True Summit

by David Roberts

  Then Devies abruptly announced that each member must take an oath of obedience, which he recited: “I swear upon my honor to obey the leader in everything regarding the Expedition in which he may command me.” A silence followed. Comments Herzog, “Mountaineers don’t care much for ceremonies.”

  At last Marcel Ichac, the cinematographer and sole veteran of the 1936 Gasherbrum I expedition, recited the pledge, with Terray softly murmuring in unison; then the others, one by one, pronounced the oath.

  For Herzog, the ceremony was deeply moving:

  They were pledging their lives, possibly, and they knew it. They all put themselves completely in my hands. I should have liked to say a few words, but I just couldn’t. . . . In that moment our team was born. It was for me to keep it alive.

  Writing in 1996, Rébuffat’s biographer, Yves Ballu, benefiting from Rébuffat’s own notes on the occasion, put the evening’s events in a very different perspective. Reading Herzog, one pictures the ceremony taking place in a small office, attended only by the Himalayan Committee and the team members. In fact, the first half of the event, featuring Devies’s speech, was a press conference in the CAF’s grand salon, with many journalists and officials present. Ballu underlines Devies’s absolute tyranny over the French climbing scene: at the moment, he was simultaneously president of the CAF, president of the Fédération Française de la Montagne (FFM), and president of the Groupe de Haute Montagne (GHM). Sitting at his right hand was Herzog, secretary of the GHM.

  Along with the stirring exhortations quoted by Herzog, Devies emphasized for the press that a colossal fund-raising effort bolstered by a national subscription campaign had raised 14 million francs ($350,000 in today’s dollars) for the expedition. The implication became explicit: Annapurna was a campaign of national honor.

  Later, in comparative privacy, Devies announced the oath of allegiance. The silence that greeted him owed less to the reticence of simple climbers, thought Rébuffat, than to sheer surprise. For Rébuffat himself, and apparently for Lachenal, the demand went beyond surprise: it was a shocking and distasteful requirement. Unquestioning obedience was not characteristic of the alpinism these two Chamonix guides had perfected over the last decade.

  Against their own instincts, the men went ahead to recite the oath. They had no choice if they wanted to go to Annapurna. It was in this context—not in bland affirmation, as Herzog would have it—that Lachenal murmured (in literal translation), “On our knees, we would go!” At once Rébuffat chorused, “With joy in our hearts!”

  That these two independent-minded mountaineers thus mocked the very oath they were forced to pledge emerges even more clearly in Rébuffat’s notes. Rébuffat characterized Devies as a “victoriste” (a coinage of Rébuffat’s own). Of the unpleasant charade culminating in the pledge of obedience, he jotted down: “Depersonalization. . . . A certain Nazification.” In 1950, no epithet could have been more inflammatory. When Rébuffat’s note was first published by Ballu, forty-six years later, the guide’s sour judgment on the expedition style of Devies and Herzog reverberated throughout France.

  GASTON RÉBUFFAT was born in Marseille on May 7, 1921, the son of a workaholic bank official and an overpossessive mother. No less likely background for a great mountaineer could perhaps have been imagined—although that domestic conventionality may itself have driven Gaston from the nest. From his earliest years, the boy was consumed with wanderlust. At every chance, he set out on promenades among the limestone sea cliffs near Marseille called the Calanques; and a visit when he was still very young to a cousin’s farmhouse in Provence imbued him with a love of nature.

  At a Catholic summer camp to which his parents sent him for the school holidays, Gaston discovered, in sports and organized hikes, the joys of comradeship. For the rest of his life, Rébuffat would sing the praises of the brotherhood of the rope as no mountaineer before him had ever done. Comradeship would center his life, and in 1950, on his greatest adventure, setting off for the Himalaya with his good friends Terray and Lachenal, he hoped to distill the elixir of shared toil and commitment.

  Gaston grew up tall and lean, with a great bushy crown of dark hair brushed back from his forehead and a famously craggy face: all but concave, the jutting chin triangulating his features, the full eyebrows guarding his mountain squint, a cigarette (later a pipe) often clenched between his lips in mid-climb. On Annapurna, he was a full head taller than any of his teammates.

  Not until he was fifteen, on a long hike out of Briançon, did the young wanderer discover the Mont Blanc massif. At sixteen, he quit school to take a menial job, joined the Haute-Provence section of the CAF, and befriended his first climbing partner, a modestly talented alpinist eight years his senior named Henry Moulin. With Moulin, he made his first ascents of real mountains. On top of his first major summit, during a traverse of the Ecrins, west of Briançon, he was transported. “What happiness!” he wrote later. “My dream realized. I’d done the Ecrins. Was it possible? . . . My first great summit. And now, may many others follow.”

  It was then, in late adolescence, that Gaston conceived as his ambition to become a member of the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix, the most prestigious fraternity in mountaineering. That goal, as he knew, amounted to an all-but-impossible fantasy for a boy from the seashore.

  The ancient village at the headwaters of the Arve, clinging to its narrow valley far beneath the soaring glaciers and aiguilles of the Mont Blanc massif, was, despite its role even in the 1930s as a world-renowned resort, one of the more xenophobic towns in France. Chamonix fiercely guarded its claim to have been the birthplace of mountaineering, from which the first ascent of Mont Blanc by Paccard and Balmat in 1786 had unfolded. The proudest office one could hold in the town was to be a mountain guide. Father passed down his expertise to son: certain families, such as the Simonds, the Charlets, the Ravanels, counted dozens of guides among their number. (In the Chamonix cemetery, the memorial to guides killed in the mountains names thirteen Simonds who lost their lives between 1866 and 1987.)

  Only once before, in the case of Roger Frison-Roche (later to write the bestselling novel, First on the Rope), had the company of guides relaxed its vigilance and admitted an “outsider.” The idea of a first-class mountaineer hailing from Marseille, however, would have seemed to most Chamoniards a rich joke.

  Yet by 1940, at age nineteen, Rébuffat had indeed become a first-class climber. His hallmark was balance and grace on rock. He seemed to flow effortlessly up cliffs where others floundered; rather than seize a handhold in a death grip, he seemed to caress it with his fingertips.

  By 1941, Gaston’s record of climbs included a third ascent and a second ascent of two challenging routes in the western Alps. That year, as he pondered enlisting in the service of his country, he was instinctively drawn to a special division called Jeunesse et Montagne (Youth and Mountains). Since by now France had already been conquered and occupied by the Germans, all such service branches were officially civilian rather than military outfits. The rugged curriculum of the JM (as it was called)—eight months of spartan training in skiing and alpinism, with the aim of turning its graduates into instructors of other young men in the mountains—embodied a kind of French anticipation of the Outward Bound movement. JM aimed not so much at preparing men for mountain warfare as at building their characters, inculcating such virtues as manliness, industriousness, and team spirit. The service could not have been more appealing to the young Rébuffat.

  On one of his first assignments, as he rode the train toward a regional climbing center, he met another partisan of the mountains, Lionel Terray, who was the same age. Gaston’s first impressions were mixed. “He is nice,” he wrote in his notebook, “but has an egotistical air. I spent the whole ride standing up: not for one second did he offer me his seat.” Years later, Terray recorded his own first take on Rébuffat: “His narrow features were animated by two small, black, piercing eyes, and his somewhat formal manners and learned turn of phrase contrasted comically with a
noticeable Marseille accent.”

  As soon as the two twenty-year-olds realized that they shared a consuming passion for hard routes on big mountains, a bond was formed. According to Terray, they spent the whole train ride comparing notes and talking of alpine projects. Soon they were climbing together, licensed by the JM to set off on little-traveled ridges and walls as partial fulfillment of their official duties.

  With Terray in 1942, Rébuffat achieved his first new route, on the Aiguille Purtscheller. Later that year, the two men pushed a brave new line up the northeast face of the Col du Caïman, which Terray would call “my first really great climb.” The somewhat obscure but very dangerous route angled up not to a summit but to a saddle between two peaks. By now the pair had agreed that Terray would lead all ice and snow pitches, Rébuffat all rock.

  The Col du Caïman came close to being a debacle. A nervous Terray dropped his ice axe low on the route, after which his partner had to make do with a piton hammer. Twice, trembling on tiny nicks of footholds on steep ice, Terray started to lose his strength; twice he avoided potentially fatal falls only with desperate lunges. With the route in perpetual shade, the pair climbed in brutal cold. Night overtook them, but they climbed on by starlight. At last Terray cut his way through the cornice cresting the col and the men emerged on that lonely saddle. Wrote Terray, “We shouted our joy to the moon like a couple of madmen.” For more than twenty years after this epic climb, Terray and Rébuffat’s route on the Caïman went unrepeated.

  Between the two men there was lively competition as well as happy camaraderie. Rébuffat was gratified to finish a particularly demanding mountain course set by the JM in first place, while Terray finished third. And in 1942, the highest honor he had ever sought was granted the twenty-one-year-old, when he was invited to join the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix. His mentor, proffering the invitation, said, “You have great integrity, and you climb well.” For Gaston, that his moral qualities were cited ahead of his technical ability formed a lasting point of pride.

  All the while he was serving his alpine apprenticeship, Rébuffat was forming his own highly original aesthetic of mountaineering. After their initial spell of enthusiasm, both he and Terray grew disenchanted with Jeunesse et Montagne. By the end of his service, Terray later wrote, he was “completely disgusted with the organization.” For Rébuffat, the rhetoric on which JM was founded began to seem highly distasteful. The unabashed aim of the division’s architects was to form a “sportive elite . . . to exalt the finest French virtues.” Climbers were to become “knights of the sky” through “the secularization of the chivalric virtues,” ultimately creating “an army of true alpinists.”

  Ever since the first ascent of Mont Blanc, the struggle of men against the heights had been conceived of and narrated in martial terms. A team “laid siege” to a mountain; it “attacked” its objective by the likely “weaknesses” in its “defenses”; reaching the summit was inevitably a “victory,” even a “conquest.”

  All this chest-thumping was anathema to Rébuffat. From his early years on, he had gained his remarkable proficiency on slab and serac not by battling against the natural world, but by embracing it. The mountain was not an enemy: it was a magical realm of peace and harmony, entered into in a spirit of communion, not of war.

  Even though he had dropped out of school at sixteen, Rébuffat was intellectually ambitious. He wanted to write about his adventures in the mountains, and to pass on his vision of the Alps not as a battlefield but as (in the subtitle of a later book) a “jardin féerique”—an enchanted garden. Eventually he would become not only an author but a prize-winning photographer and cinematographer.

  As he came into the prime of life after the war ended, Rébuffat grew as skilled and daring as any mountaineer in Europe. Without announcing to anyone his goal, he set about becoming the first climber to succeed on the six great classic north faces of the Alps, all first ascended in the 1930s. His initial blazing success in this campaign came in 1945, with the second ascent of the magisterial Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses, the “last great problem” solved by Ricardo Cassin seven years earlier. There followed the north face of the Petit Dru, the northeast face of the Piz Badile, the north face of the Matterhorn, and the north face of the Cima Grande in the Dolomites, the last two accomplished in 1949. By the time he left for Annapurna, Rébuffat lacked only the deadly Eigerwand in Switzerland, which had killed eight of the first ten men to attempt it. In 1952 he would round out his sextet, after a life-or-death struggle on the Eiger, during which he and the Austrian Hermann Buhl—meeting by chance and joining forces, just as the first ascenders had done in 1938—led seven teammates who might otherwise have perished to the top.

  In his masterpiece, Etoiles et Tempêtes (Starlight and Storm), published in 1954, Rébuffat sang those six great ascents. Yet where nearly every other mountain writer in Europe (including Terray) would have narrated those tales in terms of all-out battles against enemies conjured up out of unforgiving cliff and icefield, Rébuffat stayed true to his vision.

  A famous aside in the book, titled “The Brotherhood of the Rope,” pushes that vision to a height of mystical ecstasy:

  Together we have known apprehension, uncertainty and fear; but of what importance is all that? For it was only up there that we discovered many things of which we had previously known nothing: a joy that was new to us, happiness that was doubled because it was shared, a wordless friendship which was no mere superficial impulse. . . .

  I wish all climbers an Elder Brother who can always be looked up to with love and respect, who will watch the way you rope yourself up, and who, as he initiates you into an exacting life, looks after you like a mother hen.

  The one who shares with you his fleeting sovereignty at 12,000 feet and who points out the surrounding peaks as a gardener shows his flowers.

  The one at whom we all gaze with envy, for the mountain hut is his lodging and the mountain his domain.

  The friendship of a man as rich as that cannot be bought.

  ANNAPURNA HAD FIRED ME, by the age of sixteen, with the passion to become a mountaineer. Under its influence, exploring the ranges of my native Colorado, I graduated from easy “walk-ups” such as Mount Elbert (the state’s highest peak) to more challenging objectives: a solo traverse of the treacherous Maroon Bells, near Aspen; a winter attack on the east ridge of Pacific Peak, in the Tenmile Range. Yet I continued to hesitate short of the real plunge—learning to climb with rope and piton and carabiner and the tight-fitting special footgear called kletterschuhe.

  One day in 1959, in a local bookstore, I held in my hands Starlight and Storm. I knew Rébuffat from Annapurna, but had no sense of his individual voice or character. The nine climbers in that heroic saga remained in Herzog’s telling little differentiated one from the other; they were all idealized “knights of the sky.” Now, as I browsed through the small book, Rébuffat began to assume his own personality. Of the six great north faces of the Alps, I knew nothing, but the photos in Starlight and Storm made it clear that these savage, dark walls were far more daunting than any mountain in Colorado.

  In the book, I could see, Rébuffat had somewhat chimerically adjoined his accounts of the six north faces to a pragmatic manual titled “The Beginning Climber”; perhaps the French publisher had thereby beefed up an otherwise dangerously slender volume. It may have been that how-to treatise that made me dig deep into my pockets and buy Starlight and Storm, for I was still too green to know that you couldn’t learn to climb from a book.

  Yet it was not the Chamonix guide’s succinct advice about sunglasses and shoulder stands that captivated me, but the lyrical prose in which he recounted the harrowing bivouacs, the gutsy leads up frozen pitches, that had won him his great faces. The author himself had evidently wearied of the pedestrian job of explaining how to climb, for time and again in “The Beginning Climber” he burst into philosophy: “Of course, technique is a poor thing, even a wretched thing, when separated from the heart which has guide
d it: this is true in rock climbing, or playing a piano, or building a cathedral.”

  In these deftly romantic pages I found a view of climbing utterly different from what I had discerned in the pages of Annapurna. Yet at sixteen I was still too naive to comprehend that those two views were fundamentally incompatible. Nor did I entertain even a glimmer of a suspicion that Rébuffat’s Annapurna might have made for a different story from Herzog’s. No one in America, as I was to find in subsequent years, doubted the veracity of Herzog’s perfect saga of the world’s first 8,000-meter ascent.

  Starlight and Storm became for me a sacred text. The book closed with an affirmation every bit as revelatory as Herzog’s famous final words, “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men.” “Life, the luxury of being!” Rébuffat pealed, then laid down his pen.

  Still without any inkling that I might ever climb a big wall myself, I thrilled through each rereading of the author’s struggles on the Walker Spur and the Eigerwand. A few years later, at the age of twenty, by then a junior instructor at Colorado Outward Bound School, I was asked to give a dawn inspirational reading to the ninety-six students it was our job to toughen up in the Elk Range. With trembling voice but the passion of an acolyte, I read “The Brotherhood of the Rope” from my favorite mountain book.

  It might seem odd that a Colorado boy should have taken as his climbing heroes men from far-off France. By 1959, on the crags only a few miles outside of Boulder, a six-foot-five bricklayer named Layton Kor was putting up the hardest and most daring routes ever climbed in Colorado. One of my high school classmates even climbed with Kor—or rather, was dragged bodily up pitches far beyond his ability by a demon so possessed he would pair up with anyone capable of tying in to the other end of the rope. Kor would go on to become a climber every bit as legendary as Rébuffat. Though I was in awe of his deeds, however, I never chose Kor as a hero.