True Summit

by David Roberts

  In the heat of the sun, after so much new snow had fallen, avalanches were breaking loose everywhere, creating a near-constant din. Below Camp III, Herzog and his two ropemates set off an avalanche and hurtled with it toward a 1,500-foot precipice. The three men bounced from serac to serac, before the rope fortuitously snagged over a crest of ice, suspending Herzog on one side—upside down, with the cord threatening to strangle him—and Sarki and Aila on the other. Eventually the Sherpas were able to pull Herzog back to safety.

  Strung out all up and down the mountain, the team descended like the army in full rout Lachenal would later conjure up. Lachenal, who had not been wearing goggles, stopped to take a short nap; when he awoke, he found that he too was snow-blind. He tried to proceed down the steep slope by feeling for holds, then thought better of it, waiting instead until Couzy caught up and guided him the rest of the way down.

  As he slid down a rope that had been fixed in place over an ice cliff, holding on with bare hands, Herzog watched as pieces of skin were flayed from his fingers. At the bottom, he wrapped his bleeding hands in a handkerchief—in order, he would say in 1998, to avoid upsetting his teammates.

  As the men severally approached Camp II, Sherpas came up to greet them and help them down the last, seemingly interminable slope. It turned out that Ichac and Oudot had indeed heard shouts that morning from up high. With binoculars, they had spotted two men on a patch of ice near Camp IV, whom they took for Schatz and Couzy. Deeply alarmed, Oudot had started to organize a rescue party, but the climbers had descended faster than their would-be saviors could climb.

  In Annapurna, Herzog offers his first words to Ichac, Oudot, and Noyelle at Camp II: “We’re back from Annapurna. We got to the top yesterday [actually the day before yesterday], Lachenal and I.” Then, after a pause: “My feet and hands are frostbitten.”

  By 1998, Herzog’s memory has restructured this speech, with a significant shift in pronoun. In L’Autre Annapurna, he says, “I bring you the victory.”

  “Bravo!” cheer his teammates.

  “But my feet and hands are frozen!”

  Herzog witnessed Terray’s halting approach to Camp II. “He was blind, and clung to Ang-Tharkey as he walked. He had a huge beard and his face was distorted by pain into a dreadful grin.” Then Lachenal: “From a distance it looked as though he was pedaling along in the air, for he threw his legs out in front in a most disordered way. His head lolled backwards and was covered with a bandage.”

  That evening, Lachenal closed his diary entry with a simple formula: “Our lives are saved. Thank you, my God.” With only an easy walk down to Camp I ahead of them, the team was effectively off the mountain. Their ordeal, however, had just begun.

  SIX

  The Woods of Lété

  AT CAMP II, Oudot examined the invalids. Herzog’s extremities were numb up to his ankles and wrists. Lachenal’s toes and patches on the soles of his feet had turned black. Rébuffat had only frostnip on a pair of toes, and Terray had somehow avoided frostbite altogether.

  Three years later, the British expedition to Everest would climb more than 2,000 feet higher than the French on Annapurna, yet contract no serious frostbite. It is worth pausing to wonder why Herzog and Lachenal suffered such appalling damage on a single day’s push above 26,000 feet. The boots of the British insulated considerably better than those of the French, which had been designed for the Alps. Even so, back in the 1920s and 1930s teams had come home from high altitude in the Himalaya without serious frostbite.

  On Everest in 1922, the British discovered that they could not afford to wear crampons up high, because the straps that fixed them to the boots inevitably cut off circulation. As long as footgear was made of pliable leather (as were the French boots), that sinister tradeoff would manifest itself. By choosing to wear their crampons all the way to the top, as indeed the terrain demanded, Lachenal and Herzog cut their margin of safety from frostbite.

  In 1922, 1924, and 1953, the Everest climbers used bottled oxygen. The French on Annapurna eschewed it—one more factor possibly cutting thin that margin of safety. A hypoxic climber is thought to be more likely to develop frostbite than one breathing a steady flow of supplemental gas.

  It seems unlikely that Lachenal and Herzog drank much, if anything, on the morning of June 3. Herzog says the pair could not face the chore of lighting the stove and making tea. Dehydration further increases climbers’ risk of frostbite.

  Reading Annapurna, one gains little sense of what drugs and medicines the men were taking, but Lachenal’s unexpurgated diary makes clear that almost nightly the French were swallowing sleeping pills. In 1950, doctors had not yet warned against this practice, which can depress normal breathing and heighten the effects of oxygen deprivation. On Annapurna, most of the Frenchmen and many of the Sherpas smoked cigarettes daily. As a vasoconstrictor, nicotine makes frostbite more likely, though the science of the day had not yet deduced this possibility. (On Everest in 1922, George Finch, who performed as well as the unstoppable George Mallory, believed that cigarette smoking actually aided the process of acclimatization.)

  Finally, among the expedition’s generous supply of pills was a stimulant called Maxiton. In the 1950s, and even into the 1970s, climbers routinely took “uppers” such as Dexedrine to push their weary bodies through unavoidable ordeals. Maxiton, later users would learn, is a particularly dangerous drug, which even in small doses can produce, according to one source, “a kind of drunkenness, with a disturbance of one’s sense of equilibrium.” The drug “is a powerful stimulant that creates a sort of euphoria.”

  Though the stimulant would not have directly contributed to the men’s frostbite, it might have induced the euphoria Herzog testified to on the summit, causing him to linger far too long, and later carelessly to drop his gloves. (To this writer in 1999, however, Herzog denied ever taking Maxiton. Yet one can read Annapurna without realizing that, as they were carried out from the mountain after June 6, Lachenal and Herzog were dosed with morphine to kill the pain of their frostbite almost nightly. Only Lachenal’s diary documents the constant morphine use.)

  Alarmed at the extent of the frostbite, Oudot decided to give Lachenal and Herzog abdominal injections of novocaine. “I used them during the war,” the physician told Herzog almost jauntily, “and it’s the only treatment that’s any use with frostbite.” The injections were excruciating. “I should never, until then, have believed so much pain to be possible,” wrote Herzog. It is poignant to know that this torture, which the two men endured with great courage, did nothing whatsoever to forestall their frostbite.

  Steeling himself for his second round of shots, Herzog pleaded with Terray to hold him in his arms. Still wearing a bandana over his eyes as he recovered from snow-blindness, the “strong man” clasped Herzog. “I howled and cried and sobbed in Terray’s arms while he held me tight with all his strength.”

  In L’Autre Annapurna, after an interval of forty-eight years, that simple act of brotherhood has taken on a mystical aura.

  Lionel held me in his arms like an infant. He transfused his humanity into me. During this long torment, I felt a sense of communion with my comrade-in-arms. . . . Between two howls of pain, I made the firm resolution to be buried later side-by-side with him in the alpinists’ cemetery in Chamonix.

  By now not only Lachenal and Herzog, but also the snow-blind and frost-nipped Rébuffat could not walk. Couzy was completely played out. With his limitless stamina, Terray moved under his own power, though still recovering from his snow-blindness. On June 6, Rébuffat was hauled on a Dufour litter (a sled used in emergency evacuations) down the easy track to Camp I. Herzog and Lachenal followed by litter the next day. “I was wrapped up like a package,” wrote Lachenal in his diary, “and saw absolutely nothing because I still had a bandana over my eyes.”

  Below the snow line, the Dufour sled was useless. On June 9, Lachenal was carried from Camp I down to Base Camp by a single Sherpa, in a device called a cacolet: a chairlike litter made
of canvas and webbing, to which the victim was strapped and bundled, facing backward. The carry made an agonizing trip for the Sherpa, lugging a burden heavier than he himself weighed. And it was agonizing for Lachenal, too, who wrote, “It was a very, very hard march, because my legs hung loose and the blood descended to the tips of my feet.” The next day, Herzog was similarly transported to Base Camp. By now, Rébuffat could walk, though he was still in considerable pain.

  The long-anticipated monsoon had arrived. Torrential rains lasted all day, intensifying the team’s misery and further threatening the frostbitten duo’s health. Leery of septicemia, Oudot gave the men penicillin. Herzog sensed that the monsoon could spring a trap, for, swollen with floodwaters, the Miristi Khola might become uncrossable. Schatz, who had gone ahead to scout a ford, sent a note back reporting that the river’s volume had doubled in a single day.

  At last, Schatz and some Sherpas were able to construct a flimsy bridge over the Miristi Khola, by using lianas to lash together four or five tree trunks. Adjiba gamely carried the two invalids across piggyback, one at a time. Both men were unnerved by the passage.

  Though bound together by such acts of teamwork, the expedition began at this point to unravel. There is no hint of this in Annapurna, with its fiction that from start to finish the party was glued together by common purpose and loyalty to its leader. But on June 10, Lachenal complained to his diary:

  I have to ask for everything several times and wait forever before receiving it. Even the food—I must literally yell to get someone to bring me any. Everybody, sahibs and Sherpas alike, out of a natural attraction to the leader, fusses around Momo, who in my opinion knows how to make the most of it. All this might seem bad will on my part, certainly I probably shouldn’t write it, but if not, will it be remembered afterward?

  As the doleful retreat progressed, Rébuffat too sensed the dissolution of the team’s solidarity. On July 2, he wrote Françoise, “The members, except for Oudot, are possessed of quite some egotism! They think only of eating and of doing nothing else.”

  Lachenal’s diary methodically records the daily tribulations. On June 12, “Momo was awakened by the need to piss, so I had to help him get it done.” The day before, “The descent for me was extremely painful, although a bit numbed by morphine.” On the 12th, Lachenal took the dressings off his feet to look at the damage. “They have a lot of swelling. I have to hold them vertical, exposed to the air, until the swelling almost disappears.”

  On June 14, Lachenal and Herzog got involved in a “violent polemic,” after disagreeing whether to camp at a notch in the ridge or, as Lachenal and Rébuffat desired, descend farther. Herzog’s wish prevailed. Lachenal’s congenital impatience could not drive the stricken party’s retreat any faster than a halting plod. In one moment, he could take pity on the Sherpa carrying him on his back; in the next, he was fed up with everyone around him.

  On the dangerous traverse to the pass on the south ridge of the Nilgiris, a laden porter slipped and fell to his death. Annapurna fails to note this tragedy, which only Lachenal’s diary documents.

  With time heavy on his hands, Lachenal wrote lengthier entries in his diary than he had earlier, when he had still been caught up in the daily tasks of the expedition. Fully a third of the diary is given over to the retreat, and those passages abound in vivid detail. In 1956, however, Lucien Devies and Gérard Herzog condensed thirty-four days’ worth of entries into a scant two and a half undated pages in the published Carnets du Vertige. Those cobbled-together extracts disproportionately emphasize Lachenal’s occasional happy remarks, as when he notices a beautiful countryside or rejoices at receiving letters from his wife brought by couriers from distant outposts. Virtually all evidence of conflict, disgust, despair—or for that matter, morphine—has been expunged.

  Herzog himself was slipping into his own despair. Realizing that amputations were inevitable, he wept in Terray’s arms. “Life’s not over,” Terray tried to reassure him. “You’ll see France again, and Chamonix.”

  “Yes, Chamonix perhaps,” answered the invalid, “but I’ll never be able to climb again.”

  The ordeal of being carried wore Herzog’s forbearance thin as well as Lachenal’s. “The violent jerking caused me unbearable pain. To go on was madness, and, moreover, I just didn’t feel capable of standing another couple of hours of this torture.”

  Herzog’s patience snapped on June 15, when he thought his ice axe had been lost. In Annapurna, he says merely, “I set great store by it; as Lachenal had lost his, it was the only one to have been to the top of Annapurna. . . . I had intended to present the axe to the French Alpine Club on my return.” (The tool was found two days later, in the last porter’s load.)

  In L’Autre Annapurna, nonetheless, with its sifting of decades of retrospect, the loss takes on heavy symbolic meaning. The ice axe is “my dear companion in combat”; crafted to Herzog’s specifications by the master artisan Claudius Simond, it is “a work of art.” Herzog goes on to claim, “For the alpinist, his axe is his legionnaire’s sword. It is the extension of himself. . . . Should I add that an axe is also a cross?”

  In this extravaganza, as in other key passages of Herzog’s 1998 memoir, the author reveals how the myth of himself that memory has spun over almost five decades has transformed the events of Annapurna. Herzog was always adamant (contra Rébuffat) that the lessons learned and the virtues inculcated in the war made victory on Annapurna possible. Martial imagery mingles with Christian. As a child, Herzog had been smitten by a visit to the Cistercian monastery of Lérins, near Cannes, where he saw a vision of holy peace.

  With all the references to communion, resurrection, the cross, the kiss of peace, and so forth in L’Autre Annapurna, Herzog adumbrates an implicit metaphor: himself as Christ, martyred by his triumph, sacrificing his hands and feet so that his fellow men might live. Later, that metaphor would become explicit.

  BY JUNE 18, the ragtag caravan had left the mountains for good, entering the deep forest of Lété, where gnarled trees interwove with giant rhododendrons. Still unable to walk a step, Herzog and Lachenal were now carried on stretchers by four men each. It was the season of the rice harvest in the lowlands, and porters kept deserting. The team’s progress was so sorely jeopardized that finally the sahibs, led by Noyelle, simply went into the fields and recruited bearers by force.

  On the 18th, in the forest, Oudot called a halt so that he could trim dead flesh from the wounded men’s limbs. Herzog felt little as Oudot’s scissors snipped away at his feet, “but my hands were so sensitive that the slightest touch made me cry out in pain, and I broke down.” “It was horrible to watch,” noted Lachenal. Then it was his turn. After the surgical snipping, Oudot proceeded with the hated abdominal injections. “These made me suffer horribly,” wrote Lachenal. “He had to jab me with the needle a dozen times. Tonight, the morphine was necessary.”

  Herzog had lapsed into a high fever, the thermometer at one point reaching 105 degrees Fahrenheit. By now, he writes in Annapurna, he had lost forty pounds. (In L’Autre Annapurna, the weight loss becomes sixty-five pounds.) Delirious, Herzog anticipated the end: “Gathering together the last shreds of energy, in one last long prayer, I implored death to come and deliver me. I had lost the will to live.”

  In Annapurna, that nadir of surrender in the Lété woods passes with the feverish night. In the 1998 memoir, however, it expands to lay the foundation for the central notion of Herzog’s whole life—that with Annapurna, he came back from the dead to be born again. Lying on his mattress among the larch trees of Lété, he imagines himself already buried. “On the knoll where my tomb lay, a cross of wood had been erected—quite unprecedented among these Buddhist places, where our Christian crosses mean nothing.” Herzog watches a long funerary procession—sahibs, Sherpas, porters—“paying me a last homage as they pass by my tomb.”

  Semiconscious once more, he feels life slipping away.

  An ecstatic serenity enveloped me. . . . It had to do not with an
end or with nothingness, but with another existence. . . .

  Then came the miracle. I crossed again the boundary between the visible and the invisible. Once more, I saw the faces washed of all color, approaching me as if across an air bubble.

  No sound reached my ears, but already I felt hands placed on me, stroking my face.

  Despite all the years that have since passed, this great interior adventure remains the major event of my life. A second birth, more true in my eyes than the first—is that not a sacred mystery?

  In L’Autre Annapurna, Herzog makes it clear that the vision of Lété was no mere feverish delirium. It constituted a genuine passage from one world to another. When I interviewed Herzog in Paris in 1999, he elaborated on this theme: “Annapurna changed my life. The man I became was very different from the man I had been. I had been given a second life. The American edition of L’Autre Annapurna will be titled Born Twice.” From behind his desk, Herzog held the stumps of his fingers out toward me. “You can see what is lost, but inside, I feel what I have gained.”

  Some years after the expedition, Rébuffat, in an acerbic comment to the mayor of Marseille, who was presenting him with the Legion of Honor, remarked that he had had often to resist Herzog’s “exhibition of his hands.” His erstwhile teammate may thus have been the first to hint at the implied analogy that I felt Herzog was making, in that uncomfortable moment in his office, as he held out for me to see the mutilated evidence of his martyrdom, like Christ’s stigmata.

  The allegory played out in the Lété passage in L’Autre Annapurna—with the funeral procession passing by the tomb, the hands laying hold of his body and caressing his face, the wakening unto a new life, redeemed by his suffering—is clearly that of Herzog as Christ. Yet the fact that Herzog, in so remembering the ordeal of Annapurna, has invested it with such religious import is not necessarily a sign of grandiosity so much as proof of the man’s genuinely mystical character. To the mystic, all experience partakes of the gods.