True Summit by David Roberts Read Free Book Online

adventure for “publication in any form, public speeches, radio or television broadcasts, books, articles, interviews, conferences, official statements, published photos or films.” It was this coerced abnegation, designed by Devies and Herzog to keep the story of Annapurna the property of the expedition’s patron and its leader, sprung on the team at the very last moment, that Herzog obliquely alluded to in the pages of Annapurna as if it demonstrated the voluntary altruism of his teammates: “From the start every one of them knew that nothing belonged to him and that he must expect nothing on his return. Their only motive was a great ideal.”
    â€œGaston came very close to turning around and leaving, right there, in the airport,” said Françoise. In the end, with the deepest reluctance, he signed.
    So, even before the expedition members left France, the team was torn by conflict and resentment. Lachenal was similarly disenchanted. It was a hardship for the three Chamonix guides to give up a season’s earnings to join the expedition. With two small sons of his own, Lachenal, and his wife, Adèle, felt the pinch. According to Françoise, the wives of all three guides were promised a pension of 400 francs a month for the duration of the expedition, but none of them received a sou.
    On April 2, in New Delhi, the climbers attended a reception at the French ambassador’s house. “High society dinner in a high society apartment,” Lachenal wrote dryly in his diary. “Bored me to tears.” In the Carnets du Vertige edited by Gérard Herzog and published in 1956 after Lachenal’s death, the latter sentence was suppressed.
    Rébuffat’s melancholy funk persisted during the long hikethrough the lowlands toward Annapurna. In a letter to Françoise, he complained: “I don’t even have a friend. I’ve sacrificed a lot for friendship, and today, in this adventure, in The Adventure, I am alone.”
    Remembering the silent pantomime she had witnessed through the glass window at the airport, as her husband and Herzog had vehemently argued over the contract, Françoise told me, “Everything went badly after that moment.”

THREE
Looking for Annapurna

    A S THEY SET OFF from the Indian border to trek north across Nepal toward the distant Himalaya, Herzog’s team faced a quandary that effectively doubled the difficulty of their mission. Unlike such mountains as K2, first attempted in 1902, or Nanga Parbat, even earlier, in 1895, Annapurna had never been reconnoitered (let alone attempted) by Westerners. As mountaineers had found out the hard way on other Himalayan peaks, simply sorting out an 8,000-meter peak’s defenses could exhaust the resources of the strongest expedition. Mount Everest, for instance, would be the goal of three full-fledged reconnaissances and seven all-out attempts before its summit fell to Hillary and Tenzing in 1953.
    Between 1950 and 1964, all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks in the world were first climbed, beginning with Annapurna in 1950 and ending with Shishapangma in 1964. One measure of the quality of the French achievement is that, within that roster of first ascents ofthe world’s highest mountains, only Annapurna would be climbed by the first expedition to reach its foot.
    Knowing how vexsome merely approaching an unknown mountain could prove, Devies and the Himalayan Committee had defined the team’s mandate as an attempt on either Annapurna or its neighbor, 26,811-foot Dhaulagiri (also previously unreconnoitered). Once they had acquainted themselves with the topography surrounding these two towering peaks, the team was to choose the easier of the objectives. For much of April and May 1950, Herzog’s men bent their best efforts toward getting to Dhaulagiri. Annapurna came almost as an afterthought.
    The approach to the mountains was fraught with setbacks. The usual porter strike materialized, to be solved