True Summit (17 page)

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.

B
Y
J
UNE
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.

M
EANWHILE
, the down-to-earth Lachenal cursed the delay in Lété. All his frustration and suffering are packed into an extraordinary sentence he wrote in his diary on June 20.

My feet give me a lot of trouble and I have truly had enough of this, of the noise of the Kali [Gandaki, the river the caravan followed], always the same, of listening constantly to people around me talking in a shrill language that I don't understand, of suffering, of being dirty, of being hot, of being injected by idiots, of not sleeping, of not being able to move around, of being surrounded by no one who is kind to me, of passing whole days alone on my stretcher with at best one Sherpa as companion, with no sahibs, knowing full well that nothing will get done, not even ordinary tasks, without my having to ask many times and then to wait a long, long time.

In his misery, only one thought gave Lachenal any pleasure: to contemplate “my family, my kids, whom I have a mad desire to see again, my wife who alone will take care of me.”

From Base Camp, Herzog had sent a Sherpa ahead as a runner to get the news of the expedition's success back to France. On June 16, while Herzog lay waiting for death in the woods of Lété,
Figaro
broke the news. Because the team had signed exclusive contracts with that newspaper and with the magazine
Paris-Match,
Herzog and Ichac had been vigilant, as they had periodically sent off dispatches, that news from the expedition not be intercepted and leaked. Even at the time, Rébuffat was scornful of these first efforts by Herzog to put his own spin on the story. In one undated letter to Françoise, he wrote, “Don't believe for a moment what the telegrams sent to
Figaro
say. It makes us laugh sometimes to hear the wording Ichac and Herzog give them!”

Slowly the caravan moved on. On the 21st Lachenal bore what he called “the most painful episode for me of the whole evacuation,” when Adjiba carried him across a bridge over the Kali Gandaki. At the start of the crossing, Lachenal's left foot (the worse frostbitten) struck a big stone; then, as Adjiba stumbled on, both feet banged repeatedly against the chains that suspended the bridge. “He left me weeping beside the trail on the other side,”
wrote Lachenal; “he dumped me literally on the ground as he went off to look for the Bara Sahib [Herzog].”

So the entries in Lachenal's diary stream on, noting small indignities and rare moments of pleasure, giving the day-by-day details of the long march home that Herzog's account is too well crafted to include. “A pretty bad night. Didn't have any morphine. Besides, I was nibbled by fleas.” “In the middle of the night, a huge need to take a shit which I satisfied in an old box.” “It rained in torrents almost the whole night and it's still raining this morning.” “I believe I have never been so dirty in my life. It's been two months since I washed—not even my hands.”

“All the young females in this region are beautiful, with eyes like coals.” “In the evening, the countryside was very beautiful, a mixture of the green of vegetation and the ochre of the cliffs.” “When I'm not suffering too much, life seems almost good.”

Lachenal's sole distraction on the slow march out was a mystery novel Ichac lent him, which had the ominous title,
The Man Without a Head.
That, cigarettes, and morphine got him through his days.

Lachenal's able-bodied teammates seemed to him to have little compassion for his sufferings. Even Terray was distant on the march out from Annapurna. Only Rébuffat seemed truly solicitous. “He was very nice to me last night and this morning,” wrote Lachenal one evening, and some days later, “He offered me several very kind words, not idiotic ones. Several heartfelt words in the right tone, not the ritual phrases of consolation.”

On July 1, with the return of a courier, Lachenal was overjoyed to receive several letters from Adèle. Yet reading them filled him with a deep melancholy at the thought that his house in Chamonix, in July, “would be all beautiful (flowers, grass), waiting for me, and that I would return terribly deformed.”

On July 2, Oudot performed his first amputations. The penicillin had reduced the men's septicemia, but many digits were clearly unsalvageable. On a meadow beside the river, Oudot first went to work on Herzog. Lachenal says that four of Herzog's toes, including both big toes, were the first to go; Herzog's own account has a little finger cut off first. “This gave me rather a twinge,”
writes Herzog in
Annapurna,
with a kind of gallows humor. “A little finger may not be much use, but all the same I was attached to it!” According to Herzog, the operation was performed without anaesthetic (why, if Oudot had novocaine?).

Then it was Lachenal's turn. As Oudot snipped away with his scissors, “I cried like a baby and howled. Ichac and Lionel held my foot.” Later that night, however, “calmed by morphine, I spent an excellent evening with Pansy with a pack of Gauloises and a bottle of cognac.”

By now, the halting caravan of Annapurna survivors had spent a full month on the march out. Wrote Herzog, “The expedition had turned into a limp and anemic body straggling without much spirit on a course the reason for which escaped us. We were buoyed up by a single wish: to get to India as quickly as possible.” As always, Lachenal was beside himself with impatience. “What a lot of time we're wasting!” Herzog quotes him as complaining toward the end of the long march.

“We'll have to be patient, Biscante; things aren't always easy.”

Finally, on July 6, three trucks that Noyelle had gone ahead to arrange arrived at the men's camp. After the wounded had been loaded aboard, the trucks drove them to the railway terminus at Nautanwa. From there, the train would speed the men to Delhi.

Yet on the first leg of that journey, in 113 degree heat inside the railway car, Oudot performed a last set of amputations. After Lachenal had removed his own dressings, the doctor waited for the brief halts of the train at successive stations, then quickly cut away with his scissors. “At the station before Gorakhpur,” wrote Lachenal laconically, “two toes fell from my right foot. At the stop at Gorakhpur, three more from the right foot.”

In his sweaty haste, Oudot dropped his smaller pair of scissors down the window slot. Cutting with the larger pair, he sliced into living flesh. Lachenal screamed and jerked his foot away, whereupon Oudot scolded him, telling him to be more cooperative. Incredulous, Lachenal wrote in his diary that night, “I will remember this forever.”