True Summit (29 page)

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.

T
WO 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.

B
EFORE 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.

Soon, as the sun crept over the skyline to their left, the men emerged from the icy shadow of Annapurna's east ridge into flooding sunlight. Already, however, Lachenal's feet were numb. He stopped to take off his boots and rub some feeling into his feet—as virtually all the team members had done even below Camp V. “This didn't help much,” Lachenal later wrote, “because there was a fairly cold wind.” As he sat there chafing his stockinged feet, “Momo told me that in the war he had often felt as cold as this and that his feet had always come back to life.” With difficulty, Lachenal got his boots back on, and the men continued, plodding slowly upward and toward the right across the interminable snowfield.

“For my part,” Lachenal wrote in his diary, “I moved slowly but without too much difficulty.” Herzog, however, was beginning to lapse into a trance. Of this silent trudge in the cold, he later wrote, “Each of us lived in a closed and private world of his own. . . . Lachenal appeared to me as a sort of specter.” Once more, according to Herzog, Lachenal voiced his fear of frostbite: “We're in danger of having frozen feet. Do you think it's worth it?” Herzog's own feet had gone dead, but he wiggled his toes and climbed on, convinced this was simply another passing numbness such as he had often undergone in the mountains.

Curiously, Lachenal never mentions in his diary the pivotal event of the day—although he acknowledges it in the “Commentaires” he wrote five years later. This was the exchange in which Lachenal suggested turning back, giving up all chances for the summit. For forty-five years, the only rendering of that critical moment available to the public was Herzog's.
Annapurna
fails to make clear at what point in the day the exchange took place, although a few
sentences before, Herzog notes, “We still had a long way to go to cross [the summit snowfield], and then there was that rock band—would we find a gap in it?”

Here, then, is the version of that brief exchange that
Annapurna
presents, stripped of Herzog's internal commentary. Lachenal suddenly grabs his partner and says, “If I go back, what will you do?”

“I should go on by myself.”

“Then I'll follow you.”

In the next paragraph, Herzog feels all the weight of ambiguity and indecision lifted from his shoulders:

The die was cast. I was no longer anxious. Nothing could stop us now from getting to the top. The psychological atmosphere changed with these few words, and we went forward now as brothers.

Every reader of
Annapurna
has thus understood the crucial exchange as a simple case of Lachenal's faint heart given fresh courage by Herzog's stiff resolve.

By now, Herzog's trance has taken hold of him:

I had the strangest and most vivid impressions, such as I had never before known in the mountains. There was something unnatural in the way I saw Lachenal and everything around us. . . . [A]ll sense of exertion was gone, as though there were no longer any gravity. This diaphanous landscape, this quintessence of purity—these were not the mountains I knew: they were the mountains of my dreams.

Lachenal, on the other hand, records the hours following the turnaround exchange in the plain, pragmatic terms of a climber seeking the route:

After the traverse, a few rocks, neither difficult nor particularly congenial to climbing, then a couloir led us toward something that, from where we stood, looked like the summit. We climbed up to it. The top of the couloir was merely a kind of saddle from which
stretched, to the left, a sort of arête that once more seemed to lead to the summit. Oh, it was long!