True Summit (15 page)

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 If we can trust Lachenal's account—written, after all, for himself, and not for publication—then it was he who most cogently summed up the four men's plight on June 4 and sensed the way out of it.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.

I
N 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 shouted, 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?”