True Summit

by David Roberts

  Herzog responded to the party’s increasingly dire predicament by lapsing into a kind of robotic apathy, following Rébuffat, as Terray put it, “without a murmur.” Retracing their steps to try to find a landmark, crisscrossing the slopes almost randomly, the men sought a way out of their maze. They sensed they had reached a point somewhere near the great ice cliff of the Sickle, but could see no hint of it. Camp IVA must lie somewhere hereabouts—a single tent in a miasma of white.

  Even in these extreme circumstances, it would suit Herzog to perpetuate the notion that informs Annapurna from start to finish—that his was the counsel of reason and deliberation, trying to rein in the rash impulses of his teammates. “Terray, when his turn came, charged madly ahead.” “Lachenal gave him considerable trouble. Perhaps he was not quite in his right mind. He said it was no use going on; we must dig a hole in the snow and wait for fine weather.” “Each in turn did the maddest things: Terray traversed the steep and avalanchy slopes with one crampon badly adjusted. He and Rébuffat performed incredible feats of balance without the least slip.”

  In hopes that they were in the vicinity of Camp IVA, and that Schatz and Couzy or some of the Sherpas might be ensconced there, the men cried for help in unison. Only the swish of softly falling snow answered their plaints.

  The hours had passed almost unnoticed: night was approaching. The last-ditch suggestion of Lachenal—according to Herzog the whim of a madman—loomed in fact as the men’s best hope: to dig a hole in which to bivouac, hoping to survive until the weather changed. Recognizing this fact, Terray started to carve out a hollow with feckless swings of his axe.

  As he did so, Lachenal suddenly let out a cry. Terray jerked around, but saw nothing of his friend. Without realizing it, Lachenal had been standing on a thin snow bridge over a hidden crevasse. The bridge had broken, plunging him into the depths of the crevasse, unchecked by any belay. Yet the potential disaster turned out to be a deliverance. Lachenal had fallen a mere twelve to fifteen feet into the hole, checking up unhurt in a perfect nook for an emergency bivouac.

  In Annapurna, Herzog renders the exchange between the two old friends at the moment of the crevasse plunge:

  “Lachenal!” called Terray.

  A voice, muffled by many thicknesses of ice and snow, came up to us. It was impossible to make out what it was saying.

  “Lachenal!”

  Terray jerked the rope violently; this time we could hear.

  “I’m here!”

  “Anything broken?”

  “No! It’ll do for the night! Come along.”

  Forty-eight years later, in L’Autre Annapurna, this dialogue has been revised to make it sound more colloquial. Lachenal curses his friends on the surface as a “bunch of babotsh” (local slang for the inhabitants of the valley below Chamonix). Which version better represents the “true novel” Herzog aimed at in Annapurna? Both, no doubt, are products of Herzog’s memory. For that matter, Terray’s Conquistadors is equally a partial fiction—as, some would argue, are inevitably all memoir and biography. Even Lachenal’s diary is a construct at odds with the whole truth.

  In that diary, Lachenal delivers his own I-told-you-so:

  The whole day, we stirred up the snow without knowing where we were, climbing, descending, retracing our steps, only to come finally, at 6:30 P.M., to a decision we should have made long before: to find a crevasse in which to spend the night. We found one, into which I fell by accident.

  Self-congratulatory that diary account may be, but in its clear-headedness, it undercuts the portrait of both of Herzog’s books, and even, at times, of Terray’s—of Biscante as an impetuous climber operating on reckless instinct, having to be restrained, after his fall, like a madman on a leash. If we can trust Lachenal’s account—written, after all, for himself, and not for publication—then it was he who most cogently summed up the four men’s plight on June 4 and sensed the way out of it.

  In any event, one by one, Terray, Herzog, and Rébuffat dropped down what Herzog called “a regular toboggan-slide” into the crevasse to join Lachenal. Terray says it was a plunge of merely twelve to fifteen feet; Herzog measures it at thirty feet in Annapurna, forty feet in his later memoir. (Terray’s estimate is the more likely, for a thirty-foot drop could easily have caused broken ankles.)

  So began one of the legendary bivouacs in Himalayan annals. The grotto was just big enough to accommodate the four men, who broke off icicles and rearranged the snow underneath them to make their huddled vigil marginally more comfortable. All night, whenever any man moved, or jolted suddenly as a cramp seized his leg, he disturbed the other three.

  Terray pulled out his sleeping bag and slithered inside it, “carried away on a tide of voluptuous bliss.” It was only now that he learned that Rébuffat and Herzog had neglected to pack up their own sleeping bags. Sitting on their packs, the others shivered stoically in silence. As Terray recalled, “I soon began to feel my disgusting egoism, however, and after some contortions Herzog, Lachenal, and I all managed to squeeze our lower portions into the providential bag.”

  All four men had taken off their boots: to leave them on was to invite certain frostbite. Rébuffat rubbed his own feet, complaining out loud of the pain. Terray rubbed Herzog’s and Lachenal’s feet for hours each.

  In Annapurna, Herzog reveals that even in this wretched bivouac, the euphoric trance that had seized him on the summit detached him from his surroundings.

  I was astonished to feel no pain. Everything material about me seemed to have dropped away. I seemed to be quite clear in my thoughts and yet I floated in a kind of peaceful happiness.

  In his next breath, however, Herzog admits that he had given himself up for dead. “All was over, I thought. Wasn’t this cavern the most beautiful grave I could hope for?”

  Shortly before dawn, the men heard “a queer noise from a long way off . . . a sort of prolonged hiss.” Suddenly they were inundated with powder snow. A small avalanche had swept the slope above them, spilling loads of fine spindrift into the hole by which they had entered the crevasse. By the time the avalanche stopped, the men were buried in powder. They struggled to free themselves, but now their belongings—including their precious boots—lay lost beneath the new debris.

  At this critical juncture in the men’s survival ordeal, the various accounts diverge once more. In Annapurna, someone breaks the silence: “Daylight!” To which Rébuffat wearily answers, “Too early to start.”

  Terray admits to having fallen asleep, despite the misery of the crevasse, only to be awakened by the avalanche, which he places at first light. Lachenal alone records the hour of the avalanche—4:30 A.M., when it would still have been pitch dark.

  With the “ghastly light” of dawn, the men struggle to find their belongings beneath the piles of new snow about them. According to Terray, Rébuffat found his boots first, put them on, and scrambled to the surface. In Herzog’s account, Lachenal was the first to find a pair of boots; when he tried to put them on, he realized they were Rébuffat’s. Terray found his boots shortly after.

  All sources agree that Rébuffat was the first to emerge from the crevasse. In Annapurna, Terray calls up, “What’s the weather like?”

  “Can’t see a thing,” answers Rébuffat. “It’s blowing hard.”

  Terray follows Rébuffat to the surface. Impatient as ever, Lachenal gives up the search for his own boots and—in Herzog’s words—“called frantically, hauled himself up on the rope. . . . Terray from outside pulled as hard as he could.”

  In Herzog’s telling, “When [Lachenal] emerged from the opening he saw the sky was clear and blue, and he began to run like a madman, shrieking, ‘It’s fine! It’s fine!’ ” Thus the team realizes that, having taken off their goggles to navigate through the previous day’s storm, Rébuffat and Terray have become snow-blind. They confuse the milky blur before their eyes with a continuing tempest. Only the sighted Lachenal can see the blue sky that promises the men salvation.

  Terray reinforces the
image of Lachenal as madman: “No sooner was he up than he started bellowing again: ‘It’s fine! It’s fine! We’re saved! We’re saved!’—and ran off toward the end of the trough in which our cave was situated.”

  Lachenal’s diary, however, tells a quite different story. Having failed to find his own boots, he climbs to the surface, not hauled like a sack of potatoes by Terray, but under his own power, by “planting the tips of my frozen feet in the snow.” In Annapurna, only Terray and Rébuffat are snow-blind; according to Lachenal, Herzog is also. On emerging from the crevasse, Lachenal confirms the fact that a storm still rages, with a strong wind. There is no mad running in the snow, no screams of deliverance. Instead, “Finally I see a corner of blue sky, then little by little all the sky clears. The weather is good. We’re saved if we have enough strength.”

  Far below him, Lachenal sees Camp II. Hoping to attract someone’s attention down below, he waves his arms and shouts. Despite being snow-blind himself, Terray treats his partner’s actions as the folly of a deluded man. “Lachenal, now completely hysterical, was shouting and semaphoring in the direction of Camp II, which he claimed he could see at the bottom of the slope.”

  What is the truth here? One can forgive Lachenal for his joyous shouts at the moment when the tide in the men’s luck seems to have turned. One can imagine him running across the snow as he urges his friends to get on with their descent. In all the photos and diagrams of Annapurna, it looks eminently possible to see Camp II from the top of the Sickle, some 3,300 feet above. Perhaps that was too large a gap for voices to carry across, but who could blame a man for shouting? And once the weather had cleared, of course Oudot and Ichac and Noyelle, down at Camp II, would have been searching the mountain with binoculars for any sign of their missing teammates.

  Meanwhile, all accounts agree, Herzog continued to search at the bottom of the crevasse for the last two pairs of boots. In Annapurna, he is fairly matter-of-fact about the effort, thinking logically, “The boots had to be found, or Lachenal and I were done for.” It is only in L’Autre Annapurna, with its glaze of long-sifted memory, that that mission takes on the guise of martyrdom. In that book, instead of resigning himself to a euphoric death in the crevasse, Herzog focuses on his impending role: “From that instant on, I sensed that I would have to sacrifice a part of myself.”

  After finding the boots and sending them up on a rope, Herzog is hauled in turn to the surface by Terray, only to collapse in the snow exhausted. Both of his own versions of the story indicate that at this point, he urged the others to go on without him. In Annapurna, he says to Terray, “It’s all over for me. Go on . . . you have a chance . . . you must take it.”

  Terray rejoins: “We’ll help you. If we get away, so will you.”

  In L’Autre Annapurna, however, this exchange has been hugely expanded, into a drama of interpersonal loyalty that, if it really took place, further elevates Terray’s nobility. On the edge of the crevasse, Herzog beckons Terray close, then whispers into his ear: “Leave me, Lionel. I beg you. I’m finished. It’s impossible to stand up. My feet and hands are frozen. . . . Leave me here, beside the crevasse. Leave, leave! Hurry . . . save yourself.”

  “No, Maurice, I refuse.”

  “It’s you who’s crazy!”

  “I RE-FU-SE,” Terray hammers. “Either we escape together, or we stay here together. Here. With you.”

  “That’s . . . blackmail?”

  “No, that’s the cordée. You never abandon a wounded man in the mountains. You know that. It’s like in the war. And besides, Maurice, you are my brother in battle.”

  Something rings false about this scene. It reads like a fantasia on the theme of the solidarity so curtly voiced by Terray in Herzog’s original telling. Once more, the considerable discrepancy between the two versions creates a problem of credibility for Herzog. Which really happened? If the entire, poignant dialogue invoking the fidelity unto death of former comrades-at-arms really took place, why did Herzog leave it out of Annapurna, that otherwise so dramatically crafted narrative?

  In any event, Herzog’s earlier, terser version seems corroborated by Terray’s own account of the exchange in Conquistadors:

  As he lay there gasping it was his turn to feel a moment of despair, and he said: “It’s all over, Lionel. I’m finished. Leave me and let me die.” I encouraged him as best I could, and in a minute or two he felt better.

  The plea to be left behind, whether briefly expressed or played out in the full exchange of the later memoir, raises yet another question. In changing his story about what Lachenal voiced after his terrible fall on June 3—from a demand to descend to Camp II for injections, in Annapurna, to a demand to be left to die, in L’Autre Annapurna—Herzog perhaps unconsciously projects his own moribund despair of June 5 onto Lachenal’s plight two days earlier.

  But in both versions, Herzog makes it clear that he is not snow-blind. “The weather was perfect,” he writes in Annapurna. “The mountains were resplendent. Never had I seen them look so beautiful.” Yet a few paragraphs later, he admits, “[Lachenal] was the only one of the four of us who could see Camp II below.” If Herzog had escaped snow-blindness, why couldn’t he see Camp II as well?

  For the second morning, the men struggle to put on their boots. This time Herzog’s have to be cut open before he can force his feet into them. Now, as the men prepare to stagger on down the mountain, they disagree as to which direction to start out. Herzog urges a leftward course, Lachenal a rightward.

  Curiously, only Herzog’s two versions mention anyone calling for help. In Annapurna, at first the other three think Lachenal’s shouts toward Camp II are the final proof of his derangement. “Lachenal’s frozen feet affected his nervous system. . . . Obviously he didn’t know what he was doing. . . . They were shrieks of despair, reminding me tragically of some climbers lost in the Mont Blanc massif whom I had endeavored to save.” Yet in the next moment, the others join in, hurling their feeble chorus of cries into the thin air.

  Then the men hear an answering cry. “Barely two hundred yards away,” Herzog writes in Annapurna, “Marcel Schatz, waist-deep in snow, was coming slowly toward us like a boat on the surface of the slope.” Terray puts their rescuer even closer: “Suddenly Schatz emerged from behind a serac fifty yards away.”

  The four men, it turns out, had bivouacked in their crevasse only 200 yards from Camp IVA, where Schatz and Couzy lay in their sleeping bags. In Annapurna, Schatz and Herzog embrace, as Schatz murmurs, “It is wonderful—what you have done.” The 1998 memoir elaborates on this most emotional of reunions, turning it into a mystical religious moment:

  He clasped me in his arms, gave me a kiss of peace, breathed new life into me. Yes, in that moment this man transmitted to me something of sacred value. I would have liked to pray: “My God, I want so much to be a man, but I remain your infant.” . . . With an infinite gentleness, my friend supported me and helped me take my first steps.

  Lost in the persistent characterizing of Lachenal in extremis as a madman is the fact that, once again, on the morning of June 5, he had a better notion of what to do than the others did. Calling for help, far from a shriek of despair, was a pragmatic choice, and it brought, with Schatz’s answering cry, the escape the men so dearly needed.

  IN THE TELLING AND RETELLING of the Annapurna story, Schatz’s discovery of the four stranded men has always been treated as the capstone of a miraculous series of close calls resolved by heroic deeds. Yet one need not be an iconoclast to ponder the circumstances leading up to that moment.

  By the afternoon of June 4, in full blizzard, Schatz and Couzy would have known that the four men above them were in trouble. They would have guessed that, had they not already come to grief, the quartet would be descending in a desperate search for Camp IVA, and that the storm had wiped out the track. To go out and look for the men might have been impossible: it might well have caused Schatz and Couzy to lose their own way. But most climbers would at least have stood outside the tent and shout
ed, in hopes their friends would hear them and so be guided to the elusive camp. (On Everest in 1924, above Camp VI, Noel Odell whistled and yodeled for the better part of an hour in the vain hope of signaling his lost friends Mallory and Irvine.)

  There is no evidence that Schatz or Couzy did anything on June 4 other than lie in their tent and wait. As Françoise Rébuffat bitterly complained in 1999, “What were they doing, Couzy and Schatz, sleeping in their tent like a couple of schoolboys, instead of going out to look?”

  Indeed, as the four exhausted men followed Schatz back to Camp IVA, they found Couzy still in his sleeping bag. By now Terray was preoccupied with his own terror of frostbite. He asked his friends to leave him at IVA so he could massage his frozen feet; they might return the next morning, he urged, to fetch him in case his snow-blindness had not improved. Herzog quotes Terray as saying, “I want to be whole, or dead!”

  In the tent, Terray attacked his own feet, rubbing and beating them for hours. “After a time,” he later wrote, “the circulation came back and their rather greeny whiteness gave way to a fine healthy pink, but the pain was so great that I could not restrain myself from groaning out loud.”

  As the other five men climbed down the Sickle, they set loose a slab of snow that gathered into an avalanche, thundering down and engulfing Camp IV below, where the four Sherpas who had gone high on Annapurna awaited. Although the avalanche carried off one of the tents, by good luck none of the Sherpas was injured. Greeting Lachenal, who took off his boots to rub his feet, Pansy tried to comfort him, telling him the frostbite was nothing serious.

  Both Herzog and Lachenal felt that the only hope to save their frozen digits was to go all the way down to Camp II the same day. Herzog roped up with Sarki and Alia, while Lachenal and even the snow-blind Rébuffat insisted on descending unroped. Meanwhile Schatz, Ang-Tharkey, and Pansy climbed back up to IVA to persuade Terray to descend. While Terray deliberated, Schatz performed a courageous task, sliding back into the crevasse of the bivouac to search for Herzog’s camera, with its exposed summit photos. After much pawing through the loose snow, he found the Foca camera undamaged.