True Summit

by David Roberts

  It was of course disappointing to have our hero wonder whether we were liars. Yet at the same time, for Don and me, it was the giddiest imaginable gratification to know that we had crossed the radar screen of his consciousness. Once Washburn had convinced Terray that we were telling the truth, perhaps we might even correspond with our hero, swapping details of our respective battles on Mount Huntington. Perhaps in the future we might even meet.

  Having turned forty-four that summer, Terray was far from ready to see his scope go down the scale. He had, in fact, begun to experience a rejuvenation. Even as he had become the finest expeditionary mountaineer of his time, Terray had seen his skill as a rock climber deteriorate to the point where, on a local crag with youthful companions in top-notch shape, he felt embarrassed by his ineptitude. Such a progression is normal for aging mountaineers. As Terray’s generation was the first to discover, climbing was becoming so specialized a business that no single practitioner could excel in both big-range mountaineering and pure rock gymnastics. Other veterans accepted that fact, and contented themselves with leading expeditions. For Terray, to climb anywhere at less than an Olympian level was intolerable.

  He set out, then, to teach himself all over again how to rock-climb. At Fontainebleau, the forest full of giant boulders south of Paris, he devised for himself a training program rigorous enough to challenge a hungry twenty-two-year-old. And he deliberately chose ropemates in their twenties for rock climbs that might test his refurbished mettle.

  One of his favorite partners was his Huntington teammate, Marc Martinetti, who was only twenty-five years old. A native of Chamonix, boyishly good-looking, he had already been elected, despite his tender age, to the elite Compagnie des Guides. Martinetti had notched his belt with some of the finest faces in the Alps, including the Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses and the north face of the Dru (two of Rébuffat’s six great north faces). Optimistic, a great joker, fiercely independent, he had recently married a young local beauty.

  On September 19, 1965, Terray and Martinetti set out for a long but moderate rock-climb in Terray’s beloved Vercors, the préalpes south of Grenoble where Terray had first learned to climb three decades earlier. When the pair had not returned by dark, a search party set off to look for them. At the foot of the wall, they found the bodies of Terray and Martinetti, still roped together. From the damage the men had undergone (their helmets were smashed to pieces), the searchers concluded that they must have fallen as far as a thousand feet. At the top of the route, easy but steep grassy slopes are interspersed with short sections of cliff. It would have been normal for Terray and Martinetti to stay roped here, but to place only the occasional piton. No doubt one man had slipped, pulling off the other. Or perhaps one had seized a loose block and lost his balance, like Francis Aubert on the approach to the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey.

  In France, Terray’s death was the occasion for national mourning. In my first year of graduate school in Denver, I bought the latest issue of Paris-Match, with Terray’s rugged portrait on the cover, above a blurb reading “Mort pour la Montagne.” Staring at the photos that highlighted Terray’s extraordinary career, I mourned, for my own selfish reasons, the near miss of our intersection in life.

  Terray had died, I knew, before he could have received and read Washburn’s letter. Every young climber’s dream is to win the notice of his heroes. I had done that, across two decades and the Atlantic Ocean, only to have Terray die wondering whether some American college kids had faked the second ascent of Mount Huntington.

  ONE APRIL DAY IN 1999, Michel Guérin and I decided to hike up to the base of the climb on which Terray had been killed thirty-four years before. Michel himself had done the climb at age twenty. “It was not a pilgrimage for me then,” he told me. “When you’re young, you don’t care about death.”

  We drove route N75 south out of Grenoble, then left the highway to climb past farmsheds on a country road. It was a damp day, and the long limestone wall of the Vercors lay mostly hidden in mist to the east. The snows of a record winter had been slow to melt: above 4,000 feet, the forest still lay blanketed in wet drifts. Slushy streams coursed everywhere through drab fields.

  In the square at the center of the sleepy perched village of Prélenfrey, Michel spotted an inconspicuous plaque affixed to a limestone boulder. We got out to read it.

  To Lionel TERRAY

  Dead on the mountain, with Marc Martinetti, 25 years ago.

  His comrades in the S.E.S., of the Compagnie STEPHANE (1/15th BCA) 19 September 1990

  The S.E.S., Michel explained, was the Section des Eclaireurs et Skieurs—the Section of Scouts and Skiers; the BCA was the Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins—the Battallion of Alpine Soldiers. Thus, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, the survivors of Terray’s doughty Compagnie Stéphane, with whom he had played his absurd and perilous games in World War II, had assembled in this obscure plaza to commemorate their comrade’s passing. I wondered how often even the stray hiker came across this quiet memorial, or paused as we did to ponder it.

  Where the dirt road plunged into snowdrift, we parked, got out, and started hiking up the slope. Mats of soggy dead leaves lay in the patches of clearing; birches leaned toward the higher drifts. Soon our feet were completely soaked. In the crisp air, there was only the faintest hint of a late spring.

  The route we sought was in the center of a long wall called the Gerbier; its name was the Fissure en Arc de Cercle. With fog covering the upper two thirds of the cliff, I could see only a gray, featureless precipice; but Michel had soon picked out the route. Pointing, he indicated landmarks he remembered from his own youthful ascent.

  “The route was put up by Serge Coupé, who was on Makalu with Terray in 1955,” said Michel. “Coupé did a lot of new routes in the Vercors and the Chartreuse. Everywhere you go around here, there’s a voie Coupé.”

  We stopped to gaze at what we could see of the route. “You go up six or seven pitches there,” said Michel, suddenly animated, waving his hands in the eternal pantomime of climbers recalling routes, “then there’s a big traverse, then five more pitches. On the top, there are these razor-thin arêtes you have to traverse. Maybe that’s why they didn’t unrope.” Later I read a route description of the fissure. In the accompanying diagram, the top of the cliff was reduced to a pair of stylized horizontal lines, marked “terraces—very easy.”

  Michel stared at the cliff, as fog drifted in and out, and speculated out loud: “Possibly the accident was due to a competition between the young, very good climber running ahead, with the older, heavier climber still trying to prove he could keep up. Or maybe it was the younger one who was overimpressed. The guiding season was just over. Normally, a guide is exhausted in September.” We realized, as is so often the case in fatal climbing accidents, that we would never know what had happened that long-ago day. All the searchers had had to judge by was the rope still linking the dead bodies, with no piton attached.

  I was filled with a heavy sense of gloom. No one else was about in this still-wintry landscape. Below us, a deer bounded noiselessly through the trees. I heard the unmistakable sound of rocks plunging down the cliff above. I looked up, but could not find the falling stones against the gray smear of the cliff. Michel had hoped the weather would be good enough for us to climb the route. In that despondent moment, I was glad it was not.

  NOT EVERYONE IN FRANCE thought Lionel Terray a hero. Loyal to her husband’s estrangement from Terray after Annapurna, Françoise Rébuffat took the man to task for his servility to Herzog. “Terray was a lèche-bottes,” she told me bluntly, “a béni-oui-oui” (a bootlicker; a yes man).

  During that interview with Françoise, less than a week before, I had been devastated to learn that Terray had not in fact written Conquistadors of the Useless. “It was ghostwritten for him by Roger Nimier, an academician,” she said. “Terray was a bit of a country bumpkin. His writing, even in letters, was only semiliterate.” Later Yves Ballu independently told me the same thing, na
ming Nimier, and other journalists confirmed the claim. Michel knew Nimier’s name as Terray’s original editor at Gallimard, but it came as a shock to him also to be told that Nimier was ghostwriter as well as editor. The consensus was that Terray could never have written a book by himself, let alone so good a one as Conquistadors.

  A day or two after our hike in the Vercors, Michel took me to visit Terray’s childhood home in Grenoble. The château, he had been told, had fallen into disrepair. The ground floor had been rented out to a writer, but the rest of the house had been locked up and left to its decay. The building still belonged to Terray’s widow, Marianne, but she never visited the place.

  In the course of reprinting Les Conquérants de l’Inutile, Michel had befriended Marianne, and he had gotten to know other relatives over the years. From one of them, he secured a key to the Grenoble château.

  Terray, Michel knew, had spent weeks in Grenoble as he gathered his materials for his autobiography. We parked nearby, then walked the narrow streets of this oldest sector of the ancient town. On the Rue St. Laurent, we paused to read a plaque affixed high on the building’s facade:

  Here was born on the 25th of July 1921

  LIONEL TERRAY

  CONQUÉRANT DE L’INUTILE

  From here he set out the 19th of September 1965

  For his last climb in the Vercors

  We ducked through a gate and started hiking up a steep stone staircase set into the hill that backs Grenoble. The grassy terraces were overgrown with dandelions and irises, and the moldering château was covered with violet wisteria. Old vines crawled helter-skelter across the walls backing each terrace step, and the woods loomed upward beyond. This “perfect world in which to realize the dreams of a child possessed with freedom and the wonders of nature,” as Terray had called his backyard in Conquistadors, came alive for me now. I could picture Lionel as a boy trapping rats, shooting birds, and playing cowboys and Indians in this diminutive wilderness. No road had ever allowed vehicles to approach the château; instead, as we learned in a brief chat with the writer holed up on the ground floor, a donkey had hauled baggage up a steep track to the front door.

  The key Michel had been lent opened a creaky door on the third floor. Inside, we stumbled in the dim light through an immense clutter of old furniture and junk. Everything was covered with dust; the wallpaper hung peeling from the walls; old mirrors had grown cloudy and speckled. The disarray of the rooms testified to a ménage in which no one seemed to have taken any pride. The third floor was like a multiroom attic full of stuff its owner had not had the heart to throw out.

  We tiptoed among the bric-a-brac: a bust of Beethoven, an old, broken stereopticon, dusty books in dark bindings lying everywhere. In a closet, we found a heap of old photos, themselves coated with dust. Several images of a pretty woman on horseback evidently captured Terray’s youthful mother in Brazil. A sheaf of newspaper clippings about Terray, we realized, represented a collection his father had put together. Despite his sire’s disdain for mountain climbing, despite his nearly having disowned Lionel after he was kicked out of school, the old man had evidently taken pride in Terray’s mature celebrity.

  Michel had been given carte blanche by Marianne to look for old letters to or from Terray. There were piles and piles of dusty papers on tabletops, in closets, inside desk and bureau drawers, but an inordinate proportion of them seemed to be Terray’s father’s professional correspondence. Old bills, paid or unpaid, lurked everywhere, like reminders of mortality.

  There was something claustrophobic and oppressive about the place. It was easy to picture the erstwhile grandeur of these upper-class rooms, and their decay was all the more wistful for that. It was hard to imagine the blithe mountaineer living even temporarily in such squalor.

  We were about to go, when Michel, poking through another closet, came across a bulging green cardboard folder. A piece of adhesive tape had been stuck to it, on which, in blue ink, someone had written:

  COURSES EXPLOR

  BRESIL   ATEURS

  DRAME Mt BLANC

  “That’s Terray’s handwriting,” said Michel, as he opened the folder. I peered over his shoulder, as he leafed through page after page of carefully scrawled manuscript. “And that’s his handwriting too,” Michel murmured.

  A moment later, he let out a curse under his breath. “It’s the manuscript of Les Conquérants,” he said softly.

  Later, back in Chamonix, we studied this lost relic carefully. I went through page after page of the published Conquérants, collating it with the handwritten manuscript. With growing elation, I said to Michel, “Hardly a word has been changed. It’s word for word what Gallimard published. So much for Roger Nimier!”

  Michel ultimately returned the manuscript to Marianne, who was delighted to have it. And we too were delighted. In a moment’s accidental discovery, defying his detractors, we had restored the authorship of the book we both regarded as the finest climbing autobiography ever written to the man who not only had performed all those great deeds in the mountains, but had found, with no help from another, the right words to memorialize them.

  TWO YEARS BEFORE, on my first visit to Chamonix, I had sought out Terray’s grave in the cemetery. I found it just inside the gates, marked by an unshaped slab of brownish granite with a wooden plaque bolted to the stone. The inscription was even more laconic than Lachenal’s, declaring only

  LIONEL TERRAY

  1921 + 1965

  Above the name dangled a tiny bronze Christ. The earth covering Terray’s coffin ran riot with pansies and forget-me-nots.

  Michel Guérin arranged for me to meet Marianne Terray for tea in the chalet Terray had built in 1947. Cozy, full of sun, skillfully crafted out of a pale varnished wood, Terray’s house, like Lachenal’s, stands proud on a south-facing hillside, looking out not at the Dru but at the Aiguille du Midi.

  At eighty-five, Madame Terray was active but hard of hearing. She found my French incomprehensible, so Michel served as interpreter. “Now you mustn’t wear me out,” she scolded at the outset. But then she became talkative. “Maurice Herzog was not a very well organized leader,” she recalled. “He was full of disorder. But physically and morally he was full of courage.

  “Because of his success, he became a bit vain and troubled. He loves the glory. And he is very seductive with the ladies. But after the death of Lionel, he did everything he could for me and the children.”

  “Marianne goes three times a week to Lionel’s tomb,” Michel had told me before our visit. “She talks to him, asks his advice. If she finds her lost eyeglasses, it’s thanks to Lionel.”

  Now Marianne concurred. “He is always present. For me, he isn’t dead. For the children also. I don’t believe in death. He’s somewhere else. I don’t know where. He’s just gone somewhere.”

  Despite their falling out, Rébuffat had asked Marianne’s permission to help carry Terray’s coffin in his funeral. The request had deeply moved her.

  The chalet had the feeling of being still inhabited by Terray. Given free rein of the house since he had worked on his reprint of Conquistadors, Michel took me on a tour. The study was like an accidental museum. There, on a shelf, stood a picture of Francis Aubert, Terray’s young companion killed on the approach to the Aiguille Noire—impossibly handsome, his face full of guileless ebullience. On one wall a picture of the Eiger; on another, a familiar photo of Terray surmounting an overhang with metal stirrups, and a photo of Terray the father carrying his son on his shoulders.

  Yet another wall bore Terray’s framed marriage announcement. Nearby were a photo of Lachenal and a drawing of Couzy.

  Mounted on a wall in the antechamber to the study I found Terray’s belated Legion of Honor medal, awarded in later years for his alpinism, not for Annapurna. There was also a framed commendation for his heroism in the war. I read a personal letter to Marianne from de Gaulle himself, mourning the death of Lionel, “who carried so high the worldwide reputation of French alpinism.”

>   Michel started going through drawers. I saw a chaos of loose slides, letters, old mountain journals. We found, still rolled in the mailing tube, four large-format Washburn photos of Huntington, with a 1965 interoffice memo attached: “Un petit souvenir d’Alaska—Brad.”

  Marianne invited Michel to look inside a high cupboard. On tiptoe, he pulled open the door, reached inside, and retrieved an old, scarred rope and a beat-up rucksack. “I’ve never seen this before,” Michel mused. The pack had holes torn in it. Michel opened it. Inside, we saw a smashed headlamp, stirrups, broken carabiners.

  It hit us both at the same moment. This was the rope and pack and hardware Terray had been carrying on his fatal climb in the Vercors in 1965. Never before had Marianne chosen to show these relics to Michel.

  I looked at my friend. Stricken—for Terray had been the hero of his youth too—he turned away. Tears choked the back of my throat.

  In the silence, I took one of Terray’s broken carabiners in my hands, and turned it this way and that. It was as close as I could come to meeting the man.

  TEN

  Une Affaire de Cordée

  BEFORE THE SUN ROSE THAT MORNING of June 3, 1950, Louis Lachenal and Maurice Herzog struggled to get dressed in their camp at 24,600 feet. “We could not light the stove,” Lachenal later wrote in his diary, without offering an explanation. “It was very cold.”

  Without the stove to melt snow, the men had had nothing to drink since a few cups of tea the evening before. They had slept not at all, as the violent wind in the night threatened to rip the tent from its platform, despite the pitons that anchored its uphill pullouts. It took a concerted effort for both men to force their feet into their frozen leather boots. Lachenal was unable to fasten his gaiters over his ankles, so he left them in the tent. Both men strapped their crampons onto their boots. Because the snowfield stretching above them looked easy, they did not bother to rope up. The pair were off by 6:00 A.M.