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!
For Herzog, to reach the summit was to clasp the top rung of the ladder of St. Theresa of Avila, the image that danced in his mind at the time. The climax of Annapurna comes in the ecstatic transport of that moment:
Yes! A fierce and savage wind tore at us.
We were on top of Annapurna! 8,075 meters . . .
Our hearts overflowed with an unspeakable happiness.
“If only the others could know . . .”
If only everyone could know!
“How wonderful life would now become,” Herzog rhapsodizes on the summit. Already, it would seem, he had stepped through the door of that “new life” that Annapurna would bestow on him, despite all his sufferings.
It could scarcely have been more opposite for Lachenal, whose diary notes the end of the quest in the flattest, most prosaic of language: “Finally we are there. An arête of snow festooned with cornices, with three summits, one higher than the others. It is the summit of Annapurna.”
According to Terray, in his account in Conquistadors, by that evening, after his terrible fall past Camp V at dusk, Lachenal remembered nothing of the descent. But of the summit, he told his best friend (in Terray’s paraphrase), “Those moments when one had expected a fugitive and piercing happiness had in fact brought only a painful sense of emptiness.”
Only Herzog narrates the long spell while he lingered on top, staring at the horizon, savoring his ecstasy, posing for the camera with his three flags, changing from black-and-white to color film, while an increasingly wrought-up Lachenal urged immediate descent, finally exploding: “Are you mad? We haven’t a minute to lose: we must go down at once.” Only Herzog indicates that in the end Lachenal took off before him, almost running down the couloir that had led to the final ridge.
Of this summit performance, Lachenal’s diary records only the photo-taking. And rather than hinting at his own mounting anxiety over Herzog’s delay, he states merely, “Without lingering any longer, we started down.”
EVER SINCE 1950, THERE HAS BEEN a small cadre of skeptics within the mountaineering community who doubted that Herzog and Lachenal reached the summit on June 3. The doubts spring in part from the celebrated summit photo, in which Herzog holds aloft the Tricolor tied to his ice axe. Beyond the triumphant climber, a snow slope seems to angle toward higher ground. Frankly speaking, the summit photo does not look as though it had been taken on a summit.
In 1957, Berge der Welt, the official journal of the Swiss Alpine Club, posthumously published an interview with Lachenal; Swiss commentators then appended the judgment that Lachenal’s memories of the summit were “insufficient.” Two years later another Swiss, Marcel Kurz, wrote, “Lachenal told us that he had lost all memory of that summit day.”
To put the Swiss canards in perspective, it helps to remember that before the war it was the British, the Germans, and the Swiss who had led the way in the Himalaya. The French had only their 1936 attempt on Gasherbrum I to their credit. That the first 8,000-meter summit would be bagged by a French team might stick in the craws of some of their rivals.
Yet as I traveled in France in 1999, I found that skepticism alive and flourishing among certain French journalists. Charlie Buffet, of Libération, told me, “Almost everyone who gets involved in this controversy thinks they didn’t make the summit.” Buffet pointed out that Herzog had described “a fierce and savage wind” stinging the pair’s faces on top; yet in the famous photo, Herzog seems to be holding the flag taut as if to simulate a wind-blown banner on an all but windless day. (It is possible that Herzog is instead holding the flag to keep it from flapping in the wind.)
Buffet had asked Herzog point-blank if he had made the summit. “He answered, ‘There is a polemic of doubt about the 1960 Chinese expedition to the north side of Everest. They can produce no evidence they reached the summit. People come to me and ask me if it was true that we made the summit. My answer is, “If one climber says he made the summit, you have to believe him.” ’ ”
Buffet paused, then said, “I thought this was a strange answer.
“Some people in Chamonix,” Buffet went on, “tell a story of meeting Lachenal one day in 1954 or ‘55, when he was very drunk, and he admitted he hadn’t been to the summit.”
Buffet went so far as to play out a purely speculative scenario for me, which he said certain observers had toyed with: “Lachenal wants to turn around, Herzog does not. At last Herzog agrees to turn around, if Lachenal will agree to say they’d been to the summit.”
J
ean-Michel Asselin, editor of Vertical, had interviewed Rébuffat extensively during the 1980s. Asselin told me, “When Rébuffat spoke of the summit, he didn’t say that Lachenal and Herzog hadn’t made the top. But when he talked about it, he had a certain irony about his look.”
Françoise Rébuffat, on the other hand, insisted that Gaston had never doubted that his friends had reached the summit. And Yves Ballu countered Asselin by saying, “Rébuffat gave me no reason to doubt the summit. This is too serious a question to base the answer on a grimace.”
In the 1996 controversy provoked by the publication of Ballu’s biography of Rébuffat and Guérin’s edition of Lachenal’s diary, the question of the summit burst to the fore. Herzog countered with an air of patient exasperation. To Le Monde’s query about the summit photo, he answered, “Because of the perspective, the photo gives the impression that above us there was a snow arête. In fact, that ‘arête’ only reached to my waist. We could not climb to the very crest of that ridge, which was in truth a cornice. But we were indubitably on the summit.”
To cast light on the question, Montagnes published for the first time all five black-and-white photos purportedly taken on the summit. By themselves, they are inconclusive. Yet they raise other interesting points of debate. Four of the photos were taken of Herzog by Lachenal, using Herzog’s Foca camera. Two (including the famous image) show Herzog hoisting the French flag; one, the CAF flag; and the fourth, the banner of Kléber-Colombes. The fifth photo Herzog took of Lachenal. It is badly out of focus, but in it Lachenal sits slumped against a rock in a decidedly unvictorious posture.
In Chamonix, Elisabeth Payot told me, “What’s incredible is that Herzog kept this photo hidden until the death of Lachenal.” Certainly Lachenal had seen the photo. As they worked together preparing the text of Carnets du Vertige, Lachenal told Philippe Cornuau, “I took a photo of Herzog that was clear. He took one of me that was fuzzy. And I’m the one who was supposed to be out of my mind.” Cornuau also told me, “Lachenal was deeply shocked that Herzog would raise the banner of Kléber-Colombes—that a man would hold up the flag of the company that employed him.”
There is perhaps a simple explanation of the odd perspective in the summit photos, which commentators have overlooked. Lachenal’s diary for June 3 says,
A little below [the top] on the north face a rock bench received us, so that we could take the several official photographs that we had to take. CAF, French flag, black [and white], color. I didn’t take my own camera out of my pack, but used Momo’s Foca.
From a ledge a bit below the summit, of course, the “summit photo” would appear to be taken somewhere short of the top.
It is possible that Herzog and Lachenal, hypoxic and exhausted, could have confused a bump on the ridge for the summit. It is even possible to entertain suspicions of a hoax. But I am inclined to second the characteristically gnomic remark Michel Guérin offered Le Monde: “If Lachenal had wanted to avoid writing that he was on the summit, he would not have worded it otherwise.”
Whatever his faults, Lachenal had a bedrock integrity. His diary is full of blunt truths that more squeamish expeditioneers (including Herzog) preferred to veil. Had Lachenal chosen to fake the summit, would he have described to Terray that very evening his emptiness on top? Would he not have concocted an imagined transport more akin to Herzog’s? For me, the plain statement in Lachenal’s diary settles the case: “It is the summit of Annapurna.”
IN JANUARY 2000, thinking I had learned virtually all I could know about Annapurna 1950, I visited Chamonix once more, only to be startled out of my complacency by an extraordinary encounter with a man named Leonce Fourès. Just a few weeks before, Fourès had first met Michel Guérin, from whom he had learned about my researches.
Over dinner, Fourès unveiled his revelations. A mathematician in his seventies from the south of France, he had been a climber of modest abilities but a very close friend of Rébuffat and Lachenal, as well as a classmate of Couzy. (Both Françoise Rébuffat and Jean-Claude Lachenal later verified the depth of those associations.)
Fourès seconded Philippe Cornuau’s suggestion that, when Herzog had pulled out his Kléber-Colombes flag on the summit, Lachenal had been shocked and disgusted. But Fourès went on to say that Lachenal had later told him that when Herzog had changed the film in his camera to color, he had handed the black-and-white cartridge to Lachenal, who had kept it on his person. Some forty hours later, as the four men shivered through their bivouac in the providential crevasse, Lachenal, unable to find his boots among the drifts of fine snow the pre-dawn avalanche had dumped into the crevasse, had despaired of getting off the mountain alive. He had then, Fourès claimed, given the black-and-white cartridge to Rébuffat, making his friend promise that he would never let Herzog get his hands on the Kléber-Colombes photo.
Rébuffat had smuggled the roll of film back to France, Fourès went on, developed it, and returned all the photos to Ichac except the picture of Herzog hoisting the flag of his tire company, which he had jealously guarded until his death in 1985. As punishment for his subversion, Rébuffat was never invited on another FFM-financed expedition. I had assumed—as both Yves Ballu and Françoise Rébuffat had told me—that after Annapurna, Rébuffat had simply chosen never again to climb in the remote ranges. But Fourès insisted that Rébuffat had told him he would have dearly loved to accompany Terray on such South American jaunts as his Fitzroy or Chacraraju expeditions. It was this sacrifice that Rébuffat alluded to in telling Fourès, “I have paid a heavy price.”
On first hearing this outlandish story, both Michel and I were inclined to skepticism. The Annapurna controversy, as Michel pointed out, had brought the fantasists out of the woodwork. Had such a covert exchange taken place in the crevasse, why hadn’t Lachenal written about it in his Carnets? Why had Françoise Rébuffat never breathed a hint of it? (Later Françoise confirmed that among Gaston’s papers, she had found three or four contact prints of the Kléber-Colombes photo.)
Yet in person Fourès seemed a modest and intelligent man, with no particular axe to grind. And the more we mulled over what the man had told us, the more both Michel and I realized that the bizarre story tied up all kinds of loose ends. It might explain why Ichac had searched Rébuffat for hidden film cartridges in Kathmandu. It could very well explain why the Kléber-Colombes photo was not published until 1996 (by Montagnes magazine). The tire company had made the single largest donation to the expedition budget; Fourès set the figure at 500,000 francs. Had Herzog returned with a photo of the company’s banner hoisted on the summit of Annapurna, what better advertising coup could Kléber-Colombes possibly have devised? If the firm had the photo in their possession, what earthly reason could prevent them from using it? Finally, Fourès’s story might help explain Rébuffat’s bitterness over Annapurna in later life.
By the end of the evening in Chamonix, I was awash in a mixture of confusion and fascination. The full ambiguity of what had happened on that distant mountain almost fifty years ago came home with a vengeance, and I realized that no single person could ever grasp the whole truth of Annapurna 1950.
BROODING IN LATER YEARS about the expedition, heeding his wife’s admonitions not to make a public fuss about his doubts and disappointments, Rébuffat pondered the theatricality of Herzog’s summit performance. In the most trenchant of the aphoristic notes he jotted down about Annapurna in the 1980s, Rébuffat distilled his misgivings into the single pithiest commentary on the summit day ever penned:
After the sequence of the flags, this jingoistic and supremely pragmatic moment, Maurice organized his ecstasy. Losing, if not his reason, at least his sense of reality, he began complacently to soar, plunged into a kind of happiness, a beatitude of the moment when a sense of the real ought to have been primordial. . . . Lachenal was aware: what good does it do to reach a summit if it means losing one’s feet? His repeated entreaties had no effect, so he began the descent in order that Maurice would come to his senses and follow him.
Yet the last word on Annapurna deserves to be Lachenal’s. Bernard George, assembling his 1999 documentary on the legendary expedition, viewed all the period newsreel and feature footage he could find. “In the hospital [in Chamonix],” George told me, “not a word comes out of Lachenal’s mouth. In all these old films, I heard the voices of Terray, Rébuffat, and of course Herzog. But I could find not a trace of Lachenal’s voice.”
Only in those last seven paragraphs of his 1955 “Commentaires”—suppressed entirely by Gérard Herzog—does Lachenal at last speak. As he begins to discuss the summit day, he warns his readers that they should not expect from him any absolute truths.
That my memories sometimes differ from those of Maurice Herzog is a very normal business, when one thinks of the tension under which we attempted the summit and of the retreat in complete disorder (I measure my words) that immediately followed our success. . . . There was a divergence [in our memories], that is all.
Yet in the next breath, Lachenal takes issue with his portrait in Annapurna. For five years, he knew, he had been “consistently depicted as badly affected by the altitude, by the final struggle, and especially by the fall that I took in the vicinity of Camp V.” Herzog, Lachenal complains, had implied “that I no longer knew what I was doing.” Yet his cries for help, which Terray heard and which guided him to his fallen friend’s side, and before that his instinct to plunge his gloveless hands into his pack to save them, were both, Lachenal insists, the reflexes of a sane man doing what he had to do to survive—not the hysterical responses of a climber driven half mad by his ordeal. As for Herzog’s vignette of Lachenal trying to seize Terray’s axe to descend alone to Camp II—Lachenal denies this ever took place.
Yet none of these discrepancies matter, continues Lachenal, because the descent became a multiplying sequence of errors and desperate acts. As the four men had stumbled lost through the fog late on the afternoon of June 4, Herzog saw Lachenal’s behavior as proof of his dementia: “Perhaps he was not quite in his right mind. He said it was no use going on; we must dig a hole in the snow and wait for fine weather. He swore at Terray.” Now Lachenal reclaims his exhortation at that grim moment as “not the counsel of an unbalanced man, but of a sane one.”
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