True Summit

by David Roberts

  On May 23, above Camp II, the four principal climbers trudged in single file, carrying heavy loads, with Terray and Herzog alternating in the lead. “The other two seemed utterly worn out,” wrote Herzog.

  Suddenly Lachenal burst out bitterly, “We’re not Sherpas!”

  Rébuffat seconded him: “We didn’t come to the Himalaya to be beasts of burden.”

  The indefatigable Terray turned scornfully on his teammates: “A climber ought to be able to carry his gear. We’re as good as the Sherpas, aren’t we?”

  Bent panting over his ice axe, Lachenal inveighed, “If we wear ourselves out with this ridiculous porterage, how the hell can we manage in a few days’ time?”

  Terray lost his temper. “And you call yourselves Chamonix guides! You’re just damn amateurs, that’s what you are!”

  This scene, a rare instance of open conflict acknowledged in Annapurna, is corroborated by Terray and even by a terse entry in Lachenal’s diary: “Lively altercation with Lionel over this method of proceeding.” In Herzog’s telling, the episode redounds favorably on the “supermen,” as Lachenal mockingly calls Herzog and Terray: “You’re supermen, real supermen, and we’re just poor weaklings.”

  Yet the truth of the matter was that by now Herzog and Terray were in far better form than the rest of their teammates. The next day, angling for the first time above 20,000 feet, Terray broke trail through the worst snow yet, thigh-deep powder. He was unable to gain even three feet a minute: one whole hour to climb a paltry 150 feet. In his wake, the Sherpas Pansy and Aila carried heavy loads.

  That night the trio camped at 21,650 feet, three in a two-man tent, with only two sleeping bags. Recalled Terray,

  We spent a night of terror listening to the avalanches that thundered down the couloir less than fifty feet from our tent, which shook with the wind of their passing. The Sherpas never closed an eye all night, but just sat there smoking cigarette after cigarette.

  The next day, exhausted, Terray forced the route another 600 feet, climbing a 60 degree ice wall. “Deep inside me, I was beginning to doubt. If it went on like this every day we should all be worn out long before reaching the summit, even if an avalanche didn’t settle the matter before then.”

  The north face of Annapurna is not very difficult technically. There is virtually no rock on it that needs to be climbed, and only a few really steep pitches of ice. Yet the face is an extremely dangerous one—a huge open bowl of ice and snow torn with daily avalanches in April and May. During the half century since the French expedition, Annapurna has proven itself arguably the most dangerous of all the fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. For every two climbers who have reached its summit, another has died on the mountain.

  The constant strain of worrying about avalanches began to take its toll on the Frenchmen. With Terray momentarily worn out, now Herzog came to the fore, performing a prodigious feat of trail-breaking that pushed the team’s progress to 23,500 feet. There, on May 28, he pitched Camp IV beneath a huge, arching ice cliff the team had named the Sickle. On this exposed slope, a small serac served as a protecting wall uphill from the tents.

  As well as Herzog was climbing, his morale soared even higher. “I felt . . . complete confidence in our victory,” he wrote later. “Annapurna was practically in the bag.” Nor can this optimism be attributed to retrospect: Terray, assailed by his own doubts, marveled at his partner’s sanguine faith in the team’s success.

  Recuperating at Camp II on the night of May 28, Terray and Herzog discussed the situation in exhaustive detail.

  Maurice was very put out by the poor physical and moral state in which he found the others. Although he had spent no more than a few minutes in their company he considered them sick, discouraged, and altogether incapable of effective action.

  Out of that evening’s analysis, a plan was born. It was clear to Herzog that if anyone would be capable of making the summit, it would be himself and Terray. The next day, he proposed, the better-rested Terray would carry a load with two Sherpas up to Camp III, then descend again to II. On the following day, with four Sherpas rebreaking trail, Terray and Herzog would climb all the way to Camp IV. On the third day, the pair would carry the essentials for a light camp up through a notch in the Sickle, find a site for Camp V somewhere on the bare, windswept snowfield above, and go for the top the following morning. The monsoon was now firmly predicted to arrive by June 5. If all went according to Herzog’s plan, he and Terray would stand atop Annapurna on June 1.

  Yet there was a flaw in the plan. Even as Terray and Herzog plotted in Camp II, the other four climbers were trying to carry loads to Camp IV. Their support was vital, for without a well-stocked garrison at IV, a summit dash was far too risky.

  On the 29th of May, as Terray climbed toward III, he met Couzy and Lachenal coming down. To his great dismay, Terray learned that the other four climbers had been too exhausted to haul their loads to IV. A little later, he crossed paths with a dejected Rébuffat and Schatz.

  “As a result of their lack of form,” Terray wrote succinctly in 1961, “my companions had been unable to fulfill their mission . . . and this threw the whole operation out of phase.” That night in Camp III, Terray struggled with a moral dilemma few Himalayan climbers have confronted. Camp IV had not been supplied. The summit push with Herzog would therefore have to be delayed. And someone—clearly not the played-out quartet of descending teammates—would have to get gear and food to IV. The fittest Sherpas could pull off the job, but it would be irresponsible to send them, with their rudimentary alpine skills, up high without a Frenchman to accompany them.

  Terray’s dilemma was whether to climb back down to II, as Herzog had ordered, or to undertake the load-hauling to IV by himself, picking up the slack his teammates had dropped. In the end, he resolved to make the ultimate self-sacrifice. As Terray analyzed his thoughts in Conquistadors,

  Was I to obey orders and go back down, or should I stay where I was with the Sherpas and carry out the uncompleted task? By doing this I would lose my chance of teaming up with Herzog, who at present was in the best condition and best placed for the summit dash, so that a bitter paradox would make a disinterested action the frustration of all my hopes. It would be so easy to obey orders and bow to a fate another had ordained. Nobody would ever hold it against me: after all, I was only a simple foot soldier who had taken an oath of obedience. And yet, and yet . . . it seemed to me that by going down at this juncture I would be letting down the side. The very idea gave me a pang such as one might feel at the suggestion of committing a crime.

  In Annapurna, Herzog handsomely saluted Terray’s act of self-abnegation. Equally dismayed at his teammates’ failure to carry to IV, he began to concoct a backup plan.

  Despite Herzog’s poor opinion of the physical and psychological state of the four “sluggards,” the fact is that Lachenal had, in his own idiosyncratic way, begun to round into great form. (Such a delayed acclimatization often occurs in the Himalaya, so that a climber who spends weeks suffering from lassitude and headaches low on the mountain suddenly sprints to the head of the pack.)

  Lachenal’s diary records this transformation. Sunburned lips, exhaustion, insomnia notwithstanding, he is seized by May 25 with an optimism nearly as heady as Herzog’s. “Victory now seems assured,” he writes on that day. And finally, on May 31, “This morning, one more time, I set out not to descend again until after I have made the summit.”

  At Camp III, Terray had rallied Rébuffat to his altruistic cause. On May 30, the two men and their Sherpas took seven exhausting hours to climb with loads to Camp IV. They spent the night in an all-out blizzard: “By dawn the tents were half buried in the snow. There was so little space left inside that one could hardly move. We had to dig them out with our mess tins and re-erect them as best we could.”

  That morning Terray and Rébuffat climbed all the way down to Camp II to recuperate. “Victory seemed farther off than ever,” thought a discouraged Terray. On the way down, they crossed paths with Herzog
, Lachenal, Ang-Tharkey, and Sarki, who were heading up.

  Herzog had replaced Terray with Lachenal in his plan for a summit dash. Camp IV was now stocked. Only two days had been lost from his original scheme, and the monsoon still held off. If there was hope still to claim the summit, it lay in Lachenal’s remarkable comeback. “Lachenal was a new man,” Herzog wrote in Annapurna.

  That night the two Frenchmen slept at a new Camp IV (dubbed IVA), which they had pitched just above the ice cliff of the Sickle. In the morning, Ang-Tharkey and Sarki, who had carried yet another load high, joined them for the push into terra incognita.

  Meanwhile, down at Camp II, Terray’s spirits underwent a revolution. He had come to the belief that Lachenal and Herzog still lacked adequate support to go safely to the summit. It was intolerable for him to loiter low while his friends pushed above 24,000 feet. Terray talked Rébuffat into one more foray, and despite the agony of his recurringly numb feet, the “long man” agreed. After a day’s rest, on June 2, carrying light packs, Terray and Rébuffat moved faster than ever before (one and a half hours from III to IV, versus the seven hours it had taken them on May 30) and succeeded in installing themselves in the tent at IV, just below the Sickle. The next day, they would follow their friends’ track leftward across the featureless slope, looking for Camp V. Carrying their own tent and sleeping bags, they hoped to move into position for a second attempt on the summit on June 4. Having convinced himself that Herzog and Lachenal “were simply deceiving themselves” in hoping to gain the top on June 3, Terray savored the prospect of making the first ascent of Annapurna with his old Chamonix comrade—not the partner of his charmed cordée, but the man with whom he had accomplished his first great climb in the Alps way back in 1942. Even should Lachenal and Herzog precede them, a second summit dash a day later would still be a glorious deed.

  As Rébuffat and Terray moved smoothly up to Camp IV on June 2, Herzog and Lachenal, trailed by the doughty Ang-Tharkey and Sarki, broke new ground above the Sickle. Herzog was in an ecstasy. “Not for a single moment,” he later wrote, “did either Lachenal or myself entertain the slightest doubt about our victory.”

  In the early afternoon, the men came to a rib of rock on the far east edge of the bare summit snowfield. The rib offered no natural campsite, but by dint of relentless chopping with their ice axes the men carved out a platform, pitched a tent, and anchored it with pitons driven into the rock.

  Herzog offered the Sherpas a chance to go to the summit with them, but the men declined. Their feet starting to freeze, Ang-Tharkey and Sarki headed instead down to the relative safety of Camp IVA.

  That evening, wrote Herzog.

  I had great difficulty in concentrating and I couldn’t get up an interest in anything. Conversation languished. With great effort, and only because we urged each other on, we managed to make some tea on the stove. . . . It was impossible to swallow any food down at all.

  In the night, the wind rose, driving gusts of new snow across the barren slope. Lachenal’s diary recorded the sleepless vigil:

  The night was very bad. Violent storm. The rear of the tent collapsed on top of us under the weight of the snow. I passed the night holding on to the tent poles to keep them from falling. We were completely covered with new snow.

  For Herzog, the ordeal in the dark at 24,600 feet was worse than “our very worst Alpine bivouacs.” In the first light of dawn, as the wind died down and a metallic cold ruled their world, the two men felt “worn out and utterly weary.” It would have been tempting to take a rest day, but there was neither time nor food to waste. After two months of failure and frustration, the French team had finally put itself in position to reach the top of Annapurna, less than 2,000 feet above, across easy-looking ground.

  At 6:00 A.M. on June 3, Lachenal and Herzog closed their tent and started climbing toward the sky.

  FIVE

  Deliverance

  THE CENTRAL MYSTERY of the 1950 Annapurna expedition is what happened on June 3.

  For the time being, let us pass the question by, and follow not Lachenal and Herzog as they press through the cold, thin air toward the summit, but Rébuffat and Terray as they climb out of Camp IV, planning a second summit foray the next day. Upon arriving at the serac-sheltered camp the night before, the two Chamonix guides had encountered Schatz and Couzy, who had at last completed their assigned task of hauling loads in support of the summit duo.

  Throughout the expedition, it had been Terray who was the stickler for early starts. In that respect, he was ahead of his time, often rousing his teammates at 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., thereby boldly applying the Alpine gambit of the predawn start to the Himalaya, a range where his predecessors had by and large been too discouraged by cold and altitude to brave a launch in the dark.

  Happily assuming the lead on June 3, Terray plowed through chest-deep snow as he angled toward a notch in the Sickle. Higher up the soft snow gave way to ice, in which Terray chopped steps for the teammates who followed him. The plan was for all four Frenchmen and two Sherpas, Pansy and Aila, to carry to Camp V, then reassess the situation in light of what they might find out there about Lachenal and Herzog.

  Topping out above the Sickle, the climbers soon came to the solitary tent at Camp IVA, where they found Ang-Tharkey and Sarki, who recounted in detail the establishing of Camp V the day before. “They had frostbitten feet and seemed in poor shape,” noted Terray. “Our own two Sherpas were also complaining about their feet and lost no time scrambling into the tent to get warm.”

  On the bare slope above the Sickle, the four Frenchmen took turns breaking trail, the footsteps from the day before having drifted in during the storm in the night. Pansy and Aila followed gamely in the track. All six men felt their feet go numb, and their progress was slowed by the necessity of stopping to take off boots and rub their toes back into feeling inside the protection of a pied d’éléphant—a half sleeping bag normally used for bivouacs. Though the men had come to Nepal with the finest footgear money could buy, the best leather boots in the world in 1950 were inadequate for the cold and lack of oxygen above 8,000 meters. (It would not be until the invention of plastic double boots in the 1980s that footgear equal to the task of preventing frostbite at such altitudes would become available.) Bottled oxygen had been used on Everest as early as 1922, but the French team had chosen to do without it. This purist decision in turn contributed to the problem of cold feet, for a climber breathing supplemental oxygen above 24,000 feet normally has far better circulation than one without.

  With Terray doing the lion’s share of the trail-breaking, the six men reached Camp V around midday. There they found a single tent half buried in snow. There was no note from Herzog or Lachenal. Laboring mightily, the men hacked out a second platform and erected their tent. Terray chopped away with his axe in an efficient fury: “At times I would force so much that a black veil began to form in front of my eyes and I fell to my knees, panting like an overdriven beast.”

  The day had deteriorated into a gathering storm. Even before the second tent was pitched, Terray sent Pansy and Aila down to Camp IV, counting on their being able to follow the trail before wind and snow could fill the steps again. At last Rébuffat and Terray crawled into one tent, Couzy and Schatz into the other.

  It seemed obvious that Lachenal and Herzog must be making their summit bid, despite the storm. “Time went by without our seeing anything,” recalled Terray. “Outside the furies of the storm were in full cry, and we began to get seriously worried.” As the afternoon waned, it became apparent that it would soon be too late for anyone to go down to Camp IV. With the return of Lachenal and Herzog, there would be six men crammed into two two-man tents—an intolerable prospect in a storm. Couzy and Schatz, both altitude-sick, offered to head down to IVA. As soon as they had parted, Terray moved to the empty tent and started melting snow to brew up malt drinks for his teammates. “As time went by we became more and more anxious,” he later wrote. “I kept on sticking my head out of the tent to see if I c
ould see anything, but there was nothing but the pitiless blizzard.”

  At last, toward the end of the afternoon, Terray heard the crunching of footsteps in the snow. He thrust himself outside the tent and saw Herzog, alone, his beard and clothing coated with rime. “We’ve made it,” the expedition leader said. “We’re back from Annapurna.”

  What happened next appears in both Annapurna and Conquistadors of the Useless, in passages that strikingly agree. Wrote Herzog,

  Terray, who was speechless with delight, wrung my hands. Then the smile vanished from his face: “Maurice—your hands!” There was an uneasy silence. I had forgotten that I had lost my gloves: my fingers were violet and white and hard as wood. The other two stared at them in dismay—they realized the full seriousness of the injury.

  In Terray’s telling:

  I seized him by the hand, only to find to my horror that I was shaking an icicle. What had been a hand was like metal. I cried out: “Momo, your hand is frostbitten!” He looked at it indifferently, and replied: “That’s nothing, it’ll come back.”

  “What about Biscante?” Terray anxiously asked, using Lachenal’s nickname.

  “He won’t be long,” Herzog answered. “He was just in front of me!”

  Rébuffat got Herzog into his tent, while Terray started heating water on the stove. Lachenal’s failure to appear deeply troubled Terray. Once more, he thrust his head outside the tent to look for any sign of his friend in the deepening murk of the storm.

  Then the raging wind carried a faint but unmistakable “Help.” I got out of the tent and saw Lachenal three hundred feet below us. Hastily I dragged on my boots and clothes, but when I came out of the tent again there was nothing to be seen on the bare slope. The shock was so terrible that I lost my self-control and began to cry, shouting in desperation. It seemed that I had lost the companion of the most enchanted hours of my life. Overcome with grief I lay in the snow unconscious of the hurricane that howled around me.