violent that it threatened to tear the tents loose from their anchors.

  At last, in the wee hours, Herzog and Rébuffat drifted into an exhausted sleep—only to be wakened by Terray, that demon of the early start. As Terray tried to help Lachenal get dressed, he ran into a seemingly insoluble problem. Lachenal’s feet were too swollen to force back into his cut-open boots. There was no way the man could descend the mountain in stocking feet and survive. But what could be done?

  Suddenly the only possible answer dawned on Terray, bringing with it a gust of terror. His own boots were two sizes larger than Lachenal’s. If he gave them to his partner, then forced his own feet into Lachenal’s inadequate boots . . . The exchange could easily cost Terray his own feet. He hesitated, then performed an act of supreme self-denial. As he later wrote,

  To give way would be dishonor, a crime against the name of friendship. There was nothing else for it, and with the feelings of a soldier going over the top I hauled off my second pair of stockings and stuffed my feet into these new instruments of torture.

  Terray and Rébuffat had arrived at Camp V the day before full of hopes of going to the summit themselves. Now there was no possibility of that. Instead, their utmost efforts would be devoted to saving their friends’ lives.

  For Terray and Rébuffat, there was no other possible course. This was what a mountain guide did. In later life, however, Rébuffat’s bitterness about Annapurna was deepened by the sense that Herzog had never fully acknowledged either the two men’s sacrifice of their own chance for the summit, or their heroism in saving the frostbitten pair’s lives. For all Herzog’s considerable magnanimity in crediting the others’ achievements on the way up the mountain, Annapurna is curiously thin on such benedictions on the descent. In place of any expression of true indebtedness, within moments of his return to Camp V Herzog tries to bathe his partners in his own joy: “This victory was not just one man’s achievement, a matter for personal pride . . . it was a victory for us all, a victory for mankind itself.” (That sentence from Annapurna seems unconsciously telling, as if, with “one man’s achievement,” Herzog had already started to write Lachenal out of the story.)

  At this point, Terray seemed once again to take charge. As the men packed up on the morning of June 4, with the storm in full fury around them, he alone had the wits to urge a course that, had it been followed, might have saved the men much of the agony that lay in wait for them. Terray stuffed food and his sleeping bag into his pack, urging Rébuffat and Herzog to do likewise (neither man heeded the advice). Terray then started to collapse a tent and pack it up as well. All his training as a guide told him that to carry a tent and bag with him would give the team
a huge extra safety margin in case the men lost their downward track. But Lachenal’s impatience forestalled this canny instinct. Already roped up, Lachenal yelled, “Hurry up! What the hell do you think you’re doing with a tent? We’ll be at Camp IV in an hour.” Terray allowed his partner’s optimism to persuade him.

  In the chaos of the previous night, Terray had laid down his ice axe somewhere near the tents. Now he could not find it under several inches of new snow. With time at a premium, he and Rébuffat seized the two remaining axes, and each took charge of a frostbitten teammate, to whom he was roped. Herzog and Lachenal had had virtually no sleep for forty-eight hours, and both men were almost exhausted. With his frozen fingers, Herzog had been unable to dress himself, so Rébuffat had put on his clothes and boots for him.

  As the four men started down, Lachenal’s apprehension that the track would have disappeared proved true: not a trace of their steps showed in the newly drifted snow. Lachenal led the blind stumble through the storm, his impatience screwed to a new pitch, trying to find the way from his memory of the occasional landmark—a serac here, a crevasse there.

  By midday the wind had calmed almost to nothing, yet still the thick flakes of snow fell and piled up alarmingly fast. Terray and Rébuffat now alternated in the lead, breaking trail with painful slowness through first thigh-deep, then waist-deep powder. The mountain around the men turned into a blurry, featureless universe of white. “We kept colliding with hummocks which we had taken for hollows,” wrote Herzog. A heavy despair settled over the quartet, as they recognized they were lost. Now and then, Terray urged a halt so he could take off his boots and massage his feet. “Though ready for death,” he later wrote, “I had no wish to survive mutilated.”