True Summit

True Summit by David Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: True Summit by David Roberts Read Free Book Online
Authors: David Roberts
only the missed opportunity to reach a benign plateau above the icefall: “We were so close!”
    His leader admonishes: “You can’t push on when it’s like that.” Then Herzog moralizes: “I realized that even if we had reached the plateau, it would have been madness to try to bring the main body up this way. The risk was far too great.”
    What takes the edge off these scoldings and I-told-you-sos is Herzog’s magnanimity. At every turn, he acknowledges his teammates’ skill on rock and ice. Of Lachenal and Terray, for instance, he pauses to observe: “This celebrated partnership, which had conquered all the finest and most dangerous of our alpine faces, was today living up to its reputation.” Terray’s stoic perseverance particularly impresses Herzog. “The next day,” he writes of an early march, “Lionel Terray set a rapid pace from the start. During his illness he was so weak that he had only been able to walk with considerable effort, but now it was as much as we could do to follow him.”
    The chapters in Annapurna that cover the demoralizing search for an approach to either Dhaulagiri or Annapurna subscribe to an old, deeply satisfying narrative convention. Like Odysseus’s shipmates, Herzog’s partners dodge one lethal trap after another. They are headstrong individualists and brilliant climbers, but what holds the team together is its common pursuit of a goal as precious as life itself.
    How different sounds the kindred musing of Rébuffat, in one of his letters to Françoise:
    [The others] have the air of being completely at ease in their egotism. Among us there is no team spirit, only a necessary politeness. What hypocrisy! . . . So, I live, I exert myself, I give, and I receive. But here, we are not on the same shore as one another. Here, we are reunited to bag an 8,000-er. The rest doesn’t matter.
    Rébuffat was homesick: he missed Françoise and his small daughter badly. With him he carried his wife’s last letter, pausing to reread it now and then. It seemed to him that the other married men on the team—Lachenal, Terray, and Couzy—hardly suffered at all from the absence of their wives.
    Back home on his native turf, Rébuffat could be a gregarious and charismatic companion. As a self-made intellectual, he loved to discuss philosophical and artistic matters. Here on the expedition, however, he withdrew into his melancholy privacy. Despite his deep friendship with Terray and Lachenal, he could not find on Annapurna that distillation of perfect comradeship that had floated him through the cold bivouacs on the Walker Spur and the Cima Grande.
    In his own very different way, Lachenal marched, during the weeks of reconnaissance, along a similar gauntlet of irritations and disappointments. His diary, always plainspoken, clipped, and pragmatic, never blinks at the tensions and follies of the group’s effort. Early during the approach, after he had settled in at the night’s campsite, Lachenal impatiently waited for the rest of the entourage—porters, Sherpas, and fellow “sahibs.” Finally the caravan arrived. “They had the courage to come all the way up to here on ponyback,” he wrote sarcastically, “which seemed to me at first grotesque, then completely contra-indicated, since most of the other team members are totally lacking in conditioning.”
    On April 9, Lachenal dryly recorded Easter Sunday: “For us, a day like all the others, except a few more hassles than usual.” The sentence was suppressed in the 1956 Carnets du Vertige.
    Even the most laconic daily jottings (“Evening, the eternal chicken and potatoes”) were excised from the Carnets, as edited by Gérard Herzog. Yet the sentence, “At noon, we opened a bottle of white wine, which devilishly reminded us of our native land, truly the most beautiful we have seen to date,” was

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